Movies
MILWAUKEE STORIES – a series of short films @ MAM Thursday Apr 30
Hey Film Kiddies: Milwaukee Film is proud to invite you to the premiere screening of MILWAUKEE STORIES, an ongoing series of short films that inner city teens (working with filmmaker mentors) have created about their lives and their locale. The program, originated by Maxine Wishner, was produced in cooperation with Running Rebels, a youth community organization since 1980. The result of this year’s collaboration is five intense and heartfelt, homegrown Milwaukee films. These films inspire discussion, advance our pre-conceptions about neighborhood life, and hopefully will enhance connections within the diverse communities of Milwaukee. Thursday, April 30 2009 Milwaukee Art Museum – Lubar Auditorium 700 North Art Museum Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53202 5:30PM – 6:00PM Meet and Greet 6:15PM – 7:15PM Screening and Discussion with Filmmakers REEL Milwaukee ran into Maxine Wishner at Oakland Gyros at bartime last week and this is what we gots. OK, we did a formal interview but late night, OG, that’s more interesting than phone calls and emails. Anyway….. TCD: What makes Milwaukee Stories unique? What sets it apart from other doc-series screenings? MW: MILWAUKEE STORIES pairs five successful filmmakers with five of the Running Rebels’ youth. The intent was to create workshops and one-on-one dialogue in a safe environment where trust could grow. This comfort encouraged the youth to create authentic films that offer insight into a population with which most Milwaukeeans are unacquainted. Also unique is that we have advisers for MILWAUKEE STORIES; psychologists and children’s lawyers that educate us re: the issues of the neighborhood. The youth also act as advisers, offering feedback that is first-hand. We keep in touch with these teens, and two of the young storytellers from the first season became mentors for this year. I was introduced to Running Rebels, a community space that helps at risk kids that go through the courts . These aren’t high school kids who have their own computers. These are kids in transition, many of whom need to stay out of trouble. Our first two years we worked at Running Rebels. We started out showing a film and talking about the project. A lot of kids were interested, but we chose five and they stayed throughout the program. A few months ago Running Rebels bought a camera. They may be making films on their own, which means we succeeded at our job. We are going to meet other communities and make films there as well. Our outreach also sets us apart. We intend to use these films to create dialogues among communities, to show to young teachers who will be entering that population. They will air in school and other communities and each film will have some talking points. We are hoping if kids are interested in film we can put them in touch with potential places for employment. TCD: When and why did you start this program? MW: I moved back home in 2006 after decades of making films in New York. Wanted to know more about what was happening in other […]
Apr 28th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
Anvil! The Story of Anvil vs. Heavy Metal in Baghdad
both films share a very important message for every struggling musician out there trying to keep the faith while grasping for the brass ring (be it rock stardom or the freedom to grow your hair long without getting lynched): stick with it long enough, and eventually, a documentary filmmaker will come along to tell your story and make you famous.
Apr 27th, 2009 by DJ Hostettler
FREE SCREENING of Wilco Documentary ASHES OF AMERICAN FLAGS Mon 4/20
Monday 4/ 20 (holler): Free Wilco Movie @ Turner Hall (double holler): Pull up a chair and remenise on Wilco's sold out 2 day run at the Pabst at this amazing FREE SCREENING!!
Apr 18th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
EARLY BIRD Special For 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival Tickets. Get. On. It.
Ticket Packages and Passes for 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival on Sale April 20 Early ticket packages mean significant discounts for those who purchase before June 30 For those film lovers looking to make a wise investment with their tax return this month, Milwaukee Film has the perfect solution: a 6-pack or 12-pack of tickets, or a Festival Pass or Platinum Pass, for the 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival, which will be held September 24 – October 4. The first ticket packages and passes go on sale Monday, April 20, and early ticket pricing will be in effect through June 30. Prices go up July 1 and then again August 1, when they will be full-price through the festival. The 2009 film festival will feature more than 100 films from around the world that will be screened at venues including the Landmark Theatres Oriental Theatre on Milwaukee’s East Side and the Marcus Theatres® North Shore Cinema in Mequon. Come September, single tickets for each film will cost $10 each, but film lovers can save a bundle by purchasing a package and buying early. “These ticket packages that are going on sale Monday are the least expensive way that movie lovers can secure their attendance at the 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival,” said Diane Bacha, Executive Director for Milwaukee Film. Through June 30, a 6-pack of festival movie tickets is $48, a $6 savings off the regular price, and a 12-pack is $90, a $12 savings off the regular price. A Festival Pass, which gives the purchaser access to all screenings throughout the festival, plus the ability to skip ticket holder lines at each film, is $200, which is a $100 savings off the regular price. For the ultimate film festival loyalist, Milwaukee Film offers the Platinum Pass, which costs $500 through June 30, a $100 savings off the regular price. The Platinum Pass grants the purchaser access to all screenings throughout the festival, VIP seating at Spotlight Presentations, exclusive box office concierge access, and exclusive ‘insider’ access to special events, parties, and VIP areas throughout the 11 days of the festival. Those who purchase a ticket package receive an important added benefit: the ability to have first pick of all the films being screened at the festival. The box office officially opens to the public on Thursday, September 10, but for those who purchase ticket packages, it opens a full day early on Wednesday, September 9. Not only do those ticket package buyers get first choice of their festival schedule, they’ll be sure to avoid any sellouts, as well. Milwaukee Film Festival ticket packages and passes can be purchased on the Milwaukee Film website at www.milwaukee-film.org. Upon receipt of purchase, ticket buyers will receive a voucher in the mail that can be redeemed for tickets at the Milwaukee Film Festival box office beginning Wednesday, September 9.
Apr 16th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
Take it from a former vampire …
I’m not a vampire, but I played one on TV … bah, dum, bum … rim shot. Old joke … I did play a vampire though, throughout the first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a turn of the (20th) century Warner Brothers Television show that was a pretty big hit and to some a cult classic. It is credited with bringing vampiriana back from the dead. But the truth is vampires never die, and as an icon of popular literature they have always been around. Sometimes they seem to be everywhere; sometimes they must be asleep in their coffins. I played “The Master,” the oldest, the original, and the baddest vampire around. He lived underground in an old church that had been buried in a California earthquake. For reasons I don’t remember he couldn’t go up on to the surface of the earth until a certain moment in time. There was a lot of pre-destination in this particular vampire tale and it all was “written” in a book that only scholars could decipher. Luckily that book happened to reside in the library of the high school in Sunnyvale, the small California town where my church was buried, and the librarian of that high school library just happened to be an Englishman whose special obsession was vampires and the occult. Very convenient. The series lasted for seven or so seasons, so it is way more complicated than I can remember, and I have probably already annoyed devout fans, of which there are many. To prepare for the part, I studied as many of the vampires of our cultural history that I could, revisiting Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the first vampire film, Nosferatu, a true classic made in 1922 by F.W. Murnau, starring the phenomenal Max Schrenk, as well as the 1979 Nosferatu remake by Werner Herzog, starring the great Klaus Kinski. There is a wealth of literature about vampires and werewolves, and it evolves as the times require. The rules change. Joss Whedon, who created Buffy The Vampire Slayer in movie form and then for television, once said that the fun thing about writing about vampires is that you get to make up the rules as you go along. Someone before you made up the previous rules, so essentially there are no rules, as long as you can justify the behavior of your particular undead creature by making up a rule. In television, you can even change the rules you made up in the first season when they become inconvenient in the fifth season. There are some rules, though, that I think are inviolate.Twilight breaks one of the oldest and most established vampire rules: they die if touched by the sun. They hedge their bets by setting it in the Pacific Northwest on the Olympic Peninsula where the sun seldom shines, but it is still a major re-write of the rules. When the lead vampire walks deliberately into the sun, he sparkles as though his skin was encrusted with diamonds. […]
Apr 16th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Wildwood Film Festival – WI only Films! 4/17 & 4/18
WILDWOOD FILM FESTIVAL Appleton, WI Friday April 17 and Saturday April 18 The Wildwood Film Festival is a festival for Wisconsin films only. Whether it’s the primary creative personnel (producer/director/writer), the actors or even the locations, all projects featured have direct ties to the state. The line-up this year offers something for everyone-comedies, dramas, thrillers and more! Ah, and more! You gotta love it. Get in the car and go to WI only true WI festival! Click Here for the schedule.
Apr 15th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
What Goes Around Comes Around 3rd Annual Milwaukee Invitational 35mm Slideshow Fri 4/24
If this isnt the most heart warming thing you’ve read all day, I demand that you unplug your typewriter from your TV and never log onto the interweb again. xo, REEL Milw @ TCD Carousel: What Goes Around Comes Around 3rd Annual Milwaukee Invitational 35mm Slideshow Friday, April 24, 7pm $4 Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E Locust St. 414 263 5001 / http://www.woodlandpattern.org Presented by the UWM Film Department and Woodland Pattern Book Center “Carousel” unspools like this: Carousel sends a roll of slide film out to invited artists who work in a variety of media, but not slideshows. They in turn make their first slideshow – of their own design. No rules regarding quantity of slides (or of projectors, or of screens) or regarding accompanying sound. The slideshows are debuted in live performance the night of the show. Past multimedia extravaganzas have featured “audience chant-a-longs; slides advancing at high speed so as to achieve animation; acting performances; overlapping imagery; slides projected side-by-side; confessionals (something along the lines of a catalogue of former boyfriends); one banjo; and something bordering on witchcraft.” [excerpted from attached Press Release.] Organized, in part, as a tribute to this mechanism the slide projector, which is now no longer manufactured, but also as testimony to its ongoing potential and possibility. While PowerPoint is widespread – even uncorked in a popular series of local barroom events – 35mm slide projectors offer a singular combination of artistry and of the homespun, of the evanescently beautiful and of the reliably mechanical. As the Carousel artists testify, reports of the slide projector’s death is premature. And Woodland Pattern’s gallery space is a perfect venue to unfurl these creations. A most intimate setting for this unique relationship between advancing image and rapt audience. It is also the best venue to enjoy the comforting purr and clunky click of the slide projector in action. (At last weekend’s Edible Book Art show, Woodland Pattern offered pages to eat; on April 24th it will eschew the digital.) This year’s invited slide show artists include: Brian Perkins (Milwaukee); Kimberly Miller (Milwaukee); Warehouse Cinema (Milwaukee): Patrick Gulke & Drew Kunz (Bainbridge Island, Washington); Jennifer Kelly (Brooklyn); John Orth & Alan Calpe (Gainesville / Brooklyn); Angela Deane (New York City); and more!
Apr 13th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
35mm Slideshow @ Woodland Pattern
Celebrating the artistic possibility and readily available charms of a technology and a medium being shuffled off to obsolescence, Carousel: The 3rd Annual Milwaukee Invitational 35mm Slide Show invites a diverse – and cross country – league of artists to work in a form they haven’t tackled before: they were each asked to generate a slide show of 35mm still images. The yet-to-be seen results will be unfurled Friday, April 24 at 7pm at Woodland Pattern Book Center. The show starts at 7pm and is $4. Woodland Pattern Book Center is located at 720 E Locust and at http://www.woodlandpattern.org The invited artists this year include: Brian Perkins (Milwaukee); Kimberly Miller (Milwaukee); Warehouse Cinema (Milwaukee): Patrick Gulke & Drew Kunz (Bainbridge Island, Washington); Jennifer Kelly (Brooklyn); John Orth & Alan Calpe (Gainesville / Brooklyn); Angela Deane (New York City); and more! Presented annually by the Film Department at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Woodland Pattern Book Center, Carousel works like this: organizers Naomi Shersty and Carl Bogner – both instructors in the UWM Film Department – send a roll of slide film out to a variety of talented, creative folk, individuals and collaborative teams. The roster of artists this year includes photographers, visual artists, filmmakers, animators, poets, performance artists, and a film projector performance collaborative.
Apr 13th, 2009 by Erin Petersen
Fincher
On the advice of my friend Max Lawton I have been revisiting the films of David Fincher. When I first viewed these films, I did not like them. I found Fight Club to be too belligerent and Seven to be over-the-top and Gothically dark. The Game, as I remembered it, played too much with reality too much and facility and not enough truth. The filmmaking is obviously very skillful, but the morality is heavy-handed. And Zodiac , though it had great set pieces and some nice performances, was long, choppy and lost the continuity it needed to make a cohesive whole. I still haven’t seen Benjamin Button. I think perhaps there is a sense of humor behind Fight Club that I didn’t understand the first time through. But if it is intended as humor then it is almost obliterated by the testosterone and the brutality of many of the images. The idea of men going into parking lots and basements and beating each other senseless, learning to love each other through this violent intimacy, is a wonderfully over the top and humorous comment on the Robert Bly “Iron John” movement of the 1990s. The absolutely necessary feminist movement that brought women out of their closets and kitchens and encouraged them to form significant relationships with each other and to demand a share in our economy and social organization naturally precluded men, who felt left behind and out of the dialogue. The power – or more accurately, the presumption of power – that men wielded for centuries was felt to be slipping away, and they flailed about in what will be, hopefully, the last death throes of white male supremacy, we waged a few stupidly motivated wars, like Grenada and the two Iraq wars, the embrace of greed as a goddess, and some bizarrely adolescent behavior as witnessed in the White House over the past eight years. If Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk, the man who wrote the novel Fight Club, are commenting on this situation, then I don’t think they have gained enough distance to see it clearly – certainly not Fincher, anyway. A big part of him is still down in the basement whimpering in the corner, with blood on his lip, fantasizing about the next time he comes up against that bad man who beat him up. Or maybe it was a woman he had to negotiate with. When Fight Club really does become comedic is near the end when the anarchy that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) preaches becomes an organization of men without lives or roots running around making explosives in the semi-abandoned house that they call home. It reminds me of the cockroaches in an old episode of “Fairly Odd Parents,” the Saturday morning cartoon, where the cockroaches set about to attain “world domination” and are nearly successful. I know Cosmo, Wanda, Jimmy and the cockroaches are funny but I am not sure if it is intended as comedy with Fincher. When I say that Fincher’s style […]
Apr 8th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Blindness
BLINDNESS Fernando Meirelles directed one of the best movies of the past ten years: City of God, which takes place in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Because the depth and impossibility of the poverty is something that most of us in this country are unfamiliar with, it feels like an apocalyptic parable. It feels like the end of the world, and I am not prepared for it. Blindness, also directed by Meirelles, is more literally about the end of the world as we know it. A disease, or a plague, of blindness overtakes a modern city. It takes rich and poor, good and bad. It spreads like a virus and eventually appears to take everyone. It is not the ordinary blindness of being plunged into blackness. As one character says, “I feel like I’m swimming in milk.” You see white, the presence of light, rather than black, the absence of light. People who are stricken are quarantined to prevent the spread. In most movies or stories about a plague or disease the focus is on the people who are trying to cure or stop the spread of the disease; the drama is in the detective work to find the reason for it. In Blindness, the focus is solely on the victims, those whose sight has been lost, or taken. And these people are more prisoners than patients. To protect the outside world, they are denied access to it. If they come too close to a guard, they are shot. Food is brought to them in limited supply by a mysterious truck. They must form their own colonies, tribes, and develop their own organizations to govern themselves. They are metaphorically starting over from scratch, except that they are blind. All except one. Julianne Moore plays the wife of an ophthalmologist, the first doctor to be infected. For reasons that are never questioned or explained, she is not blind. But to stay with her husband, she says that she is, and is quarantined with him. If she were more accustomed to power, or cared more about power, the fact that she can see in a world that cannot would enable her to govern and propel the action. The most difficult question that I take from this film is why she does not chose to dominate when it would be so easy to do so. She takes care of her husband and helps others in whatever ways she can without giving away the secret that she can see. For most of the film, she is the character that could be a savior but chooses not to be. Her sight is a secret between her and her husband until his reluctance to depend on her causes their relationship to fall apart. Most apocalyptic pictures are about the action and carnage and monsters. Blindness is not that. There is carnal violence, but it is minimal. More terrifying is the social violence in the power struggle between the two wards; Meirelles makes you feel viscerally […]
Apr 2nd, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Road trip! 2009 WI Film Festival guide
The 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival starts TODAY and runs through April 5. Pack a bag - we're going to Madison! Here are Howie Goldklang's picks for the party.
Apr 2nd, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
Milw / TCD Filmmaker Finalist in Warner Brothers / CW Network Film Contest – VOTE TODAY!
LAST WEEK TO VOTE!! Local filmmaker and long-time, much-loved TCD contributor Howie Goldklang is a FINALIST in the CW Green Your World contest. The contest has 4 filmmakers submitting weekly vlogs (video blogs) reporting on green, eco-cool initiatives in their town. Please click over, vote MILWAUKEE, vote for HOWIE GOLDKLANG! CLICK HERE TO VOTE
Apr 1st, 2009 by Amy Elliott
