Movies
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
TULPAN a huge hit in NYC, coming to MKE Monday!
This just in: the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott posted a fabulous review today of Tulpan, a romance, coming-of-age story and epic landscape drama set on the desolate steppes of Kazhakstan. Scott writes: Tulpan, the first fictional feature by the Kazakh director Sergey Dvortsevoy, might be described as an epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story or a lyrical work of social realism. But the setting — a windswept, sparely populated steppe in southern Kazakhstan — gives the movie a mood that sometimes feels closer to that of science fiction. … [The lamb birth] scene, a milestone in cinematic ovine obstetrics, is both crucial to the story and a tour de force, the kind of thing a director like David Cronenberg or Takashi Miike would attempt only with prosthetics or other special effects. In “Tulpan” you see it for real, a perfectly ordinary event that is also something of a miracle. Tulpan took home the Prix un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, and it celebrates an anticipated opening in New York today. And here’s the best part, Milwaukee: you can see it here on Monday as part of Milwaukee Film‘s so-far-successful Monday Night at the Movies series at the Marcus North Shore Cinema in Mequon. It’s unusual that we have the chance here on the Third Coast to see an independent international release within the same week of screenings on the East Coast, so we recommend you attend. You can buy your tickets online now at milwaukee-film.org. See the Tulpan trailer and learn more here. Don’t feel like driving to Mequon? No car? NO PROBLEM! Join Milwaukee Film, WMSE and TCD at the Wicked Hop for a big, bad bus party. Come early for drink specials and burger madness. Bus departs at 6:30 sharp. Play trivia with WMSE DJs and join Program Director Jonathan Jackson for a casual discussion about the film on the way back. We’ll have some great giveaways on the bus and after the show! The bus is FREE, so save some cash, save the earth, and have a crazy good time. See you there, film-os.
Apr 1st, 2009 by Amy Elliott
A Not-At-All Academic Comparision of Let the Right One In and Twilight
Fig.1: Frodo of the Shire checks out Arwen Evenstar’s Elven tush (I think he’s on a footstool) When it comes to horror, I’ve always been all about the zombies. Until recently, my list of favorite horror movies was probably interchangeable with my list of favorite zombie movies: Dead Alive, Dawn of the Dead (the original, although it pained me to admit that the remake was actually pretty serviceable, despite the aerial shot of “Milwaukee” with all the in-ground pools), and 28 Days Later all take some piece of the zombie mythos and make it special for me, especially Dawn and 28 Days, both of which use zombies as a mirror of humanity in some respect (which is what the best horror and sci-fi movies do). And then of course there’s Shaun of the Dead, which somehow manages to do the same while being hilarious. But in 2008, it was all about vampires. It started with the HBO series True Blood, which I will now summarize for you (because I watched every ridiculously-entertaining-despite-itself episode) in twelve words: Sookie Sookie fuck Sookie, fuck fuck, Jason’s dick, blood tits fuck Sookie. Fig.2: Compare with the Shire photo and tell me which movie you’d rather watch? But the hell with the adult vamps; 2008 was all about immortal bloodsuckers trapped in the bodies of teens and pre-teens. In Sweden, this meant the release of Let the Right One In, a beautifully understated horror drama about the relationship between two painfully lonely 12-year-olds, Oskar and Eli, one of which has been twelve for a long, long time. In America (because 200+ years later, America is still the equivalent of Europe if its mother fed it crack in the womb), this meant the premiere of Twilight, a romantic comedy about a constipated teen vampire named Edward Cullen who falls in love with Bella, the new girl in his chemistry class, simply because she makes him jizz in his pants upon first sight (according to animated gifs on the internet, anyway). Also, vampires take chemistry class, because that’ll come in handy on that college application so you can go to school and WAIT YOU DON’T NEED TO OPERATE IN EVERYDAY SOCIETY BECAUSE YOU’RE A GODDAMN VAMPIRE. It’s probably unfair to compare the two—heck, Twilight author Stephenie Meyer admits she didn’t even know that much about vampire mythology when she wrote the damn thing (then again, all the more reason to take her to task, eh?)—but plenty of reviewers took that path already, lazily mentioning both movies in the same breath even though the age of the principal characters is about all the movies have in common with each other. And heck, since when has Cultural Zero been about fairness? Having already seen Right One multiple times (and yes, I’m aware of the controversy involving the DVD’s subtitles, so everyone can stop sending me links already, Jeebus), some friends and I popped in Twilight last weekend and watched both films back-to-back. As expected, comparing the two was like […]
Mar 26th, 2009 by DJ Hostettler
Now in glorious 3-D!!!
Before it ever became a fond figment of Americana (akin to drive-ins), 3D movies were an effective means of getting people in seats. Studios and distributors alike have a long history of using primal urges and emotional selling points to get your business, from the first sale of popcorn, Cinerama, and Smell-o-vision to today’s shilling of ultra-combos, IMAX and THX sound. But using 3D is a trick of the brain; the device makes a user feel something more than what is there. Objects and actions on a screen appear, surreally, somehow more vivid than what one could experience in real life. It activates nerve receptors that stay locked in fascination until the gimmick wears off and common sense returns. 3D movies therefore offer something hyper-real that tricks us into finding more emotion, drama, suspense or comedy in the story than is really there. This weekend marks the unofficial and incredulous early opening of the big-budget summer movie season with the premiere of DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens (in 3-D). One could argue that this posited leap-start to the season happened weeks ago with the splashy release of Watchmen, but that opening was to a much smaller niche audience. Opening a kids’ movie in general requires a special finesse and a whole lot of chutzpah marketing. These days, family movies can be sure-fire money makers and a hard-sell item paradox. Parents want to allow their kids entertainment treats by taking them to High-School Musical 3, but don’t want to sit through Tales of Desperaux or Jonas Brothers in Concert (in 3-D!). Kids want to buy memorabilia and t-shirts from their new favorite movie, but if the story isn’t emotionally solid enough, no one buys the Happy Meal toy. Movie producers and distributors can’t sell more tickets than there are people, but want more money. So how do you generate excitement and anticipation for a blockbuster family film when the market is glutted with offerings? Enter 3D or ‘Real D’ technology, for which all of DreamWorks Animation’s movies will now be adapted. Disney made the same point two months prior by showing the first visually-stunning all stop-motion movie Coraline in Disney Digital 3D, which uses the same technology. There is a slate of almost a dozen movies coming out this way in 2009, and lots more on the way next year. This new technological format was first introduced four years ago, but it wasn’t in widespread use until many theater chains agreed to put the requisite projectors in their multiplexes. With the agreement came a host of planned 3D movies with 2D versions at adjoining theaters. You’ll pay as much as $3 per ticket extra for the 3D screening, an upgrade that comes with hard plastic glasses that allows the magic to happen. The catch? You have to give them back. It’s a head-scratcher both in logic and purpose. At the end of your 3D experience, ushers wait with open hands ready to confiscate your “rental”. While theater owners are desperate to get seats […]
Mar 26th, 2009 by Brian Jacobson
A handful of observations
AUGUST RUSH I’ll put August Rush on the ring finger because it is a fantasy romance and I think of marriage that way lately. I don’t really like the picture, except that the romance is mostly told with music, and Freddie Highmore, the child actor from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland, is the star. A friend of mine started a play of hers with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC.” I think this film’s embrace of music – and of the possibility that a human can be gifted beyond understanding – suggests the existence of God as well. It’s the shots of people listening that give me that rush of emotion, that make me tear up and gasp. It’s true especially in films about music, but I think in any film about art and artistic expression, the key moment is the appreciation of the action, the moment when everything is redeemed because the audience actually hears what is being played, sung, spoken, acted, or expressed and recognizes that something extraordinary is happening, that a window is being opened into a soul and a life is being exposed with grace and dignity. My heart goes to the audience because, if Kurt Vonnegut is right, the artist walks with God, and in a way brings that as a gift to the listener. The moments of recognition in August Rush gave me that. GOLDFINGER and QUANTUM OF SOLACE The middle finger and the thumb … I spent the weekend at an autograph show with Tony Curtis, Angie Dickinson and Shirley Eaton. Shirley Eaton was the beautiful blond who betrayed Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, my favorite of the early James Bond movies. I hope that one of my last memories will be of Shirley Eaton, dead and naked, lying across Sean Connery’s bed, painted gold. If I’m still having erotic thoughts – and that is the hope – one of them will be of her. Goldfinger was 1964 and she still holds up. Fine featured and elegant, wearing gold tones, a very gracious lady and charming with the many fans that came to see her. The early Bond films celebrated a particularly decorative notion of maleness. They also celebrated the notion of the female as decoration. The new Bond, starting with Casino Royale and Daniel Craig, redefines maleness and the position of the female in his life. Craig’s Bond is a thug, a brutal man with the focus and concentration of a soldier machine who learns charm, social grace and maybe humanity itself when he falls in love with a woman. In the sequel, Quantum of Solace, which came out on DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday, he is set on revenge for her death at the end of Casino Royale. It’s a James Bond with human feelings and fast cars and million dollar stakes at the gaming table. But […]
Mar 26th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Two ways to run an agent
Body of Lies stars Russell Crowe doing an accent. He’s done a lot of accents lately: New York City Irish cop in American Gangster, also directed by Ridley Scott; American cowboy in 3:10 To Yuma; and Virginia family man here, again directed by Ridley Scott. He also apparently put on 66 pounds to play this character, a lead analyst in the CIA, living in affluence in Virginia, running an agent in Jordan by phone while he picks the kids up at soccer practice in the Lexus. It may not be a Lexus and it may not be soccer, it may be ballet, but it is definitely suburban; we are never allowed to forget that. The contrast between the agent in the field, sleeping on floors, sussing out IED’s, being tortured, speaking different dialects of the native language and the boss who processes the intelligence and directs the agent into more and more dangerous situations is made clear every time Crowe is on screen. It’s about all that is made clear. I find Crowe’s acting to be increasingly like a man who goes to a big closet and picks, first an accent, then a few physical mannerisms, the hair, a walk, something to do with his hands. He puts on a character the way you might put on a suit of clothes, but the clothes always have that new clothes look, they haven’t been worn enough to feel owned. And ownership is what brings authenticity, and that is what makes a character in a situation believable. Crowe’s partner, the man on the other end of the satellite phone, the agent in the field, the dog out sniffing up the terrorists, is played by Leonardo DeCaprio, again working against type to play a grown man, doing a tough job, in a dangerous environment. I know he can grow facial hair, or at least wear a wig and beard well, but that doesn’t quite get him over the hump fully into manhood. There’s something about the whine that gets into his voice when he becomes excited that holds him back and makes him still a boy pretending to do a man’s job. He tries on accents too, going a little Southern once in a while during the course of the film. But consistency is a problem with DeCaprio. Ridley Scott has worked with Russell Crowe several times, all the way back to Gladiator. He has also made some films that should be in anyone’s best all time list: Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise. And one of the best of the modern war films: Black Hawk Down. He knows his way around an action sequence and can tell a story in a compelling way. Body Of Lies is certainly the high-rent version of how Middle East intelligence operations work. Two major stars, an A-list director and a script by the man who wrote Departed, William Monahan, will get you a big budget and a nice release pattern. Why then did it fail? The […]
Mar 19th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!!
Is it Milwaukee Film or Milwaukee Film Festival or what? Either way, read on, poke around on that your smarky little iPhone/Blackberry and make plans to submit that film…. Milwaukee Film Announces 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival and Call for Entries New and highly anticipated Milwaukee Film Festival will kick off September 24 Milwaukee Film, the new and independent organization dedicated to presenting Milwaukee’s premier film festival, is proud to announce the dates and a call for entries for its 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival. Running September 24 through October 4, the back and better-than-ever Milwaukee Film Festival will showcase more than 100 films at venues throughout the city, including the Landmark Theatres Oriental Theatre and the Marcus Theatres® North Shore Cinema. The Film Festival will feature films from around the country and the world, providing a unique community platform for films that would otherwise not screen in Milwaukee. “We’re incredibly excited to be able to announce the Film Festival dates today,” said Jonathan Jackson, Milwaukee Film artistic director. “We’re confident that the new festival will be the best Milwaukee has seen and that it will be a Milwaukee institution for many years to come.” The early deadline for film submissions is April 6. Entry fees start at $10, but the fees are waived for any film created by a Milwaukee filmmaker. The festival will offer cash and production prize packages, to be announced at a later date. Tickets for individual films will be $10, but Milwaukee Film will offer discounts for those purchasing their ticket packages and passes early. The first ticket packages will go on sale in April, and in addition to early discounts, Milwaukee Film is planning a series of contests, promotions, incentives, and special events leading up to the film festival. “Thousands of Milwaukeeans filled the seats at the film festival in years past, and this year our goal is to bring those guests back and to attract a diverse new audience,” said Diane Bacha, executive director of Milwaukee Film. “The response we’ve gotten since forming the organization last year has been overwhelmingly positive, and we can’t wait to present Milwaukee with this world-class festival come September. It’s truly a privilege to be able to essentially bring the whole world to Milwaukee through film.”
Mar 18th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
Epic romance
Seventy years ago, Gone With The Wind blew across the movie screens of America and became, for many, the quintessential American movie. GWTWand The Wizard of Oz, also made in 1939, were for decades the definition of the Hollywood spectacular and a road map for how American ingenuity and innovation could bring a degree of enlightenment to a pop culture phenomenon. Now Australia, a movie directed by Australian Baz Luhrman and starring Australians Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, comes along and reinvents the epic romantic movie genre of the one while fully embracing the fantasy movie genre of the other. Sung with delightful awkwardness by Kidman, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” becomes the leitmotif of the film. Luhrman has said that he wants to make movies that fully engage the audience in a participatory experience, which never lets them forget that they are watching a movie. He calls it the Red Curtain discipline. His first trilogy of films, Strictly Ballroom, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge are spectacularly theatrical. They exist by, for and about performance. Australia is a departure because, without being a remake, it takes a film story that is familiar to everyone who knows classic American films – the headstrong lady of breeding meets the equally independent man of nature, they clash, work together against evil, fall in love and vanquish the oppressor – and it re-imagines it. It is a romance novel melodrama, a paper-thin story writ across the face of the incredible landscape of Australia and infused with all the magic and mystery of the Aboriginal culture that has lived there for millennium. I don’t know how Luhrman and cinematographer Mandy Walker create the astonishing colors and compositions that they do. Every square inch of every frame is deliberate and amazing. I’m sure that Australia itself is beautiful, but Luhrman sees it the way Van Gogh saw Arles, with intensity and a clarity that transposes it to the surreal. In the first half of the film, again and again your breath is stopped in your throat by a visual image. And no matter how simple and transparent the story, its visualization – the sheer passionate showmanship of the movie making – connects you to an emotional response. At points it is like listening to the best of Beethoven. There is no way to articulate in words what is happening, or what exactly you are feeling, but you are swept up and away by the mystery of sound and you become an emotion. Of course, as in love, you must be willing to surrender. It is filmmaking of the highest order. But it goes on too long. There are two films here. The first as I described before, the second after the man and the woman have come together and saved the homestead, when they must defend it and defend their love from each other and from the pressures of the outside world. And then there are the Japanese and the authoritarian forces of the […]
Mar 12th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Superheroes
There are two questions that plague me about the movies. One is: Why do we need love stories? Why is romantic love so basic to our cinematic literature? I tend to think that it is all about procreation and part of an elaborate mating ritual, but I am told that just asking the question makes me a cynic and I’m not sure I am ready to be thusly compartmentalized. The other is: Why super heroes? In the past year alone we have had Iron Man, Batman, The Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy, Bolt, and now Watchmen. Before that came Spiderman, but he ran his course a few years ago. I suspect the Fantastic Four will return and apparently the Last Stand of the X-Men was not, literally, a last stand. And if the endings of Iron Man and The Hulk are to be believed there will be more to come out of that Ultimate Alliance. The answer at an economic level is obvious: They make a lot of super hero movies because people go to see super hero movies and therefore they make a lot of money making super hero movies. Somebody started it and if Hollywood is good at anything it’s jumping on whatever bandwagon is making money. But as a social anthropologist, I wonder what it is about our society that pushes us to need super heroes to play so prominent a part in the culture. A friend once answered that question with, “Well, with our politicians so obviously worthless we need someone strong to look up to.” The man definitely has a point. For the last eight years at least, the perception has been that the leaders of our country, the politicians, are far from heroes. And before that, Bill Clinton, it turned out, was nothing more than a man and a weak one at that. The first President Bush was a bit of a clerk in his manner. Ronald Reagan wore spurs, chaps, and a cowboy hat, and he came out of the West with the sun at his back. He walked the walk and stood in the shadow of hundreds of cowboy heroes; not super heroes, but the literary equivalent of brave, strong men on whom we have always counted. With Reagan it may have been an illusion, or, as some of us still believe, a delusion. But we always seem to need heroes to stand in for us, to stand up for us, to walk into the flames before us. We live in a culture that is patriarchal by design and perhaps by nature. Patriarchal and hierarchical. We choose a leader and that leader goes out and meets the enemy for us so that we can stay at home and live a comfortable life. And that leader has always tended to be male or at least a female who thinks the way a male does, in a vertical way, in the way of dominance and submission, of power and of strength, in the way of winning. […]
Mar 9th, 2009 by Mark Metcalf
Sound the alarm
Close my blog now. OK, not NOW now, in like 2 minutes from now. Get up and git yourself back to the main page. Breathe. Take it in. This is for real. Unified, organized(ish), bleeding edge, here and now journalism. Your search is over. Explore the site. Explore Milwaukee. Explore our 3rd Coast. Milwaukee Film is alive and well with screenings galore. Film Wisconsin is bare-knuckle brawlin’ the Gov, which is in line with spirit of true indie film. More and more galleries/artists are VJ-ing, vlogging, adding film showcases … it’s so here and now, its practically reading this blog, with a drink, smiling, scrolling, click … Oh wait, that’s you. You may click away now. Now git!
Mar 7th, 2009 by Howie Goldklang
