The Wisconsin Film Festival featured 121 screenings at 7 venues over the course of a week. No one can see them all. I did my best.
Tight Spot
A 1955 film noir which stars:
- Ginger Rogers (who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backward and in heels) as a wisecracking prison inmate with a perfect manicure
- Edward G. Robinson (the gangster Little Caesar) as the the DA who needs her to testify against
- Lorne Greene (Ben Cartwright from “Bonanza”), mob boss who had the last witness assassinated just before he was to testify
- Brian Keith (estranged parent from Disney’s “The Parent Trap” and Uncle Bill from the sitcom “Family Affair”) as the cop who needs to protect the potential witness after they get her out of prison to convince her to testify.
Despite a plot twist in the last ⅓ that telegraphs the ending, it was big fun to watch that ending play out. The film was shown on a 35 mm print and was accompanied by someone from Columbia Pictures.
One with the Whale
A documentary on the Apasssingok family and their village of Gambell, Alaska, on the remote St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. The island has been inhabited by humans for a couple thousand years.
This is a powerful film that shows the life of subsistence hunters up close and personal. The high school principal explains that each student is granted ten “subsistence days” during the school year because “if you don’t do subsistence activities, you die.”
We ride in the boats as the family goes out to sea hunting whales, seals, geese. The photo above shows the village joining together to tow a whale to shore. A half-dozen aluminum fishing boats (of the sort you’d see on a small inland lake on the mainland) are towing the whale through icy waters. The whale will feed the village. The village battles climate change and the hatred of anti-whaling activists. When one of the kids killed his first whale, his mom posted on Facebook. After initial praise for feeding his village, he began to receive online death threats.
The film was accompanied by a short which shall remain nameless. The best I can say about it is that, as far as I could tell, it did not induce seizures in any audience member.
The Universal Theory
A bizarrely surreal German noir fantasy about a doctoral candidate in physics whose dissertation involves multiple realities. His major professor tells him his work is crap and to start over, but life strangely imitates his theory. Shot in a high-contrast black and white, the film takes place mostly in and around an alpine hotel, where a physics symposium is canceled at the last minute when the featured speaker can’t get a visa. While there is no symposium, there is a hotel full of theoretical physicists, so something is bound to happen. Fritz Lang meets Alfred Hitchcock meets Christopher Nolan? (2023)
LaRoy, Texas
The Coen Brothers without the great cinematography. From the opening scene you’re on a wild ride. A vehicle is broken down on a deserted stretch of Texas highway. We see a driver pass the car and continue on. Soon he comes upon the driver of the broken-down car walking along the road. He stops to give him a ride. The passenger is ominous-looking and the small talk is strained. Is the driver also ominous, or just awkward? They joke about drivers killing hitchchikers and vice-versa. Fasten your seatbelt as you’ll need to hang on to follow the twists and turns in the plot of this comic thriller in which most characters seem to be in over their heads. (2023)
Songs of Earth
The filmmaker’s love letter to her parents and ancestral home, as the camera follows her 84 year old father on hikes above the fjord on whose shore her family has lived for generations. A towering spruce planted by her great-grandfather has a major non-speaking role. As beautiful aurally as it is visually. (2023)
Wisconsin’s Own Two-handers
Four shorts that you’ll probably never see. In “Spark Plug” a woman’s car breaks down on the road and she has to call her ex for help. What is left when a relationship ends? In “Barney and Herb”, a 30-something guy visits a much-older friend every week and they talk about life and watch “Jeopardy”. The film-maker must be from here, as the film was clearly shot in LA. In “February” (or “Si Nos Dejan”) a teenage recent immigrant from Mexico lives with his sister and her family in Wisconsin. He doesn’t fit in. He sees an ice fishing display in a clothing store and wants to try it. His brother introduces him to a co-worker, “Crazy Carl”, who takes him out for an all-night ice fishing adventure. How can these guys become friends? “Maladjustment” looks at the life of a couple during the pandemic when she works from home and he is laid off. How long does it take for your partner to drive you crazy? And how crazy?
Bushman
Begun as a feature film in 1968 and released in 1971 as combination of narrative feature and documentary due to changes in circumstances I will not detail here, this looks at the life of a Nigerian immigrant in San Francisco.
Deep Sea 3-D
Not to be confused with the 2006 IMax documentary of the same name, this is a 2023 animated film from China. The story concerns a 7 (or so) year old girl on a family cruise. Her mother left the family and her father remarried, having a second child with his new wife. The protagonist blames herself for her mother leaving. Her father and stepfather dote on the baby to the extent that they forget it is the older child’s birthday. She is swept overboard in a storm at sea and embarks on an undersea adventure reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz on steroids and LSD; but only if the tale were told by a 13 year old drama queen.
The 3D is astounding for a few minutes before it becomes hopelessly tedious and bombastic. The music and effects swell ominously as we see essentially the same scene played over and over again. Had I been in an aisle seat, I would have left after ten minutes. At 105 minutes, it is about 90 minutes too long. At the end, the subtitle reads “Wake up! The show is over!” But mercilessly, it continues for several more minutes.
Gasoline Rainbow
Five friends graduate from high school in small-town eastern Oregon and head for the coast in a beat-up van, a last fling before they join the “real world” and get jobs. If the dialog was scripted, it’s pretty lame. If it is just five actual 18 year olds being themselves, there are some touching moments. Sometimes it looks like an unedited home movie, sometimes like a feature film. Did they just happen upon these parties, or are those actors following a script? Of course they encounter hardships, of course they persevere, of course they grow closer through the adventure. Not the best film I saw all week, but not the worst, this is the sort of film I go to festivals for – something I wouldn’t see in a theatre but worth the hour and a half in a dark room with a bunch of strangers.
Ashima
This 2023 documentary feature follows Ashima Shiraishi and her coach/father as she travels to South Africa to attempt her first-ever V14 boulder problem. It had been done by one female before. (Climbs are rated V0 to V17. Per Philadelphia Rock Gyms –V11 – V13 Expert (very strong, sometimes professional athletes) V14 – V17 Elite (very few climbers in the world).)
While lacking the visual drama of Free Solo (the documentary of Alex Honnold’s climb of El Capitán), it, too, is a relationship drama. The most difficult aspect of the Golden Shadow (the South African boulder she sets out to climb) is not that you are high up on a wall and a fall means death, but that you are hanging upside down at the very beginning of the climb. We see her fall over and over as she attempts to solve this problem over a series of days. The most difficult aspect of the relationship is not her partner’s fear that she will die (as in Free Solo), but her father’s driving coaching style. When she stops because she is bleeding, he says “your finger isn’t broken!” By the way, she was 13 years old at the time and just turned 23.
On my ride home from the theatre after the last show, I heard spring peepers as I rode through a marsh. Time to get out of the theatre and back on the road!
Half-fast Cycling Club 