Have you been procrastinating on getting your film fest tickets? You’re not alone. The festival kicks off on April 4, and tickets are widely available for many excellent films, including premieres you won’t see anywhere else. Isthmus reviewers have been working overtime watching films in advance to help you make some important choices.
Betty White: First Lady of Television
Fri., April 5, Shannon Hall, 3:45 pm
In these bitterly polarized times, it seems, there is very little that everyone can agree on. But one of the few might be that Betty White is awesome.
Betty White: First Lady of Television is a heartwarming documentary that showcases how talented and groundbreaking an artist the 97-year-old actor is. The film traces White’s career from the early days of television (when she would be live on the air, daily, for five hours), through her many sitcoms (Life with Elizabeth, They Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland) to her rise as a cultural icon, famously becoming the oldest host ever of Saturday Night Live, at age 88 in 2007.
What shines through in all of White’s endeavors is her impeccable comic timing and love of her craft. Although she worked almost exclusively in ensemble casts and supporting roles, she clearly made everyone she worked with better at their jobs.
One of the more profound insights she offers on her craft as a TV artist is that film stars are people you pay to see in a movie house, giving them an air of elitism. But TV stars, who are in our homes every night, feel like one of us. — Joe Tarr
Pet Names
Friday, April 5, UW Cinematheque, 8:30 pm
Pet Names is a small independent feature, an intimate and moving exploration of two young people on the cusp of adulthood directed by Milwaukee’s Carol Brandt. Pink-haired grad school dropout Leigh (Meredith Johnson, who wrote the screenplay) is living at home with her bedridden mom. When a friend cancels out on a camping trip, Leigh invites her neighbor and ex-boyfriend (Rene Cruz, who composed much of the film’s evocative score). They frolic, jostle and tease — drawing close and then shutting each other out — as they wrestle with their complicated feelings. And they become one with the verdant landscape (near Spring Green) as they take psychedelics. Their spirit guide throughout is Goose, a chubby, loveable pug. It’s tough to take your eyes off Johnson and Cruz; both are tremendously natural actors, emotional without overdoing it. This meditation on friendship sneaks up on the viewer, making it more than the sum of its parts. Brandt is a talented filmmaker on her way up, and she’s moving to Los Angeles soon. You’ll want to say you saw her here. — Catherine Capellaro
Played Out
Sat., April 6, Union South, 6:15 pm
When author Henry David Thoreau said “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” he could have been talking about the characters in Played Out, producer/director James Runde’s day-in-the-life look at three Madison musicians. The film is one of three Golden Badger Award winners at this year’s festival.
Rapper Booda (Tim West) just released his first CD, but spends most of his day caring for two young sons while his wife works outside of the house. James (Runde himself) alternates between gluing his shoes back together, practicing with his punk band and disappointing his family. Fellow band member Leslie (Leslie Gavin), a single mom with an older son at home, meditates on what to do after quitting her day job. All three lives are liberally laced with weed smoke.
Runde’s naturalistic eavesdropping style and the anonymous Madison locations give the film an almost uncomfortable familiarity. Characters bump from one thing to another, never quite living up to anyone’s expectations, including their own. Lives more mundane are difficult to imagine.
But that’s the value of Runde’s 53-minute cinematic essay. The inside look offered by his characters leads viewers to step back and examine their own lives, warts and all. Especially the warts. — Michael Muckian
Life on the Mississippi
Screens as part of “It’s Only Natural: Out and About with Wisconsin’s Own”
Sat., April 6, Union South, 8:30 pm; rush seats only
In his Golden Badger Award-winning personal essay Life on the Mississippi, Bill Brown asks, “What is the Mississippi River?” He begins with a Mark Twain impersonator and contemplates the impact Twain’s stories have had on how we market the idea of the Mississippi River to ourselves. But as he journeys along the river’s path, he also documents several scale replicas built to understand the river and to harness its power.
As with many of his films, Brown documents these locations with simple static shots as a voice-over explains their significance. It’s one of the oldest documentary techniques, but Brown keeps it fresh with his subtle humor and keen eye. — James Kreul
Making Montgomery Clift
Sun., April 7, AMC Madison, 1:15 pm; Monday, April 8, AMC Madison, 2 pm
At times, Making Montgomery Clift doesn’t seem to be about Clift at all. It is about settling family scores and, while it’s at it, spending a little time telling the life story of one of the great actors of mid-century Hollywood. Robert Anderson Clift (who co-directs with Hillary Demmon) really wants to let the truth be known about his late uncle. Off screen, Montgomery Clift was as funny as Jerry Lewis. He wasn’t a Method actor. He wasn’t a “gay tragedy” (he was as openly bisexual as an actor could be at the time). He wasn’t a pedophile. His brain wasn’t destroyed by a car accident. This film aims to manage the truth, but it gets bogged down showing us how the facts were mangled by a couple of old tell-all biographies. We spend too much time with the film’s director and his father, who have a shared obsession with Uncle Monty, and not enough time with Monty himself. Note: the festival is showing three Montgomery Clift films: Lonelyhearts, Suddenly, Last Summer and A Place in the Sun. — Craig Johnson
Los Reyes
Sun., April 7, Union South, 2 pm; Wed., April 10, AMC, 4 pm
The most striking images in this year’s festival appear in Los Reyes, a deceptively simple documentary by Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff. On the surface, the film quietly observes the lives of two stray dogs who live in a skate park in Santiago, Chile. By the end, it makes many wry observations about the rhythm and logic of life on the periphery.
Perut and Osnovikoff began by interviewing kids hanging out at the Los Reyes skate park, but when the kids didn’t want to appear on camera the filmmakers shifted focus to the two strays, Football and Chola. The kids are still present through their conversations recorded off-screen, but the image track focuses on Football and Chola as they bark at intruders, chase after balls, and find shade.
The wild shifts in scale are stunning, as Perut and Osnovikoff alternate between long-lensed observations and clinical close-ups of Football and Chola. As the dogs sleep, a drop slowly emerges from a nostril, and a fly walks around on a tooth. If Football and Chola were human subjects, the close-ups would be unsettling intrusions of their privacy. But cumulatively the close-ups project them as magnificent living creatures whose worn bodies are as expressive as wrinkles on a human face.
Motifs early in the film come back to carry emotional weight. Early in the film Chola howls in response to a police siren to comic effect; his howl late in the film is heartbreaking. Flies become more numerous and ominous. A single drop of blood stands in for an inevitable event that takes place off-screen. I look forward to re-visiting Los Reyes with a festival audience to share the experience. — James Kreul
Styx
Sun., April 7, AMC Madison, 5:30 pm; Mon., April 8, AMC Madison, 1:45 pm
There is an old parlor game called Scruples. Players read moral dilemmas off cards and try to figure out how the other players will answer. Styx is a 90-minute round of that game. “While crossing the Atlantic alone in a well-stocked 12-meter sailboat you encounter a foundering boat filled with young African refugees. You radio the coast guard to send help, and you are told not to approach the boat because you would be risking your life and might cause further panic and death. What do you do?”
The movie is a geopolitical philosophical argument in action, a microversion of the European refugee crisis. In the end, the quandary might work better in the parlor than in the cinema. The movie spends too much time floating between the two right/wrong answers waiting for our heroine to find a third option. Styx does have its virtues: director Wolfgang Fischer does a remarkable job of capturing the vast isolation felt on the ocean, and actress Susanne Wolff, who spends the first half of the movie basically doing a one-woman show, doesn’t seem to be acting so much as existing in her role. — Craig Johnson
Anna Wloch
Who Will Write Our History?
Wed., April 10, AMC Madison, 6 pm; rush seats only
Roberta Grossman’s documentary dives deep into one of the most horrific chapters of human history, as she explores the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were confined during World War II. Prewar Warsaw was a center of Jewish culture, with a flourishing Yiddish theater and music scene, daily newspapers, and more than 100 Jewish schools. When the Nazis blazed into the city in 1939, Jews were crowded into a walled-off area, where they faced mass hunger and unspeakable torment at the hands of German occupiers. The devastating doc serves as an essential corrective to a persistent myth that Jews were passive victims in the face of German brutality. The story centers around efforts to preserve accounts of Nazi atrocities (which were later used to convict war criminals). Equally important, it highlights the work of the network of artists, historians and writers who formed a collective called the Oyneg Shabes Archive. “Let the witness be our writing,” wrote key organizer Emanuel Ringelblum, a doctor who also organized relief efforts. The collective distributed notebooks and collected the stories of families as the horror unfolded. “One could say we should have seen the worst coming,” wrote Rachel Auerbach, one of three people of the original 60 in the collective who survived. (One in 100 Polish Jews survived the war.) Thanks to their careful efforts to hide the archive from the Nazis, a treasure trove of materials was dug out of Warsaw’s rubble after the war. “The life of every Jew during the war is a world unto itself,” wrote one man. Grossman’s film employs archival photos and videos, but it also illustrates the powerful writings from the unearthed archive with reenactments. Some of these lack the power of the original material. But any more wartime footage would be hard to take. — Catherine Capellaro
Between the Lines
Thu., April 11, AMC Madison, 6 pm
Early on in Between the Lines, the editorial staff of The Back Bay Mainline (a fictional alt-weekly in Boston) meets to discuss story ideas for the upcoming issue. They’re interrupted by the paper’s advertising manager, who informs them that they will have to give up four pages of content for a special ad spread.
The editor walks him out into the hallway, twists his arm behind his back and threatens him. Although I’ve never seen anything remotely similar at the eight papers (including three alt-weeklies) that I’ve worked for, I confess that it’s a lovely fantasy.
Between the Lines, the 1977 film directed by Joan Micklin Silver, spends little time on the journalism the paper produces and instead focuses on the personal relationships and staff’s insecurities, both financial and personal.
It’s worth seeing for the now-famous actors — Jeff Goldblum, John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Bruno Kirby — in some of their first roles.
And what the movie gets right about alt-weekly journalism is the financial anxiety that hangs over the whole venture. It’s distressing that it’s something journalism is still grappling with; but encouraging that more than 40 years later, some alt-weeklies are still around, even if the sense of financial security never materialized. — Joe Tarr
