The Magic Sword (U.S., 1962)
D: Bert I. Gordon

When I was a kid, The Magic Sword was on TV every Saturday afternoon, it seemed.  I tolerated it, but I really wanted to see stop-motion monsters – and the grotesque monster makeup on some of the characters gave me nightmares.  In adolescence I discovered the film again on Mystery Science Theater 3000, where it made perfect fodder: the film wasn’t bad but it was awfully goofy, with its petulant hero, his addled sorceress mother, her companions (a two-headed man and a chimp), and, of course, Basil Rathbone as the villain, hamming it up.  What the film did have was a great dragon (a two-headed puppet breathing real fire), and a handsome look, straining its low budget with decent matte paintings for a real fairy-tale feel.  Legendary B-movie director Bert I. Gordon brought his personal print to the Wisconsin Film Festival, and unfortunately with age the colors had faded to pink.  One adjusted to this very quickly, but for some reason the glowing-green eyes of the film’s hag retained the green hue, which made the film seem a little more stylish than it ever was.  After the screening, Mr. B.I.G. entertained audience questions, including a nice anecdote about how he won over a stubborn Orson Welles (through his stomach, naturally).

Paddle to Seattle: Journey Through the Inside Passage (U.S., 2009)
D: Josh Thomas and J.J. Kelley

The Wisconsin Union Theater was close to being sold out for the Wisconsin premiere of the WIFF Badger Award-winning documentary Paddle to Seattle: Journey Through the Inside Passage.  Festival director Meg Hamel was present (of course, as we’ve now established she’s been cloned for this year’s festival), presenting the award to the filmmakers and getting a bit choked up when someone in the audience handed her a bouquet of flowers.  The documentary itself is both fun and mesmerizing, as J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas embark upon a several-months-long trip by kayak from Anchorage, AK down the coastline of Canada to Seattle.  Along the way they endure sickness, bad weather, “red tide,” tainted store-bought meat, and general fatigue; they encounter grizzlies, a friendly lighthouse keeper living in complete isolation, a manatee, and humpback whales who swim right under their boats.  To keep their own sanity, they crack jokes and occasionally perform skits for the camera.  That can get a little wearying, but there are some solid laughs here too.  Really, it was perfect Sunday-afternoon film-festival viewing, because my wife and I were suffering from some fatigue ourselves (of the too-many-movies variety), so we were sympathetic.  Our asses were just as sore.

Terribly Happy (Denmark, 2008)
D: Henrik Ruben Genz

So apparently rural Denmark is exactly like the rural American Southwest.  Or, to be more precise, the rural American Southwest as depicted in the films of the Coen Brothers.  The Coens are clearly a very big influence on Henrik Ruben Genz’s offbeat Terribly Happy, which, like Blood Simple and Fargo, involves moral corruption, bizarre incidents, character quirks, and film noir stylings.  Unfortunately, the whole is less than its parts in this case. Jakob Cedergren plays a cop who, because of his own rash actions (revealed late in the film), is exiled by the police force to serve as the only officer in a remote Danish town surrounded by muddy bogs that swallow up anybody who wanders too close.  Almost against his will, he becomes entangled in the local sordid melodrama involving a sexy housewife who claims that her alcoholic husband beats her.  Murders are committed, the bodies are hidden, and the bog gets crowded.  Yet, somehow, none of it is sufficiently compelling.  A much better neo-noir handling of similar themes arrived with the Orpheum’s very next screening…

Mother (2009, South Korea)
D: Bong Joon-ho

This, the (unofficial) closing film of the festival, was sparsely attended, which was something of a shock.  Mother had great buzz, and past closing night films Sita Sings the Blues and Fermat’s Room were packed.  I can only assume that weariness was settling in upon the Madison crowd; the person ahead of me in line said that his wife couldn’t sit in a theater any longer, so she stayed home, but he refused to give up.  Mother made it worthwhile for the stalwart film buffs.  Director Bong Joon-ho had a mini-retrospective at the festival this year: his films The Host, Memories of Murder, and Barking Dogs Never Bite were screened.  Mother is a showcase for his talent; like Park Chan-Wook he has a virtuoso visual style, but he roots his stories in characters who are, to my estimation, more honest and believable, if nonetheless just as astonishing in their actions.  I knew little of the story, which lent a greater impact to the twists; as a result, I’m reluctant to reveal too much, except that it involves a mentally damaged young man, his overprotective mother, a brutal murder, and the mother’s subsequent amateur detective work.  That her snooping really is amateurish – and often takes her well in the wrong direction – is part of the story’s fascination.  We follow her down one blind alley after the next, inevitably toward a “terrible truth,” but one which is far more loaded and meaningful that most films of this genre.  Mother proved a suitably perfect closing film for the festival, dark, savage, emotional, bleakly funny, and ultimately very satisfying.

Waking Sleeping Beauty (U.S., 2009)
D: Don Hahn

In the mid-1980’s, Disney hit a new low: their latest animated film, The Black Cauldron, was beaten in its opening weekend box office by The Care Bears Movie.  The days of Walt were clearly gone.  Waking Sleeping Beauty, directed by Don Hahn (who produced The Lion King), tells the story of how Disney imploded and then rebuilt itself from the ground up, bringing in Hollywood big-hitters (namely Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg) for an image makeover that ultimately resulted in films like The Little Mermaid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Beauty & the Beast.  A warts-and-all portrait of some tense years, the film also makes it clear that not all was rosy when the cash machine was at its most lucrative: upon the release of The Lion King, the studio’s greatest success, Roy E. Disney, Eisner and Katzenberg were at each other’s throats, and on the verge of tearing the studio to pieces again.  This is where the film ends, surprisingly, although one expects a sequel should be equally dramatic (the fall of Eisner and the rise of Pixar).  Yet the primary focus of the film, directed and produced by men who were there, is the animation department and its struggles to remain creative and vital under leadership that was bringing the bottom line, and a dose of reality, to a Magic Kingdom on the verge of collapse.  Since the film consists entirely of vintage behind-the-scenes footage, there are some real gems here, such as a glimpse of Howard Ashman, quivering with nervous energy, demoing “Under the Sea” for the animation crew; a tense and bizarre moment in which Roy Disney and Eisner have a public clash at a memorial service; and the animators, cathartically working through their anxiety of losing their jobs, re-enacting Apocalypse Now in the animation studio.  Former Walt Disney chairman (and ex-Madisonian) Peter Schneider, who produced Waking Sleeping Beauty, was present for a Q&A following the screening, and explained how he was able to get Eisner, Katzenberg, and the late Roy E. Disney to contribute interviews for the film despite some initial reluctance and lingering bitterness.

A Town Called Panic (France, 2009)
D: Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar

Future midnight movie contender A Town Called Panic is a stop-motion animated film utilizing children’s toys and following a stream-of-consciousness narrative.  It’s like playing in a sandbox for 75 minutes, possibly after the ingestion of an illegal substance.  Horse, Cowboy, and Indian live together next to a farm, and when it’s Horse’s birthday, Cowboy and Indian decide to build him a brick barbeque – but they accidentally order too many bricks.  This triggers a series of events which grow increasingly surreal and absurd, and I won’t spoil any of it here.  True, it all goes on a bit too long, but that’s to be expected when padding this out to feature-length.  I will say that I was a bit worried to see so many children in attendance, as I was thinking this might move into Adult Swim territory pretty quickly; but the animators prefer a mixture of deadpan humor and whimsy - it’s more Spongebob at its strangest than anything on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  The kids will appreciate the childish logic, the adults will enjoy the non sequiturs, and the stoners, well, as soon as it’s out on DVD, the stoners will watch it nightly.

Shameless (Czech Republic, 2008)
D: Jan Hrebejk

Oskar, (Jirl Machacek) a television weatherman, is cheating on his wife Zuzana (Simona Babcakova), but otherwise puttering along just fine until he realizes, one day, that Zuzana has a very large nose.  (Why this never occurred to him before is a mystery, but part of the film’s droll humor.)  When he ineptly tries to suggest plastic surgery, she flies into a fit, and he’s shortly thrown out of the house.  He takes a job as a “safe transport” (a designated driver), mistreats his mistress’ pet turtle, and eventually begins another affair, this with a much older torch singer.  Meanwhile, Zuzana falls in love with a man trimming trees in the park.  Jan Hrebejk’s film is all about anecdotes, loosely strung together to represent Oskar’s aimlessness and borderline amorality.  It’s occasionally quite funny, but more often just melancholy, leading to a quite nice final image which manages to serve as a metaphor for the damaged state of almost all the film’s characters.  A slight film, to be sure, and one that I’ll probably remember only vaguely a year from now, but Shameless also manages a persistently light touch completely liberated from melodrama, reminiscent of the films of Hal Ashby, and that shouldn’t be undervalued.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009)
D: Niels Arden Oplev

The first of Stieg Larsson’s posthumous Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has devoted fans all over the world, and the Saturday night Madison premiere of the film adaptation, at the Orpheum, was the Event of the film festival, completely sold out and packed to the rafters, which brought out a delighted Meg Hamel (or one of the festival director’s many clones, as she’s been everywhere this weekend): “I just wanted to see all of you,” she confessed.  She then admitted that when she decided to bring The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to WIFF, she wasn’t aware of its immense popularity.  But that popularity has only grown, and step into a bookstore now and you’ll find paperbacks of the first two books in the series, starring intensely likeable sleuths Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, stacked tall and in every corner.  So how was the film itself (says this writer who’s running out of blogging time and needs to get out the door to Sunday’s lineup of movies so let’s cut to the point already)?  Raw, intense, and I’m sure unbearably suspenseful to those who haven’t read the novel and don’t know what’s coming.  Then again, for those who have read the book, foreknowledge brings a different kind of dread, as there are some really tough scenes here.  It’s very, very, good, and certainly a key film in the current wave of Scandinavian thrillers.  The extraordinary running time (152 minutes) is due entirely to the complex plot Larsson has laid out, but fans know that director Niels Arden Oplev has also trimmed, cut, and refitted quite a bit, including, alas, much of journalist Blomkvist’s motivation for working on the missing person case for which aging industrialist Henrik Vanger has hired him, and an entire subplot involving Blomkvist’s Millenium magazine and its changing ownership.  I could write pages on the discrepancies, but it’s rather pointless.  What matters is that so much of the story, with its unusual characterizations and twists, is intact.  The film captures the chilliness and isolation of the book’s island setting, and the mystery – though compressed slightly – remains compelling.  The novel had a good deal of warmth, too, and I miss it; but what’s here is suitably cinematic and exciting, and, well, you know the Hitchcock quote which I included in the margin of this blog, as it always bears reminding:

“You probably know the story of the two goats who are eating up cans containing the reels of a film taken from a best seller. And one goat says to the other, ‘Personally, I prefer the book.’”

500 Millibars to Ecstasy (U.S., 1989)
D: George Kuchar
It Came from Kuchar (U.S., 2009)
D: Jennifer M. Kroot

I’d first heard the name Kuchar I don’t know where, probably the Psychotronic Encyclopedia, the connossieur’s film guide to exploitation pictures; all I know is that at some point, somewhere, my eyes scanned the words Sins of the Fleshapoids whereupon I immediately added it to my must-see-before-I-die list.  Friday night’s screening of the new documentary It Came from Kuchar, about the singular underground career of the brothers George and Mike Kuchar, paired with George’s “500 Millibars of Ecstasy,” documenting a 1988 trip to Madison for a Kuchar retrospective, offered an indispensable survey of the Kuchar aesthetic.  Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary is thorough, and, frankly, hysterical.  Beginning in the early 1960’s, the Kuchar brothers made films in 8mm and 16mm, and eventually by camcorder, in a most prolific manner (one interview subject speculates that a complete filmography of their works has never been compiled).  Inspired by Hollywood melodramas, their films compensated for their low budget with a visual ingenuity, heartfelt themes, and a great deal of camp.  Their characters were buried under thick makeup, with absurd costumes and increasingly baroque eyebrows.  Sex was in abundance, though often slathered with heaps of angst and guilt, and the most common motifs were UFOs, monsters, robots, and tornados.  Imagine something lying between Kenneth Anger and John Waters; indeed, Waters was heavily influenced by the Kuchars, and, always delightful, he’s one of the less surprising interview subjects to be found here – more surprising is Buck Henry, clearly one of George Kuchar’s best friends, and Atom Egoyan, who wonders over a striking letter George once sent him which ends with the words, “I suntan in isolation.”  I suppose we should have expected Guy Maddin to show up (Maddin’s films also balance campy humor with eye-popping and frequently homoerotic visuals), and here he explains why he may never make a film as good as The Devil’s Cleavage.  For me one of the most interesting aspects of Kroot’s film was connecting the Kuchar style to the underground comix movement which was flourishing in the same climes (San Francisco) when the Kuchars were at their height – we learn George Kuchar was part of the taboo-busting scene, broke up Art Spiegelman’s relationship with his girlfriend by hijacking her to become one of his cinematic divas, and even drew his own comix as oversexed and psychotronic as his films.  Today George is a film professor who enlists his eager students in making new underground masterpieces – in this case, something called “The Fury of Frau Frankenstein.”  In doing so, he’s keeping the Kuchar cult growing, but he’s also inspiring the students to set out and make their own idiosyncratic low-budget films.  After watching It Came from Kuchar, my chief inspiration was to finally seek out the Kuchar ouvre – but I think I’ll steer clear of Thundercrack!, on Buck Henry’s advice.

The Thorn in the Heart (France, 2009)
D: Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) takes his Aunt Suzette on a trip through her past, from the death of her husband to the emotional conflicts with her gay son Jean-Yves, with Gondry’s characteristic playfulness and tenderness.  Suzette has been a teacher for decades, and Michel reunites her with some of her students and some of her old schools.  A documentary given more than a few eccentric spins, the film, with its intense intimacy, feels almost insular at times, but by the end of Thorn’s 86 minutes we’re family too.  Most memorable: Michel and Suzette fitting a classroom of kids with “invisibility suits” (uniforms of a solid color that can be digitally erased in the editing room), leading to a musical montage of half-invisible kids frolicking on a playground.  What might have been an irrelevant but whimsical digression instead beautifully illustrates the wonder of childhood, a wonder which Suzette has somehow managed to retain in her elder years.

The Exploding Girl (U.S., 2009)
D: Bradley Rust Gray

In NYC a girl named Ivy (Zoe Kazan), suffering from epilepsia, returns from a semester of college to spend some time with her mother, and drags along her longtime best friend Al (Mark Rendall), who is clearly not too upset that she’s going to be apart from her new college boyfriend for a little while.  Al’s smitten with Ivy, but this is a film about what goes unsaid, and the pregnant pauses, awkward stammers, and inadequate small talk that pass between young people desperately afraid of saying anything too revealing of their true feelings.  Once you come to realize that it’s this non-dialogue that tells The Exploding Girl’s story, the film begins to flutter to life, leading to an absolutely extraordinary climax on a rooftop at sunset.  In this moment, Ivy and Al may keep their feelings hidden, but the world about them explodes with emotion.  My favorite film of the festival so far.

The Bug Trainer (Lithuania, 2008)
D: Rasa Miskinyte, Donatas Ulvydas, Linas Augutis, Marek Skrobecki
Le Roman de Renard [The Tale of the Fox] (France, 1930)
D: Ladislas Starewitch

In the early days of cinema, one of the true pioneers was Ladislas Starewitch, now credited as one of the inventors of stop-motion animation.  In his early silent films he strung lifeless beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects with wire, and animated their movements to form silly (and sometimes slightly dirty) little playlets.  Later he expanded his art form, leading to the triumph Le Roman de Renard, a full-length animated film in which the Fox and his family outwit the resident Wolf, Bear, Cat, and just about all the other members of this literal animal kingdom.  The Bug Trainer, with one of its co-directors in attendance, is a recent documentary outlining Starewitch’s life, narrated by a computer-generated bug; but as illuminating as the documentary is, it can’t hold a candle to Starewitch’s vital and endlessly creative animation, full of mildly dirty jokes, elaborate gags, and hints of comical sadism.  For an eighty-year-old film, it’s aged very well.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (U.S., 2009)
D: Judith Ehrich and Rick Goldsmith 

Strange times in Madison.  At about 10pm on Wednesday night, the sky turned green and a great almighty fireball blazed across the sky – a meteor, the national news later reported.  Thursday a throng of Tea Partiers gathered at the capitol to listen to Tommy Thompson tell them that he really, really, really wanted to run for Senate, but his wife wouldn’t let him.  And on Thursday night, a crowd threaded from the main entrance of the historic Orphem Theater around the corner, around the corner again and through the parking garage, and back around another corner until it nearly met itself.  A multi-pierced young student asked dazedly what event we were all waiting to see, and a festival goer responded, “Daniel Ellsberg.”  The student nodded vaguely and walked away.  

More correctly, we were all waiting to see The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  A riveting documentary, and a worthy film to hold the prized 8pm Thursday-night-at-the-Orpheum slot for WIFF, I was nonetheless surprised to see the huge theater fill to near capacity.  But this is Madison; we’re strange folk.  The film recounts how Ellsberg, a young Harvard intellectual and a highly-placed military analyst for the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, came to leak a massive, and massively-top secret, report from the Pentagon on the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  The film is narrated by Ellsberg, featuring interviews with his wife Patricia (ever-present, and always beaming proudly at her husband and at the cameras, in the 1970’s news footage shown here), as well as his son (who, as a tyke, helped his dad Xerox the Pentagon Papers), key players such as the New York Times’ Neil Sheehan and RAND colleague Tony Russo, and friends such as the late Howard Zinn.  It’s a fairly unassuming documentary, bereft of gimmickry (apart from some crudely-animated, and very amusing, “re-enactments”), and I find it refreshing that the filmmakers let the story provide its own genuine drama and tension, of which there are spades.  Ellsberg took tentative steps out of his own shell, the result of applying his intellectual acumen to a belated and painful self-analysis, realizing that he was, in fact, helping perpetrate the war; at one point he attends an antiwar rally and has a private breakdown, vividly described (the film movingly reunites Ellsberg with the Vietnam vet whose speech at the rally triggered that breakdown).  Then he reinvents himself, and begins secretly and laboriously photocopying the Pentagon Papers on the hope that if its secrets were known - exposing the lies of multiple administrations - America will stop the President and the war.  He first distributes copies to Democratic members of the Senate, senators who had been against the war longer than he’d been, but he’s shocked to find they do nothing.  So he goes to the New York Times…and what follows is historical record but nonetheless gripping: Ellsberg goes into hiding from the FBI; the White House challenges the freedom of the Press; rival newspapers form a united front against the President; the Congress cuts off funding for the war - all of these being important incidents on the road to Watergate and resignation.  And thank God Nixon taped everything.  The excerpts from his recordings are shocking, and I’m not just referring to Nixon’s unwarranted abuse of the nonsensical “son-of-a-bitching.”  Nixon, in vertiginous meltdown mode, rants against Ellsberg, the press, and the citizens of Vietnam (whom he contemplates either drowning or nuking).  But for all the eye-opening facts and anecdotes in The Most Dangerous Man in America, the film has an undercurrent of melancholy.  After the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg notes, the American people are largely complacent; they follow the scandal but seem oblivious to its meaning, and in a short time the evening news moves on.  Nixon is undone, but largely of his own doing.  Ellsberg had a key role in stopping the war, but Nixon was reelected by the people.  It’s clear in the film that Ellsberg is still disappointed by this complacency, and it’s telling enough (and touching) that in the final moments in the film we see the old man getting arrested again, proudly, this time in protest of America’s new wars.  George W. Bush was reelected too, beating out the Vietnam vet running against him.  My mind keeps lingering on one moment in the film, as Ellsberg recounts debriefing a newly-arrived Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam War; Ellsberg then voices his prediction that Kissinger, after receiving high-level clearances, will learn information of such a priveleged nature that he will cease to listen to anyone else, and the advice that analysts like Ellsberg provide will be ignored.  This is what happens, Ellsberg insists – you rise high enough and you stop listening.  But the heartbreak at the center of the tale of The Pentagon Papers is that, despite their impact, the American people wouldn’t listen very closely either, and the problem of popular complacency is hardly isolated to the past.