Sean Weitner writes about “Visitors,” which played to a packed house at Sundance Cinemas on Tuesday night:
“Visitors” is a mesmeric, meditative film, and those aren’t subjective judgments. Stitched together from long shots of people’s faces, abandoned skyscrapers, decaying statuary, wintry swampland, the moon and a Bronx gorilla, this non-narrative film conjures a mood of ominous ruin.
Enemy” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:30, three stars out of four.
It happened to me. It was 1995, and I was backpacking through Europe. At the Czech Consulate in London, while waiting to get a travel visa to go to Prague, I looked across the crowded waiting room. Slouched against the far wall was a man who looked exactly like me.
So, remember all that build-up to the Wisconsin Film Festival on this blog? Remember how I said over and over to check back for daily coverage of the festival? Some of you may have seen me on Twitter calling myself the “Helen Thomas of the Wisconsin Film Festival” since I had covered it every year since it started in 1999.
Yeah, about that.
Sean Weitner weighs in on Ken Loach’s “Black Jack.” It plays a second time at the Wisconsin Film Festival on Thursday, April 10 at 4 p.m. at Sundance Cinemas.
“Black Jack” is the forgotten third feature of British director Ken Loach (“The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “The Angels’ Share“), released in 1979 and based on a 1969 children’s novel of 18th century adventure. It’s a doozy.
It’s all classic movies this week (well, movies that are a decade old at least), in this week’s edition of Instant Gratification.
Pick of the week: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind“: Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO thriller stands the test of time because it’s so grounded, with Richard Dreyfuss and the other folks obsessed with Devil’s Tower seemingly like real middle-class people. Looking back, the film plays like a bridge between the personal filmmaking of 1970s auteurs and the blockbusters still to come.
Today’s the last day to buy advance tickets for the 16th annual Wisconsin Film Festival through wifilmfest.org. Starting Thursday, the first day of the eight-day festival, tickets will be available for a film at the venue on the day of the screening (meaning you can buy a ticket for an evening show that morning, which is a smart strategy). Even for the films below, which sold out all their advance tickets, a limited number of rush tickets will likely be available — just get in line at least an hour before the screening and cross your fingers.
Hopefully this list of advance ticket sellouts will help you plan out your fest.
The Wisconsin Film Festival starts on Thursday, April 3, and we’re zooming in on one of the many films that still have advance tickets available via wifilmfest.org. Today, Sean Weitner takes a look at “Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus.” Make sure to check back to Madison Movie for daily coverage throughout the eight-day festival.
“Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus,” (Friday, 12:15 p.m, UW-Cinematheque, and Tuesday, April 8, 9 p.m. Sundance)
Pick of the week: “The Grandmaster” — Just like Ang Lee did with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Wong Kar-Wai (“In the Mood for Love”) tries his hand at the martial arts movie, and the results are similarly ravishing, as the famed Ip Man faces a rival as the Japanese invasion of China looms.
And the riffs just keep on coming. Between the news that the Rifftrax guys will be hosting a new miniseries on the National Geographic Channel and the latest release of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” DVD sets from Shout! Factory, it’s a good time to be snarky.
After 28 installments and over 100 films, the Shout! Factory sets have this down to a science; like its predecessors, “Vol. 29” features four films, spanning the MST3k-verse from the uneven first season through the Golden Age on Comedy Central, and finally one from the Sci-Fi Network years. Sprinkle some bonus features on top, and you’ve got some cheesy goodness in store.
Original host Joel Hodgson, who seems to have really embraced the “MST3K” legacy in recent years, provides new introductions for the first two films in the set, “Untamed Youth” and “Hercules and the Captive Women.” “Untamed Youth” is a classic ’50s troubled-teens drama with Mamie Van Doren, who appears in a new interview on the disc talking about her experiences as a ’50 starlet. (It does not sound fun – when she wanted to start a family, the studio immediately dumped her.)
The “Hercules” movies are among my favorites in “MST3k” and “Captive Women” is classic Italian-dubbed sword-and-sandals badness. The disc also includes a surprisingly engaging interview with artist Steve Vance, who draws the delightful ’50s-style mini-posters that Shout! Factory includes with each film.
“The Thing That Couldn’t Die” (not to be confused with “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”) is a slow-moving late ’50s horror film. The disc includes an entertaining making-of doc — at one time, strangely, an overstretched Universal Pictures shut down production on every film except this one, because it was so far under the radar.
But the jewel in “XXIX” is one of the best episodes of the Sci-FI Channel era, “Pumaman.” An incredibly cheap “Superman” knockoff from 1980, it boasts some of the worst “flying” visual effects imaginable, and a hero who wears a cape and sensible slacks. It is pure gold, and the disc includes an interview with star Walter G. Alton, Jr. How Alton became Pumaman is an odd story — he was a New York attorney who, when his firm refused to make him partner, decided to take a break and try acting. After “Pumaman,” he wisely went back to the law.
Alton also continues a run of MST3K “stars” who clearly bristle at the idea of the show making fun of their work. To quote from the opening theme song, they should really just relax. The show and the disc sets have brought a whole new audience to films that would have otherwise been forgotten. The Shout! Factory disc even includes an “Un-MSTied” version of “Pumaman” in its original form, although anyone who could sit through that would really be some kind of superhero.
Madison film fans, don’t expect to get a break after gorging yourself on great movies at the Wisconsin Film Festival. On April 11, the day after the festival ends, Sundance Cinemas is jumping right into a new Screening Room calendar of independent, foreign and documentary films. And several weeks they’re booking two films a week instead of one. So no slacking.
Madison Movie 