What a week us Milwaukeeans and Wisconsinites just experienced!
The Packers beat their archrival the Bears, again.
The Brewers are National League Central Division champions for the first time since 1982. Go, Brew Crew!
And the 3rd annual Milwaukee Film Festival (MFF) had a record-breaking opening four-day weekend.
According to early estimates, over 1,000 people showed up for the Oriental’s 7 p.m. screening of director Steve James’ powerful anti-gang documentary, The Interrupters. Anyone who missed the Best Documentary Feature Oscar hopeful will have one more opportunity to see it this Tuesday, September 27 at North Shore Cinema in Mequon. The screening time is 4:15 p.m.
Over the next seven days, local film fans will have the unenviable task of having to pick and choose which festival title(s) to see, knowing that a good deal of the cinematic offerings being shown will likely never play here again. Here are my picks for the films to catch today (Monday, September 26) and tomorrow (Tuesday, September 27) at the 2011 Milwaukee Film Festival.
Monday, September 26
Considering my No. 1 pick for today, the Cannes Film Festival sensation We Need To Talk About Kevin starring Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Collins) and Oscar nominee John C. Reilly (Chicago), is one of the festival’s two early sold-out screenings, I’d suggest that you take in the last festival screening of Here, which stars Emmy winner Ben Foster (Showtime’s “Bang Bang You’re Dead”) as a cartographer who forms a strong emotional bond with an Armenian ex-pat and jet-setting art photographer, played by Lubna Azabal. The film screens tonight at 7:15 p.m. at the Marcus Ridge Cinema in New Berlin.
I’d also recommend these three hard-hitting documentaries:
The Last Mountain
In Appalachia, a small, close-knit community battles a coal mining corporation with deep pockets and unrepentantly loyal lobbyists for rights to the last great mountain in their area. The citizens have damn good reason to fight as science has confirmed what many already knew in their hearts was fact: the corporation’s practice of blasting mountaintops to get at the reservoir of resources within has polluted the air and water and has resulted in the deteriorating health of many in the community. Cancer is rampant, as are other serious health issues, so much so that some influential people, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have joined the fight to stop the blasting. Environmental filmmaking at its best, the film runs 95 minutes and plays tonight at 7:15 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre. It screens two additional times this week, on Wednesday, the 28th at 5:00 p.m. at the Ridge in New Berlin, and Sunday, October 2nd at 2:15 p.m. at North Shore in Mequon.
The Redemption of General Butt Naked
Yes, I know, the title makes this sound like a spin-off of “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” the infamous Lincoln White House-set “sitcom” that aired briefly on UPN back in the late-1990s. I can assure you that it’s anything but. Making their feature debut, directors Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion chronicle the incredible story of Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known as General Butt Naked, who was responsible for countless deaths and wrongful imprisonments during Liberia’s 14-year civil war. In 1996, General Butt Naked converted to Christianity and has spent the past 15 years trying to make amends for past war crimes, even going as far as visiting his victims and attempting to rehabilitate the very child soldiers who once fought and killed for him. Is he truly repentant or is he a madman pulling a ruse? Decide for yourself. The film screens at 4:45 p.m. today at the Oriental and tomorrow at 9:45 p.m. at the Marcus Ridge Cinema.
The Flaw
The second of three scheduled festival screenings of this thought-provoking cinematic treatise of what caused the current global economic crisis happens tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Ridge Cinema. If you appreciated director Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, his Oscar-winning indictment of what, and more to the point, who, caused the 2008 economic collapse, you’ll be equally impressed with director David Sington’s counterpart.
Tuesday, September 27
Like Crazy
Felicity Jones gives a star-making performance as a British college student who falls in love with an American college student (an equally superb Anton Yelchin), who’s forced to return home to London without him when she’s banned from the states after overstaying her visa. It’s every bit as romantic and heartbreaking in its own way as the doomed, star-crossed romance between Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater was in the 1993 chick flick classic Untamed Heart. Its sole festival screening is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre.
Wish Me Away
A chronicle of singer Chely Wright, commercial country music’s first out LGBT performer. She gave directors Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf unprecedented access to her life ( including access to an intimate video diary) over a pivotal two-year period of her life and career during which she publicly came out of the closet. The film screens at 7:30 p.m. at the Ridge (Birleffi & Kopf will be in attendance), with two additional screenings this week: Thursday, September 29 at 9:30 p.m. at North Shore, and Saturday, October 1 at 9:45 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre.
Valley Maker
This documentary is a part of the Cream City Cinema festival program and chronicles local filmmaker Sean Kafer’s journey on a homemade wooden raft down the great Mississippi River from Prescott, Wis. to New Orleans, La. Part documentary and part travelogue, the film is said to be a beautifully shot meditation on the power of healing through nature. Kafer and David Bischke (the film’s executive producer) will both be in attendance at the film’s one-time festival screening scheduled for 7:15 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre.
Check back tomorrow for Part Three of my festival picks for Wednesday and Thursday. And I’ll offer my fourth and final 2011 Milwaukee Film Festival daily picks for the remainder of the festival’s run this Thursday.
Tickets are $10 for adults, $9 for seniors and students (with valid ID), $8 for festival members and $6 for children (12 and under). Tickets can be purchased either at the theater box office, online or by phone.
For additional information about the schedule, venue locations, pricing, and scheduled events, visit milwaukee-film.org.
