Mack Bates

Even in this social media-entrenched age, some still have the mistaken impression that Milwaukee’s film scene is pretty much entirely comprised of screenings and events thrown either by the film department at UW-Milwaukee or the good folks behind the annual Milwaukee Film Festival. And that’s it, case closed. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s not the case: the city’s film scene has a lot more to offer than some of you may have been led to believe. Starting at 6 p.m. this Friday, February 1, The Mandel Group in with Plaid Tuba and Honeycomb Productions will present “Spectacle! At…

The following is the second in a series of interviews that Moviegoers’ Mack Bates conducted with alumni of the Milwaukee Film Festival (or MFF, for short) program entitled “The Milwaukee Show,” an annual competitive showcase of the best new work from local filmmakers that is part of the festival’s Cream City Cinema program. Every year since 2009, the year of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s inception, the Filmmaker-in-Residence prize has been awarded to the local filmmaker who wins the juried Cream City Cinema Award. In 2009, UWM Film alum John Roberts won for his work on Mary’s Friend, a Tim Burton-esque mix of…

Photos by Vallen Alexander Gillett I can still remember the first time my parents took me to see a movie. It was the summer of 1982, I was 5 years old, and they took me to see the Steven Spielberg film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. We had to travel a distance because there wasn’t a movie theater in the small town in Michigan where we lived. I remember being struck by how huge the theater was – but then again, most spaces and places are huge to a 5-year-old – and by all of the other kids who were there with their families.…

Actors playing addicts onscreen is a time-honored tradition in Hollywood. Chances are if they’re an actor of note, they have played an addict at some point in their career. Just one week after the nationwide release of director Robert Zemeckis’ welcome return to live-action filmmaking, Flight, featuring Oscar winner Denzel Washington’s bravura lead performance as an airline pilot attempting to keep his substance abuse under wraps, yet another fall 2012 film dealing with addiction hits local theaters. In writer-director James Ponsoldt’s sophomore feature, Smashed, scream queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Black Christmas, Final Destination 3) takes a stab at establishing herself…

“The Milwaukee Youth Show” – a youth-skewing offshoot of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s popular “The Milwaukee Show,” an annual showcase of the best shorts from local filmmakers – made its inaugural bow on Saturday, Sept. 29 at the Oriental Theatre. Milwaukee Film’s Education Director Susan Kerns, has long wanted to implement a similar showcase for local filmmaking youth. An educator and filmmaker in her own right (in 2010, she co-founded a production company, Gal Friday Films, with Kara Mulrooney) and a major force behind Milwaukee Film’s Collaborative Cinema program which “provides high school students, college students, and emerging film professionals…

Halloween is just around the corner, and the fall movie season is now in full swing. Award season hopefuls – some of which held their world premieres at prestigious international film festivals ranging from Venice to Telluride to Toronto – are now trickling into local theaters with increasing regularity. Here are five October 2012 releases (one of which was the closing night film at the recently wrapped 2012 Milwaukee Film Festival) that are worth your time, and more importantly, your hard-earned money, to carve out time in your busy schedule to see. October 2012 Film Must-Sees Searching For Sugar Man…

Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Film Festival First things first, if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that the 2012 Milwaukee Film Festival has sex on the brain. Want proof? The 2012 edition of the now four-year old festival, opened with Starbuck, a French-Canadian comedy about a man whose frequent sperm donations from 20 years earlier have helped to yield 533 children, some of whom are interested in finding out the identity of their birth father. It marked the first time that the festival opened with a foreign-language film. The festival closed with The Sessions, an autobiographical American comedy-drama that is…

Matthew Klein flew all the way from Boston to see his short film premiere at the Milwaukee Film Festival. Klein is just a teenager, but his portrait of his cello teacher got one of the best crowd reactions of the entire 20-film, 53-minute “The Milwaukee Youth Show” program.  “Matthew flew in from Boston to be in attendance and was incredibly engaging and enthusiastic with the audience,” Kerns says. Debuting this year, the program was a success – if the audience attendance figures and post-screening feedback are to be believed. “I was really impressed by how eloquent these young people are…

First things first, if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that the 2012 Milwaukee Film Festival has sex on the brain. Want proof? The 2012 edition of the now four-year old festival, opened with Starbuck, a French-Canadian comedy about a man who’s frequent sperm donations from 20 years earlier have helped to yield 533 children, some of whom are interested in finding out the identity of their birth father. It marked the first time that the festival, which just wrapped up its fourth year, has opened with a foreign-language film. And closed with The Sessions, an autobiographical American comedy-drama…

This year’s Milwaukee Film Festival offered up 220 films (91 features & 131 shorts), playing at three local theaters (the Oriental, the Downer and the Fox-Bay Cinema) over the course of 15 days. Quite an impressive feat of programming for a festival that’s just about to wrap up its fourth year. And there have been a record number of festival screenings that have gone to rush status (meaning advance tickets are no longer available), including tonight’s closing night film, The Sessions, starring Academy Award nominee John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Academy Award winner Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets), and Academy…