Slapdash

Small things thrown together.

MSPIFF #4

Natural Selection: Conservative Christian on a road trip with her dying husband’s secret junkie son. Really good.
Compliance: What will people do if they think they’re being told to do it by the police? Bad things.
The Girls in the Band: Women in jazz, from the swing era on. Recommended if you like women or music or humans.

Details.

MSPIFF #3

New Skin for the Old Ceremony: New videos for old Leonard Cohen songs. My main takeaway: that’s a great-sounding recording!
Keyhole: Guy Maddin’s surreal haunted house gangster Odyssey. Spellbinding; like a cross between Fritz Lang and a less commercially-oriented David Lynch.
God Bless America: I didn’t see this, but I caught some of the Q&A. Bobcat Goldthwait seems like a good guy.

Wilders: The Movie: Contemporary Dutch right-winger we should all probably know more about. Undermined by weird storytelling choices like focusing on a journalist who can’t get an interview with him but does sometimes look stuff up on Google.
The Real American: Joe McCarthy: Cold War American right-winger we should all probably know more about. Undermined by weird storytelling choices like brooding, shadowy reenactments of all-too-illustrative moments from his life (possibly).

Details.

On Monday the Park & Recreation Board is hosting a screening of The Interrupters, a true story about countering violence with peace in Chicago, and probably my favorite film in last year’s festival.

MSPIFF #2

Tales of the Night: Animated fairy tales. Pretty, sometimes, but vacant.
Father’s Chair: Road trip to find a runaway son. Thoughtful, moving.
A Trip to the Moon: Méliès in color, plus a documentary. The gags still work!

Tahrir 2011: 3 short docs on Egypt’s uprising. Best: watching cops talk about how they saw it.
Brooklyn Castle: A Brooklyn public school’s world-class chess team. Fascinating, inspiring, and not too chess-y.

The best thing about Brooklyn Castle was watching it with seven of the main subjects of the film, plus a whole new team from I.S. 318, in Minneapolis for this year’s tournament, which they won.

Details.

MSPIFF #1

This Is My Land: Hebron: Israeli settlements. Well made, hard to watch.
Hope: Noir comedy about a vigilante guidance counselor. Very funny, mostly.
V/H/S: Lo-fi horror anthology. Creative and crafty, but my least favorite genre.

Details.

Recommended tomorrow at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival: Sound of Noise, a thriller of sorts about six terrorist percussionists (think of a violent Matthew Herbert, sort of) and the tone-deaf cop on their trail.

You can buy tickets online, but if you just show up and it’s sold out, see the Russian stop-motion feature The Ugly Duckling instead.

My name is Erik. I make music and web sites. I don't post much about those things here. Here are some things I post about:

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I moved to Minneapolis!


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