clever peasant pharmacy

A great variety of film types and genres!

"Dad & Me" (Donn Kennedy)
Not all recovered memories are bad.  I’m a sucker for tales of redemption.  Could have benefited from better sound quality on the voice-over and a more convincing portrayal of the angry father.  I also had a hard time buying into the initial premise that Alzheimer’s sufferers sometimes create false memories, since I’d never heard this before.  I believe Kennedy said this was his first film - very impressive - and he usually does music videos.

"Basketball" (Anne Morningstar)
Strong hand-drawn animation - again, I think Morningstar said this was her first such film - alas, the script wasn’t nearly as powerful.  It took several hundred drawings to make this one minute film; yikes!

"Ornithology" (Caroline Kastelic)
I was most impressed by the cinematography of this stop-action film (mostly claymation).  There wasn’t a clear motive behind the horror aspect, though I’m strangely glad that it didn’t come across as a heavy-handed message against animal experimentation, because it would have lost its charm.

"Split" (Doug Roland, Jackson Myers)
I was actually surprised by the ending.  I thought it would come down to a choice for the protagonist between a) letting his girlfriend take the fall, and b) turning himself in as a deserter.  Instead, the filmmakers posed a choice between a) escaping with his girlfriend as an armed fugitive, and b) letting his girlfriend take the fall.  If the protagonist did, indeed, let his girlfriend take the fall, then it seems he valued escaping more than he valued his girlfriend, and so maybe he’s more of an anti-hero.  I think the filmmakers should have done more to bring closure to the father’s part of the story.

"Skin Tone" (Eric Gerber)
The landscape and bird shots were lovely in black and white; the blood and scab shots were very difficult to watch and not all that interesting in black and white.  I didn’t find a strong thread to tie it all together.

"Plastic Fangs" (Andrew Rosas)
Could have gone in so many different directions, but none of the potential stories really went anywhere.  Almost all of the footage appeared to be vintage 1970s/1980s (Halloween costumes, cars, etc.); if it was all contemporary, I would be awestruck.  Did he weave old and new footage together?  The title doesn’t really sum things up or evoke a theme for me.

"The Road that Takes You There is the Road that Leads You Back" (Michele Isaac)
Captivating and mysterious play of light and shadow.  I want to know how this was shot!  Again, the title doesn’t help all that much to tie things together, but the music/sound was a lovely match.

"Passed" (Luke Kalteux)
Good story (is the premise factual?).  I enjoyed the acting of the man playing the prisoner more than the other characters, though the sound quality needed to be higher in order to catch some of his lines.  Poses some good moral dilemmas - is one person’s life worth more than another’s?  Who decides?  The ending scene of the wife at her husband’s funeral needed to be more obvious.

My housemate Jill Hopke and I found out this week that our short film was selected for inclusion in the Madison Sesquicentennial program - yay!  If you’re in the Madison area, we’d like to invite you to stop by one of the following screenings:

Saturday 3/25  7:00pm+
–Hypatia Housing Co-op, 102 East Gorham Street (entrance on Pinckney Street)
–We’ll show our 10-minute film + housemate Zsuzsi Nagy’s 5-minute film, multiple times
–Refreshments provided

Sunday 4/9  1-3pm *and* 4-6pm
–Monona Terrace Convention Center, Lecture Hall Theater
–Both screenings will include all eight short films selected for the Madison 150 program
–http://www.cityofmadison.com/planning/150/
–http://www.wis-kino.com/madison150

Our film is called "A Sense of Place: A Social History of 102 East Gorham Street."  It’s a brief chronicle of those who have lived in the 150-year-old building where I now live (including a two-time Madison mayor, a director of the UW-Madison School of Music, fraternity members, nursing home residents, and members of three housing co-ops).

I had been loving this winter, with its lack of snow/ice and more warm days than average.  My husband had been sick for a while, and snoring at night, but I figured that couldn’t last much longer.  Then he was diagnosed with cancer (diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, to be exact), at the age of 34.

I’m not all "poor me" or "how could this happen?" or anything.  Shitty things happen to young people, and good people, all the time.  My brother, for example, was diagnosed with cancer four years ago, at the age of 35.  One of my old bandmates fell while visiting a construction site, and became a paraplegic in his 20’s.

While I would normally be in a funk around this time of year (having run out of my stored-up sunlight), I am now in a downright foul mood.  Everything and everyone annoys me.  In fact, you could call me a Bitch On Wheels.  Just warnin’ ya.