REVIEW: Milking the Rhino

Picture the last nature documentary you saw about the African bush: bilbao trees, tall grasses, lush jungle, parched desert, and wildlife ranging from impalas to elephants, zebras to giraffes. If it's anything like the last one I saw, the animals appeared to be living in an untouched paradise.

"The reality is that if you just turn the camera around, you have people that live just next to this wildlife," explains a national park director in Milking the Rhino, a fascinating documentary filmed over three years about the tumultuous relationship between humans and animals in post-colonial Africa. Produced by Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, The New Americans) and directed by David E. Simpson, it is a content rich film that should forever change the way you watch a nature documentary or, if you can afford it, participate in an African safari. As one of the year's best and most thought-provoking documentaries, it's hard to even know where to begin talking about all of the issues raised in Milking the Rhino. So while I'll attempt to lay out some of its key points, I really recommend that you take the time to sit down and watch it.

300 Words About: Living Arrangements

For movie buffs, there is probably not a more surreal experience than seeing yourself on screen in a film. But seeing your own streets and neighborhood landmarks is a bit of a trip, too. For residents of the Uptown neighborhood where I live in South Minneapolis, Living Arrangements is a charming indie horror comedy with a satirical local flavor that only we can appreciate; for everyone else it's still a charming indie horror comedy.

The debut feature from Minneapolis-based director Sam Thompson, Living Arrangements is a high-concept story about a pair of newly engaged vegans, Sasha (Joe Noreen) and Billie (Alexandra Glad), who move into an Uptown apartment only to find a werewolf living in their attic. It sounds like the kind of bizarre idea you'd come up with joking around with friends at 2:00 AM, but the production is treated with just enough seriousness that by the grisly finale you're actually invested in the characters and you've long forgotten how ridiculous the premise is.

REVIEW: Etienne!

There are two kinds of pet owners in the world: cat and dog owners, and bird/fish/reptile/rodent owners. I've recently joined the ranks of the former, but for a good part of my childhood I was one of the latter. Due to my dad's reluctance to own a dog (he was once bitten by a rabid German shepherd), and due to the time and money required to care for cats and dogs, we had a series of hamsters - adorably soft little dwarf hamsters, more specifically. They live about two years and were a great source of enjoyment and entertainment for our family (I once accidentally sucked one up with the vacuum hose - she survived).

It takes a special kind of person to appreciate dwarf hamsters, and by extension, a special kind of person to appreciate a movie about one. I couldn't believe it when I saw the description for Etienne! in the Flyway Film Festival lineup: "After Richard's best and only friend, a dwarf hamster named Etienne, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decides to take him on a bicycle road trip up the California coast to show him the world before he must put him to sleep." I had to see this movie.

REVIEW: Colin

Exactly how do you make a film with a budget of $70 (Yes, that's seventy dollars.)

"We bought a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and I think we got some tea and coffee as well -- not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind," explained British filmmaker Mark Price in an interview I read on CNN.com last May, when Colin premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His claim was unbelievable and cheeky - in fact unbelievably cheeky, considering budgets on numerous Hollywood films each year extend into the hundreds of millions of dollars (the recent disaster movie 2012 had a price tag of $260 million). So alhough I'm not a big zombie guy, when Colin popped up on the schedule at the recent Flyway Film Festival, well I just had to see how this played out.

REVIEW: Ink

Is it fair to judge a film based on its bang-for-the-buck value (low budget, high production), and ignore otherwise standard criteria like writing and acting? Is the bar set a little lower for independent films, making the mediocre ones appear good and the good ones appear great?

Your perspective around these two questions will undoubtedly influence your opinion of Ink, the low budget ($250,000) sci-fi fairytale from Jamin Winans that recently played on Opening Night of the Flyway Film Festival. It's been receiving a healthy supply of positive buzz from Ain't It Cool News and Film School Rejects, and the filmmaker's comparisons of the film to Donnie Darko, The Matrix, and especially Pan's Labyrinth are justified.

But the problem with comparisons to those critically acclaimed hits is that if the film in question doesn't measure up to them (and Ink does not, in my opinion), it's maybe better not to mention the similarities at all - like hearing somebody can dance like Michael Jackson and then finding out they can't even moonwalk.

Flyway Film Festival: Colore Non Vedenti

Colore Non Vedenti
Jay Cheel, 2009 (Official Website)
Run time: 29 min.  |  Canada 
Categories: International Zombie Summit

When you spend as much time as I do reading and writing about movies, names of critics and bloggers and freelance writers often blend together in an incomprehensible mish-mash (by some definition I could be considered all three, for example). So when I saw the name Jay Cheel listed as the director of Colore Non Vedenti, the wheels in my head started turning - where had I seen that name? About ten seconds of searching provided me with the answer, as I've read a lot of Jay's writing at both Film Junk and, much more so, The Documentary Blog.

This all means nothing in the context of the charming Colore Non Vedenti, aside from perhaps proof that Jay can make films just as well as he can write about them. This sci-fi "zombie" thriller comedy (it kind of defies labeling) is well-written, assuredly directed, and impressively acted. It's evidence that low-budget does not mean low-quality, making it a perfect companion to the Cannes zombie hit Colin (reportedly made for $70), with which it will screen at Flyway.

Flyway Film Festival: Reviews of Selected Shorts

I've really only come to appreciate short films in the last few years, almost entirely because of the theatrical screenings of the Oscar nominees every February. In fact I think I'd rather watch La Maison en Petits Cubes, last year's Oscar winner for Best Animated Short, again than the much-lauded Up (which I nonetheless did like). Anyway, my point is that shorts aren't the amateur and/or unimportant productions I may have once thought they were; many filmmakers even make a career out of short films.

There is an almost overwhelmingly high number of shorts playing at the Flyway Film Festival this weekend, and I've been fortunate to get a peek at several of them. Unfortunately one of them that I was really excited for, Surprise!, didn't play in my region-limited DVD player, so I can't say anything about it other than that it sounds like a promisingly boffo French comedy: "As an attentive husband, Pierre has prepared a surprise for his wife Brigitte's birthday, but a series of harmless incidents (like a draft, a sun beam reflected off a window) brings the next door neighbor into his bed just as Brigitte walks through the door." Maybe not high-minded comedy, but if handled the right way these set-ups can be hilarious.

So while I haven't seen Surprise!, here are some words about four shorts that I have seen, in alphabetical order and including video when I've found it available.

Fly Away to the Flyway Film Festival, Oct. 22-25

This weekend across the river over der in Pepin, WI, the second annual Flyway Film Festival will showcase an impressive lineup of narrative features, shorts, and documentaries. Amusingly, about half of the films are family-friendly while the other half are zombie flicks (in fact Saturday is being called the International Zombie Summit). But there are plenty of other options if you don't have kids or don't like dead people.

Here's a blurb from the website from festival director Rick Vaicus:

"Selections range from regional Wisconsin/Minnesota offerings to international fare, among them, the Cannes-favorite U.K. zombie film Colin; German drama Storm, which garnered huge praise at the Berlin International Film Festival; Trust Us This Is All Made Up, from U.S. director Alex Karpovsky (whose mockumentary Woodpecker was a 2008 FFF audience favorite); and the family-friendly feature Etienne!, which has steadily been gathering warm critical praise.

Added into the mix is the Opening Night (and Midwest premiere) screening of the extraordinary sci-fi film Ink and Closing Night’s feature, the Wisconsin typesetting documentary Typeface for a variety of subject matter that can truly appeal to almost every film lover.