Wisconsin Film Festival Crazy neighbors, wild kids, and angry trolls (AVC at WFF 2011 Day Three)

Mark: Friday’s final screening at the Wisconsin Union Theater reminded audience members that there are many ways to get back at loud, annoying neighbors, but the heroes of Shut Up Little Man found something a little more creative than passive-aggressive door slamming. UW-Madison grads Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D resolved to take down their new neighbors—an annoyingly shrill gay man named Peter and a homophobic sociopath named Ray—by turning their drunken, vitriolic warfare that bled through the wall and recording it to share with friends. Gradually, soundbites like “I am the human race! I am a decent fucking human being!” worked their way across the country, traded around on tapes by fans of old dudes putting the verbal beat down on each other. The recordings of Ray and Peter slowly approached a viral critical mass that would spawn countless artistic renditions of their verbal jousting, including illustrations, a short play, and even several competing film projects.

The visuals of the film bear remarkable stylized touches, bringing loosely documented details like the dirty, old apartment building they all lived in to life through motion graphics and animated sequences. They blended original photos and current-day reference to establish the 1987 setting of Ray and Peter, going as far as building replica sets where Eddie and Mitchell act out the original encounters with actor stand-ins for Ray and Peter. Those mashed with hastily shot images of the real Ray and other animation and video created by fans of the recordings gives the film a collaborative, almost scrapbook quality, only it’s a scrapbook of joyless homophobic hatred.

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! AN AUDIO MISADVENTURE A montage of Little Men... from Closer Productions on Vimeo.

“Why did we continue to live there? I guess it was our appreciation of the absurd,” explained Mitchell in the post-film Q&A. He and Sausage also reaffirmed the subtle thread in the film that the speed at which Internet memes spread means they just aren’t the same as what they accidentally created. Mitchell explained, “The instantaneous element of today’s world makes everything very ephemeral.” Most of the middle-aged crowd seemed to resonate with their nostalgia for a day before disposable Internet subculture. Apparently none of them have seen the Double Rainbow Song. It totally holds up.

As far as their ideal casting for a Ray and Peter narrative feature? “I always thought Dennis Hopper would have made a great Ray,” mourned Mitchell. Sadly, we’ll never know just how homophobic Dennis Hopper could have been on screen.

Shut Up Little Man screens again April 2, 8 p.m. at the Bartell.

Ben: Two in the afternoon at the Chazen is a little early to see a guy stop a rapidly spinning bike tire with his ball sac. But I’m not like the heroes of Tilva Rosh, unburdened by common sense, exploiting opportunities to prove their bravery/stupidity with the fervor of boys in the twilight of their youth. I once was—though with much more regard for my body—so I can appreciate the pursuit of fun at all costs.

Nikola Lezaic’s loosely fictional account of Serbian skateboarders who take occasional breaks to film acts of hilarious self-inflicted pain and other radical shit carries an interesting twist. Many of the characters, including leads Marko Todorović (Toda) and Stefan Đorđević, are playing themselves. Lezaic first came upon the daring duo through their self-produced Jackass-style video, Crap—Pain Is Empty, and approached the two about making a movie about them, starring them, kind of based on them.

Maybe that’s why this story about two friends in their last summer after high school, contemplating their future and competing for the attention of a girl (Dunja Kovačević, one of the few fictional characters in the film) is so believable it’s almost mundane. Interspersed with actual footage from Crap, the pain they experience from hitting each other with belts is real, but the narrative of the film adds some depth to the pain beyond the surface scars. It’s easy to say that I could do without the multiple trips to the hospital Toda and Stefan endure in their insane pursuit, but I also wouldn’t want to go back to the almost helpless uncertainty they are experiencing, even if it looks pretty fun at times.

Over at the Bartell that evening, the short documentary Monica & David was weaving another story of young people in a hurry, this time to commit to their love for one another in marriage. But marriage for them means defying great odds, since both have Down syndrome and, as the film explains, as recently as the early ’80s, the life expectancy of someone living with the disorder was only 25.

Despite the incredible challenges they face and knowing that they’ll never completely have everything that many young people want, Monica and David live graciously and love completely. First time director Alexandra Codina focuses as much on the young couple as the mothers who raised them—their biological fathers are both absent since early on in the couple’s lives, something Monica confronts in a particularly heartbreaking scene. Much of the film plays out as a struggle between their mothers’ wish to protect them from an often-cruel world and Monica and David’s push for independence. It’s tough to watch, since you feel their frustration, but at the same time, you can’t help but envy the way their unquestioning support and encouragement of one another creates such a strong relationship.

From there I got over to the Orpheum for Troll Hunter, which appropriately was another film about young people in a hurry, this time to keep up with the title character. I’ll say that the special effects are just as good as advertised, that the documentary style works well, and that it’s an extremely fun adventure film. But Kyle was there too and he called it, so I’ll leave the more in-depth review to him.

Tilva Rosh screens again April 2, 10 p.m. at the Play Circle and Monica & David screens again April 3, 11 a.m. at the Bartell.

Kyle: With the budget repair bill still mulling around in the courts, it’s pretty easy to exaggerate connections between films at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival with the goings-on up at the top of State Street. But no matter how hard I tried to separate The Pipe, the Risteard Ó Domhnaill-directed documentary about an Irish fishing community standing up to bureaucratic bullies attempting to sneak a pipeline through their water and farmland, the similarities were too prevalent to ignore. They had the Rossport 5; we had the Dem 14. The Irish government brought in emergency response teams, riot police, and helicopters; Gov. Scott Walker threatened to bring in the National Guard. They fenced up an area of public beach; we locked the doors of the state Capitol. There are times when it seems like the biggest difference between the Irish fishers and Wisconsin union workers was dental hygiene.

In either case, it seems that the law is defined by what the powerful say it is. And we should be so lucky that Madison doesn’t endorse police brutality to the level of Ireland’s Gardas. The first thing you learn in The Pipe is that Shell E&P Ireland refused to help make the documentary, and after watching women and elderly get slugged with bats by uniformed men, it’s easy to see why they would want to distance themselves.

But it does demean The Pipe’s merit that we only get the one side. The group of farmers at risk of losing absolutely everything is extremely endearing, but even the largest gathering pales in comparison to what we saw at any point in Madison last month. The pipeline would provide an economic boost to other families across the country that could certainly use it, and we have no barometer of evil or standard for cost-benefit analysis. But because the fishermen lack the capital to defend themselves in court, taking over their coastal territories is like shooting fish in a barrel. The Pipe, then, is a compelling account of how one civilization is learning to swim in a barrel.

The Norwegian government used quite different, though similarly desperate, methods to save face in Friday night’s closing movie, Troll Hunter, as well. Troll Hunter employs the same DIY, first-person camera techniques as Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, but director André Øvredal avoids the perennial Shaky Hands Syndrome by casting its documenters as collegiate comm arts students who know their way around a camcorder. Additionally, Øvredal tackles the issue of terminal boredom by writing a script that is equal parts self-parody and genuine excellence.

The Troll Hunter himself, a bearded stoic named Hans, takes the crew of university journalists on a tour of his life, in which they discover a Pandora’s box of secrets that have been long held by the Norwegian government. But it stops short of conspiracy theories by burrowing its tongue firmly in its cheek, and it likewise saves itself from gratuitous bloodshed by putting all of its emphasis on the hunt itself.

It’s hard to imagine a movie called Troll Hunter that is somehow lacking on triumphant death-by-troll scenes of terror, but I found it even more impressive that Troll Hunter was able to ditch the mindless slayings of horror movies to make a film that was completely awesome of its own accord. There’s a wide world out there for trolls to roam, and I would be terribly disappointed if we don’t get a few more movies like this in the near future.