Wisconsin Film Festival Pianos, world records, and The Replacements (AVC at WFF 2011 Day Four)

Ben: On State Street Saturday, the nice weather brought out the hordes of both regular folks and scabby faced zombies, each group seemingly in agreement that it was a perfect spring day for lazily lurching up and down the block. Inside the Orpheum, A Screaming Man—despite its aggro title, conjuring images of some Henry Rollins-type smattering your face with flecks of spittle—was echoing those sentiments perfectly with its almost excruciatingly deliberate pace.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s story about a father and son’s relationship amid near-constant wartime in Chad was careful to let the faces of its central characters convey the deep, difficult emotions at play by focusing in on them for minutes at a time. Adam—who everyone calls “Champ,” in reverence to his 1965 swimming title—and his son, Abdel, work as pool attendants at a local resort, a job that Adam quite seriously describes as “his life.” But when job cuts loom, he is forced to take over the thankless job of hoisting the front gates for obnoxious honking motorists, while Abdel remains poolside as the sole attendant.

As the current rebellion draws closer, the citizens are forced to move and Adam is compelled to make some impossible decisions. The kind which eat away at him from the inside and show up so painfully clear in his eyes, whether he’s listening to the mournful song of his unofficially adopted daughter or willing his moped through the sandy terrain on a vital mission, all at slow speed. But all the intimate time that Haroun allows us to spend with Adam is what ultimately draws us so close to him by the end of the film.

Across the street at MMoCA, another possessed man was on a mission, but this one was a search for the perfect sound. Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck’s documentary Pianomania lets us peek under the hood of magnificent grand pianos with all-star Steinway piano tuner Stefan Knüpfer as he deals with the fickle ears of concert pianists. Knüpfer, whose colleagues think he has a knack for making simple things difficult, believes that a great pianist can leave a tonal imprint on a piano, effectively changing its sound.

It’s this belief that must power his boundless energy and gleeful charm as he tinkers, futzes, and manipulates pianos to the precise will of virtuosos—like Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is preparing to record Bach’s The Art Of Fugue with the help of the master tuner—when a normal person would have snapped long ago. But all the running around the film makes us endure along with Knüpfer serves to intensify the moments we get to spend with him, listening in the wings, enraptured by the colors and emotions given life by a flawless performance on a perfect instrument.

Pianomania screens again April 3, 11:30 a.m. at the MMoCA.

Kyle: “I’m caught between journalism and bullshit.” As it turned out, that quote, ripped from an unnamed character in Alina E. Skrzeszewska’s Songs From The Nickel was a pretty apt summary of the downtrodden neighborhood as a whole. The area immediately surrounding 5th Street in downtown Los Angeles (hence the name “The Nickel”) is home to the only kinds of people who could sustain a life in such crippling poverty—which is to say, they’re extreme characters.

But the more interactions Skrzeszewska captures, the more it becomes apparent that the vast array of backstories are all exactly the same, in that none of them make any sense. And while most residents disagree about whether gentrification is a welcome economic stimulus or a downright bastardization of their underbelly culture, all seem to agree that winding up in The Nickel apparently requires some suspension of reality. These stories are too outlandish to be heard, and it’s regrettably telling of The Nickel’s continually ignored existence that none of these questions ever really get answered in this piece of journalism.

Although, there are other times when stories are best left without the slanted agendas of journalism, and maybe none at this festival have shown that better than Louder Than A Bomb. Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel present Louder Than A Bomb for exactly what it is: the ice cap on a mountain of urban potential that is all too often lost to high tuition rates or the more endemic lack of support in impoverished zones. Telling the story of the world’s biggest slam poetry competition located in Chicago, Jacobs and Siskel succeed by simply staying out of the way and letting the participants, the youth of the film, tell the story of how expressive art can yield more creative, challenging, and engaging minds. Louder Than A Bomb is emotional, gripping, and inspirational, but if there’s one thing the film taught me, it’s that I’m nowhere near good enough with words to do it any kind of justice.

Paired with a post-film, spoken-word performance by members of UW-Madison’s First Wave, LTAB was one of those instances when the Wisconsin Film Festival suddenly stood to mean much more. It was enough to prompt a near standoff between Madison mayoral candidates in the lobby (it probably wasn’t as exciting as it sounds), but just about everyone other than them showed up at the Chazen for the afternoon showing of Loving Lampposts. Todd Drezner floods Loving Lampposts with stories, voices, and far too many different individuals to reasonably connect with—but that’s half of the point. Drezner’s sweeping introduction to autism sheds light on how narrow-minded popular conceptions of autism are, and how inundated with nuance the disorder actually is. Loving Lampposts is not really about exposing the audience to individual narratives, but rather about changing the landscape and dialogue surrounding autism. The personal anecdotes and arguments often seem long-winded and overstated, but they’re trying to hammer home an important message—that the overly narrow approach we take in trying to treat or find a cure for autism is an example of autism in itself.

By Saturday evening, there were very few things that would have made me willfully miss Final Four basketball games, but The Replacements were pretty high toward the top of the list. That ruthless dedication classifies nearly everyone who considers him- or herself a Replacements fan, though, and tons of them appear in Gorman Bechard’s Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements. Among the myriad compliments bestowed upon “the last best band,” Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles called their songs “music for humans” because they write “the most human music possible.” On the one hand, it sounds like a nicely decorated insult (they are unmistakably rife with faults). But the more appropriate interpretation is how the Mats (as the band is sometimes called) used those faults to create a fleshy, lifelike myth about itself.

Color Me Obsessed is consistent with this endearingly faulty portrayal of the band. The members are never shown, and their music is never played. In the post-film Q&A segment, Bechard suggested that part of the Mats’ undying appeal is how each person has his or her own story of discovery. It was never easy to get interested in The Replacements, but those who have already done the legwork can attest to its rewards, and will undoubtedly agree that sitting in a basement on a sunny spring afternoon is not so bad when you do it with the Mats.

Mark: Saturday began with my squeezing into the Wisconsin Union Theater to witness the athleticism of marathon joggling (juggling while jogging) in Benjamin Fingerhut’s Guinness Book Of World Records documentary, Breaking And Entering. The film is a thorough record of people who desperately cling to feats like riding a stationary bike for 111 hours, going as far as to defend their record repeatedly while risking the ire of their spouses. While it seemed to me that most of the subjects were just desperate for the attention they didn’t get as children, the crowd ate it up, apart from seeing the record for most bruised bare ass acquired during a world record attempt. Seriously, they invented camera blur for a reason.

Acquainted With The Night came next, scheduled appropriately as the undead rose up against Scott Walker on State Street. While the film didn’t cover Hell’s spillover into the world of the living, it did chronicle the international culture, economy, art, and issues tied to the evening hours, ranging from understanding the ecology of swarms of bats in Austin, Texas, to rounding up drunks at bar time in Toronto, to viewing the curious Easter tradition in Chios, Greece as rival churches launch thousands of rockets at each other in a pretend war that leads to some actual fires at numerous town buildings. The globetrotting doc covers a lot of ground in a scant 80-minute run time, especially given an entire film could be made about many of the locations they visit. According to director Michael McNamara, look for the film to show up on Netflix in the future.

Acquainted With The Night screens again April 3, 1:15 p.m. at the Bartell.

Remembering there was still plenty of day left, I popped back over to what would be my last screening ever in the Fredric March Play Circle (they’re retiring the venue after this year) for Soul Boy. The narrative follows Abila, a boy from one of the poorest slums in Kenya who must face Herculean feats of courage and cunning assigned to him by a cow-legged witch who promises to restore his father’s soul if he succeeds. The film is part of a project that teamed a production crew lead by German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) with Kenyan film students, a creative approach to reaching out to impoverished parts of the world that resulted in a beautiful film that is at once a quest story and a look at the living conditions of Nairobi—poverty, violence, and mostly, people just trying to survive.

Turning from third-world to first-world problems, the ultra-low budget, quarter-life crisis story The New Year was up next, offering a lot more heart and a lot less quirk than most films of its ilk.

Indie films about young people who are lost in their mid-twenties are a dime a dozen, but The New Year is distinguished in a few ways. For one, our heroine isn’t diverted from her ambitions as a writer by her cancer-stricken father, whose illness forces her to drop out of school and take a job at a local bowling alley (or bowling center if you prefer) while she takes care of him. Still, Sunny—deftly played by relative unknown Trieste Kelly Dunn—sadly yearns for something bigger than reading all day at a bowling center in Florida, especially when a former academic rival comes to town and makes her realize just how deep a rut she has dug for herself. Director Brett Haley shot the film over just 12 days, but you never get the sense that the film was rushed, other than that the whole film has a very real quality that comes from using actual bowling patrons in the backgrounds instead of extras.