Wisconsin Film Festival Underground warfare, photo therapy, and '80s references (AVC at WFF 2011 Day Two)

Kyle: Upon seeing his son for the first time in over a decade, Riva’s father remarks, “Drinking and fornicating. A whole life’s ambition.” For the most part, he was right. Riva, the titular character in Djo Munga’s Viva Riva!, spends the majority of the film’s 96 minutes drinking champagne and pursuing women we never learn much about, which fits the lead character’s hazy context—ostensibly, he also knows very little about them.

He spends the remainder of the film running from equally nondescript characters, though these ones fully embody the film’s primary vehicle and the life ingredient Riva’s dad failed to mention: violence. There’s violence for sport, for revenge, to gain advantage, to (assumedly) fill plot holes, and (definitely) just to kill time. What results is a four-way setup, in which we’re only vaguely sure who we’re rooting for and absolutely clueless as to why, while a whole slew of peripheral characters tug at our sleeves and are promptly forgotten.

There is ample roughhousing and there’s gratuitous sexy time, but very ambiguous lessons or morals support such bottomless behavior. But I don’t mean to sound overly critical. Viva Riva! is definitely a well-paced, fun, and entertaining event, just so long as you’re willing to allow your life’s ambitions to sink to drinking and fornicating for an hour and a half.

But whatever depth or detail was lacking in the late-night show of Viva Riva! came in bundles in the Orpheum’s matinee showing of Beneath Hill 60. Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2010 Hamptons Film Festival, Beneath Hill 60 is scrupulous in its scientific details, without ever sinking to esoteric jargon. It tracks the tale of a crew of Australian miners who are sent to Belgium during World War I to try to infiltrate enemy lines from below. The gritty math of the underground tunnels is there on paper, and plenty of scientific thought certainly preceded each mud-encrusted maneuver, but director Jeremy Hartley Sims veered away from exclusionary arithmetic to focus instead on anecdotal knowledge that informs the broader concepts at play.

So it was an unfortunate, albeit somewhat predictable, dilemma that the writers were not as successful at engineering compelling romance narratives or any big surprises. Despite reliable flashbacks to the attractive girl back home in the film, the echoes between the two time periods are often too faint to connect.

But Sims manages to breathe life into the film with neat scientific asides, like how miners measure oxygen levels with candlelight and bird tweets, and how the Germans figured out the Allied forces were mining around in the first place. War is an intensely emotional subject, but time after time the mathematics consistently outperform logic. And by the end of the film, we learn exactly what Of Montreal tells us on “Gronlandic Edit”: “Physics makes us all its bitches.”

Viva Riva! screens again April 1, 7:45 p.m. at Orpheum Stage Door.

Mark: Thursday’s festival lineup had MMoCA running brownish-red with the corny fake blood of a so-bad-its-good horror triple feature and, though I didn’t get to stay for Evil Dead, the first two features had enough absurd death scenes and awkward rape scenes (no trees, but still) to fulfill my Wisconsin Film Festival camp requirement. As with the night before, each feature was preceded by a stellar selection of horror trailers, and there were a few gems ahead of Blood Hook, including the story of a teacher driven to teach the punk kids of 1984 a lesson—with a blowtorch.

As the muskie-fishing killing spree of Blood Hook began, the laughs kept on coming as the fresh-faced newcomers (read: absolutely terrible actors) of the cast are slaughtered mercilessly by a fisherman driven mad by the “devil’s tritone” formed by cicada chirping and that damn rock ’n’ roll music all the kids keep listening to just before the hook and lure of death drags them into murky Wisconsin waters. The hammy performance from the grouchy old groundskeeper astounds, with responses like, “Your grandpa would smack you in the snotbox for talking like that!” when the hapless protagonist claims that he’s going to take on the murderer himself.

Night Train To Terror doesn’t stick to one absurd premise, but instead presents three vignettes of people facing evil, as told by a train conductor to God and Mr. Satan as they negotiate over the ownership of the souls aboard God’s magic space-train to heaven. The train is full of new-wave rockers who provide a song-and-dance transition between each of the stories, blissfully unaware of the cosmic happenings just a train car ahead. Some of the stories are better than others—hypnosis, mental institutions, and illegal trade of body parts are surefire recipes for terror. But the main takeaway is that God looks like Colonel Sanders and Satan is a dick. It’s just like the Bible teaches us.

For my final screening of the evening, I opted to truck it down to the Wisconsin Union Theater for Marwencol, the story of Mark Hogancamp and his richly photographed world of a WWII-era town in Belgium populated by dolls representing imaginary characters and people from his life. Introducing the documentary, festival director Meg Hamel admitted candidly that the film was her favorite at this year’s festival. Marwencol is a story of a man turning a hobby into a work of art as a form of therapy after suffering massive brain damage in the wake of a severe beating he suffered outside a bar in Kingston, New York. Hogancamp’s photos of his doll’s adventures are stunningly realistic—amazing, especially in light of the limited resources he had to take the photos. The work takes him from losing the ability to draw to presenting his therapy project at an exhibition in Greenwich Village, with the film serving as a record of his slow build of a new identity for himself as an artist. The documentary was my personal highlight of the festival so far.

Marwencol screens again April 1, 10:30 p.m., at the Bartell Theatre.

Ben: Thursday evening at the Orpheum Stage Door was packed, to the extent that the volunteers had to play a game of seating chart Tetris just to fit all the different-sized groups that flooded the tiny theater. I gave up my seat so that a couple could fit in, but thankfully got to escape a puffy mullet-obstructed view with a good excuse. How appropriately ’80s that haircut was for our feature film that evening, Taika Waititi’s Boy.

Not that you’d know from the setting (rural New Zealand), but the never-ending references to decade touchstones like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and E.T. gave it away all too often. The movie centers on the title character, a boy named Boy, whose vivid imagination carries him away from his adorable yet difficult reality of serving as father figure to a younger brother, Rocky, and a pack of impossibly cute cousins. That is, until his estranged father—played by the director—returns, to serve as a comedic (and sometimes frightening) bad influence on Boy.

The laughs come hard and fast early on, but unfortunately die out soon as the film gives over to some standard indie quirk fail-safes like weird ancillary characters (“Weirdo,” the father’s Crazy Horses gangmates, a goat), goofy props (numerous sparkler performances, a microwave full of door knobs), and awkward moments. Luckily, the film has charm coming out of its ears, and those awkward moments are often well used to explore the difficulty in patching up a relationship between children forced to grow up too quickly and parents who never grew up at all.

The short walk over to the Bartell was brisk and helped snap me back to reality just in time for an unflinching look at a whole other world, encased in a junkyard in the shadow of the New York Mets’ new home, Citi Field. Véréna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki smartly forgo narration in their documentary Foreign Parts, an enthralling look a ramshackle community, prone to flooding and impossibly dirty, built around the business of car parts. Though unsightly, the neighborhood of Willets Point thrives on interesting characters, ingenuity, and hard work, even in the face of possible demolition to make room for a development to match the sparkling ballpark next door. It’s a fascinating story that the filmmakers let slowly unfold and communicate itself in the faces of the residents, the sounds of an industrial city, and the real relationships that bind them together.

Boy screens again April 3, 5 p.m. at Orpheum Stage Door and Foreign Parts screens again April 2, 4:30 p.m. at Wisconsin Union Theatre.