Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The 2nd Annual Milwaukee Film Festival Day 5


Three promising films on tap today, including the film that I've been waiting the most to see since the films were announced, Breathless. Fatigue is really setting in, and I think I'm going to need to take some time off soon in order to catch up with writing and just generally recharge. I think it probably sounds funny to someone that attending a film festival is exhausting work; you're sitting in a theater after all, but it genuinely is.

The first film of the day is Monica & David, which is a documentary about a couple with Down's Syndrome who get married. The film's subjects are here, as is the director, and I actually found this out because I saw them walking to the theater in the parking lot. They looked really sweet, chatting and holding hands. The talk back following the film was very interesting - I know that I miss out on a lot of director/actor talk backs by staying at the North Shore theater because I think there are a bunch of them that attend screenings at the Oriental, but I have appreciated the ones I've been able to see and hope that the festival continues to offer those. I still regret not being able to see Susan Sarandon, but it was announced too late for me to be able to change my film schedule without blowing out the whole day, so I had to weigh what was most important to me - seeing films or listening to Sarandon and screening one of my least favorite of her films.

Then there's a documentary about two ballet dancers in Brazil that I'm only seeing because it's between two films I scheduled, but if history has told me anything, I'll probably end up loving it because I started out lukewarm on it. It seems that I've encountered at least a dozen or two of films in the six years I've covered the festival where some of the best movies came out of nowhere and were originally time fillers.

Finally, there's Breathless, that I'm really glad isn't going to be in the Ultrascreen since the aspect ratio would be all weird on that big screen. I'm a huge French New Wave fan, and Breathless has been on my "must watch" list forever, so when I saw that the festival was going to offer the newly restored version it quickly shot up to being the #1 film I wanted to see. There was a great crowd for it, which was really encouraging since I immediately felt a common bond with everyone there, because they not only came out to a 9pm show on a school night for a classic movie, but a classic French movie to boot, which is all good in my opinion.

By the end of the night I was Fidgety McSquirmsalot and while I was loving the movie, was wanting to get the hell out of there, so I can tell it's definitely time for a break and regroup day.

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