Thursday, Saturday, Sunday tickets
Although I think it already has.
Since I last wrote – over a week ago, when I was making cookies for election night – I’ve volunteered for and watched a bunch of movies at the WI Film Fest.
On Wednesday, after work, I went to my film fest volunteer training, then I came home and ate a microwave s’more and too many extra marshmallows on the side.
On Thursday, I had online class at 7:00 PM. I came home and made the leftover Passover chicken scallopine (boneless chicken breast, pounded, dredged in matzoh meal, and fried in olive oil, then kept warm in the oven for some ridiculously long time while we do the Haggadah) into a kind of chicken parm with tomato sauce and cheese. We ate it with garlic-buttered-spaghetti, then I had class from 7:00 to 8:00 and finally, we went to see Uncle John at Union South. Rural violence, inter-cut with a cute love story, millennials in Chicago, Uncle John’s nephew, a video production guy at a company that makes commercials.
Friday I worked my first volunteer shift. Which went OK, except that the second showing of Uncle John – for which half of Lodi, Wis., where it was filmed, turned out – got started late, in part due to my inexperience as a lead volunteer. Then we went to the symphony, where the soloist was Christopher Taylor, a pianist on the faculty at UW, and then, for the 2nd half they did Anton Bruckner’s (1824-1896) Symphony No.7 in E Major, which was omigod 66 minutes long. I could not stay awake.
On Saturday we did four 4 movies. We started with Bloomin’ Mud Shuffle – the mud being as in drywall, about a young guy in Indiana (although I think they filmed it in Berwyn IL). The main character, who’s really going nowhere, kind of reminded me of some of my kid’s friends, who didn’t go to college and worked crummy jobs, and drank and smoked too much. We were in the second row, and I was seasick – I was queasy clear through our next film.
Which was In Order of Disappearance, with Eric the vampire’s dad, as a citizen vigilante in Norway, who goes after a bunch of gangster drug dealers who killed his son. And, oh by the way, his brother was part of gang for awhile. The gangsters were all done in by their own greed, and the kingpin was delightfully hateable.
The we hoofed it as fast as we could to The Connection (La French), a Mad-Men-perfect recreation, not of the 1960s and early ’70s, but the late 1970s and 80s – when disco queens and hippie chicks wore their hair long and straight, and halter tops and flares – or bell bottoms, as we called them back then. Madison band VO5 would’ve been right at home. The most challenging thing about the movie was that the lead good guy and lead bad guy looked quite similar – they both were French heart throbs a la Jean Paul Belmondo. The good guy had a cleft chin, and bad guy had a smoother more Italianate profile. The good guy was also in The Artist.
French leading men, left to right: Gilles Lellouche, Jean Dujardin, Jean-Paul Belmondo
After, we walked home, got the car, and we bought sandwiches in the drive through at Milios, that we ate in our last movie, Tu Dors Nicole. French Canadian kids in summer, watching the house while mom & dad are away, reminded me a lot of my own teenage years – down to band practice in the living room. It was b&w, and probably not quite enough happened for two hours of movie. One of the reviews says, “when the summer seemed like it would last forever.”
And I think that’s all I can do for tonight – I’ll have to tell you about Sunday to Wednesday next time.
