Milwaukee Film Fest 2021 Views (Part 1 - I was deep into documentaries this first week)

My favorite time of the year is happening, Milwaukee Film Festival. Again this year it was virtual and this year I purchased the Festival Pass (watch all the movies you want during Film Fest for $75, duh, yes and yes) so I was able to see a LOT of movies this year. I broke my reviews down into multiple posts, chronological by when I viewed them. The film festival goes until the 20th, so if there is something on the list that you like, act fast you might be able to see them!

 The Dry: This wasn't originally on my list of things to see but then I heard someone mention that it was based on a book and I was like "Hold on.....I think I read that book". And I did. If you (for instance) live with someone who is not into indie or weird movies and just want a straight forward, main stream thriller this is a perfectly good choice. I like Eric Bana. It was good to see him. Also, middle of nowhere Australia, hard no thanks. 

MKE Film Description: Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, THE DRY follows Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) as he returns home for the funeral of a friend. The small town is reeling from what looks like a murder suicide, but Aaron employs his detective skills to find out what really happened. Haunted by another mysterious death from his youth, Aaron has to reconcile his present with his past as he is confronted with suspects around every corner.

MC Escher: Journey to Infinity: This movie was a disappointment for me. The pull for this movie was that it was a documentary told in the artist own words, and I was like oh that will be interesting. But that was only the case for like...60% of the movie? And the VO actor was Stephen Fry, who I don't have a problem with but I think that he was the wrong choice for this role. The best part of the movie was the credits because thats when they were actually like "hey, every pop culture reference to this fella? Here it is". Inception, Labyrinth, The Simpsons, The Rolling Stones, he is everywhere!

MKE Film description: Featuring the Dutch graphic artist's own words (narrated by Stephen Fry), this illuminating documentary explores his well-known works through a less-well-known lens. Using animation to help us see these pieces again in a new way, audiences are asked to consider anew the celebrity of Escher, layered here with the philosophical power and profundity of his scientific thinking and biographical details that inform his worldview

25 Weeks: A Wisconsin Pizza Harvest: A hour long, short, sweet profile of a farmer who specializes in growing old fashioned wheat the old fashioned way here in Wisconsin. He grows wheat because he loves pizza and you need wheat for pizza. A great part of this movie was his cute little donkeys!

MKE Film description: Watch as farmer, filmmaker, and general Renaissance man Charlie Tennessen takes archival wheat seeds from planting to harvest with the help of his trusty barncats and three lovely donkeys. This meditative journey across 25 weeks (winter to autumn 2020) of weather, hard work, and persistence will make you appreciate food on a whole new level. Come for the pizza, but stay for the bucolic slice of life lived at a deliberate pace

The Meaning of Hitler: Because I am who I am I knew I was going to watch this one. The problem with this one for me was that I felt like it never really defined what it was trying to say. I was hoping it was going to be a little more focused on like, Hitler's influence on current extreme alt-right groups and it was kind of like that, but there was also a section about a guy who is a famous Holocaust denier. It wasn't a bad documentary it just felt like it kind of wandered. Some good art direction though.

MKE Film description: Taking inspiration from Sebastian Haffner's titular book, in THE MEANING OF HITLER Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker set out to explore what Hitler means in the current waves of white nationalism and antisemitism. Featuring interviews with historians and scholars like Martin Amis and Saul Friedlander coupled with time spent with Nazi hunters, microphone technologists, and the curator of the US Army's confiscated art collection, this Herzogian documentary offers an unexpected, refreshing yet sobering journey to help us know why this history remains urgent.

Rez Metal: This documentary follows a group of Native American's living on Window Rock Navajo Reservation in Arizona on their quest to bring notice to the plight of Native Americans (especially the very high suicide rate amongst their people) through their heavy metal band. It was interesting, I'll never be surprised by the terrible conditions on many reservations - it's a stain on this country.

MKE Film description: I Don’t Konform is a heavy metal band from the Navajo Nation in Arizona that uses their music to uplift a community devastated by suicide. They catch the ear of acclaimed Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen, who joins the band in their hooghan to begin recording their next album. REZ METAL is a stripped-down celebration of the heavy metal spirit, and a compelling portrayal of a community channeling their raw emotions, ethics, and hope through music.

Inklings Week Celebration and Vacation Reads

First up, starting next week it's one of the most fun weeks of the year, Inklings Week! A week where we celebrate CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien along with their wonderful works that have made such a profound impact on so many people's lives. My longtime blogging friend Jamie is hosting the celebrations as she does every year! I am taking part in different parts of the celebration. First, on Monday night Jamie, myself and author Katherin Reay will be on a panel discussing Tollers and Jack, some of our favorite works and what they mean to us. A little later in the week I'll also be guest posting on Jamie's blog. Here is Jamie's post with the panel information and a sneak peek of what is to come, we'd love to see you around the old interwebs! 

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I'm very fortunate that I (a vaccinated human) get to see my sister and her husband (also vaccinated humans) for vacation. After more than a year of being cautious and seeing no one and doing nothing the prospect of a vacation feels like a dream.  But what is a vacation without some vacation reading? I picked up and packed two books from Half Price books today, though, if we're honest I might need a few more. I wish I was a Kindle user because I'm sure it would take up less space but it's just not my preferred kind of reading. 

"Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance" by Ian Buruma 

Summary from Goodreads: Ian Buruma returns to his native land to explore the great dilemma of our time through the story of the brutal murder of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh at the hands of an Islamic extremist. It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the vocally anti-Islam Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that "blasphemed" Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice, which in a very real sense he was. The murder horrified quiet, complacent, prosperous Holland, a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native country to try to make sense of it all and to see what larger meaning should and shouldn't be drawn from this story. The result is Buruma's masterpiece: a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a true-crime page-turner and the intellectual resonance we've come to expect from one of the most well-regarded journalists and thinkers of our time. Ian Buruma's entire life has led him to this narrative: In his hands, it is the exemplary tale of our age, the story of what happens when political Islam collides with the secular West and tolerance finds its limits.

The War for All Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at Waterloo by Roy and Leslie Adkins. (My weird obsession with maritime battles continues, obviously)

Summary from Goodreads: Roy Adkins (with his wife Lesley) returns to the Napoleonic War in The War for All the Oceans, a gripping account of the naval struggle that lasted from 1798 to 1815, a period marked at the beginning by Napoleon's seizing power and at the end by the War of 1812. In this vivid and visceral account, Adkins draws on eyewitness records to portray not only the battles but also the details of a sailor's life, shipwrecks, press-gangs, prostitutes, spies, and prisoners of war.

And then literally any of the several magazines that Quinn has with her because she has a slight addiction to cheap magazine subscriptions. Doing her best to keep print journalism alive, that one!

Book Review: "A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II" by Sonia Purnell

 If you are here, you know that I read a lot of history books. But the amazing woman who are story focuses on today is someone who I hadn't heard of in any book... I actually heard of her from the classic show, Drunk History. This whole video is full of badass women but Virginia's section starts at 5 minutes, 22 seconds.

Virginia Hall was a woman born to an upwardly mobile Baltimore family. Her mom had all of her hopes pinned on Virginia for a wealthy husband to help the families upward social trajectory. Virginia was like....nah. She wanted to see the world and have experiences so she got jobs at US embassies in Europe and in the Near East (like Turkey. Is the Near East a thing people actually say?) Anyway, she busted her ass for almost no money and no respect but liked being in Europe, A hunting accident (literally shot herself in the foot) and a terrible case of gangrene left her with an amputated leg and fake leg named Cuthbert. (Though she was super guarded about her leg - it makes sense because she was fighting a lot of sexism throughout her life and why would you also add on abelism to that mix). 

Through much persistence, some good luck and the desperation that comes in war time she finally was able to get the British to drop her into France to work with The Resistance. Very quickly she made herself indispensable, working to build a network of people who were reliable and trustworthy so when agents were dropped into France they could be the most effective possible. Then the problem became that the agents who dropped into France spent a lot of time chasing women and drinking - it also didn't help that a lot of times that in the rush to get people in the field they didn't get as much training as they should have. And then it doesn't help that her handlers in London did a lot of micromanaging and sending other people with no experience to be her boss even though she was the only reason any of the resistance was having any success.

Her time in France was marked by close calls, amazing jailbreaks, loss, intrigue and everything else that you could think of. This book is amazing and exciting and celebrates a woman who went out of her way to stay out of the spotlight and under the radar. And because of that and, frankly, because she was a woman in a man's world, she never got the respect, title or paycheck that she deserved. So all hail Virginia Hall - a bad bitch who deserves to have at least 100 primary schools, a cool cocktail and several parks in France and Baltimore named after her. Let's make it happen!

 

What I've been reading...

 Version Control by Dexter Palmer. A couple (5?) years ago I was able to meet a blogging friend IRL while she was working at a bookstore in a town that I was visiting. For a book about time travel (which I love) the time travel came into this book really late into the book. I liked it, I just was surprised how long it took to get to (what it felt to me) the point.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatalov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar.  This book should be the least surprising book to show up on this blog ever. Oh, a book about an unexplained incident in post-WWII Russia with mysterious deaths? Yeah duh. I really liked this book, it felt well researched and full of these hikers humanities. What was great was that literally as I was reading this book there was breaking news about what might have caused the hikers deaths'. Interestingly enough, the theory that is breaking is a different theory than this book offers up. No "for sure" answers!

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg. I really wanted to adore this book because it seemed to hit a lot of my interests. I was disappointed in the fact that it didn't really hit for me. I think that the problem was that it tried to cover a lot of topics in a shortish book. Maybe it needed to be two separate books and then we would have been in business.

Book review: "The Street Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power" by Deirdre Masks

I love love love love this book. Some of my favorite book things are 1) maps and 2) super super specific nonfiction. And this book gave me both of those things. (Look how the cover art has a crease on it like it's a folded map - be still my heart). Each chapter is it's own topic but the theme throughout it all his street addresses!

I have so many postit notes in this book - sorry in advance for how long and disjointed that this will be, haha.

Also, quick side note, I think if we think about people who don't have a street address we think that either those people are a)homeless or b) living in a squatter or slum kind of situation. Not true! A lot of folks in the good old USA are living in rural roads that don't even have names let alone house numbers. Okay. Now we will start.

- "In recent years more than 40% of all local laws passed by the New York City Common Council have been related to changes in street names". That's...SO MANY.  

-This is a fact not related to street addresses - the British Empire trafficked over 3.1 million Africans in the slave trade.

-Do you know what the "zip" in zip code stands for? Zone Improvement Planning. For as much as I play trivia I can't believe that's never come up. 

-A bunch of roads in Belgium are named after their food specialties - Passage of Speculoos. (I want to live on a street named after a cookie) 

-Only 2.6% of streets are named after women. These folks are on it. 

- Most europeans didn't have permanent last names before the 14th century. You know why those were established? So people could get drafted and taxed. SURPRISE SURPRISE. 

- A bunch of teenagers in Iran were anti-British so they decided to rename the street that the British Embassy on from Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street. It caught on so quickly that the British embassy made another entrance to their building so people coming to the embassy didn't enter on that street. If you didn't spend your childhood elbows deep in books about irish politics - Bobby Sands was.uh..incredibly anti-British and was held as a political prisoner by them when he died of a hunger strike as a very young man in 1981. 

- I've been to DC several times and I thought I was pretty confident in the city's layout and spoke and wheel thing that it was designed around. Somehow missed: "numbered streets run east to west, lettered streets run north and south...diagonal streets were named for the states of the Union (15 at the time) with longest avenues given the names of the three largest states at the time (PA, MA, VA) and now every state in the union has a street named after it.

-There's a great chapter about renaming or un-naming street names because of wars, revolutionaries, scandals and more. Russia has more than 4000 streets named after Lenin, equaling 5363 miles which is a longer distance than Moscow to Minneapolis. In a few different european countries that have streets that translate in English to "Jew Path". The streets don't cut through the middle of the cities, Jews were forced to use these paths that were far out of the way, to isolate them from others.

Book review: "This is Chance: The Shaking of an All American City, A Voice that Held it All Together" by Jon Mooallem

On Good Friday in 1964 a 9.2 magnitude earthquake centered 75 miles east of Anchorage. It lasted 4 minutes, which is an incredibly long time for an earthquake. Oil tanks exploded in Seward and set the harbor on fire. A large tsunami came in and wiped out small villages up and down the cost. It was so violent that an island southeast of Anchorage was knocked nearly 70 feet out of it's original position. Water levels jumped as far away as Libya, Israel and Belgium. In downtown Anchorage two whole city blocks dropped 10 feet. So, all of this is to say - this was a very bad earthquake. Please see evidence below.

 

Enter, Genie Chance. 

Genie was a reporter/on air personality for local radio station KNEI - the only woman. When the earthquake hit she was in downtown Anchorage with one of her children, stopped at a stoplight. She thought they had blown a tire because as they were slowing down to stop at the stoplight her car started rocking violently but then she looked around and saw that every other car was also rocking. As soon as the earthquake stopped she sped home, checked on her family, and then almost immediately began broadcasting. A lot of the information at the beginning was just safety tips. Then people started coming in and handing her messages like "My name is John Baker, can you please let my parents know I'm okay?" or "There's a need for electricians at the hospital, anyone who can please gather there". Even though there was a city manager, and several other department heads where Genie was set up at the Public Safety broadcasting she became the de facto organizer. Volunteers poured in looking for ways to help, and since Genie was the only person who knew where people were going and what other people needed. She did this for days. This book focuses on Genie, how she got to KNEI, her time during the earth quake and her life afterward. Her story was not always a happy one, but she did a lot of good for the people of Alaska.

And while the damage was horrific less than 15 people died (though the people who did die were killed in awful sort of ways - being swept out to sea, being crushed by falling debris, being literally swallowed by the earth). And though the damage was horrific the people who studied how disaster affects people were shocked at how the residents clung to each other and helped one another. (The one documented case of looting was by a police officer 🙄🙄🙄🙄)

There was a really interesting quote about trauma and how it affects people in situations like this earthquake. Genie noticed that she was repeating tasks subconsciously in the months after the earthquake "...it was as though she'd come back to remember, to test that the orderliness of the world had truly been restored. Maybe this is how trauma worked. Maybe it didn't knock you back, like an earthquake, but infiltrated and destabilized you slowly, like rot".

There were two things that I didn't like about this book:

1. The author writes himself into the story at the end and refers to himself in third person and it's weird and I didn't like it. 

2. The author had this weird habit when he introduced new people in the story. Where he would introduce you to someone and then almost immediately tell you how they died. Like "Wesley Hoffmann was an Anchorage resident who stood at 5 feet 3 inches, worked in an office and refused to wear clothes with patterns for some unknown reason. She was killed in 2028 when she got drunk and tried to fight a walrus". It was a strange choice and it took me out of the story each time he did it.

Overall I really liked this book - if we learned anything this year we know that not all heroes, like Genie, wear capes.

Book review: "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller

 I'm just so fortunate, another great book! I'm ending the year very strong with my reads, which is awesome because for a good chunk of quarantine spring (like....April-June) I just couldn't read anything. Hat tip to my friend Chas who recommended this book to me, I remember hearing about it and that it was popular but never investigated it further.

While I was reading this book I was think about this occurrence at UVM. The author is educated in Classics and languages from some of the best schools that this country has to offer. If you're reading a book blog, I can assume that books (or maybe just me) are important to you so I won't preach to the choir about the importance of arts of the humanities in education. I understand that educational institutions are in a tough position but we have to find better ways. 

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled bookish programming.

Patroculus is a young prince in a little to no consequence kingdom in ancient Greece. He accidentally kills someone (a-hole kid+ shove + rocks= oops) and he is sent in exile to be raised by a king in a different part of Greece. He's scared out of his mind, but his homelife wasn't great so maybe this isn't the worst thing that could happen? This king has taken in a few misfit exiles but Patroculus befriends Achilles, the young prince in this new kingdom. Achilles dad is the king but his mom is a straight up terrifying sea goddess (but she's mad because she was raped and kidnapped so, it's not like it's unwarranted. There's a lot of abuse of women in this book, but a couple of shining moments for them too. Not nearly enough but...) His mom goddess has told him that a prophecy about him is that he will be the greatest greek whoever lived. No pressure. P and A grow up together and become very close and eventually fall in love. But then their pretty ideal existence is imploded by what becomes the Trojan War.

If you wanted this movie to be less bloated and ridiculous and more gay, have I got a book for you!

Like all wars everyone thinks that it will be done in like, a year (it's not) and as usual old men talk and young men die. I really enjoyed how the book talks about the tension between all of the kings (many cooks in the kitchen), what day to day life looks like in a ten year siege, and the relationships built around a conflict. A lot of the names will probably sound familiar to you, but you might now know the details of them (Ajax, Pyrrh, etc) or more familiar ones like Odysseus.

It was a fast, interesting, relationships focused read with a setting of the futility and banality of war. And a love story! I give it 4 out of 5 stars!