April - Wisconsin Film Fest / Day 3

This was a day on which I learned something about myself. What I learned is that four movies in one day is pretty much my limit - by the time I hit the fifth film, I am seriously ready to not be in a movie theater any more.

Day 3 (4/5) -

• 26 - The Substitute is another Scandanavian film, but the exact opposite of Waiter in that it did not make you want to kill yourself. Alex wanted to go see some serious, mind-expanding documentary in this timeslot, but I said, "Let's check out this movie about a sixth-grade substitute teacher that turns out to be an alien instead!" and so we did, because she's good like that. And it was great - definitely in my top 5 of the fest.
• 27 - The Linguists is a documentary about two scientists who travel the world trying to document languages on the verge of extinction. Educational and entertaining, and one of the linguists was there and spoke afterwards.
• 28 - Song Sung Blue, a documentary about a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute duo, was surprisingly sad and touching. But that feeling didn't linger long after the credits rolled and the widow (the husband died during the making of the film) treated the Q&A like her own personal live-audience infomercial. She plugged her upcoming concert dates and offered CD's & t-shirts for sale. She was also the only one of the filmmakers/stars that we saw arrive for their screening in a limo. My impression of this film was definitely tainted by her behavior afterward.
• 29 - Getting Home is sort of a Chinese Weekend at Bernie's in which a man tries to return his deceased friend to his home town for burial. Under normal circumstances I probably would have enjoyed this more, but I was starting to lag and knew I had this one plus one more for the day to get through. And as an added bonus, the print of the film hadn't made it through customs so we had to watch a dvd with timecode projected on the big screen. Not my favorite thing ever.
• 30 - Mongol would be more accurately titled Ghengis Khan: The Early Years. I was ready for the day to be over by the time we sat down to start this one, so I was not in the best state of mind for an epic. It was pretty good, but I didn't realize it was only going to cover his rise to power, not the height of his reign or anything, so I kept thinking "when is he gonna take over all of Asia already?!? Let's get the world conquered and get this over with. I'm ready to go home!"