Knight of Cups, Wisconsin’s Own favorites at Pinney Library, and a David Fincher classic
All freakin’ weekend
Knight of Cups (Sundance)
Terrence Malick has been on a streak as of late, bringing his lyrical, oblique style to a series of projects firmly set in modern times. 2011’s The Tree of Life questioned life’s mysteries with a macro-chronology of everything from Sean Penn’s childhood all the way back to dinosaur, and Malick’s follow-up, To the Wonder, reflected its hasty release date with its own birdy entreaties to Olga Kurylenko’s disintegrating personal life. Knight of Cups fashions Christian Bale as a hard-partying actor, perpetually strung out from the booze, drugs, and rubber horse masks required of Hollywood all-nighters. Like most of Malick’s oeuvre, Knight of Cups, which takes its name from an Egyptian parable Bale’s father (Brian Dennehy) tells him as a child, wouldn’t be complete without poetic introspection, parent issues, and luminous shots of the aurora borealis. And while the prospect of another threadbare narrative hidden under layers of breathy voice-over might rub the director’s detractors the wrong way, who can say no Entourage by way of The New World?
Friday
Pinney Mini Film Festival (6:00p — Pinney Library)
In its fourth year, the Pinney Branch’s “Pinney Mini Film Festival” is both a FREE do-over for those who didn’t catch local selections at last year’s Wisconsin Film Festival and an easy warm-up for this year’s. Fri’s lineup features New Glarus Brewing doc The Tale of the Spotted Cow and Little America, Kurt Raether’s Golden Badger-winning piece on Marshall’s charming-to-a-fault 1950s style amusement park. Also promised are Prairie Burns, a poetic, talking heads-free docushort on controlled prairie fires, and Geoffrey Broughe Handles Confrontation Poorly, Jon Phillips’ delirious one-man race from a police detention center. Both Phillips and Prairie Burns‘ Elizabeth Wadium are set to appear for a Q&A with Wisconsin Film Festival coordinator Ben Reiser.
Saturday
Dan Savage’s HUMP! Film Festival (7:00p, 10:00p — Barrymore Theatre)
After a live Friday night recording of his podcast (also at the Barrymore), nationally-syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage comes back with his traveling program of homemade pornography. Like Savage’s own brutally earnest writing, the bluntly titled festival has been altering the way we think about erotica and sex for years now. Savage’s return to Madison — where he first seeded his advice-giving during his time as a Four Star Video employee — seems like a welcome one. (Admission is $18, 21+)
Se7en (11:00p — Union South Marquee)
Zodiac remains David Fincher’s best film, but his 1995 thriller with writer Andrew Kevin Walker laid all the groundwork for the director’s obsessions with pulpy murder-mysteries. Pairing a baby-faced Brad Pitt with Morgan Freeman’s cynical dick on the cusp-of-retirement, Se7en throws its mismatched detectives into a surreally visceral string of murders, with each killing carried out on successive days and corresponding to each of Dante’s Divine Comedy transgressions. And as a grimy procedural, it’s as good as its gets. Kyle Cooper’s credit sequence is a thing of skin-crawling beauty; a serial pedophile’s apartment is a putrid crash course in tension; and the reveal of the culprit is second-to-none. A pioneering vision of same-day delivery service, Se7en’s ending remains a gut punch on repeat viewings, indicting its audience for thinking this is just another forensic circus to indulge in. This ain’t CSI. (FREE.)
Sunday
Shame (2:00p — Chazen Art Museum)
Cinematheque continues their Bergman on 35mm series at the Chazen with this, a wartime drama that depicts the collapse of its pair of souls (Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann). On the outskirts of civilization, the young musicians-turned-exiled farmers find their already reclusive way of life interrupted by civil war as it threatens their lives and any future of a family. One of Bergman’s lesser known works, Shame presents a stunningly personal dissolution of ambitions in the name of cold, hard survival. (FREE.)
Hit 2 Pass (7:00p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
Micro-Wave Cinema’s featured documentary is alternately frenetic and pensive, with director Kurt Walker set to make a video Q&A appearance. Here’s an idea of what to expect from Sun’s demo derby oddity, via Grant Phipps’s preview:
Acceleration is less of a factor than the intention of collision that’s required in order to pass the car ahead. Hit 2 Pass’ glimpse into a three-week preparation by a father-son team, Dale and Tyson Storozinski, turns the aerodynamic performance strategy one might find in the frugality of a soapbox derby into a daredevil competition in which planning is more about softening the vehicular damage.