Late last week, the Wisconsin Film Festival (WFF) released its 2012 schedule. For those that haven't vigorously studied the film guide, Dane101 will post a trailer-a-day until the festival begins on April 18.  

Our first trailer is Margaret. Featuring Anna Paquin, Matthew Broderick and Matt Damon, Margaret was filmed in 2005 and went through six years of editing before a limited released last year. From the WFF website:

A privileged, precocious, and extremely self-absorbed New York City teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin), in pursuit of a trifle, distracts a city bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) and later feels more than a little responsible for the fatal accident that follows. Though she initially gives false testimony to the police, Lisa's guilt looms heavily and she seeks advice from a variety of adults including her mother (J. Smith Cameron) and two ineffectual teachers at her private prep school (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick). Determined to live a morally uncompromised life, Lisa proceeds to set things right, turning several people's lives, including her own, upside down.

Margaret plays Thursday, April 19, 3:30 p.m. at Sundance Cinema 1, and again Friday, April 20, 6:30 p.m. at the Orpheum. Tickets are available through the WFF website beginning March 31.

A musician and steelworker, Chen, is being divorced by his estranged wife. Their daughter, Xiao Yuan, will go with whichever parent can buy her a piano. Chen cannot afford such a luxury, but he is determined and scheming, and embarks on a quest that includes his singer girlfriend, worker friends, and the members of his band (they play mainly Russian music). Spontaneous, often surreal, musical numbers, zany capers, and gorgeous shots of the crumbling industrial city lead us, in the end, to an unexpectedly sad resting place.

The preview summary of the Chinese film compared it to Full Monty, but without the stripping. I admit, this is one reason I decided to see it. And I could see echoes, in the striving of a group of men made economically obsolete to recover a sense of dignity. “We workers can do anything when we put our mind to it,” says one old engineer, when they consider the idea of building Xiao Yuan’s piano from scratch. “We should always try.”

Square jaws, square shoulders ... Beneath Hill 60 is as square a movie as has ever played at the Wisconsin Film Festival. Now, squareness cuts both ways -- this WWI picture is conventional down to its very bones, but it's also a handsomely set gem of classical filmmaking, and delivers its upbeats and downbeats with conviction; the first casualty whose death we truly mourn is portrayed in a truly dynamite, pure-cinema kind of shot. (My colleague Matt has more to say about its filmmaking virtues.) The movie cuts between Capt. Woodward's arrival at the Western Front as the new commanding officer of a mining unit charged with burrowing beneath the German line, and flashbacks to his days in Australia as he decides to leave his supervisory job at a copper mine and join the army. The movie won a prize from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which awards movies that deal with scientific and technical issues, and the movie was selected by the Wisconsin Film Fest to draw in enginerd moviegoers (a number I count myself among; in her introduction, festival director Meg Hamel also noted the three generations of Wisconsin engineers in her family).

Thinking about this movie's appeal to a technical audience provides one of the most useful vantages for peering under its hood. How can a movie incorporate scientific content? It can show science in action, it can show scientists in action, and it can probe into the morals and ethics of how science is applied.

Eavesdropping.  It could be a roommate’s quarrel overheard at a grocery store, a phone conversation at an airport, or even a domestic confrontation heard through thin walls. No matter who it is, where it takes place, or what it is about, there is something intriguing and almost ironic about listening to something that you are not meant to hear.  But at what point (or volume) does the conversation switch from private to public?  At what point does it turn from eavesdropping to entertainment? 

Shut Up Little Man is a comedic documentary and pop culture phenomenon formed around the art of eavesdropping.  It tells the story of how two college graduates, Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D., stumble across conversations equating to comedic gold. Eddie and Mitchell moved to San Francisco in 1987, signing an apartment lease on a complex they like to refer to as the “Pepto Bismol Palace.”  Late in the evening, lying in bed, Eddie began hearing loud yelling and arguing, "Shut up Little Man!"  He awoke the following morning, finding that Mitchell hadn’t heard anything.  After weeks of reoccurrence, he finally wakes Mitchell up in the middle of the night to have him listen to the maddening domestic disputes next door.  It was the ramblings of their two drunken neighbors, Raymond Huffman and Peter J. Haskett.  The irony was that Raymond was a loud-mouthed alcoholic homophobe living with Peter, a “Queen Bee” argumentative homosexual.