There are two big flicks on today's schedule for the Milwaukee Film Festival, the education documentary "Waiting for Superman," and a black comedy called "It's Kind of a Funny Story," with the very funny Zach Galifianakis.
Before we look at those two, I want to point you in the direction of an interesting World War II documentary, "A Film Unfinished," at 8:45 tonight at the North Shore in Mequon.
This reconstruction of an unfinished Nazi propaganda film on the Warsaw Ghetto is an unadorned story, which shows extended clips from the original attempt by German filmmakers to "document" the situation in the area of the Polish capital crammed with Jews from around occupied Europe.
It details the fake scenes set up by the Nazis for a film that was clearly designed to show that even in the ghetto, there was a wealthy group of Jews alongside the starving poor. The cold, silent footage is humanized by "witnesses" who survived the Ghetto and now react to what they're watching along with us.
Here's a preview:
I haven't seen "Waiting for Superman," but I'll be in the audience at 2 this afternoon at the Oriental for Davis Guggenhemi's look at our education system.
Here's the trailer:
I also plan on taking in "It's Kind of a Funny Story" at 7:15 this evening at the Oriental, featuring Galifianiakis as a psychiatric patient.
Here's the trailer:
For ticket information and a complete schedule, go to the Milwaukee Film Festival Website.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
