This week in movies TV you missed: Dead people won't stay dead. No, they're not zombies. And no, this is not ABC's new hit show "Resurrection," but its artier and spookier European predecessor.

What You Missed

Four years ago, a small French mountain town lost 39 children to a freak bus accident. Now, as the power grid flickers ominously in the twilight, one of those kids comes back.

Fifteen-year-old Camille (Yara Pilartz) doesn't remember anything after the accident. Not aged a day, she expects to pick up her life where she left off. Instead, she returns to a home driven asunder by grief, to parents who have split and an angry sister (Jenna Thiam) who spends all her nights at the local pub. 

Camille and her family aren't the only ones getting a rude surprise on this idyllic summer evening. Librarian Adèle (Clotilde Hesme) is about to marry her live-in boyfriend when a dead lover (Pierre Perrier) knocks at her door. An elderly man receives a similar visit from his wife, who died more than 30 years ago. And a serial killer who hasn't struck in years is suddenly active again.

For nine consecutive Sundays beginning on March 30, the Dartmouth Film Society will present "The Life Cinematic," a full retrospective of the films of American filmmaker Wes Anderson. The series runs through May 25 with a screening of Anderson's star-studded new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

One of the most stylistically distinctive of all current American directors, Anderson has built his reputation on the excellent performances he extracts from his remarkable casts, and on his oddball sensibility. The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which Bill Murray's remarkable facial hair takes top billing, has received stellar advance notices.

The series presents Anderson's films in chronological order, beginning with his first feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), and including such audience favorites as Rushmore on April 6 and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on April 27.

Interspersed into the Anderson series are two cinematic masterpieces that present stories of World War I: King Vidor's The Big Parade and Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, on April 17 and May 20, respectively. Though they have nothing to do with Wes Anderson, these films are part of a ticket-pass package that patrons may purchase from the film society.

Anderson's filmography may not be gigantic (though it does include a number of short films not presented in this particular series), but it is quite rich, and rewards viewers who take the time to dive into it .This series provides just such an opportunity.

Though many of its films come to Montpelier from other nations, the Green Mountain Film Festival is making a point this year of showcasing a small number of films made by locals.

The “Vermont Shorts Program,” playing at the festival on March 25, brings together five films: two fiction features and three documentaries. The filmmakers will be present to speak to the audience after the screening.

Michael Fisher of South Burlington might be familiar to festival regulars. He has had numerous films in the GMFF over the past several years, and his latest, “Attic,” kicks off the Vermont Shorts Program. Steeped in the Southern-gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor and seasoned with a dollop of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, “Attic” is a moody, gorgeously shot character study.

Fisher’s approach to filmmaking is unusual, in that his output consists almost entirely of five- to 10-minute fiction films. Since these are relatively less complex to execute than feature-length works, Fisher, 36, is pretty prolific — he’s made more than 40 shorts. “Attic” premieres at this year’s fest; soon thereafter, Fisher will make it available via his website.

“Like a lot of my projects, this one started with a location,” Fisher says. “In this case, it started with my driving around Vermont with just the seed of something I’m thinking about, looking for a setting that would be interesting for that story.” He adds that “the older styles and the textures in the rooms of the beautiful old Vermont farmhouse” he tracked down in Charlotte “got me thinking about the color of the piece, the warmer tones — this hot, summery kind of thing.”

One career ago, I was a professor of film studies. I gave that up to move to Vermont and write for Seven Days, but movies will always be my first love. In this feature, published occasionally here on Live Culture, I'll write about the films I'm currently watching, and connect them to film history and art.

Digging deep into my DVD shelves, I extracted an oddball title that I’ve owned for years but had never actually watched: the late, great Rudy Ray Moore’s fourth feature film, Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Son-in-Law. Yes, I will watch anything.

Actually, this film, low-budget and silly though it may be, is completely enjoyable for all kinds of reasons. For me, the main attraction is Rudy Ray Moore himself, whose comedy I’ve always loved. Moore is best known for his “Dolemite” character, which he created as part of a stand-up routine in the early 1970s. Dolemite, whom Moore played in both Dolemite (1975) and Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado (1976), was, to put it bluntly, the baddest muthafucka on the block. He was a slang-talking, badass pimp who always outsmarted his adversaries and attracted the simultaneous carnal adoration of all the ladies he met.

The character Moore plays in Petey Wheatstraw, though not nominally Dolemite, could nevertheless be described in exactly the same way. Such characters have a really interesting place in African American folklore, which is one of the most fascinating things about Petey Wheatstraw. More on this subject below.

This week in movies you missed: Is bluegrass the saddest music in the world? This Oscar-nominated love story from Belgium might make you think so.

First, a local note: You can see The Broken Circle Breakdown on the big screen in Burlington next Thursday, presented by the Burlington Film Society, the Vermont International Film Festival and Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center. That's March 20, 7 p.m., at the Main Street Landing Film House. $5-8, free for VTIFF members. More details here.

What You Missed

The film opens with banjo player Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and his bluegrass band singing the standard "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" (Characters in this movie speak in Flemish and sing in English.) The next scene, set in a hospital, shows us that Didier's circle will not be unbroken. He and his wife and bandmate, Elise (Veerle Baetens), are preparing their 7-year-old daughter for chemotherapy.

Director Felix van Groeningen uses a nonlinear narrative to tell the story of these two free spirits who settled down, became parents and too quickly found themselves facing the unthinkable. From Didier and Elise tending young Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) in the hospital, we flash back to a night that might have been her conception. We don't see the couple's first meeting — at Elise's tattoo shop — until we've grasped its long-term consequences.

The movie juxtaposes moments of bliss with moments of despair, as Didier and the volatile Elise struggle to weather events. It's all glued together by their performances of heartfelt standards — songs seeped in the faith in God and an afterlife that this modern couple finds it all but impossible to feel.

Now in its tenth year, the Found Footage Film Festival is more than just an annual showcase of the oddest oddities of America’s VHS heritage. It’s also a kind of educational program. In this year’s show, which comes to Higher Ground in South Burlington on Sunday, March 23, viewers will learn, among other valuable life skills, How to Have Cybersex on the Internet.

A video with exactly that curiously redundant title, produced by a Minneapolis video house in 1997, is one of the highlights of this year’s fest, says co-host and co-curator Nick Prueher. Prueher and his fellow host/curator Joe Pickett, both 38, travel the country every year, scouring thrift store and garage sales for videotaped ephemera that would otherwise never see the light of day. How to Have Cybersex on the Internet, Prueher says, has a unique appeal. “It’s too sexy to be informational, but not sexy enough to be titillated by,” he says. “Why does it even exist? What are we watching here?”

The traveling show presents a combination of screenings of unintentionally hilarious videos, a recounting of the stories behind them and a number of comedy bits inspired by them. Prueher and Pickett both have serious comedy chops: They’ve written, respectively, for “The Late Show with David Letterman” and The Onion, among other outlets.

Prueher, speaking by phone from New York City, sounds both proud and surprised by the fact that his and Pickett’s festival of strange videos has become a central part of the “found materials” movement that has also manifested itself in such venues as Found magazine and innumerable craft projects on Pinterest and Instructables. “We grew up in small towns and had to make our own fun, so you look at the stuff around you and make something of that,” he says. “We spent a lot of time in thrift stores in Wisconsin.”

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Though the festival has now grown into an international phenomenon — the two curators recently completed a tour of Europe in which they both presented and collected obscure videos — Prueher, for one, finds that many of the videos they show embody a uniquely American quality. “One thing we found about a lot of the footage that we’re drawn to,” he says, “is that people had a lot of ambition, even if their talent was questionable. That’s one of our exports, and it’s true about us as a people.”

When the pickings are irresistible, the festival does occasionally curate DVDs: Prueher mentions a DVD they found in Memphis called Sing Like the King, an instructional video for Elvis impersonators. But it’s VHS, for all its analog-era imperfections, that holds the real allure for these curators. “VHS is the bastard stepchild,” Prueher says. “It’s an ugly, clunky format, but that doesn’t make the footage any less worth hanging onto.”

Though they’ve sometimes proven to have a shelf life longer than originally predicted, VHS tapes do decay, a fact that lends a sense of urgency to the Found Footage Film Festival’s mission. As well, Prueher notes, he and Pickett were startled to learn recently that many thrift stores no longer even accept the tapes as donations, since they simply don’t sell. That’s one of the reasons anyone attending the festival is encouraged to bring their own video oddities as submissions for future screenings.

Though they’ve long made their own comedic videos (which often carefully recreate the no-budget aesthetic of many of their found treasures), the festival curators recently released a video of a different kind. Bored over a long holiday in their native Wisconsin, they dreamed up a way to game local morning shows: Prueher would masquerade as a chef who specialized in turning leftovers into creative new meals.

As the author of the nonexistent book Making a Winner of Last Night’s Dinner, Prueher appeared on numerous talk shows, earnestly instructing viewers on how to make such horrific concoctions as mashed-potato-and-corn ice cream cones and blended ham shakes. Even when he straight-facedly namechecked the late shock-punk rock star GG Allin as his culinary inspiration, no one caught on to the stunt. “Nobody questioned it at all,” Prueher says. “Bless their hearts, they just kind of plowed forward. I’m surprised at how much we were able to get away with.” See for yourselves below:


Even as the compilation video of these stunts (which quickly went viral) represents a different kind of comedy than the found films themselves, the humor it embodies “has always been a part of the show,” Prueher says. “We know what the recipe is for weird, awkward footage; we know all the elements of the uncomfortable. We used some of that knowledge for this material.”

Reiterating that anyone who creates anything draws inspiration from whatever surrounds them, Prueher says that, for him and for Pickett, it’s the seemingly endless supply of oddball videos “that brings us so much joy."

The Found Footage Film Festival, Sunday, March 23, 8 p.m., Higher Ground, South Burlington. $12. highergroundmusic.com / foundfootagefest.com

One career ago, I was a professor of film studies. I gave that up to move to Vermont and write for Seven Days, but movies will always been my first love. In this feature, published occasionally here on Live Culture, I'll write about the films I'm currently watching, and connect them to film history and art.

In preparation for an essay that I’ve been asked to write for a film journal, I’ve recently returned to a film that I’ve seen many times before, and it’s one that never fails to instill in me a mighty sense of “HUH?” It’s an animated version of Snow White, but not the famous Disney version from 1937; this one predates Disney’s epochal film by four years, and features Fleischer Studios’ sauciest leading lady, Betty Boop, in one of her weirdest star turns.

The occasion for my return to this film is that this particular journal will soon publish a special issue on “Bizarre Films,” and the 1933 Snow White is a gold-medal winner in bizarreness.

Informed that I could write about any bizarre film I wished, I thought for weeks about which to choose, rejecting such obvious options as Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, almost anything by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal’s rather remarkable 1971 film Viva la Muerte (a showing of the last was the occasion of one of my first dates with my now-wife; make of that what you will). I didn’t want to write about these or other films that seemed to cultivate strangeness, even as, generally speaking, I welcome that artistic gesture. Rather, I wanted to write about a “normal” film that has a current of strangeness coursing through it.

In animation circles, Fleischers’ Snow White is well-known as an oddity, so I’m not breaking new ground here. But it seems to me that this 80-year-old film has slipped through the cracks; even many lovers of animation don’t know about it, so it seemed ripe for revisiting. (I'm also happy to note that this is the first "What I'm Watching" film that is available on YouTube, so you can watch it below.)

This Week in Movies You Missed: Two best friends take a shine to each other's hot sons in an arty drama that doubles as a virtual vacation for middle-aged ladies.

What You Missed

Lil and Roz (Naomi Watts and Robin Wright) have always lived virtually next door on an idyllic part of the Australian coast. They've always been BFFs. Their husbands and kids have done little to change the equation — conveniently, their sons are BFFs, too. After Lil is widowed, and Roz's husband leaves her for a job in Sydney, the foursome becomes inseparable.

Like, really inseparable. When Lil's son, Ian (Xavier Samuel), makes a pass at Roz, she's into it. Roz's son, Tom (James Frecheville), is weirded out by the relationship between his friend and his mom for a second or two. But he quickly decides that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and makes his play for Lil.

It all works amazingly well until Tom takes a jaunt to Sydney and realizes that other places and women exist.

One career ago, I was a professor of film studies. I gave that up to move to Vermont and write for Seven Days, but movies will always been my first love. In this feature, published occasionally here on Live Culture, I'll write about the films I'm currently watching, and connect them to film history and art.

I experienced one of the weirdest coincidences of my life this morning. It had been a few days since I’d opened up Words With Friends on my phone: I’m a serious addict, but these days I’m a little more addicted to Triple Town, to the neglect of WWF. In one of the games I’m playing against my cinephile friend Jake (the same friend I refer to in my post on Dune), my tiles could be arranged to spell the last name of a film director who had just died two days earlier. And since I recently figured out how to take a screenshot on my phone, I can actually provide evidence!

Weird enough that those exact seven letters can spell the name of a person recently in the news; weirder still that it arose in a game against Jake, probably the only one of my regular WWF opponents with whom I could have a conversation about Alain Resnais.

I admire Resnais’ films more than I like them, in most cases: I recognize his importance and skill but rarely choose to watch his work. Resnais had an incredibly long, prolific, and award-larded career (he made 50 films over 80 years!), and several of his films are inarguably among the greatest ever made.

(If you’ve never seen the gut-wrenching yet eminently plainspoken Night and Fog [1955], then, believe me, you could spend half an hour far less well than by watching it online freely and legally right now. It’s so smart and succinct and affecting that it makes one realize that few, if any, of the raft of films made about the Holocaust in the last 50 years have even come close to its power.)

Nuit et Brouillard (1955) from KICK TO KILL on Vimeo.

I don’t regard Resnais’ death as a tragedy. Sad, but not tragic. He was 91 years old, and had lived a rich and productive life. I was hit somewhat harder by the death, about a month ago, of the great Hong Kong actor-director Wu Ma, who died at 71 of lung cancer. As an ardent admirer of Hong Kong cinema, I’ve seen Wu (his surname) in more movies than I can count, and probably more than I even realize. He was even more productive than Alain Resnais, having directed more than 40 films and appeared in 250+. That’s even more acting credits than Royal Dano, folks.

Just in time for Oscar weekend, Middlebury College announced yesterday that it has historical ties to one of the two friendly white men portrayed in 12 Years a Slave (though not the Canadian abolitionist played by Brad Pitt.)

Nominated for nine Oscars and considered the favorite to win Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave is based on the true story of Soloman Northup, a freeman living in upstate New York who is captured and illegally sold into slavery in Louisiana. In the movie, Northup is rescued by a character named "Parker," a white shopkeeper who was Northup's friend and neighbor in the Saratoga Springs area.

In reality, the college says, Soloman Northup was rescued by a fellow named Henry Bliss Northup — a "prominent upstate attorney" and member of the Middlebury College Class of 1829, on whom the character of "Parker" is based. 

The college's museum recently acquired two 36-by-28-inch oil portraits to commemorate the connection: one of H.B. Northup and one of his wife, Electa.