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Busier Than A Beaver In A Spring Rain

 Jeaane Kornkven sent me a fascinating timeline of the history of global temperature. One lighthearted notation caught my eye.


My goodness, Poppa Jeff has been busy.

The Whale 
The Oriental Theater
If you watch the trailer, you might think that the title references the main character, Charlie, a six-hundred-pound recluse.e This fellow teaches high school students,  via Zoom, how to write. He accomplishes this by blanking his on-screen square so his students are distracted by his appearance.
His story is complex and slowly revealed through his interfacing with three characters, his caregiver, his daughter, his ex-wife, and the memory of his late lover. The film, based on a stage play written by Samual D. Hunter, is the story of a man who is lost in grief and turns to the family he abandoned to be with the love of his life to find a reason to live.

Only In Theaters
Shown to members of Milwaukee Film as their monthly free film benefit.
This documentary is about the side of the movie business that is less talked about. After a film is completed, it needs an audience. Unlike today, films in the early 1900s were shown in theaters. One theater company that was started at the beginning of the movie era and exists today, owned and operated by the same family, is the Laemmle Theaters.
They are classed as an 'arthouse.' Theaters of this stripe traditionally avoid big-budget blockbuster films and tend to show smaller independent and foreign films.
This documentary traces the success this family had in running movie theaters and the directors, actors, and screenwriters who got their big break in the industry because the Laemmiles showed their films when nobody had ever heard of them. It also documents the challenges of keeping these theaters open. Finally, it covers the years when television, movie streaming, and Covid almost put them out of business.
We in Milwaukee have The Oriental. Today it is leased and run by Milwaukee Film. Their commitment to the art house film is often sometimes taken for granted. For example, when I lived in The Fox Valley, I came to Milwaukee to see films at the Oriental and Downer because the two theater groups that operated up there were not going to show an art house film unless it got nominated for an Academy Award.
Fun fact: When I visited Milwaukee, I'd shop at Swartz's books and dine at the Coffee Trader. Little did I think it would become my neighborhood.











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