Being born in the mid-seventies, I grew up with a pretty severe lack of exposure to computers for the majority of my schooling. Sure we had a computer lab where we would learn how to use a computer, but that was rarely more frequent then once a week and the majority of that time was spent playing Oregon Trail. My family didn’t even have a PC until I was in High School, and even then most of my teachers preferred papers to be typed rather then printed on computers. Even when I went off to school at a Big Ten university in the mid-nineties, computers still were not a huge component of the work I did. Though it was in college that I finally began to use the Internet. First on Gopher and later through the World Wide Web. Back in those days 28.8k modems was scorching fast, and texting wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar.

Today college is a vastly different environment. Most students own their own laptops, attend classes online and have never lived in a world where computers and the Internet weren’t simply a seamless extension of their lives. So when director Melody Gilbert came up with the idea of filming a documentary about three students (Mitchell Lundin, Andrew Tate and Caitlin Magnusson) at Carleton college who choose to not use any computers for three weeks, I was immediately intrigued. Just how would they pull this off, and just how miserable will they become trying to accomplish such a task?

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Anna tends to head home to Brainerd, MN about once a month to visit her family. While I enjoy visiting her family, my job doesn’t afford the me the luxury of weekends off so I rarely can adjust my schedule to make these trips. And while I miss spending time with her on these weekends, I am afforded one small luxury. I get to watch movies for this site that she has absolutely no interest in.

Now, over the years we have both forced the other to watch movies that we knew the other didn’t want to watch. But in fairness to both of us, typically these are films that we were passionate about and simply wanted to share something we loved with the other person. Unfortunately, both of us have wildly different tastes. She is fiercely pretentious and very selective in what she will spend her time on. I am more of a buffet styled viewer, slopping anything and everything on the Netfix queue in the hopes I find a gem within the mountain of crap. She became a fan of Bill Murray after watching Lost in Translation, and refuses to watch any of his films previous to it. I am a fan of all Bill Murray films except Lost in Translation, because it sucks. She is a fan of Lars von Trier films like Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. I may have called her stupid for liking those movies. And so on and so forth.

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Note to self: If ever I decide to write a movie that is based in Wisconsin, evidently it is a requirement to include some sort of wood cutting scene with a ginormous axe.

Having just recently watched The Wintress, I found it a bit amusing that another film starring Bill Elverman would focus so much on splitting wood with an ax. Knowing Elverman wrote both The Wintress and TREE I secretly wondered if Elverman had an unhealthy obsession with axes. My guess is he watched The Shining one too many times as a child. I know I did. But evidently, their was a far more innocuous reason for including so many axes in both films, TREE was made first, and Elverman likes to plagiarize himself because this idea works quite well in the context of these two films.

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Growing up in Iowa I always wanted to be a Native American, specifically a member of the Blackfeet Nation, because I was fascinated by their ability to hunt buffalo. But mostly because I thought the name sounded super cool. Over the years I began to accept, begrudgingly, that I was stuck being white boy. From Iowa. How uncool is that? But my fascination with Native American culture still lingers.

It wasn’t until I came to college in Minneapolis that I finally saw my first real life Native American. He was standing on Hennepin Avenue a block before a freeway on-ramp begging for change. Needless to say, it was not the noble introduction I had been hoping for. Over the years sightings like this would become painfully familiar, as these members of a once proud culture struggled to exist in a world that has been anything but kind to them.

Older Than America pulls back the curtain and one of the many horrible acts perpetrated against Native American cultures. But while most people can rattle off a laundry list of lies and deceptions perpetrated by the United States government and its citizens against Native Americans, generally people would think these things occurred decades, if not hundreds of years before they were ever born.

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Growing up in Iowa and later in Wisconsin, it was difficult to find films that weren’t decidedly mainstream. As such, the idea of making a film seemed even more out of reach. Thus I eventually moved to Minneapolis, content to watch and critique films at my leisure. Thankfully Bill Elverman, writer and director of The Wintress, took a different path then I did.

While there are numerous films about small Midwestern life, very few ever seem to truly reflect the unique cultural and environmental dichotomy that makes up Wisconsin. But unlike other fare, The Wintress manages to capture the look and feel of Wisconsin. The noticeable film grain adds not only atmosphere to the picture, but gives the air surrounding the characters a thick humidity eerily familiar to anyone who has lived through a Wisconsin winter.

But the look of the film isn’t the only great quality of The Wintress. Like the best short stories, The Wintress creates a lived in world that can be easily entered by the viewer. Clocking in at 26 minutes, The Wintress deftly manages to create fully fleshed out characters that are easily to identify with, and then manages to end just when the rug has been pulled out from under you. The ending, not so much a cliffhanger but a punch to the gut, is bound to linger in audience’s minds long after the credits have rolled.

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Growing up I always wanted to be a Veterinarian. I was fascinated with animals from the time I could talk, and spent hours every day reading as much about them as I could. But due to an unfortunate Guinea Pig incident when she was growing up, my mother was decidedly anti-animals. My father, for his part, was pro-dog but really didn’t care for anything else unless it related to farm work. Because of this it was always a challenge to convince my parents to let me have a pet.

First up were my two pet Anoles, Jay and Sue. As I grew older I would later come to realize that they weren’t a male and a female Anole, but rather two males. This led to Jay being quite stressed out by the decidedly butch Sue. Eventually Jay succumbed to the stress and an aggressive mealworm, resulting in quite the traumatic discovery one horrific morning. I like to think that I would have been a fairly normal person if not for the discovery of Jay’s half eaten remains. My father, sensing an opening, and to be fair probably not wanting me to get upset when Sue invariably died in the future, proceeded to console his eight year old son by explaining that Sue was just upset as I was and should be released into the wild where she might find another of her own to live with. Of course, at that time I was not yet aware that Anoles were native to Florida and other tropical climates, and would stand no chance of surviving in the wilds of Iowa. Way to convince me to kill my pet, Dad.

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