There are worlds that man should fear to tread. Worlds that man should never see. But in spite of these warnings, several years ago I found myself trapped in a horrifying otherworldly dimension; the women’s restroom at Target in Downtown Minneapolis.

Unlike most Targets the Target in Downtown Minneapolis is two stories tall, making it a bit of an engineering marvel for those of us used to the standard storefront footprint. Now the store really is no different then any other, merely cut in half and stacked on top of one another. But there is something about it that draws people to it. I will say this though; the specially designed escalator for the shopping carts is pretty darn impressive.

But as much as I would like to keep the focus on the physical structure of a big box retailer in a blatant attempt at diverting attention from my terrible decision making skills and inability to pay attention to my surroundings. You see, I left my companion with the simple plan of meeting up a few minutes later in the toy aisle, yet due to my inattentiveness I would not be seen or heard from for over a half hour.

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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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I have struggled with trying to come up with a suitable intro for this review. With its mix of sex and artistic flare it is a tough nut to pin down, and not typically the sort of thing I can readily compare to my everyday life. You see Marta’s Sex Tape is a very unique viewing experience, one that I wouldn’t not normally sit down to watch. Yet I am quite sure that is why I enjoyed it.

Marta (Pilar Padilla) is deep in debt and unsure how to drag herself out of this mess. Her friends can’t afford to buy any more of her paintings and she can’t get a job, so she decides to take a very unusual approach and make her very own sex tape in the hopes of selling it to a local pornographer. But unfortunately for Marta the tape is far too artsy, and while sex sells, there just isn’t any money in art.

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I first was introduced to the work of Alex Karpovsky back in 2006 when The Hole Story was screened at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Film Festival. The Hole Story was an incredibly unique film that seamlessly melded fiction and non-fiction into a wonderfully funny and melancholy story about one man’s dream to try and make a pilot for his television show.

With Woodpecker Karpovsky once again uses his unique style of mixing fact and fiction, this time focusing on the fervor surrounding the sightings of the previously presumed extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the bayous of eastern Arkansas. Following one ardent bird watcher (Jon Hyrns) as he attempts to become the first person to definitively prove the elusive birds existence, Karpovsky also interviews many of the locals who are both thankful and frustrated by the birds sudden reappearance.

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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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