AND THIS IS IT! The first day of the Wisconsin Film Festival! Well, actually, yesterday was, but I was too tired yesterday night to write this. Sue me.

My Darling B was so excited that she couldn’t sleep! I thought I was pretty jazzed about it, but she was so crazy into it that she wanted to get downtown a full hour before the first movie started. That turned out to be a pretty good idea, actually. A crowd was lined up outside the Orpheum already when we got there, but it wasn’t quite long enough to stretch around the corner, so we got in early enough to snag some pretty good seats in the balcony.

I love sitting in the balcony. Always have. I’m going to be crushed when the last of the movie theaters with balconies finally closes. One of my favorite dreams is owning a movie theater as magnificently huge as the Orpheum, where I would watch my favorite movies from my front-and-center balcony seat all day long. It wouldn’t be an ordinary balcony seat, it would be an overstuffed sofa, so I could snuggle with My Darling B in it. I would tear out all the seats and replace them with overstuffed sofas, wing chairs and recliners, and in front of each sofa, or beside each chair, there’d be a little table so the other people who came to watch could set down their drinks and buckets of popcorn. I’d welcome everyone at the door, wait until they were all curled up in their seats, then take my own seat and start the movie. I think I’d need to hit the lottery to make that happen, probably the Powerball, and it’d probably all be gone in about a year, but what a great way to blow a ton of money, eh?

Of all the movies that I wouldn’t be showing at my fantasy movie theater, Keyhole would be near the top of my list. We went to last night’s screening at the Chazen because Isabella Rossillini was in it. I just love Isabella Rossillini. She could tempt me to watch any movie she was in. She even makes me want to watch that television show about how bugs have sex. So you will excuse me, please, for thinking this movie might have been worth 93 minutes of my viewing time.

The write-up in the movie guide described Keyhole as “the mutant spawn of 1930s horror and gangster films … [it] conjures an uncanny atmosphere ‘as creepy as The Shining’ (Film Comment), yet retains [the director’s] gleefully irreverent humor.” It sounded pretty intriguing. The thing about mutant spawn is, sometimes they advance the species, but sometimes they kick the bucket without any benefit at all. Now that I think about it, I might have read that most mutants croak without benefiting the race. Maybe they should have chosen another metaphor?

From my own point of view, Keyhole was not as creepy as The Shining. It was not a creepy movie at all. Creepy movies make me shiver all over in anticipation of the next scene, wondering what’s going to happen. Creepy movies make me curl up in a fetal ball and shut my eyes, cover them with my hands, look away because I can’t bear what I suspect may be coming, while at the same time they compel me to watch every scene. I looked away from Keyhole many times, but only because, like the woman sitting next to me, I was bored enough to nod off.

“A film noir fever dream,” as described by the guide again, shots in Keyhole were out of focus, superimposed, cut together so quickly as to make them subliminal. Dialog was haphazard, nonsensical; a lot of the time it truly seemed the actors were making it up as they went. A lot like a dream. And, like the dream that a coworker tirelessly describes to you while you’re trying to eat your lunch, boring. Even scenes that were tarted up with outrageous non sequiturs or full-frontal nudity remained lifeless and boring. I honestly can’t remember a scene, a character or a line of dialog that I liked.

The most unbearable thing about Keyhole was that I couldn’t walk out of it. I was stuck in the middle of the third row, and the rows in the new Chazen theater are packed together so tightly that it’s impossible to get in and out without climbing over everyone, or making them stand up and obscure the view of the people in the three rows behind me. After twenty or thirty excruciating minutes I started hoping that somebody, anybody at the end of my row would walk out and maybe start a chain reaction. Just my luck, they were all determined to see it through to the bitter end.

Monsieur Lazhar, on the other hand, was probably the most pleasant surprise I’ll have at this film festival. After watching the trailers, I was expecting the usual story about the new teacher who wins over a classroom of misfit students after they put him through the wringer for about thirty minutes of film time, a pleasant enough diversion, a bit of sentimental fluff. I like sentimental fluff. Monsieur Lazhar was not sentimental fluff. It began with a difficult story about the grief shared by adults and children, told by some remarkable actors, most of which weren’t old enough to be called teens, and not even the hug at the end was overly sentimental, but necessary. I’d show it over and over at my fantasy movie theater until the film was scratched and spliced in a thousand places.