am I not cultured?

This weekend was the Wisconsin Film Festival, and this year, having missed it for the four previous years I've lived here, I bought a 16-pack of tickets. I am not cultured. Rather than look through the listings myself I relied on the expertise of my film-buff roommate to choose the movies. It's more fun to see/discuss movies with others, right? (And frankly, I couldn't take time from studying to make those informed decisions -- it's why I missed the past festivals). Of the five I saw, 3 sucked, 1 was fair, and was was good. For a while, we kept going with the hope that this one has got to be good!, but it wasn't. At one point, the guy who announced Au Hazard Balthazar said we were lucky to see this, his favorite film of the festival, and perhaps of all time. I saw the Christ symbolism, but there wasn't enough besides it to make up for the donkey-beating. Clearly, I am an uncultured oaf. Lili's Apron was good, a bit disturbing, had a chance to be awful, but settled for mildly dissatisfying. Apine Ballad was too soon and too slow to follow the donkey-beating movie, and I was tired of long shots of domesticated farm/work animals, although in another mood, it might have been good. Daughters of Everest was a sort of "reality TV" of five women who needed to pull together to summit Mt. Everest, and it follows the in-fighting and personal trials as one-by-one they drop out; the "winner" gets all the glory -- despite editorial protestations of the narrator. Too bad. Finally, the film that ended it all for me was Delamu promised soo much, but the only 35mm print of it in the world was at the mistakenly sent to the Hong Kong Film Festival instead, so we got a very low quality (fuzzy) DVD with the words "ALF Sample" taking up the top 15% of the screen. Ugh! Might go see Kontroll this afternoon if I can get ahold of Kerry and Leah... The things one does to be cultured.