Simply A Masterpiece

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

So what's so wrong with this movie? First, It was as if they didn't have enough content to make the needed length(90 minutes?), so they filled it full of dead space and useless shots, and still only got it to 76 minutes! Really, If you hacked out all of the useless non-related footage it would probably only run about 35 minutes! Second, whenever something interesting did come up, they skipped right past it, giving us almost no information at all. Third, what was up with that annoying 'whisper like' voice over! I swear, every time that annoying voice came on, I wanted to reach right through the screen and pull the guys tongue out! In fact this was so bad that it got me to post my first ever movie review on this or any site. So please, learn from my mistake, don't waste your time or money on this lousy film. Cause if you don't, you may find yourself doing the exact same thing I'm finishing with right now.

Beautiful shot, emotionally distant and utterly incoherent. What interested me in the film to begin with, the story of this small town and all of the bizarre misfortune it faced, turned out to not be true at all. But the film never freely admits this. The film moves between the B&W past and a living-color present. The present documents the town of Black River Falls exclusively, a small town in northern Wisconsin. So, when we flash back to the past, we are led to believe that all of the morbid events: murder, madness and mayhem, that we're hearing about occurred in or around Black River Falls. Perhaps some of it did occur in the immediate region, but more precisely, we're getting accounts of the morbid events from the Black River Falls NEWSPAPER. So we're talking about events all over the state, not in one small town! A girl drowned herself in the lake in Kenosha? Kenosha is near the Illinois border. Not to mention that other towns in the film: Appleton, Rhinelander, Eau Claire, LaCrosse, Beaver Dam, and Madison represent points at every corner of the state. Most people wouldn't realize this, but when you do, you know the rest of the film is based on a flimsy misrepresentation and it completely loses its coherence and what makes its initial premise compelling. If the timeframe were 10 years later, they might well have represented McKinley's assassination as taking place in Black River Falls, since the paper surely had a story about it. I didn't hate the film, it has some great imagery and some of the stories are interesting enough, but I felt cheated more than anything, because in the end, there's no real through-line and as such, not only no resolution but nothing to resolve.

That's what I was doing 30 minutes into this film, sleeping. My friend lasted a little longer than me but he was out at the 45 minute mark. This film could have lasted 20 minutes and you would get the point, instead it goes through each season with the same stuff going on. I love independent films because they are usually much better than big productions, but sometimes there are duds, and this is one. It would be more suited for the TV. Save your money and yourself.

A series of stories connected only due the violent nature, location and time. No context is given on if this time period was really more violent than others, or if this era was more violent in the nation at as a whole. Assuming this was abnormal there is no attempt to explain why this would take place. A very well done series of real life stories, sometimes a little graphic, with no context.