regisgoat

This is a graceful documentary about the life of a brilliant student who went mad; as a student she'd been part of the circle of David Chase of The Sopranos and wrote a thesis on Beckett that her professor remembered more than 20 years later. After schizophrenia claimed her, Elizabeth Wiltsee was cared for by the church ladies of a small town in Northern California. Bill Rose (The Loss of Nameless Things) interviews the men and women who knew Elizabeth Wiltsee in her years after she was a lit student in Stanford. Working from primary sources, Rose investigates this downfall. It's memorable, compassionate work and one of the highlights of the 2008 Cinequest film festival in San Jose.

If you're fond of the little fur-bearing parasites this is a movie you cannot watch without a large hankerchief. It's superior to the current family movies in a number of reasons; lovely color, the realism of a vet's life, delightful Scots Highlands locations, a fine dramatic structure bolstered by that underrated actor Patrick Macgoohan and by a pretty, startlingly black-eyed starlet named Susan Hampshire (the two represent science and faith, respectively, and they come together with an ease you wish these two opponents would share today). But the film is mostly about the tragedy of losing a cat, and the childish, unkillable hope that one day they'll return. The sequence of cat heaven, ruled by the Goddess Bast, is reminiscent of the best of Michael Powell, explicitly referencing Powell's A Matter of Life and Death. The excellent animation is done by the pioneer of the cartoon industry Ub Iweks. A family movie in the day when kids were tougher, it was memorably broadcast on Disney's Wonderful World of Color on TV. I Expect wracking sobs in the scene where a rain- soaked Thomasina comes to the window. Jeez, I'm tearing up right now, just thinking about it.