Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with Milwaukee Film, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including comicwonder.com. He recently filmed an episode of the popular AMC series "Mad Men."

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on a pair of 2008 movies -- "Tulpan" and "Tony Manero" -- that are screening this weekend at the UWM Union.

TULPAN and TONY MANERO

The main character in George Bernard Shaw's play "Misalliance" prefaces many of his lengthy speeches with something that, loosely paraphrased, sounds like, "There are two kinds of people in the world..." He then goes on to elaborate, as will I.

It seems that there are two kinds of movies in the world. One presents an imagined world against a backdrop of artifice -- either on a green screen, in miniature, with CGI effects of some magical sort, or in animation. Into this group, I would also place the typical Hollywood, or Bollywood-style romance that bears only the most fanciful relation to real interpersonal relationships.

Some of the spy or action movies that we see are also in this category, because even though they use documentary style camera work and struggle achingly for some sort of verisimilitude, they are more like a methamphetamine blast than the normal cup of coffee that most of us are used to. And when was the last time you heard about a high-speed chase in Manhattan lasting more than thirty seconds? They are fantasies, metaphors, or escapist literature.

The other kind of movie follows more closely Hamlet's dictum that the Players should "Hold the mirror up to nature." These films move sometimes alarmingly close to being documentaries. They usually have a cinematic style like a documentary. There is a strong feeling of improvisation amongst the actors. The structure is not always apparent and it sometimes feels as though the director has lost control of the story, if there is a story at all. When the film is good, you have the very strong feeling that you are eavesdropping on someone's life. That sometimes takes patience, because people's lives are not always all that interesting unless you are paying very close attention.

"Tulpan" and "Tony Manero", which will both be shown UWM's Union Theatre this weekend, fall into the latter category.

"Tulpan" is the first narrative feature of a Kazakh documentary filmmaker named Sergey Dvortsevoy. It takes place in an area of Kazakhstan called the Hungersteppe. It is literally tabletop flat for hundreds of kilometers. No brush, no grass, nothing grows above the height of your knee. It is flatter and more desolate than even big parts of North Dakota.

The people that live there are nomadic sheepherders usually not even owning their own flock, but managing a herd for a big-time owner who lives in the city 500 kilometers away. They live in small yurts, which are packed up and moved when the grass is gone or the seasons change.

It is a life as alien to what we know here as it can be, yet the people and what they are trying to accomplish is familiar. A young man, Asa, returns to his sister's family on the steppe after service in the Russian Navy.

We are introduced to him sitting cross-legged on the floor of a yurt telling a tale of the dangers of the giant octopus and other stories from his life at sea. The absolute incongruity of tales from the sea being told in this flat, dry, dusty landscape is very funny and touching. Asa is trying to impress a young woman, the Tulpan of the title and the only eligible female for several hundred kilometers, and gain her parents consent to marry her. We never see Tulpan throughout the film except as she peaks out from behind a curtain at Asa during his repeated attempts to woo her.

Asa's dream, and it is a fanciful dream for him, is to have a wife, several children, a flock of sheep of his own, and to live in a nice yurt, traveling across the steppe looking for grass. He is rejected at first, because his ears are too big, but the more he is told no, the firmer becomes his resolve.

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