Short reviews of 15 films at the 2011 Traverse City Film Festival. Rated 1-5.

HESHER, 2010/ USA/R/106 min.

Grief interruptus by Hesher. #4

RID OF ME, 2011/USA/NR/105 min.

Great casting. Great photography. There’s a place someplace for everybody. Lots of musical montages. Made in Portland, Oregon. #4

BLACK BUTTERFLIES, 2011/Germany, Netherlands, South Africa/NR/100 min.

See South Africa a little bit. Discover poet Ingrid Jonker (compared to Sylvia Plath). You are beautiful, my dear, but mad. Painful. #3

1. Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne, Scribner, New York, 2010.

2. Long for this World, the strange science of immortality, by Jonathan Weiner, HarperCollins, New York, 2010.

3. Too Big to Fail, the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system and themselves, by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Viking, New York, 2009.

The visitor to China may be interested to be forewarned China has a lot of people. Cities of millions boggle the mind, as each city may be perceived as a world unto itself. The teeming masses find their place in the city as the traveller their hotel and may only guess what the rest of the world looks like.