The 11th annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues Friday through Tuesday, August 20 through 24, at the 3 Penny. Tickets are $5 for matinees, $7 for screenings after 7:00. Festival passes are $75, and a $35 pass admits you to ten films. To purchase advance tickets call 866-468-3401; for more information call 773-525-3449. Films marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended.
Brave New York
This 16-millimeter documentary takes its title from the Japanese silent by Yasujiro Ozu, which offered a child’s limited perspective on adulthood, but director Roddy Bogawa inverts that dynamic, delivering a middle-aged look at youth. Starting with the death of rocker Joey Ramone, he muses on his devotion to the LA punk scene of the late 70s and early 80s, his relationship with his father, and his ethnic identity. His deliberately flat approach favors extremely long static shots (of buildings, of his father practicing his golf swing, of himself reading old music magazines), as if they were inherently profound, but his themes never come together, which leaves this teetering between the hypnotic and the soporific. 90 min. (HSa) (7:30)
Cavalcade of Stars
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A variety of surreal shorts. The toughest to watch is Gretchen Hildebran’s beyond-edgy 2003 documentary Carve, about two knife-wielding artists who use their own bodies as canvases. Allan Roysdon combines noir and melodrama in The Troll, a shrill exercise in drag-queen camp. More fun is Guy Maddin’s Canadian Fancy, Fancy Being Rich, which combines elements of Viennese-style operetta and trashy romance novels. But the weirdest is Marcel DeJure’s The Tooth (2003, in English and subtitled Spanish), about a Hispanic politician advised by marionettes and an opponent who feeds a shock-haired accordion player a hallucinogen-spiked tooth. 73 min. (AG) (10:30)
Abstract Expressions
Ben Coonley’s 2003 video re-creates and and riffs on Michael Snow’s 1967 structural film Wavelength. This time around, the super-slow, 45-minute zoom-in on a loft space is treated with digital filters and other tricks, which don’t add much to the original and are likely to induce headaches. I’d rather revisit the original. Also on the program but at the other end of the pacing spectrum are two videos edited nearly frame by frame to create flickering images: Paul Bush’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde muses on psychosis, and Les Leveque’s Pulse Pharma Phantasm says heaven knows what about drug advertising. Least interesting is The Remote Controller, an overlong video by People Like Us that samples old educational films in the manner of a dance remix. 66 min. (HSa) (2:00)
