The 12th annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues through Thursday, August 25, at the Music Box. Tickets are $8; a discount card, redeemable for ten tickets at the box office, can be purchased by calling 866-468-3401. For more information visit www.cuff.org.
RThis Revolution
Shot in summer 2003, this compelling 80-minute video documentary follows various members of the Miami police department’s sexual battery unit as they come under intense political pressure to apprehend a serial rapist in Little Havana. Directors David Beilinson, Michael Galinsky, Suki Hawley, and Zachary Werner were granted remarkable access to the investigative team’s professional and personal lives, and that intimacy, combined with the multiplicity of perspectives, boosts this several notches above the police procedurals on network TV. Completing the program is Kristen Nutile’s Police Blotter (2004, 4 min.), a tart snapshot of crime in the U.S. (Reece Pendleton) (8 PM)
Grandpa
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This no-budget mockumentary video has a lot going on despite its crude production values, uneven acting, and harsh humor. Two friends decide to chauffeur an elderly drunk, referred to as Grandpa, to a hotel where he engaged in some legendary debauches (one tale has him taking on five prostitutes in a single night). Bill Tyree is both comical and pathetic as the title character, and writer-director Giuseppe Andrews (whose Trailer Town screened as part of the 2003 festival) intentionally blurs the line between scripted dialogue and the incoherent ramblings of an old boozer. The video’s biting misanthropy and humiliation are clearly influenced by Charles Bukowski, though this lacks his singularly pungent context. 85 min. (JK) (11:45 PM)
Sugar
Video maker Canaan Brumley took advantage of his day job as a barber at Camp Pendleton, California, to shoot this no-nonsense documentary of marine recruits being whipped into shape over 12 weeks. It’s impossible to watch this without thinking of Frederick Wiseman’s verite classic Basic Training (1971), and like Wiseman, Brumley dispenses with editorializing and talking heads, letting the story tell itself. Not much has changed in the past three decades: drill sergeants do their best to break down the recruits’ sense of individual will and unleash their bloodlust. “Open up the chain saw!” shouts one during combat training. “Rage and aggression!” But Brumley is also admirably attentive to the more mundane aspects of camp life: one lengthy low-angle shot shows nothing but the men’s feet in the shower, slapping around in their cheap flip-flops. 115 min. (JJ) (2 PM)
