The 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival continues through Sunday, August 19, with screenings at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, and Elegant Mr. Gallery, 1355 N. Milwaukee. Tickets for single screenings are $7; a $50 pass admits you to ten. For advance tickets visit brownpapertickets.com; for more information call 773-341-6727 or visit cuff.org.
Thax Poet Thax Douglas is a loner who shares his intimate thoughts with hundreds or thousands of strangers; a fixture on Chicago’s rock scene, he takes the stage before musical sets to read his verse, often penned on the spot. Director Alex MacKenzie uses taped performances, home movies, interviews with Douglas’s family members, and the poet’s prodigious memories to reveal a fiercely intelligent writer. But he also manipulates Douglas, driving him to New York for a reading that doesn’t happen. Running throughout is a tension between celebrity and privacy: although Thax relishes the spotlight, he resents the fact that his audiences think they know him. With its revelations of homosexuality and electroshock therapy, this documentary goes a long way toward correcting that. 78 min. (AG) a Chopin Theatre, 7:30 PM.
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Viva This parody of early-70s nudie exploitation features is a real tour de force for Anna Biller, who starred, wrote, directed, edited, animated one sequence, and designed the wildly colorful sets and costumes. She plays Barbi Smith, a naive Los Angeles housewife who takes up a career in modeling and later, accompanied by her likewise married pal (Bridget Brno), launches a secret career as a prostitute. A camp exercise with deliberately wooden line readings, forced double entendres, and gales of obnoxious laughter, the movie wears out its welcome long before it meanders to a close at 121 minutes. But as a kinky costume party it’s watchable, if only for the smutty sex scenes and Biller’s bold pop-art decor. (JJ) a Chopin Theatre, 9:30 PM.
Midnight, Aloft Experimental and animated videos. 73 min. a Chopin Theatre, 1 PM.
RThe Sky Song James Fotopoulos, perhaps Chicago’s most prolific film- and video maker, presents his first “western,” in which animated images share the screen with a range of characters–a few dressed in western garb–delivering cryptic lines about shootings and worse. Fotopoulos’s best work tends to evoke feelings of being trapped in space and time, and a soundtrack of droning noises intensifies those feelings here. Black humor, as in a shot of the eyeballs a bad guy has put out, leavens the mix, but not everyone will have the patience for this abstract antinarrative. 127 min. (FC) a Elegant Mr. Gallery, 4:30 PM.
Go-Go Motel Dan Bell presents his Baltimore epic of titty-bar squalor behind a Grindhouse-style scrim of picture flaws–scratches, dirt, blackouts, refocusing. The three vacuous heroines perform at a go-go bar, turn tricks for extra cash, and live nearby in a decrepit hotel where all manner of outrages occur (including a grisly bathroom abortion). Bell’s low-life cruelty is prosaic at best, but his video casts a spell of sorts with its eerie black-and-white sequences of low-fi imagery backed by Patsy Cline, Johnny Mathis, and other 60s balladeers. 73 min. (JJ) a Chopin Theatre, 10 PM.
No Man’s Language and Random Lunacy Each of these two video documentaries portrays an iconoclastic man in his 70s. No Man’s Language (45 min., in English and subtitled Hebrew) profiles the eccentric Ron Israel, who was married to the grandmother of filmmaker Dana Levy for 17 years. A Holocaust survivor with a predilection for wearing skirts, Israel has spent four decades creating his own language, which he believes could promote greater understanding among nations. Victor Zimet and Stephanie Silber’s Random Lunacy (60 min.) spotlights David Pearlman, aka Poppa Neutrino, a larger-than-life society dropout who, with assorted wives, children, and hangers-on, has spent years traversing the globe and even voyaged across the Atlantic on a raft made from scrap wood. (JK) a Chopin Theatre, 2:45 PM.
