The seventh annual Chicago Underground Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, August 18 through 24, at the the Fine Arts, 418 S. Michigan. Tickets for most programs are $7; a $30 pass will admit you to five films, and a $55 pass will admit you to ten. For more information call 773-866-8660. Films marked with a 4 are highly recommended.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19
Planet Krulik 2000
Leslie Jordan stars in an autobiographical feature, which he adapted from his off-Broadway play, about his search for companionship and sexual identity in mid-70s Atlanta. After fleeing his born-again parents he comes out at the eponymous transient hotel, a playground of sex and drugs, and becomes emotionally entangled with a kooky disowned heiress (Erin Chandler) and a young hustler (Mark Pellegrino). First-time director Julia Jay Pierrepont III draws on the iconography of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the party scenes and Midnight Cowboy for the tearjerker male-bonding scenes, though they aren’t as meticulously staged. And aside from a few poignant and reflective moments she lets her actors get away with a bathos and kitschy vulnerability that would embarrass John Waters (especially Jordan, whose fey Candide appropriates Truman Capote’s screechy southern drawl). The film’s saving grace is its evocation of the hotel’s seedy, disco-driven milieu, complete with snappish drag queens and garish, saturated colors (courtesy of cinematographer Sacha Sarchielli). With cameos by John Ritter, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Marilu Henner and Michelle Phillips (as two “mommie dearest” types). 100 min. (TS) (3:15)
Shadow Boxers
Tommy Strange, a musician and anarchist living in San Francisco, is the subject of Naysayer, a thoughtfully minimal 18-minute documentary being shown as part of this program of shorts. Interviews with his band mates–one of whom describes Strange as a thrower of barroom tantrums who gets into surprisingly few fights–give way to performance footage, low-key discussions between Strange and an off-camera interviewer (presumably filmmaker Amy Happ), and montages with voice-over by Strange explaining his views on life and labor (one persuasive idea: being an artist may be just another elitist version of the American dream). He sighs a lot and seems both depressed and full of free-floating ambition as Happ paints her deliberately unfinished portrait of a man in the process of defining himself. (LA) On the same program, which runs 75 minutes: Randy Bell and Justin Rice’s Look Back, Don’t Look Back and Kevin Wisor’s Ed’s Juke Joint. (6:30)
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This ultralow-budget horror video by Chicago director Clifton Holmes trots out many cliches of the genre (a woman explores a scary house–more than once) but benefits from an engaging plot and sharp timing and editing. A young woman receives a series of notes from an unseen “Master of Games”; each one directs her to a new location and contains double the cash that accompanied the last. As her reward increases she takes greater risks, and the video descends into a low-rent version of Sade, with sadomasochistic manipulations that become increasingly unnerving. The acting is uneven and the story sometimes implausible (common problems in low-budget work), but the narrative kept me watching. A world premiere. 105 min. (FC) (10:00)
