The ninth annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues Friday through Wednesday, August 23 through 28, at Landmark’s Century Centre. Tickets are $9, $6.50 for programs before 5 PM. A $30 pass admits you to five films. For more information call 773-327-3456. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
A Chronicle of Corpses
The documentary Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2001) tackles a fascinating topic: the mid-90s emergence of punk rock in Seoul. The scene isn’t by any means cohesive or easy to pin down–the subjects argue over a definition of punk and disagree about what their activities really mean–but over the course of the 39-minute video a sense of developing community does come through. Directors Timothy Tangherlini and Stephen Epstein make some odd aesthetic choices, though: an extended segment on the all-female band Supermarket lets the drummer yammer on about how much she enjoys doing laundry, and for a full minute we watch her clean a pair of socks. Sooyoung Park, the Korean-American musician who fronted the Chicago indie-rock band Seam, narrates. Also on the program, two 16-millimeter shorts: the animated Rude Roll (How to Dance Ska) (2001) and the documentary Useless (2001), about Gerry Hannah, the former Subhumans bassist who went on to become an infamous Canadian terrorist. 72 min. (Peter Margasak) (6:45)
Horns and Halos
Troma Films lead Will Keenan directed and stars in this mix of adolescent silliness and postmodern excess, about a young man who tries to form a secret society consisting entirely of beautiful girls. Though he talks about countering “the conspiracy against women,” he also phones the city morgue looking for a used foreskin because he’s unhappy about having been circumcised and waves a giant fake dick at the cuties he’s gathered. Keenan does his own stunt work–he’s good at getting hit by cars and seems to enjoy getting beaten up by gorgeous girls–but he and codirector Gadi Harel insert so many layers of parody and self-parody that the video falls flat. 75 min. (FC) (10:30)
See listing for Friday, August 23. (12:15)
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A genuine rarity–a 40-minute experimental film in 35-millimeter and Dolby sound–this intriguing and arresting opus by D.B. Griffith shifts between “straight” documentary and drama as five allegorical, autodidactic outsiders (a clown, a butcher, a weeping priest, a doomsayer, and a man with a beak who speaks to birds in their own language, subtitled in English) emerge from landscapes of buildings and industrial sites in Chicago and Gary, each traveling a little further into the film’s wasted terrain. Shuttling back and forth between color and black-and-white stock, the film constitutes a kind of grim historical narrative, with an effective score by Josh Abrams that sometimes seems to emerge from sound effects. The cast includes local filmmaker Tom Palazzolo and musicians Bobby Conn and Douglas McCombs. I couldn’t get very far with the three 16-millimeter shorts rounding out this 75-minute program: Shawn R. Owens’s The Trial of Set, a lot of tribal hocus-pocus; Psychelicious-N-Junkman’s Canadian Monolethea, whose footage of a couple wandering through the Wild West doesn’t quite unite its all-inclusive images; or Bill Basquin’s black-and-white meditation on a deer hunt, The Last Day of November (2001), though in this case the visuals are refreshingly spare. (JR) (1:30)
