Debriefed

The mini-movies come up short

by Peter Keough

Brevity is the soul of wit, and wit is the soul of that odd entity known as the short film. Both, however, are in short supply in this year's assortment at the Boston Festival. Ranging from rambling, earnest melodramas and documentaries with a social or political point to one-joke efforts that mostly fall flat, these works don't show many signs of up-and-coming auteurs.

There are exceptions. The best film in the collection (and frame for frame one of the best in the festival) is, fittingly, one of the briefest. Ryan Rowe's "I'm on Fire" (in Package 1: Monday at 7 and 9 p.m. and Tuesday at 12:45, 2:45 and 4:45 p.m.), three minutes in the life of a burning man, is an excruciatingly funny and paradoxically subtle metaphor for passion.

The same program offers two other polished and provocative love stories that make their points in 20 minutes or less and are far more profound and illuminating than Hollywood romantic comedies five times their length. In Betsy F. Thomas's "Pam Flam & the Center of the Universe," Jim Carrey clone Chris Hogan plays every part but one in a deceptively simple fable of a self-centered man who can't get over himself until he meets the woman of the title, played by Melanie Hoopes. More baroque in style and story (and title) is Adam Collis's " `Mad' Boy, I'll Blow Your Blues Away. Be Mine." -- a comic, whimsically surreal junior-high love story whose its ornateness resolves with (and like) one of those MAD magazine fold-ins in which seemingly extraneous detail disappears into a punch line with the bending of the page.

Not so other Package 1 offerings. Jean Bach's overlong "The Spitball Story," which tells the legendary tale of how a prank and an altercation with Cab Calloway led to the start of Dizzy Gillespie's career, has a lot of the music but little of its grace and pizzazz. Calixto Hakim's "Distorted Images," the story of an American journalist whose conscience is pricked by police violence in Brazil, is either too short or too long -- the film and its message seem neither pointed nor thoughtful, only pat.

Such socially conscious efforts, earnest but platitudinous, make up the bulk of these short films. In general they fail to capitalize on the urgency or the gemlike precision that are among the virtues of the short form. In Package 2 (Tuesday at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m.), Gregorii Viens's "Adio" takes a promising subject -- a Jewish woman in Rhodes surviving World War II -- and makes it into a rambling home video. In Package 3 (Tuesday at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 and 2:30 p.m.), David Hayward Evans's "Dirt," the record of four seasons in neighborhood gardens in Manhattan's East Village, could use some sweeping up -- its 52 minutes drift purposelessly.

Not so the longer and more trenchant "Surviving Friendly Fire," from Todd Nelson (Package 6: Tuesday at 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.), a non-fiction Fame in which gay street kids in LA have turned their trauma into a hit stage show. The emotions are raw but real, unlike those in David Fickas's synthesized "Loves Me Loves Me Not," also in Package 6, a dramatization of a spousal-abuse case that touches all the predictable buttons and makes you feel more manipulated than enlightened.

A common flaw in many of the selections is the abrupt, often bewildering ending. Margie Strosser's ambitious and impressively produced (except for the anachronistic music) "Moon Juice" (Package 5: next Thursday at 7:15 and 9:15 and Friday at 10:15 a.m. and 12:15 and 2:15 p.m.) starts with its small-town '60s heroine pregnant and her boyfriend facing the Vietnam draft and pretty much leaves them there. Henry Zhou's "A Small Circle" (Package 5) develops a convincing relationship among three estranged brothers, then ends it with gratuitous violence.

So, too, does Riccardo DiLoreto's "Locomotive" (Package 3), whose story of an awkward relationship between a college boy with brutal, fratty roommates and a sensitive Asian co-ed is polished and well performed until the melodramatic ending. Perhaps this effort -- like Jacob Rosenberg's "Silent Rain in the Ninth" (Package 4: next Thursday at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 and 4 p.m.), a portrait of an old-timer with a penchant for the horses that captures in its 19 minutes more of the pathology of gambling than Rounders -- is a work in progress. Both films display a skill with actors and storytelling that bodes well for feature filmmaking.

Others with promise in going long include Mauren Brodbeck, whose "Plastik" (Package 3), though self-indulgent and pretentious at times, shimmers with style and imagination. More accomplished is Stuart Acher's "Bobby Loves Mangoes" (Package 4), an ingenious mystery that has the most fully achieved narrative among the selections. And, of course, Ryan Rowe's "I'm on Fire" -- though his brilliant ditty almost makes feature film look like a lesser form.

Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

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