Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour

To judge from a sample package of short works from the 36th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour, the four-part show at the Coolidge Corner this week June 23 and June 24 might be among the weakest of the popular series. Some entries feature the abstract squiggles and synthesizer soundtracks that have been repeated by undergraduate filmmakers for the last 40 years. Many boast a mournful ambiance and are obliquely death-obsessed without having any content or point of view.

"24 Girls," a 30-minute film by Eva Iliona Brzeski, has literally 24 12-year-olds perform little audition theatrical pieces; it's about 15 too many, and these are tied together unpersuasively by the story -- real or fiction? -- about one girl who was killed in an auto accident. Huh? Another 30-minute film, Jay Roseblatt's "Human Remains," is an at-first effective postmodern bio effort in which Hitler and then Mussolini do their own voiceovers atop rare documentary footage of their satanic lives. Hitler: "I never drank coffee, only chamomile tea, which I also used as an enema." But the film starts to drag with exactly the same format, the same rhythm, for Stalin, Franco, Mao. Please, no more dictators!

The one fabulous film: Todd Korgan's seven-minute "Have You Seen Patsy Wayne?", a documentary with a punchy surprise at the end about a Portland (Oregon) shopping-bag lady who believes she's the love child of "Duke" Wayne and Patsy Cline.

-- Gerald Peary