E-Mail This Article to a Friend Kleiler’s hundred The fifth BUFF, plus Olivier Assayas BY GERALD PEARY

The fifth Boston Underground Festival (BUFF), directed and curated by my pal David Kleiler, is far longer than before (16 days!), and at more locales (10 venues!). But does much bigger translate as better? Can the more than 100 shorts being shown all be worthy of a festival screening? Even if nobody knows more about short films than Kleiler, a veteran of 25 years of programming through his "Local Sightings" series?

Many of the short-film picks are inspired ones, especially such cartoon works as Signe Baumane’s "Five Fucking Fables" and Matthew I. Rasmussen’s "Marboxian" and whatever movies are brought for his annual visit by Bill Plympton, New York’s very affable animator. Check www.bostonundergroundfilmfestival.com for times and places. But what does concern me is the so-so quality of some of the features that I watched. Next year, let’s hope Kleiler searches a bit harder for the most exciting, adventurous, avant-garde, and transgressive movies.

The best of BUFF

The Politics of Fur. Ex-Bostonian Laura Nix conceived this stylish LA-set revisit to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 classic of lesbian masochist melodrama, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Fassbinder’s fashion designer has become an ultra-cool music producer who’s into post-ambient sounds. Her demeanor is upset by a punk-rocker with whom she falls in love, an experience that leaves her suddenly vulnerable. Katy Selverstone is great as the crashing fashion plate.

The Flew. A truly eccentric black-and-white experimental feature by Miamian Clifton Childs that takes place at a turn-of-the-century amusement-park shooting gallery, an antiquated urban world at the edge of memory, akin to the Borgesian graphic novels of Ben Katchor.

Zero Day. A chilling, fictional narrative about the two murderers at Columbine that imagines their screwed-up private lives the year before the massacre.

Anathema. A drifting Massachusetts road movie with kinky homicides sports the fest’s best performances, from John Kuntz, Laura Latreille, and Robert Pemberton.

Somewhat worth seeing

Little Erin Merryweather. Nothing new, just a competent, occasionally scary slasher movie about an adult Little Red Riding Hood slicing her way across a New England campus.

100 Days. A fictional re-creation of the slaughter in Rwanda that is terrific in creating a panorama of a country experiencing genocide, woeful in focusing on personal dramas because of the abominable acting by stiff amateurs.

Maestro. A fairly interesting documentary about New York’s underground club scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, and a homage to the late and legendary DJ Larry Levan.

Money Shot. Photographed and edited in 72 hours, this no-budget movie is pretty funny at times in its spoof of a porno set where ex-XXX star Dick Swollen, a cokehead, is making his on-camera return in a tale about horny sorority chicks.

Petunia. A dubious story about a shrewish wife who drops dead and returns as a flower has some screen power because it’s a musical, and the songs by John Levy, who’s also the screenwriter/director, are really tuneful and arresting.

Definitely worth skipping

Sundown. A totally predictable, unappealing neo-noir that feels like a turn-off TV movie.

The Champagne Club. Four decadent assholes lounge around a California swimming pool in a movie that feels like the worst Radley Metzger softcore ever made.

It All Happens Very Fast. No it doesn’t, as a cast of lesser actors struggle with pretentious, self-consciously clever dialogue while portraying the denizens of a neighborhood bar.

Maru. A skimpy, indulgent, no-story narrative in which various sketchy people talk at each other in a host of languages that include Japanese, English, and French. Is this incomprehensible film really about "the lack of communication in the modern world"?

OLIVIER ASSAYAS, French filmmaker (Irma Vep) of the hyper-spy film Demonlover, talked last May at Cannes about the frenetic, video-game ambiance of his movie, in which multi-national corporations vie for a lucrative contract for a Tokyo-based pornographic anime. "One of the subjects of the film is how images contaminate us, attract us like a magnet, make us slightly different persons in ways we don’t acknowledge. We are the first generation to have access to whatever images we fantasize. I now have a very non-cinephile approach to cinema. I’m not dealing here with cinema but with images. I think movies are part of some collective consciousness. That’s now how I watch movies, not as part of film history."