Independents Film Festival Boasts Variety

The American Film Institute’s U.S. Independents Film Festival will present 19 new pictures today through Thursday at the Monica 4-Plex. Among those films previewed, the range runs from the terrific to the downright terrible. Because 19 is a sizable figure, the AFI might have been better off pursuing a less-is-more policy.

Even so, there is much work that is encouraging and rewarding, and one could not wish for more variety. The festival is being sponsored by New Line Cinema.

Mark Rezyka’s “South of Reno” (screening Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.) typifies what one hopes to find in a low-budget first feature. It has much wit and style and is sufficiently original to offset a certain mannered quality. In what is essentially an extended anecdote, Jeffrey Osterhage is very good as a young man living in the desert who is slowly losing his mind--as well as his wife--as he gives in to inertia.

What is most impressive is Rezyka’s ability to suggest that the perceptions of Osterhage’s loser sharpen as his personality disintegrates. What ensues becomes ironic as he struggles to pull himself together.

More rewarding than any of the fiction films previewed is Janet Forman’s “The Beat Generation--An American Dream” (Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m.), which is at once comprehensive and incisive in its survey of poets, artists and writers who rebelled against the conformity of the Eisenhower era. Of course, people like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs have often been heard from on the subject of their times, but narrator Steve Allen (who is also seen with Jack Kerouac in a 1959 clip from his TV show) puts them and many others in perspective.

What’s new here are the voices of the women, most notably that of Diane diPrima, who tells us that the ‘50s were not nearly so liberating for the women of the Beat Generation as they were for the men. DiPrima is also especially illuminating in regard to Kerouac, suggesting that his tragedy was his unwillingness to change along with the very changes he had wrought.

Joseph Destein’s “The Method” (Friday at 4 and 10 p.m.) is a modest first-time feature designed to show off the radiant Melanie Dreisbach, who is smashing as a 41-year-old Oregon divorcee who comes to Sausalito to try to become an actress. “The Method” plays like a fairy tale, but you go along with it because Dreisbach, who reminds one of Diane Keaton, is so thoroughly captivating as her Anna hones acting skills unused since college.

No low-budget first feature could be more different from “The Method” than Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss’ “Border Radio” (Saturday at 4 and 10 p.m.), which is a kind of minimalist triumph. Ostensibly, it’s a story of what happens to some rock musicians when they crack a club safe to get some money owed them, but it deftly backs away from its on-the-lam plot to depict the lives of young musicians trying to get themselves together.

“Border Radio” is far funnier and off-the-cuff and implicit than this description suggests, yet the film does in fact reveal just how hard and tenuous the rock ‘n’ roll existence is. The film makers capture a sense of aimlessness without succumbing to aimlessness itself, a formidable challenge for the most experienced craftsmen, let alone newcomers; what’s more, you don’t have to be into New Wave to be captivated by this sly, witty film. The cast features Chris D. (of Divine Horsemen), John Doe (of X) and Luanna Anders as Doe’s wife.

For information and full schedule: (213) 856-7707.