MOVIE REVIEWS : Second Screening’s the One at Nuart’s Ann Arbor Festival

Early on in the preview of the 26th annual Ann Arbor Film Festival offerings, which screen today and Friday at the Nuart, one is tempted to agree with the young projectionist who remarked, “I saw all these in film school.”

In truth, there’s too much that seems familiar and sophomoric, but gradually the scales tip in favor of some worthy and inspired work. The festival, which is devoted to showcasing the offbeat and the avant-garde, would have been better off presenting one two-hour program of its best entries instead of two different two-hour programs. We really could have been spared the sight of a man being slapped for seven minutes or a naked man doing nothing but painting a wall for five minutes. There are also a couple of nature films that are so like dozens of others that you can’t remember whether you’ve seen them before or not.

The second evening is much stronger than the first. Among the festival’s 23 films, ranging from 3 to 30 minutes, the longest work is perhaps the most ambitious and satisfying. In “Mock Gravity,” Franco Marinai enriches a love story between a painter (Peter Leiss) and an actress (Ida Heyman), told simply in black and white, with bold, brightly hued flashbacks into their imaginations. These reprocessed color images give the lovers an entirely new dimension. The best part is that Marinai accomplishes this with humor--and without pretentiousness.

There are some wonderful examples of animation, and again, most of them turn up in the second program. Sally Cruikshank’s “Face Like a Frog” is a kind of joyous trip to a Hades--i.e., apparently the basement of a shopping mall--that comes across as a paradise in hot tropical colors and populated with adorably ferocious creatures.

Sabrina Schmid’s “Elephant Theatre” is also weirdly witty, a tale told in pasteled rough sketches of a strange little person’s dream of a circus with no fewer than 54 party-loving elephants.

By contrast, Steven Gentile in the delightfully wry “The Ant Who Loved a Girl” uses simple black line drawings to capture the rueful plight of an ant enamored of a pretty young woman. (What a Herculean effort it is for him just to dial her number!)

The second program also boasts some succinct narratives. John Allen’s “Anna Spilt the Oil” is a dandy, bemused observation of the perverse working of fate that causes a man to be swept down a drain, clinging to a bar for his life. Dan Bailey’s “Solus,” which displays a beautiful sense of composition, takes us through the daily routine of a young writer-musician without letting us glimpse much more of him than an arm or a leg. Tony Mortillaro’s “Legends of Doo-Wop” is an hilarious mock homage to a couple of now middle-aged back-up singers of the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the most provocative films in the second program is Robert Gates’ “Communication From Weber,” which we’re left to assume is documentary rather than fiction. Albert David Weber/Sabina is presented as a wildly eccentric yet compelling radical poet-philosopher transvestite, resident of the “Free State of Venice, California” who’s dedicated to destroying the oppressiveness of traditional sexual roles as well at to the freedom of all people.

The most enjoyable film in the first program is Luke Latino’s “A Man’s Race,” a documentary on the macho hell-raisers attending the 62nd Grand National Motorcycle Race in Laconia, N.H. The piece de resistance is not the race but a giant bonfire of cars. There’s some genuine “Wild Ones” uneasiness lurking beneath the good-ol’-boy shenanigans, and you wish Latino had explored it further.

Also included in the first program are Pacal Aubier’s droll sendup of religious miracles, “L’Apparition,” which has had previous local showings, and George Kuchar’s “Musical (Break Through),” a mildly amusing and campy orgy in a punk rock disco setting that seems an awful lot like the stuff Kuchar, the best-known film maker in the entire program, was doing years ago. Despite these films, you might well pass on the first evening in favor of the second.

Information: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.