MOVIE REVIEWS : The Promise, Idealism of Student Films

The sheer range of student film festivals can be exhilarating. On one side you see the awkwardness, self-absorption and mimicry of youth. But, on the other, you see its idealism, energy, its fertile ideas. UCLAVision ‘88, the current weeklong festival of student works from the UCLA film school, starting tonight, is a perfect demonstration. All of the films screened for review are interesting. Several are superb.

The programs vary daily--with award ceremonies tonight and next Friday.

For me, the masterpiece of the festival is Frank Marlow’s “Manatic” (June 5). “Manatic” shares, with the Oscar-winning “Best Boy,” the topic of mental retardation. But it’s a superior movie, for its calm skill, its range of emotion and its unflinching perusal of reality.

The unforgettable central character is an all-night laundromat guardian nicknamed Cuckoo--once a local legend for his sexual prowess and now gatekeeper of a curious, savagely amusing night world of the insulted and injured: average citizens, layabouts, losers and local prostitutes. Cuckoo keeps surprising you. His saltily articulate humor, spirit and, especially, his generosity shame his more “intelligent” neighbors. It’s a revelation of the Los Angeles underside: one that opens your eyes, cracks you up and breaks your heart.

Other documentaries are notable too--including Claude Budin’s “Transvestites in Paradise” (June 5), a slightly over-sober study of the cross-dressing “mahus” of Polynesia.

Of the animated works, Celia Mercer’s “Street Works” (June 11) makes creative use of manhole covers, reducing them to abstract, purified images. And in Y. Tom Yasumi’s “Beyond the Z Quad” (also June 11), another of the fest’s gems, a beer-guzzling couch potato--as viciously stylized as a Tomi Ungerer drawing--gets trapped in a Kafkaesque space-time-and-comic-strip-panel warp.

The short narrative films draw influences from all over. One of the best, Ara Madzounian’s “The Pink Elephant” (Wednesday)--in Armenian with subtitles--portrays the Lebanese civil war with marvelous economy: the crisis and self-realization of a troupe of theater actors caught in the cataclysm. One freeze-frame of an actress twirling a parasol in a basement recalls Truffaut or De Broca.

Three of the directors shot their films in monochrome, and all boast beautiful images. Jeffrey Bell’s “Radio Inside” (Wednesday) with its symbolic fraternal struggle between sex and religion, has frames that recall David Lynch. Toni Gibson’s “Truckstop” (today)--about a crisscrossing romantic misunderstanding in a country-and-Western town, suggests the Bogdanovich of “Last Picture Show.” David Lewis’ “Descendent” (also today)--probably the best of the dramatic shorts, along with “The Pink Elephant”--penetrates, like “Manatic,” into the underside of Los Angeles, the bleak downtown derelict areas that become an arena of self-realization for a man tracing the whereabouts of his alcoholic father.

Pamela Beere Briggs’ “Out of the Rain” (Wednesday)--shot, along with “Radio Inside” and “Promised Land,” by cinematographer Bill MacDonald--is a sympathetic study of togetherness, and tea, in crisis. Thomas Pugsley’s “The Dove” (also Wednesday) is a coming-of-age hunting tale with a pacifist twist. Jill Goldman’s “fort/da” (Thursday), the most experimental of the narrative films, examines the fragmented Angst of downtown L.A. artists with a touch slightly too solemn.

Best of the horror or science fiction films is Jonathan Reiss’ weird and disturbing “A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief” (Wednesday), in which anthropomorphic robots wage a deadly, repetitive, relentless war--apparently after the last apocalypse. David Meiselman’s “Futuria” (today) suggests a bizarre mixture of Hammer Horror, sub-Corman, post-apocalypse science fiction and a National Geographic special. Steven Lovy’s “Circuitry Man” (Thursday), with its android lover running amok, suggests sub-Schwarzenegger more than, say, Alfred Bester’s great android tale “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

Finally, the festival boasts an excellent chase comedy and a fine, sparkly comic musical, by two young writer-directors who show off every commercial-movie talent you’d think a studio would reasonably desire. Gerald Hughes’ “Going for Broke” (today) takes an amusing premise--a frantic downtown driver trying to make it, against impossible obstacles, to a radio station giveaway he’s just won--and pushes it past the limit: the test of a true comic sensibility.

And Pat Verducci, drawing her major inspiration from the satiric Kelly-Donen-Comden-Green musicals, has written, directed and even composed the songs for “Promised Land” (next Saturday) which, after a strained start, becomes a wonderful, blithe little show about unknowns trying to make it in Hollywood.

Perhaps that should be the theme here too: a promised land, and soon, for all these admirable young film makers.