MOVIE REVIEWS : 10 Short Films That Are Long on Laughter, Imagination

No wonder the first Festival of Short Films, which begins a two-week run tonight at the Four Star, 5112 Wilshire Blvd., is such a delight. The 10 films--one is being presented as a surprise attraction--were culled from 200 entries by festival organizer Jeffrey Hamblin, who in 1990 formed Mini Movies Promotions to showcase the so-often neglected short film in programs designed to tour theaters across the country.

Most of the films in the two-hour program fall neatly into three categories: outrageous dark comedy, the adolescent experience and compulsive behavior. Two of the dark comedies come from New Zealand, that beautiful but fundamentally conservative country.

The opening film, Don McGlashan’s “The Lounge Bar” (1989), is set in a seedy waterfront bar and involves the quite literal impingement of the past upon the present with the cockamamie precision of a Rube Goldberg invention. The second is a hilariously kinky sexual romp. Another film involving a weird couple is Wendell Morris’ “An Urban Tragedy” (1989), in which the presence of an immense cockroach disrupts the bizarre daily lives of a tough dame who keeps the man in her life in a state of constant, subservient terror in their filthy tenement apartment.

Neither of the New Zealand offerings is especially cinematic, but Morris and his cinematographer Brian Agnew bring plenty of bravura visuals and high energy to their confined setting. “Tom Goes to the Bar” (1985), written by Michael Taav and directed by Dean Parisot, is an off-the-ceiling rather than off-the-wall comedy set in a tavern that is a haven for the blighted urban neighborhood. This is a wonderful film of the ridiculous, about which nothing more should be revealed.

The most inspired offering is Canadian Barry Greenwald’s 1975 “Metamorphosis,” a brilliant work of absurdity in which an ordinary-looking office worker develops a compulsion to race against time in a decidedly peculiar way. In the course of an elevator ride, starting from the top floor of a building of something like 14 floors, he discovers he can strip to his shorts and dress again by the time the elevator reaches the bottom floor. The sheer joy of the conquest of time inspires him to keep increasing the challenge--i.e., to start undressing at increasingly lower floors and so forth. The effect of this nightmarish fantasy is as funny as it is oddly unsettling, perhaps even tragic.

The one documentary in the program, John Starr and Roger Teich’s “Stealing Altitude,” achieves a kind of grainy black-and-white visual poetry as it introduces us to a man who makes clandestine, night-time parachute jumps from tall buildings. Intriguingly, this addiction to jumping with its cathartic thrills has helped him overcome a drinking problem.

From Great Britain, director Jonathan Tammuz and writer Lib Stephen’s exquisitely wrought “The Childeater” (1989) turns upon a child’s misunderstanding of a stupidly cruel remark by her stepfather about her uncle, with whom she is going to live in rural Wales. Michael Schmidt’s gentle, ruefully amusing “Safari Holiday” (1989) could not be a more perceptive portrait of adolescence in which a boy on vacation with his family in Southern California insists on staying behind at the motel (where he has seen a beautiful older woman of perhaps 18 or 19 by the pool) instead of going off to Sea World. On a less ambitious note, director Rick Hays and writer Dave Abrahamson’s rambunctious “Happy Birthday, Bobby Dietz” deals with the comeuppance of a bully intent on wrecking his little brother’s birthday party.