TV REVIEW : Modine Makes PBS Look ‘Alive’

The directing debut of actor Matthew Modine is the chief hook, if not necessarily the main reward, of tonight’s installment of “Alive TV,” the occasional PBS series collecting unusual contemporary short films. Two of the three, Modine’s “Smoking” and David Munro’s “Bullethead,” were hits at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and make their television premiere here.

Judging from the 13-minute “Smoking,” there’s no evidence Modine will be a filmmaker to reckon with anytime soon, but the source material is strong enough that it doesn’t much matter. He’s taken writer David Sedaris’ whimsical meditation (first heard on public radio) on the personal and social hazards of tobacco addiction and provided a pack of literal images to go with the droll narration.

Sedaris’ musings begin as a funny, anti-PC paean to partaking with an opening rant against “aggressive nonsmokers,” then turn into a more wistful accounting of the sad cost cigarettes extract. Modine’s visual additions are pretty obvious at every point, and the Woody Allenesque jazz scoring doesn’t help, but the short’s still a good, provocative second-hand joke.

The 12-minute closing short, “Bullethead,” is very much in the vein of early David Lynch, as the title would suggest, but director Munro proves one of the master’s better imitators. How’s this for Lynchian: The title figure is an Eastern Bloc sled racer whose head was surgically elongated when he was a child to make him superhumanly aerodynamic.

It’s not at first clear this is anything more than a perversely enigmatic extended gag. But the intentions, if pretentious, aren’t pointless: The aged Bullethead, being studied in front of a wind machine in a lab by a scientific bloke chugging a Coke, emerges as the sad product of a Cold War whose end has rendered his dystopian engineering irrelevant.

In between these two is a quickie piece of animation concerning a would-be lounge lizard. Altogether, a more legitimately lively “Alive TV” than average.

* “Alive TV” airs tonight at 11 on PBS Channel 28.