Goose Bumps and a Glass Eye

Following a special screening of the 1973 documentary “Wattstax,” produced by David L. Wolper, last night at the John Anson Ford Theater, the third annual Hollywood Film Festival officially opens tonight at 7 at Paramount Studios, its principal venue, with the world premiere of the romantic comedy “Kiss and Tell,” followed by an invitation-only opening night party. It will conclude Monday with an awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton. At Paramount, films will be screened in either the Paramount Theater or the smaller Studio Theater.

The festival offers a strong double feature Friday in the Paramount Theater with Liliane Targownik’s “Rosenzweig’s Freedom” (at 7 p.m.) and David Flamholc’s “Lithium” (at 9 p.m.) The first was inspired by the neo-Nazi attacks on hostels housing political asylum-seekers that occurred in 1991 and 1992 in the wake of the reunification of Germany. Targownik’s film, swift and implacable, centers on Michael Rosenzweig (Christopher Gareissen), a burly young Jewish laborer who is visiting his Vietnamese girlfriend and her small son in a hostel when it is set afire by skinheads. Everyone escapes safely, but Michael, running through nighttime streets, shoots his pistol wildly as a gang of neo-Nazis pursues him. He is soon arrested, wrongly accused of assassinating the neo-Nazis’ leader in his apartment, and Michael’s lawyer brother, Jacob (Benjamin Sadler), winds up defending him. This terse, angry film condemns German xenophobia and reveals a lingering anti-Semitism beneath the surface of German society half a century after the Holocaust. At the same time, Targownik has created an exciting entertainment, as suspenseful and darkly witty as it is critical.

With “Lithium,” Flamholc takes a most familiar plot: Headstrong--to put it mildly--fledgling reporter bucks her superiors to pursue a serial killer only to set herself up as a potential victim--and proceeds to breathe fresh life into the genre with his high energy and perceptive wit. Agnieszka Koson’s Hanna lives a life of constant turmoil. As an intern on a Stockholm tabloid she does constant battle with its editor and its star reporter, who would confine her duties to opening letters. In establishing contact with a reader seeking help in the disappearance of his girlfriend, Hanna believes she may get a line on the killer himself. In the meantime she’s up to her ears in fireworks with her boyfriend (Johan Widerburg), with whom she’s trying to break up but who understandably gets all the more agitated and determined to protect her when he learns what she’s up to. Flamholc has a knockabout go-for-broke style and a mordant sense of humor that works well, and Koson is a dynamo who pulls out all the stops; both are just what the story calls for.

Australian auteur Jon Hewitt’s “Redball” (Paramount Theater, Saturday at 9 p.m.) pumps life, in all its messy, savage contradictions, into the cop saga, as a dedicated detective (Belinda McClory) pursues an elusive serial child killer, inactive for two years, who goes on a new spree. As her pursuit turns to an obsession that leads to her suspension, the insidious corruption within the force becomes clear. Obviously, not all cops are like her colleagues, but Hewitt could not more forcefully make the point that absolute power over others in certain circumstances has the familiar potential of corrupting absolutely. Hewitt is adept at suggesting the ambivalence that charges the relationships among these police officers who so easily can be alternately treacherous and caring. This black-and-white low-budget winner comes on like gangbusters and never lets up; Hewitt has been called a cross between Lars von Trier and Abel Ferrera (think “Bad Lieutenant”) but even more his work brings to mind numerous Sam Fuller films.

Among the short films screening in the festival is Lisa Plettinck’s clever and amusing 38-minute “Splinter” (Studio Theater, Saturday at 4:30 p.m.), in which Pauline Tannous stars as a grade-school teacher with a remarkably life-like glass eye, the gift of her fiance (Aaron Buckwalter), who made it himself and presented it to her in lieu of an engagement ring. Unfortunately, as undetectable as it is, it has a tendency to pop out, which is exactly what it does while the teacher happens to be in the yard of the lavish home in which she is house-sitting. It sails through a chain link fence and lands on the backyard lawn of the house next door, where a dog promptly swats it in a murky pond.

When the teacher knocks on the front of the house adjacent to explain what happened, an eccentric, highly affected woman (Carol Kline) peers out; for certain, the teacher won’t retrieve her glass eye easily--if at all. But this, of course, is when the fun begins. Tannous and Kline are more than up to the roles Plettinck has written for them, and she succeeded in getting “Welcome to the Dollhouse” composer Jill Wisoff to come up with a jaunty score and some amusing songs for her film, a 1999 Student Academy Award nominee. (213) 480-3232.

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ACM Siggraph ‘99, the 26th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, will screen free to the public on Sunday at 8:30 p.m. at the Shrine Auditorium “The Story of Computer Graphics,” a survey of the 45-year evolution of digital technology. You don’t have to be able to grasp fully or even partially just how all this came about to comprehend how rapidly computer graphics have developed. What a huge boon it has already been to be able to find a medium in which it is possible to visualize in three--even four--dimensions what is impossible to photograph or otherwise replicate in the fields of advertising, science, medicine, business, industry, the military, the arts--you name it--with advances in computer animation pointing toward a virtual reality so effective that in time we may not be able to detect real actors from those generated by a computer. Right at the outset, writer Judson Rosebush, a multimedia writer, producer and artist, and director Frank Foster, senior vice president at Sony Picture Imageworks, realize the awesome implications of computer graphics when their eloquent narrator, Leonard Nimoy, speaks of the medium’s awesome capacity to create--and destroy.

Along with the technical stuff, which will sail over the heads of many, there is a flood of dazzling color and imagery illustrating the astonishingly protean nature of computer graphics. Shot entirely on state-of-the-art High Definition Video, “The Story of Computer Graphics,” with a 93-minute running time, is a thought-provoking experience. It ends with making the point that computer graphics, as the next millennium fast approaches, is only at the threshold of its vast potential. In time there will surely be another chapter in this ongoing story. With hope, by then--if not sooner--there will be a different kind of change: Of the 52 interviewees, described as industry leaders and pioneers, all are Caucasian except for Japanese computer artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi--and only three are women. Siggraph ’99 will be held Sunday through Aug. 13 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For registration information: (312) 321-6830.

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One of the most venturesome films of Outfest ‘97, award-winning Seattle actor-playwright Ted Sod’s “Crocodile Tears,” which director Ann Coppel has brought from stage to screen effectively, is a stinging allegory. Sod stars as an art teacher who, learning he’s HIV-positive, makes a pact with a devil’s envoy, his school’s homophobic principal (William Salyers). “Crocodile Tears” screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5 and Aug. 14 and 15 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex as part of the Laemmle Theaters’ “Summer Series.” Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 397-9741.

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Nicholas LoCasale’s “Hollywood and Nowhere” offers what is almost certainly the most corrosive portrait yet of kids trying to survive on the mean streets of the erstwhile glamour capital of the world. It will screen Monday at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., as a benefit for Children of the Night, an organization that has served runaways for two decades. Santa Monica’s prestigious private Crossroads School is a half-hour drive from Hollywood Boulevard yet is worlds away, but LoCasale was a student there when he wrote, produced, directed and starred in this utterly uncompromising, compelling work, shot at the cost of $37,500 with a rookie crew when he was 16 going on 17. “Hollywood and Nowhere” has astonishing force and clarity, and it’s one of those films in which rough edges tend to work for it rather than against it. (310) 640-2224.