Frozen-food fanatics exude wacky warmth at festival

“NBT,” which stands for “Never Been Thawed,” is an ideal movie for the Silver Lake Film Festival, which tries at once to be accessible and alternative. It is wickedly funny and deliciously subversive. The idea of spending time with the members of the Mesa Frozen Entree Enthusiasts, composed of about a dozen dorky people around age 30 in a bland Phoenix suburb, takes some getting used to but pays off.

As the group plans its first convention, the film’s subversiveness starts setting in. The club’s founder, Shawn (Sean Anders, the film’s director and co-writer), has turned his punk band into a Christian rock group to truly sacrilegious effect. Shelly (Shelly Frasier) is an Intercourse Prevention Hotline counselor at the William Jefferson Clinton Abstinence Clinic with a crush on Shawn. Meanwhile, Shawn’s bandmate Al (Allen Zwolle), whose work at a children’s hair salon requires him to work in clown makeup and refer to himself as a “smilist,” has long been secretly in love with Shelly. This micro-budget movie is a wondrous display of off-the-wall humor.

Maryte Kavaliauskas’ “David Hockney: The Colors of Music” deftly reveals how the artist has gone about designing for opera over the past three decades.

Seen at work over the years, Hockney emerges as a warm, unpretentious man who works well with others. He takes his inspiration from the music itself, which he is seen listening to in his car on regular drives through the Santa Monica Mountains and on a trip to Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon. As his sets take shape in models it’s clear that he envisions all the necessary elements for a successful design -- the integration of lighting, perspective, scale, etc., to create a stylized world in which the opera is to take place and at the same time reflect its varying emotions and moods.

Since film festivals tend to feature serious, difficult films, a lighthearted entry is welcome, especially one as deliriously silly as Thai writer- director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “The Adventure of Iron Pussy,” which has that quality of sincerity essential to pure camp. It stars Michael Shaowanasai, an ordinary guy with glasses, who when he dons drag becomes a glamorous kickboxing superwoman who is recruited by the Thai government to infiltrate a drug ring. The film is also a florid musical and even features Thailand’s former prime minister and health minister in a singing and dancing number.

Taiwanese director Cheng Wen-tang’s “Somewhere Over the Dreamland” is a poetic minimalist fable of displacement and longing. It centers on Watan (Yu Lao Yu Gan), a former construction worker and native islander of the Ayatal tribe who retreated to his rural roots after a crippling fall from a scaffold in Taipei 10 years earlier. He returns to the city in search of his lost love, Rimon, and encounters a lonely young man, Xiao Miao (Muo Tsi-yi), who tells Watan of talking with an Ayatal woman on a lonely-hearts telephone exchange. She could well be Rimon.

The director, who has been concerned with the fate of native islanders since Formosa became Taiwan, is impressive in his narrative feature debut.

Sternberg silent

In Josef von Sternberg’s “The Docks of New York,” George Bancroft plays a stoker on a tramp steamer who saves a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) from drowning, only to become more involved with her. The 1928 silent is a typical tough/sentimental saga of low life but exudes the pungent atmosphere that was a Sternberg hallmark.

What is apparent about this and other Sternberg films is his ability to elicit genuine emotion amid the most artificial settings and contrived circumstances. The more outrageous Sternberg’s material was, the more poignant was the effect. In this more conventional film -- for him -- his stars emerge as genuinely lost souls who it is possible to care about.

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Silver Lake Film Festival selections

* “NBT,” 7:45 p.m. Saturday

* “David Hockney: The Colors of Music,” 7:45 p.m. Tuesday and 1 p.m. Wednesday

* “Somewhere Over the Dreamland,” 7:45 p.m. Saturday

* “The Adventure of Iron Pussy,” 7:45 p.m. Friday and 10:45 a.m. Monday.

Where: ArcLight Cinemas, 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

Info: Schedule subject to updates. Hotline, (323) 993-7225, or www.silverlakefilmfestival.org

Silent Movie Mondays

* “The Docks of New York,” 8 p.m. Monday

Where: Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax, Hollywood

Info: (323) 655-2520