Short cuts: September 30th, 2000

Like one of the countercultural anthologies put out by Feral House or Re/Search press, the four short films in MediaHead’s unbeatable film series traffic in conspiracy, paranoia, fringe culture, meta-filmic fugues and all around freaky mayhem. It’s rare to see a collection of short films that work so well together, and without one clunker to spoil the batch. A hard-boiled noir send-up with the aesthetics and tawdry subject matter of a grindhouse exploitation film, Joao Machado’s “Estetyka” is the story of a man, a woman and a limousine, narrated by a cabby with a Charles Bukowski-meets-Homer Simpson turn of phrase. The crusty cab driver recounts his life-altering run-in with a road-worn hooker named Shirley Valentine who convinces the hack to transport her from California to New York to bail her son out of prison, earning money along the way by turning tricks in the limo’s backseat. But the cabby soon discovers, after Shirley has a disastrous run-in with a kinky cowboy in a gas station bathroom, that madness “is constructed much like a pyramid.” If Abel Ferrara and Ed Wood had a love child, “Estetyka” would be its name.
More inspired weirdness, “I Wash Therefore I Am,” directed by Rob Smits and Britta Hosman, is a minimalist moment-in-the-life of two Hare Krishnas, one a slow-witted lug prone to gawking at goldfish at the local pet shop, the other an armchair philosopher who draws elaborate lessons about karma out of a trip to the laundromat. The two chant, stare and pontificate while waiting for their laundry to be done in this daring effort to show it’s not all dancing and cymbal-playing in the religious cult — Krishnas have to keep clean, too.
Social misfits of a different order are featured in Jennifer Read’s geek-heroic “Hackers, Crackers and Lamers” set around the frenzied yearly Hacker Conference in Las Vegas where boy and girl hackers bond while shooting random objects in the desert and play “Spot the Fed” — positively identifying two agents from the convention crowd. Featuring interviews with federal agents, hackers and a Georgetown professor who admits you can’t out-think the hackers, this is a playful look at the seemingly unstoppable efforts of computer terrorists to hack for fun and profit.
The program ends on a lyrical, but no less obsessive, note with Larry Morris’ funny-disturbing “S.F.,” which has a Jimmy Stewart sound-alike doing a Scottie Ferguson Vertigo revisitation of San Francisco and his lost love. Returning to the movie locations in Alfred Hitchcock’s equally stalker-esque Vertigo, the film’s narrator finds SUVs, unisex clothing, yuppie eateries and overpriced museum entrance fees at the locations where Hitchcock’s tale of sexual obsession unfolded. This wonderfully idiosyncratic meta-filmic tribute to one of the most psychologically rich films of the classical Hollywood cinema starts out amusingly enough as Ferguson sees his familiar city transformed into a confusing modern place, but it soon becomes a powerfully melancholy statement on the imperfect world that exists outside of our seamless, beloved movie fictions.