Screen Picks

+Lost Film Festival 7.0 (Sat., June 1 through Fri., June 7, the Rotunda, 4018 Walnut St., www.lostfilmfest.com) Wow, has it really been 6.0 already? The Lost Film Festival returns for an umpteenth installment with an expansive weeklong program of DIY, left-wing, punk rock, anarchist or simply off-the-rails entertainment, with rock shows, after-parties and a handful of panels thrown into the mix. For $4 a pop -- with multi-screening and all-access passes available for purchase from Spaceboy Music, About the Beat Records and the Bubble House (3034 Sansom) -- the LFF offers plenty of incentives to take a chance (which is a relief, since you've never heard of most of the people whose movies are playing). From a re-edited hourlong version of The Phantom Menace (Fri., June 7, 11:59 p.m.) -- not the Phantom Edit, but still with less Jar Jar! -- to DIY or Die (Mon., June 3 and Wed., June 5, 6 p.m.), which features interviews with such self-starters as Ian MacKaye, J. Mascis, Jim Rose, Lydia Lunch, Maggie Estep and Richard Kern, the fest pays tribute to mediamakers who make their own maps.

A prime example, and one of the festival's highlights, is Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's Horns and Halos (Sat., June 1 and Fri., June 7 at 8 p.m.). A dual portrait centered around the publication, withdrawal and re-publication of Fortunate Son, the controversial biography of George W. Bush, the film introduces us to J.H. Hatfield, the book's author, whose previous experience consisted of quickie celeb bios and science fiction novels, and Soft Skull Press' Sander Hicks, who re-published the book from an office in the basement of a building where he also served as superintendent. (At one point, he's juggling calls from a paper wholesaler and a tenant with a backed-up toilet.)

Hawley and Galinksy, who've previously directed two rock-themed fiction features (Radiation and Half-Cocked) make an able jump to non-fiction, and more than live up to their title, which comes from Hatfield's contention that any biography has to show the good and bad in its subject. The film remains undecided on the question of Fortunate Son's accuracy -- the book's original publisher, St. Martin's Press, withdrew it in the wake of published accounts revealing Hatfield's felonious past -- and on Hatfield's trustworthiness in general, though even when he's admitting he conspired to kill a co-worker as part of an insurance scheme, he still comes off more like a schlub betrayed by circumstances than a hardened criminal. Hicks, too, has more than a trace of the huckster about him, though perhaps only in the best muckraking sense. (In the interest of disclosure, I should probably mention that Hicks slept on my couch during the Republican convention after a screening of a partly completed Horns, though I haven't spoken to him since.) Though it clearly serves as an indictment of the American publishing industry -- Hatfield's book was at best insufficiently vetted by St. Martin's, who then hastily backpedaled to cover their tracks -- Horns surprisingly makes its greatest impression on the simplest and most human of levels. The relationship between the ingratiating, barricade-storming Hicks and the beleaguered, regretful Hatfield is an inestimably moving one. You sense each needs the other to shore up his own beliefs: Hatfield that he hasn't ruined his life for nothing, Hicks that there are causes worth assaulting the behemoth for. The movie's full of painful setbacks for all concerned, but some of their determination rubs off on the audience as well.

Also well worth seeing is Boom: The Sound of Eviction (Sun., June 2, 4 p.m.), which chronicles the dot-com-spawned housing frenzy in San Francisco, and the concurrent upsurge in ad hoc evictions and homelessness. A Bay Guardian cover story asks if S.F. is on its way to becoming "the first fully gentrified city in America," and such certainly looks to be the case, with Mayor Willie Brown smugly throwing up his hands in the face of seismic neighborhood upheaval. Rest assured, Boom was produced recently enough that you get to see the info-incubi get their comeuppance, but all the dot-com crashes in the world won't turn live/work lofts back into family homes. Still, for anyone who's watched their neighborhood old-man bar morph into a hipster hangout, Boom is a captivating mixture of been-there, done-that and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God.

The Devil’s Playground (Thu., May 30, 8 p.m., Cinemax) Or, Amish Gone Wild! If you couldn't make into the sold-out screenings at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, here's your chance to catch this documentary tale of Amish teenagers who are given the right, even encouraged, to misbehave between their 16th and 18th birthdays, before they decide whether or not to join the faith as adults. Now you know why the Reading Terminal Market is so close to the bus station.

Meet Mike Mills (Fri., May 31, 9 p.m.; Tue., June 4, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel) No, not the bass-playing, freaky-suit-wearing R.E.M. dude. Try the director of short films and music videos, graphic designer and album cover artist (who, OK, also did play bass with Cibo Matto for a while). Although this 90-minute look at Mills' varied career ill-advisedly shuttles between a documentary portrait and a sampling of Mills' work -- better to have the bio first, then the films -- it's a welcome chance to sample his multi-speed oeuvre.

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September 12, 2002
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