Portland Underground Film Festival

[June 10th, 2009]

Billed as “the film festival that out-drinks all others,” the four-night cinema binge features free vodka cocktails at the opening-night party (10 pm Thursday, June 11) and a third annual evening of bike porn (7 and 9 pm Friday, June 12). Oh, and there are movies:

Summer of 69
When a festival opens with a movie directed by the man who runs the festival andthe theater where it’s held, it is not unreasonable to suspect a vanity project. But ego does not drive Seth Sonstein’s Summer of 69; instead, the film’s motivation can be found in a question asked by a “wise prostitute” (and, implicitly, by nearly all women in the picture): “Do you want me to take my shirt off?” The answer, always, is yes. Between the two acts of reciprocal oral sex that bookend Summer of 69, starring comedian Ian Karmel Karpel returns the favor bestowed by his female counterparts: He bares much of his enormous girth as he scales the minor but absurd obstacles keeping him from the girl of his dreams (Greta Pauley, who does seem the kind of sporting person worthy of a gift basket filled with drugs). Flaccidly paced even at 77 minutes, 69 is still highly amiable Saturday-afternoon filmmaking, with the courage of its shaggy convictions: A gag with Karmel Karpel in ironic blackface would be tired, except he stoutly maintains he’s supposed to be Kevin Duckworth. AARON MESH. 8:30 pm Thursday, June 11.

Abraham Obama
Ron English’s not-quite-famous image of Barack Obama’s face morphed into that of Abraham Lincoln is the ubiquitous subject of Abraham Obama. In the months leading up to the Democratic National Convention, a bare-bones film crew followed English across the country on a self-congratulatory postering campaign that was intended to win Obama the arts vote. Their footage is mainly of English and his friends goofing off in alleys and on street corners as they illegally paste up their product. Thereof, it’s kind of funny, but the result of the unfocused filmmaking is to nullify the question of whether there is anything special about the idea of Abraham Obama. Artist Shepard Fairey appears numerous times to tout his own piece of Obamart, the world-famous image of the candidate looking up hopefully. It’s typically clueless of the filmmakers to feature Fairey, whose artistic contribution to the campaign is clear, while the question of whether the mischief of Ron English helped Obama win is as ignored by this short, haphazard documentary as any real connection between the two presidents. ALEX PETERSON. 6:30 pm Saturday, June 13.

PUFF Short Films Program
I fear combining this selection of shorts with beer was a mistake. If nobody barfs during the 10 minutes of Drew Tobia’s Leperfuck (in which, not to give anything away, a loyal wife has carnal relations with a suppurating leper), the janitorial team should ready itself for the ocular-surgery scene in Victor Spatafora’s I Breed Ghosts. Most of the entries here are homemade grotesques. I didn’t like any of them, though I probably wasn’t supposed to. The closest thing to a success is a 90-second paper-animation tribute to the 1986 documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot; the movie I would like to see again (with better actors) is Notorious M.I.K.’s Acid Chip, which observes a cat’s funeral disrupted by the accidental ingestion of LSD. At least nobody vomits. AARON MESH. 8 pm Saturday, June 13.