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CRITICS CHOICE IN THE CHICAGO READER
December 13, 2002
Z Film/Video Festival

Organized by local video maker Usama Alshaibi [and Kristie Alshaibi..ed], this third annual indie festival offers an energetic collection of nine videos and two films from Paris and across the U.S. In Christina Spangler's moody and assured 16-millimeter clay animation Unearthed a dropped potato rolls into the forest and sprouts legs. When a cat pounces on the potato he fights back, tearing out one of the cat's eyes and placing it in his own spud head; later he discovers an open bag of potato chips and the chips dance in the moonlight like ghosts. Aside from this gem, the program tilts toward satirical and highly imaginative digital-video exercises delivered at MTV velocity. Motion Man: "C'mon Y'all" by James Reitano is a hip-hop commercial for a pair of musical action heroes who cavort around a white-middle-class home; in Laurent Hart's campy and kinetic sci-fi adventure Cardboard Man and the Girls a 3-D animated knight made of boxes saves damsels in distress. More demanding and rewarding are Ognian Bozikov's Doppelganger, a dark and percussive 3-D animation in which a man gradually realizes he's been recruited to serve as "the hub for the hormonal pattern of our new society," and Mike Olenick's Son of Samsonite, which uses a series of extended shots (a man with a bundle of dynamite for a head, a man's corpse lying facedown among scattered suitcases) with scrolling text at the top and captions at the bottom that describe the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Miranda July gives the best performance in her monologue The Amateurist, playing a nerdy and needy video surveillance agent who keeps watch over a scantily clad blond woman locked in a room somewhere. 123 min. -- J.R. Jones