Tag Archives: Future Language: The Dimensions of Von LMO

October 9, 2018

The 5th Annual Oakton Pop-Up Film Festival!

By michaelgloversmith

I am excited to announce that, after the success of the last four Oakton Pop-Up Film Festivals, I have programmed and will be hosting P.U.F.F. for the fifth consecutive year. The screenings of these acclaimed independent American films (three features and three shorts), spanning various genres and styles, will all take place at Oakton Community College’s Footlik Theater in Des Plaines, Illinois, from Tuesday, November 27 through Friday, November 30. The entire festival is FREE and open to the public and ALL screenings will be followed by live Q&A sessions with cast and crew members from the films. Any of my students who attend a screening will receive extra credit points towards his or her final grade (see the extra credit page of your course website for more information). Don’t you dare miss it!

Oakton Community College’s 4th Annual Pop-Up Film Festival!
Footlik Theatre, 1600 E. Golf Road, Des Plaines
Tuesday, Nov. 27 – Friday, Nov. 30 – FREE admission

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Tuesday, 11/27 at 2pm: Madeline’s Madeline + post-screening discussion with Tina Fakhrid-Deen and Michael Glover Smith
Madeline got the lead role in the play! Strangely, the character wears sweatpants like Madeline. And has a cat like Madeline’s. And is holding a steaming hot iron next to her mother’s face… like Madeline is. An official selection of the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals, Josephine Decker’s intense psychodrama is an indescribable masterpiece that has been acclaimed as “one of the freshest and most exciting films of the 21st century” by Indiewire.

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Wednesday, 11/28 at 12:30pm: Future Language: The Dimensions of Von LMO + live Q&A w/ director Lori Felker moderated by Shannon Sloan-Spice
This experimental documentary chronicles the life of Von LMO, a musician and self-proclaimed alien-hybrid who was part of the late 70s New York No Wave music scene. Between trips to his home planet Strazar, Von has spent some very real time in prison and on the streets of Earth. Challenged with translating his Future Language for audiences across the galaxy, Lori, our filmmaker and Von LMO fan, gets sucked into Von’s orbit and finds herself lost in his story. An official selection of the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

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Thursday, 11/29 at 2pm: Rendezvous in Chicago + live Q&A w/ director Michael Smith, cast members Clare Cooney, Rashaad Hall, Kevin Wehby, David McNulty and producer Layne Marie Williams moderated by Kathleen Sachs
RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO is a short, comedic feature film consisting of three vignettes that correspond to the beginning (“The Brothers Karamazov”), middle (“Cats and Dogs”) and end (“The End is the Beginning”) stages of a relationship. This love letter to the Windy City and its colorful inhabitants was an official selection of the 2018 Adirondack Film Festival.

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Friday, 11/30 at 12:30pm: Experimental Shorts Program + live Q&A w/ directors Melika Bass, Maggie Scrantom and Haley McCormick moderated by Michael Smith
This program showcases acclaimed, wordless experimental short films that were all produced locally: CREATURE COMPANION (Bass), ASHES OF ATOMS (Scrantom) and DANCER (McCormick).

The film festival is sponsored by Oakton Community College’s Educational Foundation.

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June 7, 2018

The 25th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival

By michaelgloversmith

The following piece on my best bets for this year’s Chicago Underground Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through this Sunday, was posted at Time Out Chicago today.

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The Chicago Underground Film Festival reaches a significant milestone with this year’s 25th-anniversary edition, which runs from Wednesday, June 6 through Sunday, June 10. CUFF’s notion of what constitutes an “underground” film has always been admirably expansive and this year’s program is typically eclectic in its offering of narrative, documentary and experimental works. We picked one movie to see from each category.

Savage Youth is a fact-based crime drama set in Joliet that features half-a-dozen phenomenal performances by a cast of young adult actors. Will Brittain (Everybody Wants Some!!!) and Grace Victoria Cox (Twin Peaks) stand out as a budding horror-core rapper and a visual artist, respectively, whose lives veer inexorably into tragedy after they begin dabbling in drugs and petty crime. The film’s depiction of an economically depressed and racially divided small town milieu looks especially trenchant and disturbing in light of the current political climate (although it was shot before the 2016 election), but writer and director Michael Curtis Johnson allows his characters moments of tenderness worthy of early Nicholas Ray.

Lori Felker’s Future Language: The Dimensions of Von LMO is a fascinating documentary about an eccentric subject: a cult figure and pioneer of the No Wave music scene in New York City in the late 1970s who claims to be a “hybrid alien” from the “planet Strazar.” Felker’s film, eight years in the making, is an impressive work of both archaeology and craftsmanship that uses every stylistic trick in the book—from archival footage to animation—to chronicle Von LMO’s many rises and falls; but the director’s masterstroke was allowing the true subject of the movie to become her complicated friendship with this weirdo. Future Language is as much a thorny love letter from one eccentric artist to another as it is a warts-and-all portrait of a gifted musician haunted by demons of his own making.

DANCER is a wordless 8-minute experimental short that repurposes footage from Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 to exhilarating effect, taking a well-known scene of Christina Ricci tap dancing and “making it strange” by chopping it up, adding split screen and heavily distorting it all with a video synthesizer so that the fragmented and fuzzy images that result become a treatise on female beauty as well as the objectification of said beauty. Director Haley McCormick’s analog-painterly aesthetic is perfectly complemented by a gorgeous original score composed and performed by Heart of Palm (a side project of No Coast / No Hope operator Shea Hardacre).

For more information on the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival, including ticket info and showtimes, visit the CUFF website.

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