NEW YORK – NYUFF
Anthology Film Archives
Dukes of Masturb
Saturday March 11th
7:00 Upstairs
Monday March 13th
5:45 Upstairs

If Saturday night was at all representative of this year’s New York Underground Film Festival they ought to change their name to the Shit York Stupidground Boring Festival. What a fiasco!

We went to see our buddy Yoshua’s 2000 masterpiece Rhinoplasty in the “Dukes of Masturb” series (whatever that means). There were about 40 people in the theater, which, at a big place like Anthology Film Archives is pretty embarrassing. After about 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what was going to happen some girl who appeared to be barely out of her teens got on the stage and said something like, “Hey everybody. Thanks for coming. We’re going to start the movies now” and walked off the stage. Thanks. The movies they choose were, for the most part, pretty good. The Cox and Combes George Washington song was brilliant, Mister Warning starring Mel Gibson was also great and we especially liked dirtyglitter 1: Damien, a gay Sin City complete with flying unicorns, motorbike getaways and thousand mile shots of a sprawling non-existent city (some moron later asked if it was shot on a green screen—DOYE! No you fucking idiot, the guy was magic and kept jumping from fantasy scene to fantasy scene using a time machine from the future). Then there was some crap piece of shit movie that involved a series of digital camera shots and pathetic narration about some idiot jock buying a sword (pictured here). It looked like it took an hour to make and was thrown in as a last minute assignment in film school that inevitably got a D. Who let this in to the festival, his brother?

Yoshua’s movie was the best obviously but the pussy New York crowd couldn’t handle it. They almost had a heart attack at the beginning when the chick gets microwaved and some even left during the rape scene (the guy behind us slapped his knee, went “that’s it. I’m outta here” and stormed out). Unfortunately the quality of the image on all films looked like shit and they had the volume cranked up so loud only Lemmy could bear it. Here comes the worst part.

After the films were over the lights came on and … nothing. Um, should we leave? Is there a Q&A thing? Where was that adolescent that made the shitty intro speech? It was FUCKING EXCRUTIATING. Eventually the filmmakers assembled themselves and people asked questions on their own accord (that’s when moron boy asked about the green screen – yes we laughed our heads off). At least fifteen minutes later the hostess with the leastess shows up and decides to chime in with her question: a five minute diatribe describing how she felt about Rhinoplasty that was not a question in fact and more a meandering pontification of what her and her friend thought of the movie when they first saw it. Like anyone gives a shit about the person who just got through making us all feel incredibly uncomfortable. As we all walked out of the theater shaking our heads we asked Yoshua how he feels about flying all the way from Mexico City for this. “I don’t know” he said. He’s a pretty polite little guy but his face betrayed him. As he looked up at us with a “who the fuck is running this festival, a bunch of fucking niños pequeños?” look on his face, we cringed and tried to convince him this has nothing to do with New York or Underground or Films or Festivals.