Festival Review:
7TH ANNUAL SILVERLAKE FILM FESTIVAL-YEAR OF THE PUPPETS
By Robin Menken

The Silver Lake Film Festival feels like Berkeley circa 1970 mixed with proto-punk music energy. The 7th Annual offered a rowdy mix: Art-erotica, a Fringe and Music Fest and 98 shorts (not a bad one in the bunch.) Highlights included Sean Meredith’s Dante’s Inferno, a Toy Theatre production of Dante’s scathing tale of political corruption. Styled like the toy fold-out theatres of the 19th century, bawdy master puppeteer Paul Zaloom and designer Elyse Pignolet have masterfully adapted Sandow Birk’s Dante trilogy, producing a hand-drawn autopsy of the ills of the Western World.

Hung-over Dante (Dermot Mulroney) wakes in the gutter on the bad side of town. Mullet-haired Virgil (James Cromwell) offers to show him the way home through Nine Circles of Hell: sewage clogged rivers, security checks, used car lots. Dante learns that Hitler is consigned to hell on a technicality and Cheney is so foul, he’s doing time before he actually dies. Evil gays are consigned to an eternity dancing to Techno, no matter how tired they are. Blessed with witty repartee (check out the pre-show puppet audience) the cast makes the most of the scabrous jokes. Kit Pongetti plays Francesca – half of an adulterous pair of fucking puppets. Her deadpan drawl, set against their doggie-style sex scene (cardboard tits flapping in the breeze), is a blast.

Circle 8 is for sinners who commit fraud: crooks (Nixon), pimps (Peter Lawford), grifters (social-climbing Leni Riefenstahl), schmoozers (Peter Lawford again) Serial killer John Wayne Gacy is condemned for sins against hospitality. Performance artist Zaloom makes an appearance, as Lucifer snacking on sinners dipped in Velveeta.

Heart Of the King directors Shane Stuart & Andrew Lankes planned to make an Elvis impersonator mockumentary, infiltrating the scene posing as Elvis wannabes. A chance encounter with the earnest pair of overweight dreamers, Danny and Mark, changed the focus of the film as the filmmakers found the true center of their poignant picture.

Pasty-faced Mark, a hospital janitor, looks up to mentor Danny who teaches Mark the moves, hooks him up with jumpsuits and drives them to karaoke gigs. Mark’s wife Jane is “simple”, traveling to Las Vegas for the Elvis contest with her guardian. Danny’s brother David, whose legs were run over by a Semi, spends the day in his wheel chair, stuffed to the gills on pain killers, dressed as Elvis. We meet Elvis Priestly (The Reverend Dorian Baxter) a hip- swiveling Anglican Priest, whose Church of Christ the King Graceland draws 300 people a service and Little E, a “delayed” pint size Elvis whose lip sync career is the sole focus of his adoptive mother.