I'm Crazy for You

Celebrity and obsession are the chocolate and peanut butter of life. They taste great together and are nearly always as messy; although, let's face it, it's easier to get a molten Reese's off your paws than the escapades of Paris Hilton out of your mind. (More satisfying, too.) But without the conjoined twins of the pop-culture malaise, the bastard offspring of toothless carnies, fame and ridicule, where would we be? Minus Monday morning watercooler chat and plus-sized grist and grease for the mental mill. It'd be a bleak world indeed but for celebrity obsession and the resultant meaning of life.

Blow-Up: Short Studies of Celebrity Obsession takes that urge overkill and fleshes it out via four-plus short films, including Steve Marshall's "Get the Script to Woody Allen" (edited by former Austinite and UT film alum Jeff Turboff), which chronicles the director-cum-mensch's quest to, well, get the script to Woody Allen. "Kristy," Stephanie Gray's experimental take on everyone's favorite former little darling Kristy McNichol, is seven minutes of pure flashback, while Jason Simon's "Paul Schrader's Bag" gleefully borders on invasion-of-privacy issues and ends up being the best film with Schrader's name attached to it in ages. Jamie Levinson's "My Brother Is James Chance" is a no-wave tour de force and the most poignant film in the program, chronicling David Siegfried's relationship with Chance, née Siegfried, whose late-Seventies/early-Eighties turn as a post-punk, East Village provocateur is resurrected by resurgent popularity well after the fact. Finally, Nikolaus Utermohlen's "The Last Days of Sid Vicious" does for drug-addled Peter Pan-ism what Huggies commercials do for the first bloom of youth: I'm a dead kid now! Taken together, the films provide a revealing (and quasi-creepy) glimpse behind the societal scrim, part mash notes to the unrequited heart of cultural iconography, part OCD manual of style. And where else are you going to see spiky-haired toddlers lurching around in swastika T-shirts, punker than you'll ever be?