Also good: "Small & Deep, Love Stories." High-falutin' title, but nevertheless humble and fun; our favorite image was as two coffeecups in love, smooching as their owners, themselves cooing lovebirds, batted eyelids at each other. "Silig" was like a well-crafted peek into the diary of a typical misunderstood 14-year-old: a series of sketches about sad, gory suicides. And the finest work was in "Sindrome de Línea Blanca," by Lourdes Villagómez; a gorgeous and meticulously animated stop-motion dance of inanimate objects, half-celebratory and half-mournful, depicting an accident victim and the lineage she would not continue.

Much of the evening involved aggressively symbolic montages of varying craftsmanship. A castrated grasshopper! The Pope with a feather duster! A woman in a swimsuit exercising while an English voice endlessly repeats the phrase "I'm sorry!" Uh, WTF? We're all for art that's open-ended, but this stuff was just open-endless. The painful seating -- hard wooden planks with about four inches of legroom -- heightened our discomfort. By intermission, our ass, legs, and back were so sore we could barely continue; and as a stoned girl giggled ceaselessly and intermission dragged on, we knew that we couldn't.

Though the first half offered some treats, we couldn't bear another 30 minutes of open-endless mysteries with descriptions like "learn about Rhode Island's industial evolution through the midnight flight of a little bat." The evening was best left to those who enjoy having question marks flung at them, and while we're sure the second half of the screening did not disappoint, we were too busy washing our brains out with an emergency renting of to care.

Barbarella