Screen gems The 7th Annual Newport Film Festival BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The 7th Annual Newport International Film Festival is screening nearly 80 films this time around, drawn from 15 countries. While the array in competition is as eclectic as usual, various themes are focused on in supplementary three-film programs this year. "Rock ’n’ Roll Diary" puts the spotlight on Metallica and celebrated producer and recording engineer Tom Dowd. "Politics As (un)Usual" ranges in subject from the Arab satellite news network Al Jazeera to the Holocaust. And "Swedish Films — How Swede It Is" presents Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and Roy Andersson’s downbeat vignettes, Songs From the Second Floor.

Tickets are $10, except for the opening night film, Bright Young Things, which is $25. For a complete schedule, go to www. newportfilmfestival.com.

Here is a sampling of this year’s narrative features.

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

Tuesday, June 8 at 7 p.m.at the Jane Pickens

When English actor Stephen Fry was drolly portraying the tactful butler Jeeves in the P.G Wodehouse BBC adaptations, he must have been quietly taking mental notes about frivolous young aristocrats. As screenwriter and director of Bright Young Things, he certainly seems to be relishing taking the offenders to task. It’s set in the London of the late 1930s among revelers-till-dawn, for whom there was no greater offense than to be boring. Joining farces with Evelyn Waugh, from whose satirical novel Vile Bodies this is based, Fry details how even the smart set can be pretty dumb. Coke — they call it "naughty salt" — flows more copiously than martinis in the Thin Man movies of the period.

Our bright young anti-hero is Adam Symes (Stephen Campbell), casually betrothed to the vivacious but frivolous aristocratess Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer). As his financial situation changes, he keeps breaking and then re-making their engagement, sometimes more than once a day. Adam gets work as a society gossip columnist, and we get to attend mad, mad parties. Some familiar faces have delicious cameo roles to chew on. Peter O’Toole has a grand old plummy time as Nina’s lordly father, signing checks as Charlie Chaplin. Stockard Channing is a fake American revivalist, entertaining a posh crowd with a missionary choir. ("Ain’t no flies on the lamb of God/ he’s smarter than a whip/ He rules us all with an iron rod/ in his firm but tender grip.")

Fry was notorious in earlier years for his dissolute ways — a bad-check habit of his own got a conviction — so he knows the perils of dissipation. But this is no morality play. As in the novel, the party is over when realities, such bad-form inconveniences as World War II, intrude.

RECONSTRUCTION

Wednesday, June 9 at 3:30 p.m. and Friday, June 11 at 12:30 p.m. at the Opera House

Such indie hits as the reverse-time Memento and even the cleverly disjointed Pulp Fiction proved that initially disorienting story structure won’t ruin a compelling tale if we all land upright by the end. By now even semi-serious moviegoers can read most film cues without moving their lips.

The suspenseful Danish psychological drama Reconstruction pushes that envelope, all but including a lecture on deconstruction. August Holm (Krister Henriksson), who we sometimes hear in a voice-over, is a writer who informs us after the first scene that the two potential lovers we have just met are his creations. In "real" life, he suspects that his much younger wife, Aimee (Marie Bonnevie), is having an affair. Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the interloper into both his imagination and his family, lives with Simone, who is also played by Bonnevie, so glamorlessly that she looks like a different person.

Imaginary and tangible realities eventually merge for Alex. He confesses to a friend before his tryst that he dreamed he had a girlfriend who was attractive because she was "stupidly fragile"— he so dreaded hurting her that he woke in a panic, he says. His greater alarm occurs when, deep into his affair, he enters the Twilight Zone and finds that no one knows him any longer, not even longtime lover Simone.

But screenwriter/director Christopher Boe puts romantic as well as existential notions in the mouth of August. The novelist observes that men and women differ in attitudes on love: women choose it, can’t live without it, and men "want love to take us by surprise" because otherwise it "gets in the way" of their lives.

Coe employs an economic film style: to present Aimee’s inner turmoil after she decides to leave her husband, he has her tear pages out of the book he just dedicated to her; we see stop-action flashes of her tantrum in a park as they contrast with calming music. But the most impressive part of the film is how Coe helps us to not much care that we are, off and on, as confused as the lovers. He frames the film to orient us, opening and closing with a street magician levitating a cigarette and with a crucial observation of the narrator: this may be just a story, August says, "a construction . . . but even so, it hurts."

HAIR HIGH

Sunday, June 13 at 8 p.m. at the Jane Pickens

Any animation that opens with a fly consuming and vomiting up a crumb of cookie in loving offering for his fly sweetie can’t be all bad. It can be all that grotesque, though, or pretty much so. Hair High has a David Lynch-esque fascination with bodily fluids and a general sense of humor so over-the-top sophomoric it’s sophisticated. Animation artist Bill Plympton here merges the wacko romance of his 1998 I Married a Strange Person and the horror movie freak-outs of his later Mutant Aliens. The result: Tales From the Crypt meets Robert Crumb, and they go beat up Charlie Brown.

The exaggeration excuse is that this is an urban legend told by soda fountain proprietor JoJo to a couple of squabbling teenagers. The tale is about a nebbishy new kid at Echo Lake High, Spud, and the trouble he gets into with the most popular couple in school. Cherri has a Sandra Dee flip hairdo way outdone by her boyfriend Rod’s angler fish pompadour. By the time they’re finished with Spud, a tragedy of rock ’n’ roll romantic ballad proportions ensues, and the senior prom will never be the same.

This is all an excuse for Plympton to try to keep one-upping himself with sight gags, some of which challenge his audience to not literally gag. Cigarette-sucking biology teacher Mr. Sners coughs up his guts, and not metaphorically: Spud impresses stunned classmates by knowing in which order the internal organs should be stuffed back in. In the annual football combat between the Fighting Cocks and cross-town rivals the Beavers, a chicken-suited mascot pumped up with an aphrodisiac ends up humping everything in sight. No, it doesn’t look like Bill Plympton is building a resume for a Saturday morning cartoon show any time soon.