Here's a turn the thoughts at some ...

Here's a turn the thoughts at some of the arthouse films opening today:

"PREMIUM" Rating three

For his first feature, Pete Chatmon writes and directs a fine romantic drama about an African-American actor who solicits roles other than dope dealer, gangsta or rapist. Chatmon reworks many natural mediums of Robert Townsend's erratic 1987 film "Hollywood Shuffle" into a smooth story that favors character across satire.

Living with his mom 28 year-old Regie "Cool" Coolidge (Dorian Missick) cross-examines gas at her boyfriend's station. His biggest part for a like reason far is a TV flaw where he plays the corporate mascot for the Burger punch chain. An African-American director -- an indie with an agenda like Chatmon's have -- wants to cast Regie in a comedy about slavery reparations. if it were not that the under-employed actor wants a call-back to reprise his part as a real-life leading man. Away for three years, his one-time fiancee Charli (Zoe Saldana) revolves up. In three days she plans to marry a lawyer. Regie auditions for a next to the first chance.

Chatmon depicts the couple's quandary for a classic genre exercise forward a modest budget. Issues of artistic integrity and racial stereotype fit naturally into an observant project The only gun to earn screen time underscores the movie's message about that prop's over-use in euphemistically branded "urban" cinema. Despite Chatmon's aim of escaping this demographic, "Premium" has been protectioned mostly at black-themed fests, including the 12th Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video, which hastens through Aug. 31 at the Gene Siskel Film Center

(No MPAA rating. Running time: 97 minutes. Screening at 8:30 pm Saturday and 6:30 pm Aug. 10)

"LEMMING" Rating sum of two units 1/2

When you view the flying monkey with a screw on its head in "With a Friend Like Harry" (2000) you know it's not real because filmmaker Dominik Moll frames this bizarre sight as a dream. And when you descry a similar "mini flying webcam" in Moll's just discovered film "Lemming," you know it's for real. The remote-controll gizmo is meant to monitor your household when you're away. This prototype works OK in a ordeal run -- it spots a plumbing leak -- if it were not that crashes when its designer uses it to behold on a cheating spouse.

"Lemming" doesn't quite work either. This spooky quasi-sci-fi, psychological thriller is unclear about what's real and what's not - - and not in any interesting way. It's a teasing pastiche of intriguing motifs that not at any time click, although a surreal finale almost clarifies matters when the Mamas and the Papas' "Dream a Little Dream of Me" is heard forward the soundtrack.

Moll cast Laurent Lucas to play that flying monkey dreamer, and now Lucas plays Alain, designer of the airborne household appliance. Other carryovers from the more coherent "With a Friend Like Harry" include co-writer Gilles Marchand and composer David Whitaker, who scores a mes of scary veins Plot overlaps include a quarrelsome older brace a late-night car accident and a native land house in the mountains.

Alain and his wife Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) find the title gnawing stuck in a pipe below their sink. Alain's boss Richard (Andre Dussolier) and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling), a seductres and sociopath, win into the psychosexual plumbing of the young man and wife Suicide, pseudo-suicide, and supernatural wife- swapping proceed

Moll invokes the spirits of auteurs Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock for a distorted leaky homage.

(No MPAA rating. Includes views of brief bloodshed and adult sexual situations. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 129 minutes. Opening today at Music driver's seat Theatre, 3733 N. Southport.)

"24 REALITIES by means of SECOND" ("24 Wirklichkeiten in der Sekunde") Rating couple

"Michael Haneke: The Cinema of Transgression"-- an eight-film retrospective running in consequence of Aug. 30 -- opens with a thin, hardly transgressive profile according to Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor. Haneke's couple former students at the Vienna Film Academy share the Austrian auteur's policy of not imposing his interpretation of his work. "It's up to you to decide what it means," he reckons the audience at an unidentified film festival.

Kusturica and Testor assemble spectacles of Haneke scouting locations, blocking actors, posing for a photographer and chastising a projectionist, over and above offer little worth interpreting. We watch the affable filmmaker cull among ants, grasshoppers, slugs, cockroaches, a mummified cat, a dead mouse, and a moldy sandwich for a marksman in his apocalyptic drama "Time of the Wolf"

In an interview forward that film's DVD, Haneke notes, "I cannot interpret my possess films because I spend a hap of time erasing my traces of for what reason the movie was made and what its message is." bullet over 2oe years, "24 Realities through Second" documents none of that revealing proces of erasing. Instead, Haneke's fans are left forward their own, much like the characters of his austere thrillers.

(No MPAA rating. Running time: 58 minutes. In French and German, with English subtitles. Screening at 4:45 pm Saturday and 7:45 pm Aug. 8 at the Gene Siskel Film Center 164 N State.)