The Alternative Screen-Flushed

Despite being the focus of countless music videos, fashion layouts and movie scenes, the public restroom still holds some strange allure as a last bastion of emotional and psychological realness. Somehow the performing of bodily functions-and the place where the performance takes place-has become synonymous with unvarnished truth. Flushed takes off from this not-quite-true premise, and crashes pretty quickly. Set in the men's and women's restrooms of a popular New York club, the film is crammed with inane musings of Gen-Xers. Yes women obsess about weight, sex and attractiveness, and the men fret about their sexuality, attractiveness, and power. But do the conversations have to sound as they do here, secondhand, so recycled? The trick when trying to capture everyday banalities is to know how to subtly shape and push them, to find the poetry and truth beneath moldy cliches. Director Carrie Ansell tries to be casually raunchy, attempting to raise an eyebrow with the film's gay/straight/male/female generational angst, but there's nothing here that hasn't been said and done before - and better.

Far more successful is Lela Lee's Angry Little Asian Girl, a collection of shorts that views like a marker-drawn slide show in which the grade school heroine tackles racism, gender issues and stereotype with a blue tongue. Imagine South Park crossed with the comedic musings of Margaret Cho, and you'll get the picture. (Alternative Screen at Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave; Thursday, April 30, 7:30pm