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As a child, Jim Sikora went straight from The Maltese Bippy to 2001, and once his ambitions really got hold of him, he didn't stop until he became a one-man Super-8 film production unit. He still complains that he was doing things to his grandfather's home movie camera, when he was a kid, that wound up looking just like everything Stan Brakhage ever made on fancy government grants.
When Sikora was later stationed in Germany as a GI, he went a little AWOL to hang out with the local art fiends. With company equipment, he shot a film that got him in immediate trouble. Sikora had unfortunately used a site in Nuremberg to show a skinhead doing drugs where Hitler had once tread! Oops!
So he high-tailed it back to his hometown as soon as he gracefully could, to enroll in film school. That was more hassle than it was worth; so after graduating, Sikora just kept making Super-8 movies in between time on his many day jobs. Now he shoots music videos for local bands, and other long and short pieces.
After shopping around video copies of his notorious comedy short, "Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera," and an early version of "Love After the Walls Close In," he has finished Walls in the City as a mini triple feature. The production values are almost unnervingly high, considering Sikora did the sound and image work all by himself with one camera. The dialogue is free from interference, without sounding as if it had been looped in someone's bathroom. The cinematography is smooth and confident. Distractions have been carefully pruned away, to allow a series of two-character encounters room to maneuver:
David Yow, lead vocalist for The Jesus Lizard, faces off against performance artist/standup comedienne Paula Killen in the first sequence. Yow is a drifter whose only possession is a tiny, crumpled photo he refuses to identify, and Killen is a good-time girl who won't stop asking questions.
Bukowski's story acts as a centerpiece, introducing an ulcer patient (played by Tony "Philadelphia" Fitzpatrick) who greets the outside world with a cantankerous attitude. Violent misgivings and bad debts give way to reconciliation; so the last line, "We made it," has multiple meanings instead of just being a double-entendre.
Another of that ever-expanding theatrical family, Bill Cusak, encounters another of Paula Killen's incarnations in the final episode. A horrifying flash-forward leaves the shaken Killen ready to face an unappetizing present.
-by PicPal's J. Kramer
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