Stars and Guitars

So you wanna be a rock & roll star? Forget rock & rolling all night and partying every day, and get ready for an endless round of mind-numbing press junkets and claustrophobic hotel rooms. The Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy (screening this week at UC Irvine) makes the rock-star life look infinitely less appealing than a career in claims adjusting. Touring to support their smash 1997 album, OK Computer, the band live in a kind of glamorous purgatory; it's like a rock-star version of Groundhog Day. The buzz of recording radio promos and doing interviews gives way to a soul-crushing tedium as the gears of the hype machine grind on relentlessly. You hardly have to be a fan of the band's music to wonder when increasingly high-strung singer Thom Yorke's ever-roving lazy eye is going to pop right out of his head. The screening kicks off the UCI Film Society's new series, Eccentrics and Iconoclasts: Portraits of Life.

Meeting People Is Easy screens at the UC Irvine Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium, Campus & W. Peltason drives, Irvine, (949) 824-5588; www.filmsociety.uci.edu. Fri., 7 & 9 p.m. $3-$5.