saturday was my last day at my job in the language lab, and mostly i stayed out of the way for the new supervisor--oddly, i think i ended up doing more work than many of my days before, with all the questions and assistance--and stuck to a computer in the back, finding myself some short films online. see, for this year's oscars, i made an effort to see nearly all the films nominated for everything. i had even managed to watch 7 of the 10 nominated short films online before oscar weekend... and oscar weekend, my wife and i made it to a screening of all 10--and the danish poet (which won for animated short) is awesome and worth seeing if you get the chance. so, then i learned, after the oscars, that the documentary shorts would be screening this weekend, and between watching some short films in february and researching these documentary shorts--not to mention my own interest in producing a short film--my interest in short films was piqued, so there i was at work, scouring youtube for animated shorts listed on the oscars archive site and i managed to watch 12 at work, made it to the documentary short screening and watched all the oscar nominees for 2005 on dvd, plus happened upon harvie krumpet (which won the oscar for animated short for 2003) on sundance late saturday night and loved it. checked sundance ahead and recorded two more short films on the dvr, watched them late last night
anyway, a quick rundown:
- the fan and the flower - simple visual style, wonderful story--a ceiling flan and a flower in a pot fall in love but can't be together--nice narration by paul giamatti
- gopher broke - a pixar short i hadn't seen, amusing--a gopher deliberately sets up speedbumps to knock food off delivery trucks--but not nearly as clever as some of their other work
- guard dog - ok visual style and an amusing little story, delving in the paranoid fantasies of a dog out for a walk, showing how his imaginings of what might happen to his owner make him bark at even innocuous squirrels
- ryan - lacking in content (a little short and inconclusive) but a fantastic visual experience, using cgi to show emotional and other non-visual conditions as visual
- the chubbchubbs - simple and short or i probably wouldn't have enjoyed this one much. alien janitor wants to sing, but the chubbchubbs are coming and folks freak out
- katedra (the cathedral) - awesome (and i use that word properly here) visuals but the overall metaphor comes off a little like the ending of apocalypto, easily taken as an affirmation of religion by someone religious or taken as a condemnation of religion by an atheist... i'm pretty sure it was supposed to be the former, but either way, the visuals alone are worth it
- das rad (the wheel) - all human history from the perspective of a couple piles of rocks, nicely done with a great visual style
- atama yama (mt. head) - overall lacking in style but clever in its content, as a stingy old man finds a cherry tree growing on his head and people come there to picnic, and ending with an amazing visual i won't spoil here
- give up aul yer sins - a little girl's telling of the story of john the baptist put to animation, lacking only because the girl just didn't embellish as much as one might hope
- fifty percent grey - a very simple film about a guy finding the afterlife to be empty but for a tv, very funny
- father and daughter - perhaps a little long, but its meditative tone works well at going slow, so i guess it isn't too bad. some nice visual metaphors but if i hadn't known ahead what this one was about i might have gotten lost in the slow middle
- rejected - hilarious collection of supposedly rejected promos for the family learning channel and some other products, taking more and more absurdist directions as they go on
- the blood of yangzhou district - the winner for documentary short this year, this film was 1) seriously sad in its subject matter, orphans left behind after their parents are dead from aids, some of them with aids themselves, and all shunned because of the lack of education about the disease in the poor area in which they live and 2) blatantly manipulative and self congratulatory as it was made by the people who were so proud of themselves for helping these orphans, or at least trying to
- recycled life - an amazing look at the lifestyle of people living off of, and sometimes in, a massive dump in guatemala city, better in the first half when it is just presenting these people and their lives, losing some of its power as it moves on to talk about the attempts to school the children of these families
- rehearsing a dream - at least in its objectivity, the best of the four documentary shorts this year, in my opinion, easily expandable into a feature length sort of thing like spellbound or the like. details the 7 day afaa affair in miami, in which 160 high school students interested in the arts got to workshop together and with professionals in their various arts. no agenda to this one
- two hands - like the previous one, objective and lacking an agenda, but this one was too much just leon fleisher telling his story--about how a hand injury led to years unable to play piano and further hand problems once he got to play again--and not enough visual record, archival footage i'm sure would be available at least for more performances or something
- harvie krumpet - harvie likes to be naked, can't help but touch things (and people he meets) with his finger, and, after an injury and a lightning strike, has a magnetic metal plate in his head, but he grows up, grows old, marries, raises a child and all of this displayed with some great claymation work. a beautiful little film, if you ask me
- badgered - simple and plain, but amusing still, the tale of a badger trying to get some sleep, bothered by some noisy birds and some army missiles buried under his hole
- the moon and the son - subtitled "an imaginary conversation" this is a conversation between a son and his now deceased father, an abusive drunk with ties to the mob and a life story he kept mostly secret until he was old and dying. pretty good, if maybe a few minutes too long, but it kept my interest, unlike...
- the mysterious geographic explorations of jasper morello - despite some amazing visuals and designwork, this film, about a navigator desperate to prove himself sets out on a voyage that may just cure a plague, managed to be a little boring, and it's only 26 minutes long, so that's saying something
- our time is up - live action short about a psychiatrist who changes how he deals with his patients wehn he gets some bad news from his doctor. it ends abruptly, but it's funny and gets done in its short time more than some much longer films manage sometimes
- Ausrei?er (the runaway) not much to say about the plot of this one without maybe giving too much away. a guy gives a boy a ride to school and... gets stuck with him for the day. a simple film that borders on some cliches but avoids them pretty much because the two actors are quite good
- the last farm - a wonderful visual in the end, at the grave, but a little pointless otherwise--seriously, i'm not sure what the point to showing the family on their way was at all
- cashback - what could have been a nice treatise on midnight shifts and hellish jobs turns into an excuse to show naked women--which you'd think would be a good thing--but seems a little pointless in the end... apparently a feature length version was completed before this short even got nominated for anything. i'm curious what that's like, so i guess it wasn't all bad
- six shooter - four people affected by recent deaths ride on a train. one of them just might be psychotic, and at least one of them suicidal. if you're into black comedy, especially tinged irish, this one's good
- iota - sundance sceduled this one wrong and my dvr missed the ending, so i'm not even sure what happened in it--and i can't find it online--but i still liked it, something happened to a little girl, drawn out of her room under mysterious circumstances, a year later her deaf sister and her father deal with the trauma
- the mood - a man's bad mood proves contagious and eventually dangerous
and i still managed to watch the finale of daybreak online and the latest episode of battlestar galactica--and i really hope the writers come up with a way out of this without starbuck being a cylon, or katee sackhoff sinks her all into being a cylon--on the dvr and spend time with my family--trip to the flea market yesterday yielded some nice little people toys for saer, among other things--immediate and extended
six shooter