Short-Film Week: The Bar at the End of the Line
The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman’s documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the “destituted” people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.
An object within an object of the same type – the novel within a novel, the film within a film – is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work. But if the object is nearly whole – that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content – looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.
My version of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact uses the same source material but starts at the 33-minute, 25-second mark and ends at one hour, 26 minutes, and five seconds. It’s a marvel of economy. Let me explain myself.
The animated T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is a feature-film plot distilled into 10 minutes, and it shows the ways in which the short film is more forgiving than longer cinematic forms. This movie operates wordlessly almost as a plot outline, and it’s gorgeous to look at and challenging to keep up with. It feels like a small, perfectly cut gem. On reflection, that’s a good analogy, because Piet Kroon’s 1997 short is a beautiful piece of visual craftsmanship that fails as art in any rational analysis.
Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s 
Short movies are at once the most ubiquitous and the most neglected films there are, garnering little critical appraisal as objects themselves even as they’re unavoidable in everyday life.
From December 2 through 8, Culture Snob and Ed Howard’s 
Things are awfully quiet around here. Too quiet. And that can only mean one thing: Culture Snob is busy preparing for the 
Honestly and truly, I bear no antipathy toward Robert Zemeckis, although I wouldn’t want to sit through many of his movies, and even those I like are problematic at best. But I hoped fervently that something would prevent his Beowulf from leading the Box Office Power Rankings this week.