Devouring the Oscars: Best Animated Short Film

maisoncube.jpgI’ll start with an admonition: You have no reason not to have a horse in the short-film categories for the Oscars. These should be your favorite races, because they require relatively small investments of time. If you see and hate The Reader, you’ve lost 124 minutes of your life. If you see and hate Lavatory – Lovestory, you’re out 10 minutes. And the chances of you hating Lavatory – Lovestory are much smaller. Alas, each has about the same chance of winning the top prize in its category.

Short-Film Week: The Bar at the End of the Line

terminalbar2.jpgThe 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.

Short-Film Week: A Sweet, Whimsical, Dirty Movie About Rape or Regression

talktoher03.jpgAn 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.

Short-Film Week: “Gem” as Faint Praise

transit4.jpgThe 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.

Short-Film Week: The Addict

camera2.jpgLike most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes. Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.

Announcing the “Short-Film Week” Blog-a-thon: December 2-8, 2007

shortfilmweek1small.jpgWhen I read the initial announcement for “Short Film Day,” slated for December 4 at Ed Howard’s Only the Cinema, my heart sank. I’d been mulling a short-film blog-a-thon for months, but was hesitant to set a date because of my experience with the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon; these things are a lot more work than I’d imagined. So Ed beat me to it. But then my barnacle/parasite/moocher antennae got all tingly, and I proposed that we co-host the blog-a-thon and expand it. He agreed.