I’ve seen so many movies with so many different version of the afterlife, I’m not sure whether to expect the sixty-foot snowglobes of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, the visual splendor of What Dreams May Come, or the somewhat predictable puffy clouds of Heaven Can Wait.
Imagine my surprise to find out that heaven looks an awful lot like Southern California, as evidenced by Brandon Rice’s faith-focused short film “A Dim Light.”
If film is art, then animated films, especially those that use stop-motion animation, are sculptures. The amount of time and effort it takes to make a great one is staggering, and the best of them illuminate the human condition in a new way.
All of which explains why “Undone,” a lovingly-crafted piece of stop-motion brilliance by Hayley Morris, took home the prize for Best Animated Short at Slamdance 2009.
This is not a review, though I will count it as such.
I find it hard to qualify something as a “review” when it contains no criticism. In the case of “The Third & The Seventh,” there is nothing to criticize.
People complain all the time that there are no new ideas to be found in modern movies, outside of new kinds of special effects and fancy 3-D technology.
These people have obviously not seen the new thriller, Mother, from Korean director Bong Joon-ho.
I suppose it says quite a bit about my approach to picking movies when, in a weekend I could have chosen to see Hot Tub Time Machine, instead I bought tickets to see the new Ben Stiller movie Greenberg.
Needless to say, it feels like it was the right choice.
Ah, I remember my days at the University of Texas. (Some of them, at least.)
So when I heard that one of the feature films selected to be screened at this year’s SXSW Film Festival was produced by my alma mater, I felt mildly obligated to check it out. And while Dance With The One may not be destined for major box-office numbers, it is good, solid entertainment, even though it does have a few issues.
Corruption is certainly a popular theme in cinema, and has been for quite some time.
But not since The Godfather (the first two, not the abysmal third one) has a film so completely captured the transformation from sympathetic to corrupt as does Jacques Audiard’s Oscar-nominated film Un Prophéte (A Prophet).
Horror fans (and anyone who would consider themselves a movie-lover) know the name George Romero, and when they hear it, they usually think of zombie-filled, blood-dripping, message-heavy goodness. But let’s face the hard reality that’s painfully obvious in most of Romero’s films: what they really needed was a credit card with lots of available balance.
God bless Romero, as he clearly made the most of what limited resources he had. But the 2010 remake of The Crazies stands not only as a taut thriller, but also as a kind of window into the films Romero might have made if he just had more cash.
It’s easy sometimes when you’re watching a movie to forget about just how many people it takes to make one. And while shorts don’t have the budgets and resources available to most feature films, they can still require the same level of execution by many of the same talented people who make features.
“Mnemosyne Rising”, screened as part of this year’s SXSW Texas Shorts block, has to have one of the longest credit rolls of any short I’ve seen, and every name seems to have contributed something important to the film.
Sitting in “judgment” of short films is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, a short should have a real sense of completeness to it, leaving the viewer with the sensation that they’ve seen a “fullness” of story. On the other hand, the best (in my opinion) short films are shorts in name only. They feel larger, they revolve around stories with a strong central idea, they deliver the theme in interesting ways, and they give us characters in whose world I would like to spend more time.
And so, with that in mind, I give you the winners of the 1st Semi-Annual F.E.D. “Festie” Awards.
