Short films fascinate me. Though their stories are often more intimate, the best shorts feel as conceptually grand as the best feature films.
After watching (and now reviewing) all of the Oscar-nominated short films for 2010, I hope more people seek out short films in the future. Films like The Door are just as powerful and moving as anything you’ll likely see in theaters, which is an accomplishment for a film that’s less than 17 minutes long.
Comedy is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty of genuinely funny people out there, but what’s funny between friends often just lands with a dull thud on screen.
Thankfully, the Oscar-nominated short film Instead of Abracadabra is not only hilarious, but it has a sweetness that sets it apart from all the other nominated shorts.
This isn’t a story about movies that are “so bad they’re good” as other reviewers have opined. It’s not about picking apart and denigrating the craft behind a movie. And if you’ve come here looking for hilarity at the expense of a filmmaker, his cast and his crew, prepare to be disappointed.
This is about dedication. It’s about not being willing to watch a dream die. It’s about the emotions that truly great films stoke inside all of us. And it’s about killer eagles and vultures.
Would you be surprised to find out that slavery still exists around the world? Probably not.
Would you be surprised to find out that more people (over 27 million) are enslaved now than at any other time in world history? I certainly was.
There’s a shot in The Ghost Writer that says a lot about director Roman Polanski. In it, a worker is gathering sea oats and beach grass that the gusty wind has blown onto the deck. As he places it in a wheelbarrow, the wind again blows it back out and scatters it across the deck.
As hard as Polanski tries, the wind keeps blowing his demons out into full public view. The only way he has ever known to deal with that is to make movies, and good ones like The Ghost Writer.
You know, I’ve seen other reviewers/bloggers lament about how weak they think this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated live-action shorts are. Maybe they’re right. Maybe not.
But at least one of the entries felt more notable because of what it could have been, rather than what it is. And that missed opportunity is the short film The New Tenants.
Kevin Smith is a very funny writer. Clerks. Mallrats. Chasing Amy. Dogma. Zack and Miri Make a Porno. He’s the kind of guy that you might not want to sit next to on a Southwest Airlines 737, but you definitely want to sit next to in a bar. As a writer, he’s not afraid to offend and insult, and as a director, he’s smart enough to always find the real heart in his characters.
It’s too bad he didn’t write Cop Out, his new movie. If he had, it might not suck so completely.
I won’t pretend to know what makes a truly great film. I think I know what many of the ingredients are, but there’s just something that’s often hard to identify that gives a really powerful film its impact. And sometimes when you’re watching a strong film, even a short, you may not fully “get” how good it really is until a few days after, when you’ve had a chance to think about it.
Miracle Fish is that kind of film.
You know, it doesn’t generally take much to get me excited about a movie. And when you tell me you’ve got a picture that has Paul Bettany, Charles S. Dutton, Dennis Quaid, hordes of zombie demons and ass-kicking angels, you’ve got a sale.
Oh, how all that potential is wasted in the film Legion.
(Review requested by Nadia.)
When I was asked to review The Peanut Butter Solution by my friend Nadia, my first response was, “huh?” I can’t say I had ever even heard of the movie, but hey, this is what I do, so I went out looking for a copy. What I first found were comments on various blogs from people who had seen the movie as kids. Here are some of their memories…
“It creeped me the f*#k out as a kid!”
“This movie scarred my childhood.”
“Disturbing and scary.”
This movie scared the shit out of me as a child.”
Sounds like my kind of movie.
