Something new – having just recently seen the two sets of ten films nominated for this year’s Oscars in the categories of Best Animated Short Film and Best Live Action Short Film, I have taken it upon myself to review them, and thereupon debase myself by predicting the winners. (These predictions will be taken up into my earlier Oscar predictions).
BEST SHORT FILM – ANIMATED
“Lavatory – Lovestory”
I wrote a brief review of this film after seeing it at the Chicago International Film Festival, and my thoughts haven’t materially changed: “A charming, simple narrative about the lady attendant of a public men’s restroom (her job consists of making sure people pay on their way in, and cleaning up when things get too filthy). While this incredibly tedious life grinds along, she dreams of finding romance; but it finds her instead, in the form of mysterious flowers that keep appearing, without any indication of which of the many men who walk past is leaving them there. Not a very ambitious story, but it’s absolutely appealing, and the simple cartoon style (it looks a lot like a moving James Thurber drawing) is easy on the eyes.” What can I add to that? It’s a very clean-looking film that is resolutely unmemorable. Mind-boggling that it got nominated.
7/10
“La maison en petit cubes”
Like I always say: when a 12-minute film seems to drag, you’ve done something wrong. The plot is fairly simple: an old man fights rising water levels by building one level after another on top of his house. When he drops his favorite pipe into the submerged levels, he dons scuba gear to find it, and passing through one old home after another he reminds himself of the people he has loved and known. That’s a fine metaphor and all, but writer-director Katô Kunio doesn’t really do anything interesting with it, leaving a film with but two ideas, both of them fully expressed by the midway point. At least the film is tremendously beautiful: done in a very scratchy, obviously hand-hewn style that looks a bit like colored pencil, only much brighter. It’s gloriously 2-D, and obviously a labor of love, and it’s just a damn shame that it was so repetitive.
7/10
“Oktopadi”
And now, the opposite: a film so brief that it hardly seems to have started when the end credits start to roll. A female octopus is taken from the aquarium she shares with her lover, destined to become someone’s dinner; the male responds by chasing the truck carrying her throughout the streets of a Greek seaside town. Thanks to the bright candy-colored setting and characters, the film is a visual charmer, and the peppy story, reminiscent of Tex Avery, is perfectly entertaining in the extremely brief space it occupies. Absolutely disposable, but hopelessly appealing anyway.
8/10
“Presto”
Or as it’s better-known, “the Pixar short that played before WALL-E“. So pretty much everyone with more than a marginal interest in animation has likely seen it, and presumably loved it. To my mind, it’s the best such movie since 2000’s “For the Birds”: there’s very little to it besides being a swell riff on a 1940s Bugs Bunny short (a magician’s hungry rabbit causes havoc, in pursuit of a carrot), but since 1940s Bugs Bunny shorts tend to be absolutely perfect, I’m inclined to give the film a pass. Unlike a lot of Pixar’s short films, it doesn’t obviously raise the bar in any technical sense; it doesn’t seem as a lot of them do that the animators were testing out a new trick or practicing new surfaces. It’s just a fleet comedy with impeccable timing.
10/10
“This Way Up”
A delightfully sick joke from first-time British directors Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, “This Way Up” follows a father and son pair of morticians as they attempt to deliver a deceased old woman from her home to the cemetery, encountering a great deal of trouble when an errant boulder crushes their hearse, and seemingly every obstacle imaginable crops up along the treacherous road (vultures, swamps, getting the old woman stuck in a tree). The CGI is quite handsome and unlike most of the Pixar/DreamWorks-influenced cartoons that we see these days, and the playfully dark and gothic design makes this arguably the most visually memorable film of the lot. If I have a complaint, it’s a tiny one: by the end, the filmmakers have become just the tiniest bit desperate to keep the film gloomy ‘n’ zany, and it certainly doesn’t conclude as well as it begins (though at least their vision of the underworld – I spoil nothing, really – is vibrant and original).
9/10
Who wins the Oscar?
Over the past few years, I’ve hit upon a pattern: if I have seen more than one nominee prior to the ceremony, it’s my least favorite of those I’ve seen that wins. By that logic, “La maison en petit cubes” shall be crowned victorious come Sunday.
BEST SHORT FILM – LIVE ACTION
“Auf der Strecke”
A fascinating exercise in misdirection and ambiguous storytelling. A Swiss security guard is in love with a woman who works at his store; comes an evening on the train home when he sees her quarrelling with a young man. A few moments later, he watches as the young man is threatened by some bored kids. What happens after is better left to the film itself to explain, since a great deal of the point of the thing is figuring out on one’s own exactly why the characters do what they do. Paced to be slow and steady, and altogether low-key in its visuals, “Auf der Strecke” achieves a kind of rarified anti-entertainment – and at 30 minutes, it’s awfully long for a “short” – so I wouldn’t hold it against anyone who called it boring. But it’s a terrific moody character study, and it’s a crying shame that so few people are ever going to see it.
8/10
“Manon on the Asphalt”
A real high-concept barnburner, this one: a woman named Manon (Aude Léger) is hit by a car on the streets of Paris. As her life slips away, she recalls – and narrates for us – the people who she has known, and wonders what effect her life and death has had and will have on those people. The sheer bravura of the idea is enough to propel the film through it’s wee running time, but I found myself weirdly disengaged from what was happening. Something about the execution is very arch and irritating in its artsiness; it’s overwhelmingly French, in that respect. I suppose that the film has something to say about the import of an everday life, and I salute it for that (not all of the nominees end up having anything to say at all). But there’s something vaguely clumsy about the way it’s put together, and I feel comfortable saying that the best parts of the movie never made it off of the page.
7/10
“New Boy”
Disclosure: I was at Northwestern at the same time as the film’s writer-director Steph Green, and I know people who worked on her senior year project. So when I say that “New Boy” is a pretty fine little film, light in touch and well-observed, I am perhaps not as wholly unbiased as I ought to be. The film tells of a young boy from Africa on his first day in a new school in Ireland, where there are bullies and new friends, and teachers who mean well but lack all the patience that might be appropriate. In a lot of ways, the film plays like a ten-minute version of The Class, with the attendant shallowness that suggests. It’s breezy and bright, maybe a bit disposable, but at least it’s fun to watch, which isn’t really true of most of its fellow nominees. My one real complaint is that there’s a definite stiffness to several of the compositions, leaving the film a bit claustrophobic in a way that contrasts badly with its genial tone.
7/10
“The Pig”
An absolutely brilliant satire. There’s an old man (Henning Moritzen) in the hospital for a minor bit of colon surgery that unexpectedly turns serious when possibly cancerous polyps are found. It’ll be a few days of waiting in a hospital room until anything is certain, though, and the man latches on to a painting of a cute smiling pig as his good luck charm while he waits. Unfortunately for him and his luck, his new roommate is a Muslim, and his roommate’s son is offended by the pig, demanding that it be taken down. Complications, as they are wont to do, ensue. Inspired, I suspect, by the contretemps a few years ago about those Danish political cartoons depicting Mohammed (“The Pig” is from Denmark), the film is a remarkably sensible snapshot of the struggle between Islam and the West, as well as a tremendously entertaining comedy. Designed perhaps to rankle and provoke rather than provide a nice, balanced argument, but it is the privilege of the artist to upset applecarts.
9/10
“Spielzeugland”
I am over Holocaust films. That’s doubtlessly an insensitive thing to say, but I am not noted for my sensitivity. Anyhow, this is about a little German boy who doesn’t understand why the friendly Jewish neighbors and their own little boy are being taken away, so his mommy tells him they’re going to Toyland. Which sounds like such fun, that the little boy decides to sneak along when the Jewish neighbors are taken away, leaving his mother to search frantically for him before he gets tossed in a camp. It’s dressed up a bit with an oddly-shifted chronological structure that actually does work to ratchet the tension up something powerful, and it’s very well shot, indeed – maybe the best-looking of the nominees. But I’m sorry, no film that reminds me of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas gets any kind of recommendation.
6/10
Who wins the Oscar?
The easy route is to assume that WWII is like catnip to voters, and “Spielzeugland” certainly counts as the frontrunner. “Auf der Strecke” is much too hard, and I suspect that “New Boy” is too light (I thought the same thing about last year’s winner, though). Let us say that I see a three-way race leaning towards the Nazi picture, because “Manon” is kind of pretentious, while “The Pig” is a bit too thrilled with its own snottiness to be the Right Kind of political movie.