24 January 2010

Sundance Shorts

Next up were a series of short films from Youtube's Sundance Film Festival page. Para Fuera is a profile of a surgeon who also composes music. It didn't really interest me all that much except where he talks about learning to be tolerant, which reminded me that the trouble with surrounding people who think like me and so forth is that I'm in many situations intolerant of people who think differently than I do. It got me thinking that I should try harder to do things with people who are different from me and that I should work harder to be less judgmental about the way other people think. C

Old Fangs is an animated short about these forest creatures that go out so the wolf (or fox?) can visit is estranged father. I didn't really connect to it all. C

Glottal Opera was more engaging but also kind of too creepy. It's this Australian girl group in the vein of the Andrews Sisters or something and they're singing a poppy number except that the video is of their epiglottis or voice box or whatever it is. I learned long ago that body parts never look anything like they do in textbook diagrams and I was too creeped out by the singing alien vaginas to process what was happening and connect that to what I learned in my intro to linguistics class in 2003. I should have liked it but I'm too squeamish. Also, the end credits are more than a third of the running time, which seemed weird. C

Thompson is a portrait of a couple of juvenile delinquents at the onset of adulthood. I watched these a couple of days ago and mostly recall liking this one but feeling ambivalent about some aspect which I currently cannot remember. C

Voice on the Line is, as I remember it, a mix of live action (found footage?) and animation. It's about a presumably fictional program where the CIA got people to blab on the phone about all their secrets by using certain kinds of operators and things. It was fun but I feel like I sort of tuned out toward the end. B

Frankie won the best short award at the Berlin film festival or something. It's about a fifteen year old boy from a British council estate trying to prepare himself to be a good father for the child his girlfriend his carrying. I liked some things about this. It was a good idea and there are bits of it I quite liked but some of it comes across as cheap, such as the ominous shot of the boy walking away from the stroller to check out someone's new car. I guess he won't break the cycle after all but what kind of fool would expect him to? Maybe that's the point? B-

It seems like the one I liked the most was Mr. Okra. It's a profile of this guy who drives a vegetable truck around the 9th Ward in New Orleans. It was good. He had (has) an interesting life. B+

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