2 short films: Spike Jonze & Guy Maddin

Over the last few weeks the blogs in my Google Reader have been chattering about a few short films: Jonze's I'm Here, Maddin's The Little White Cloud That Cried, and Ramin Bahrani's Plastic Bag. I do most of my internetting at work (without audio) and it took me a while to get to the first two. The latter I still haven't gotten around to watching.

Given that the kind of person who has a film blog seems most often to the kind of person who likes both robots and Spike Jonze it seems natural that people have seemed to like I'm Here so much. My own circle of friends has given a range of responses that goes from "meh" to assorted vitriolic displays of scorn-fueled mirth. I'm more on the "meh" side of the spectrum. I thought the story was engaging enough but the metaphors and so forth aren't so great. I didn't really like philosophy driving the narrative. You can watch it on the official Absolut-sponsored page here but I found that page irritating and a little precious so I found it on this page which seems to be Hungary's answer to Youtube. C-

Guy Maddin basically brings us tranny art porn. If your math doesn't make that last sentence add up to "fabulous" you're clearly using the devil's calculus. It took me a couple of minutes before I was won over by The Little White Cloud That Cried but the important thing is that it won me over in a big way. Of course, I can't imagine most people enjoying it as much as I did because there are so many ways for people to criticize movies with hardcore sex involving pre-op transsexuals and a metaphysical edge. I liked it though. It's said to be a tribute to experimental filmmaker Jack Smith but I'm not very familiar with any of his work (which includes Flaming Creatures and Normal Love) so I can't even speak to any of that... Watch it here. If you dare. A-

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987)

I feel like such an idiot for never guessing that this movie was so easily available on the internet. I'm sure I must have looked for it before but I'm kind of hopeless when it comes to finding digital contraband on the internet. It turns out that it's on Youtube but somebody sent me an AVI file so that was good.
It seems to be the film that brought Todd Haynes to prominence. It's the story of Karen Carpenter's rise and fall where all the actors are Barbie dolls. It's strange that it's the Carpenters who sued and had it 86'd and not Mattel. It's really kind of a fabulous film. It's played as less of a joke than I expected and it's much more touching than you'd think. It's a shame it's illegal to exhibit this movie. It should get an exemption for being art. B+

Oscar Nominated Live Action Short Films

This is spoiler city so if you plan on watching these and haven't already I guess you shouldn't read this.

My boyfriend and I went to see the Oscar nominated live action short films last week. I had already watched the animated nominees online though I can see after seeing the live action ones on the big screen that it may have also been worthwhile to see the animated ones that way.

Kavi is timely and well-intentioned. It's also a pretty decent short film, even if it suffers from the sort of sentimentalism you might be afraid of... It's about a boy who lives as a slave with his parents making bricks all day in the hot sun while the private school boys play cricket in a small, neighboring field. At the beginning of the film, Kavi seems relatively happy, playing make believe games in his family's domicile, which is basically a brick cell. One morning he's working with his parents, very efficiently like a good boy, when he is distracted by some boys who are, for whatever reason, playing cricket in a small field next to this slave labor camp in the middle of nowhere. He's taken to the boss man and scolded and the boss says the boy is his fastest worker and if the boy can clear away this giant stack of reject bricks, they can play cricket together. As the boy is moving the bricks from one pile to another he overhears one of his fellow slave laborers talking to a couple of journalists or activists or something. They try to get the boy to talk but he runs off with a bottle of soda and his apprehended and punished by the guys in charge. He turns sullen and can no longer enjoy his life there. He gets in trouble the next day for throwing a ball back to the private school kids and the whole family gets beat up on and the boy is chained up in the office. The camp is suddenly evacuated and the cops show up with the two men who were asking all the questions in the woods behind the brick pile but there's nobody there and it seems like the man who runs the camp is going to get away with it but the buy escapes and runs out. There's a ridiculous moment where the boss tries to frighten the boy into keeping his mouth shut and the two activist guys are trying to get the cops to do something other than stand there looking disinterested. It ends with sobering statistics about world slavery. It's well intentioned, pretty to look at, and very engaging but upon reflection it seems kind of forced and manipulative. I mean, I kind of agree with WEB DuBois that any art worth giving a damn about is really some kind of propaganda but I don't think there was enough design here. It seemed simple and lazy, somehow. B

Miracle Fish was the one I had already seen before. I thought it was kind of bad. Both times. When I watched it online it just seemed kind of bland and pointless from start to finish. This time, it was more uneven. The movie starts with a mother dropping her boy off at school. It's his birthday. She has to go see his dad in the hospital. She gives him his lunchbox and tells him there's a surprise inside from his father. He sits in class and the kids behind him throw things at him. He goes outside for recess and finds a miracle fish in his lunchbox. The boys come over to rub it in that he didn't get anything for his birthday because he's poor and he makes up stories about all the stuff he got. They say mean things to him and go off. He goes to the nurse's office but she's on the phone so he shows himself into the sick bay and takes a nap. He wakes up and the school is deserted. He walks around. Finds a book about alien abduction and looks around. Goes to the school store and eats a bunch of candy bars and such. Walks around. You see a bloody handprint on the back of the door when he closes it. He hears a cell phone ringing. He finds and answers the phone and is told to hide. He stands there being difficult. The lunatic who was seen in the background when his mother comes down the hallway and into the room reciting a crazyman spiel like a first year acting student. They have some meaningless chatter. The man is shot. The boy is carried away by a policeman, never loses his composure. This is another movie that isn't thought through enough. This one is even worse though. I can't think of why it was even nominated. There's nothing interesting about this movie. I think this piece here sums it up better than I have. Oh well. D

The New Tenants ended up being my favorite, I think. I liked the weightier The Door quite a bit and I enjoyed the quirkier Instead of Abracadabra but something about this one just worked for me better. It starts with two gay men sitting at a table. One is smoking and reading the paper and the other is eating meat on a stick and, I believe, reading as well. The one who is eating complains about the other one smoking while he's eating and the other one launches into a tirade about any number of things, including Chernobyl, interestingly enough. The movie is basically them sitting there arguing and neighbors dropping by and acting crazy. You realize these guys have just moved in. All hell breaks loose and they do a sort of surreal dance. It's completely implausible but it somehow really works. A-

The Door only falls short of being my choice for the best of the nominees by a hair. It's about this couple and their daughter who are evacuated from their home after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. They leave their whole lives behind and like many other children, the daughter is lost to radiation sickness. The father defies the law and sneaks into the old apartment to steal the door so that he can carry his dead daughter on the door as they had done with his father (grandfather?) It struck me as a graceful, beautiful, humane film. A-

A friend of mine referred to Instead of Abracadabra as the 'Napoleon Dynamite' one. That kind of sums it up. I enjoyed it. I laughed too loud. It's a dark, quirky comedy about a dweebish man still living with his parents and thinks himself a magician. He convinces his parents to let him put on a show for them and ends up putting the mother in the hospital. He falls for the new next door neighbor and invites her to his father's party that weekend. He convinces them to let him perform at the party by saying he'll get a job. The show at the party is like a twisted take on the dance number in Napoleon Dynamite. It's amusing but I don't know if I really liked it that much, if that makes sense. Maybe it's just sort of quirky and disposable. I can't put my finger on what it's missing for me... B/B+

February Update #3: Trucker/Princess & the Frog and the Animated Feature Oscar/Miracle Fish/Amreeka/Moonfleet/The Cove/Dirty Filthy Love

It's been winter doldrum season so I've sort of been slacking on this thing.
It's been a pretty uneven month, certainly last month was more fulfilling cinematically but I suppose I've filled in some gaps.

Trucker showed up on some end of the year lists and it caught my eye at the video store a while back and I finally got around to watching it a few days ago. Michelle Monaghan is a woman who had been married to Benjamin Bratt, seemingly a great guy, and abandoned him and her child. She works as a semi truck driver now and seems happy with her life of driving, drinking, and no strings sexual encounters. She has what seems like an ill-advised friendship with a married neighbor and after depositing him on his porch she stumbles home to find her ex-husband's wife waiting for her with the discarded son. It seems daddy is in the hospital with cancer and his wife's mother just died so she needs to go away for a few weeks and the mother is reluctantly stuck with her son who is naturally resentful. I guess you can imagine what comes next. The film is likeable. The mother's flight from the definitions the world has imposed upon her is understandable and the characters come across as authentic and compelling for the most part. There's an act of violence toward the end and I'm not really sure it worked for me. I love that it's about working class people, more or less, but it never really soars like Frozen River, as I hoped it might. B/B-

I finally watched The Princess and the Frog so now I've seen all the Oscar nominated animated feature films this year. I feel like this one is probably the weakest even though I think I rated all of them three out of five stars on Netflix, except The Secret of Kells, which I rated four stars. It feels like a Disney movie in sleepwalk mode. It's just a regurgitation onto a standard template with standardly unimpressive music. That said, it's kind of engaging in a slight way. It has the sort of charm I might expect from a well-done direct-to-DVD children's movie. I've never seen All Dogs Got to Heaven 2 but it felt like a sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven somehow. Maybe the music and the attitude. I feel like it makes sense that their first black princess would find herself in the middle of a sort of bland undertaking and, culturally, it's probably for the best. I'm just glad there wasn't a single rap in the whole movie because that would have been really gross. I liked the touch of bayou flavor in the music and the attempts at local color but it was kind of insipidified during Disneyfication, I think. C

On the subject of the Animated Feature Oscar, I'm not sure if I have a horse in the race. It'll probably go to Up, which I didn't care for all that much, but I'd probably have voted for The Secret of Kells. My second choice would probably be The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven't seen Mary and Max and the word I've heard on it has been very splintered but I kind of expected that to get nominated.

Miracle Fish is an Oscar nominated live action short film from what seems to be a much hyped Australian production company. It's about an eight year old boy who gets picked on at school because it's his birthday and all his mom gave him was this lame fortune telling fish thing that looks like it cost one to two dollars. It looks like you can currently buy 12 for five dollars on their website. In any event the rest of the class goes on some field trip or something and he sneaks into this sick room in the nurse's office and wanders out to find an empty school and eventually a gruesome surprise that is neither believable nor interesting. There was something I liked about it but it was generally dull and maudlin and insipid. C-

Amreeka is about a divorced Palestinian woman in the West Bank who works in a bank and lives with her mother and her teenage son. She and her son have to cross through this checkpoint every day and that's fairly miserable and increasingly frightening. They get a permit to emigrate to the USA she had applied for a long time ago and the son convinces her they should go because there is no future for him in Palestine. Things naturally don't go smoothly when they arrive in America but there's none of that forced Lars-von-Trier-esque torture that you might expect from this sort of thing. The kid has troubles at school; they and the cousins they move in with must cope with increasing racism; the mother can find only the most menial of jobs despite her education and her experience. It's a really lovely movie though and it's more bouyant than it sounds. There's something so real and beautiful and human and significant about it. It was mostly all the things I look for in a film. If I had seen it sooner it would likely made my top ten list or at least the honorable mentions. A

Moonfleet is a 1955 Fritz Lang film based on a popular English children's adventure novel from 1898. Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn it begins with an innocent youth arriving in a sinister English coastal city that seems to make a lot of money off various forms of piracy. The youth naturally finds himself mixed up in the den of thieves and in deep trouble from all sides. I sought it out because it's listed in John Kobal's methodology-challenged book of the Top 100 films of all time but I really don't think it belongs there. It's a decent film but it's not likely that it would even make my top 10 Fritz Lang movies, let alone top 100 of ever. Stewart Granger is kind of dreamy though, Joan Greenwood is appealing as George Sanders's sassy wife, and Viveca Lindfors is kind of electric in her brief, mildly lurid performance as Stewart Granger's gypsy-esque mistress but the story didn't really do it for me. C

I finally got around to watching the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove last night. The trouble with so many of these well-intentioned things is that they tend to overstep in their stridence. I think this movie escapes that pitfall though and it comes across as pretty veracious throughout. I think that's why it's so effective. It feels like the filmmakers are saying, "We want to level with you hear and we aren't trying to manipulate you except explicitly by showing you this video of a dolphin slaughter and letting you make up your mind." I like that the video is presented with only the sounds of the dolphins and that although the film is set up like a suspense movie it doesn't try to manipulate you with music and they never resort to the sort of hysterics that tend to alienate people from doing the right thing. It was a good and worthy use of time and resources. A

Lastly, the final film I watched in February of 2010: Dirty Filthy Love. It's a 2004 made for British television movie about a man (Michael Sheen) whose latent OCD and comorbid conditions sort of explode when his marriage disintegrates and he loses his job. He meets a plucky nut played by the fabulous Shirley Henderson, whom I've loved ever since I saw her in that Masterpiece Theater presentation of The Way We Live Now (2001). The nut recognizes his OCD and tells him to come to her support group and he does and it's well and then he has a breakdown when his wife gives him a false hope and then moves on. The movie's kind of out there--my boyfriend wasn't really paying attention to the movie and kept remarking that the movie I was watching was really weird--but it's really kind of good. It seemed like a generally honest depiction of a constellation of mental disorders and the acting was pretty good. If only we subsidized the film industry in the United States... It's kind of sad that our nominees for best picture are very often weaker than the average European made-for-TV movie... A-/B+

oscar nominated animated short films

Below are links to all five animated shorts this year. They were a lot better last year, I think. They're all sort of cute this year but none are particularly moving. I might vote for The Lady and the Reaper but it's hard to say since none of them really jumped out at me.

French Roast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbFhATUfuow

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
http://www.grannyogrimm.com/#/the-film

The Lady and the Reaper
http://212.227.136.88/press/

Logorama
http://www.garagetv.be/video-galerij/buzzing_bees/De_kortfilm_der_logo_s.aspx

Wallace and Gromit: A Case of Loaf and Death
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=49816402

It's like, they're all sort of entertaining but none of them have the magic of last year's nominees.

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+

Summer Hours / Of Time and the City / 9 / Peter and the Wolf

The other night I watched Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours. It's been on all these critics' lists but it always sounded dull or severe or heady or, mostly, like it would be one of those off-putting movies that expect us to get all worked up about the petty concerns of people with too much wealth. Fortunately, it wasn't quite what I feared it sounded like. The story is basically that the matriarch of a French family has a birthday party with her three children and their families there and there's a lot of talk about her uncle, a late famous artist, and the art collection, housed in the country house where she lives, because she's getting older and so forth and recognizes she's going to die. Once she dies, the children need to decide what they'll do with the house and the art. Whether they keep things or sell them. And it's really about how you have the one son (Charles Berling) living in France who's still attached to these things, then the other son (Jeremie Renier) who's working for PUMA in China, and then Juliette Binoche as the daughter whose life is in America now. I mean, it's really about the way the French have to come to terms with their heritage as they're moving toward the future. And, as an American where most things are so new, where my pre-War apartment building seems older than most things anywhere you go, I kind of identify with the grandchildren in the movie who don't have a choice about holding on to their heritage. I guess one of the questions is about the value of heritage. I feel like the movie doesn't really put forth a strong opinion on the subject. That it's more a document of a transition from one era to another. It's really lovely though. I particularly love the scenes with the matriarch and with the housekeeper. I also feel like the cinematography is amazing. The light in the movie is exquisite. And I like the way the light has such a different quality based on where they are. It kind of seemed to change after the mother died. It was like things felt so lyrical and then came to feel more modern, and then at the end there's this party with some grandchildren at the house and it almost makes you think of children playing about in some old ruins or something. I guess this movie made me feel very present in the passage of history. A

As for Of Time and the City, I don't think I was in the right mood to watch it. It's sort of an experimental documentary about Liverpool, England. I've heard it described as a film essay, so maybe that's what it is. Aside from the feeling that I might have already seen it before on Sundance in my last apartment where I had cable television, the main thought I had while watching the movie was, "I could be watching Derek Jarman's The Last of England instead." I think I'll have to watch it again but I'm not sure it worked for me, aside from it being fun to pick out the literary quotes and things. C

Then last night we watched 9, the animated science fiction thing produced by Tim Burton. My boyfriend thought it was cliché and that there wasn't enough plot or character development. I think my roommate agreed with him. I really didn't though. I liked that it was kind of spare. It reminded me of when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum with my old roommate and I said it was the best one and he said it didn't have enough plot, whereas I felt that it was the best one precisely because it didn't waste time with all these plot conventions which aren't usually ever that interesting anyway. In most cases, I'd rather be spared unconvincing dialogue and phony relationships. I liked this movie. I thought the original short was kind of nice as well. B

After that we watched the Oscar winning animated short film Peter and the Wolf (2006). It's the music and the story by Tchaikovsky. It was nice. Cute, right? The music was nice. The duck was darling. The cat was funny. It was charming. I didn't really connect to it though. C