Category: Short
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The Girl in the Woods is about a missing college student. The missing guy’s fianceé asks his best friend to go looking. He discovers a forest nymph with seduces wayward men with her ability to prattle on about the freedom of the forest. It doesn’t end well. Director Rzayev tries to focus entirely on Girl’s…
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I’m not sure what the best thing is about Neighbors. There’s the comic pacing, there’s the comic acrobatics, there’s the story, there’s the acting. Co-directors Keaton and Cline quickly introduce this fantastic setup–Romeo and Juliet across a fence in an alley and then immediately get into two very complicated Keaton-fueled acrobatic mastery. It segues into…
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The Scarecrow opens with a lengthy practical effects sequence. Buster Keaton and Joe Roberts are roommates and they have an elaborately designed “concise” home. It’s like IKEA’s dream, only with manually pulled ropes instead of some kind of remote control. (There’s also a gag Chaplin had, a year later, in The Kid). Turns out the…
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Convict 13 has some undeniably funny stuff in it, but directors Keaton and Cline rely almost entirely on physical comedy. By physical, I mean actors doing choreographed comedy. Sometimes it’s Keaton, both for the smaller sequences and the larger, or Joe Roberts as a gigantic, revolting prisoner. Both senses of revolting. Oh, right. Real quick–Convict…
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One Week is pretty much perfect. Directors Cline and Keaton structure the short beautifully. It takes place over a week, the passage of days torn off calendar pages, as newlyweds Keaton and Sybil Seely set up their home. Literally, set up; they’re constructing their own pre-fab and things go wrong. The tone of the comedy…
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It’s impossible not to crack a smile at the end of LABEL, which dares the viewer not to laugh at it. Two women–Mary Krasnoperova and Kira Mathis–sit around and complain about the world and the amount of time it takes to drink coffee versus smoking a cigarette. At first, the acting from Krasnoperova and Mathis…
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Predator: Dark Ages is a fan film, simultaneously amazing, appropriately bad and inappropriately bad. It’s bad because director Bushe’s script borrows its structure and dialogue from the original Predator movie. Only he’s got Knights Templar saying the lines. It’s goofy. It could be funny goofy, but it’s not because otherwise Bushe handles Dark Ages completely…
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The ‘High Sign’ starts innocuously enough. Leading man Buster Keaton is out of work and answers a want ad to be a clerk at a shooting range. Maybe the tone of the short can be determined from Keaton stealing a cop’s gun to practice, because things don’t stay innocuous for long. In addition to the…
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The Hearts of Age is a funny short film. It’s weird funny, but it’s also funny funny. The weird has these grotesquely made up people–the film centers on an old woman, sitting on a bell, being pulled from below by this servant (in blackface). People pass her, going down these stairs. She watches them. Then…
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Forza Bastia chronicles a day in Bastia (France). A Corsican island. It’s an important day because it’s April 26, 1978, when Bastia (the soccer team) played PSV Eindhoven. Bastia was an obscure team and the first leg (I had to learn soccer terms) was a tie at zero. Jacques Tati shot Bastia at the time,…
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The Doll is adapted from a short story and falls victim to a standard adaptation problem. Director James uses the protagonist’s internal monologue for exposition; he doesn’t open the film with it either, so it just pops in a few minutes later. Luckily, James’s direction is good and his attention to detail meticulous. Oh, and…
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House Specialty chronicles the last few minutes of a day at a pastry shop in a small French town. The short’s credits are incomplete, but it appears the lead–the clerk–is played by Dominique Lavanant. She’s an attractive young woman surrounded either by old men or almost old men. The difference is the almost old men…
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Perihelion is a gorgeous film. Director Gallai composes the widescreen masterfully; he’s shooting digital, but uses Panavision aspect ratio to great success. The only times there’s any problem with the short’s visuals are when he and photographer (and editor and composer) Gergö Elekes hurry a shot. The film’s a rumination on sadness and loss, with…
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Evening Classes is a bit of a surprise; without Jacques Tati’s involvement, the short would almost work more as an examination of his films. With his involvement, Classes certainly has some outstanding moments, but director Ribowski and Tati (who also wrote the short) don’t really have a point. The film opens with Tati as M.…
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Keep Your Left Up is a genial little short set in a small French country town. The arrival of the postman sets off the short, which eventually has local do-nothing Jacques Tati in the ring against boxer Louis Robur. The charm comes mostly from the setting, Clément’s excellent composition and Jean Yatove’s oddly mismatched score.…
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The strange part of Los Bandoleros isn’t how it ends lame–it’s how well it starts. Sure, there’s this dumb story about how Vin Diesel, on the lamb in the Dominican Republic, has become a Robin Hood to the local people. Oh, right, forgot–It’s a Fast and the Furious vanity short “film” from Diesel. Undoubtedly something…
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It takes Fun Sunday! almost the entire short film to find its footing. The problem is director Berr; he has no comic timing. Sunday cuts a couple corners as far as budget–the sound cuts in and out, going over to music and not the background noise–but it’s rather ambitious stuff. Except for Berr. He doesn’t…
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In Service of Nothing doesn’t have a writer credit, which is unfortunate. Even though the narration is occasionally too heavy-handed, it still has its effect moments. Nothing is an unlicensed James Bond “potential” short film. Director Gibb does it as a pre-visualization, which lets him get away with a lot. The unfinished format conditions the…
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With the exception of being a Hollywood production (even if it’s a Hollywood production for video), Turbo Charged plays like an amateurish short movie make on an iMac. The kind of thing iMovie was great for back in the late nineties–lots of imaginative transitions, the omnipresent music so there doesn’t need to be any dialogue…
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Blue Dream runs just under five minutes. Until the end, I didn’t realize the protagonist isn’t a protagonist in a fictional story; rather Blue Dream is a very stylish documentary short. Elekes’s direction is fantastic; great Panavision-aspect composition. Great photography, great editing. And music. Elekes does almost all of it and the stuff he doesn’t…
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Quite a bit of Brute Wanted is rather funny. The whole idea is funny–dimwitted, failing actor (Jacques Tati) goes for an audition and it turns out he’s agreeing to wrestle a musclebound Russian grotesque. Tati’s got a nagging wife (Hélène Pépée) who also manages him. A lot of the short is spent on the fight…
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Just from the concept, Power/Rangers should be a lot better. Or maybe not. The concept–a gritty action movie “Power Rangers” adaptation, done as a short with a professional cast, professional effects–sounds really amusing. The result, however, is way too mired in continuity to be amusing for its fourteen minute run time. Or eleven and change,…
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Aftermath goes too far. Director Rzayev operates without taking the benefits of reduction and constraint into account. The short would work a lot better if he just cut out a couple money moments. It’s a short with one scene–Gizem Aybike Sahin argues with her brother, played by Berkan Uygun; most of that scene is exposition.…
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This Is Water is incredibly slick. Director Freidell is literally visualizing a commencement speech David Foster Wallace once gave. Wallace will mention cars on a freeway, Freidell has the cars on the freeway. Often, Freidell visually represents parts of the speech–in stylized graphics–in his shots. It’s slick. And that slickness, whether it’s how well Freidell…
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BLT runs twelve minutes. It’s probably about four minutes too long to be effective, since most of the run time is spent with Stephen Molloy (as a successful businessman) lecturing a homeless man, played by Ross Owen Williams. Director Cunningham’s script makes too many value judgments in the dialogue–Molloy’s just too obviously a prat–for the…
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The Last Days of Peter Bergmann is something of a procedural documentary short. A man, using the alias Peter Bergmann, checks into a hotel in an Irish town. A few days later, he is found dead on a nearby beach. Unable to ascertain his identity, the police use CCTV footage from around town, from the…
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The first seventy percent of The Honest Date is reasonably amusing. Director Feingold has his stars–Allyn Morse and David Lowe–bantering, rapid-fire, back and forth, usually about dating mores or pop culture and it works. Lowe is excellent, Morse has maybe one questionable delivery but she’s otherwise really good. They handle all the dialogue and make…
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Atropa is just short enough–around nine minutes–not to be too frustrating in its failures. Director Sasich–and his production designer, Alec Contestabile–do a great job creating this little space ship where the lead (Anthony Bonaventura) tools about and plays chess with his computer. Eventually he finds a ship and then things progress through a silly expository…
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Director Tanaka starts out Marie in a hospital–after a flashy opening title card–and it’s impossible to know where the short is going. It’s a scary enough hospital and the titular protagonist (played by Kasia Koleczek) is already on the gurney. There’s no music, just the sounds of the operation getting ready. It’s creepy. And it’s…
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Time Trap is a good combination of humor and visual effects mastery. Director Shanks–who also did the special effects–does some amazing work on the short. It’s about some space guy who crash lands on Earth after the world’s ended and he has to create time bubbles to look for parts to his spaceship. So there’s…
The Stop Button 