The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Live Action Films
Ave Maria:: A Palestinian-French film that is, of all things, a comedy, this one
concerns a hardcore orthodox Jewish family who gets into a traffic
accident at a West Bank convent of catholic nuns on Shabbat. The Jews
can't use any technology on Shabbat, while the sisters have all taken
vows of silence. Hijinx ensue, albeit not as many as I was expecting,
and the entire thing is resolved through a nun suddenly possessing the
advanced skills and tools to do something she realistically could have
done at any point prior to the movie's commencement. Still, not every
film has to be Hamlet, and this one's at least all right.
6/10
Shok:: Hey guys, did you know the war in Kosovo was horrible for children?
Because it was! Shok is a movie about two Albanian boys in Kosovo
dealing with efforts to alternately Serbify and eventually Ethnically
Cleanse their village, and it is approximately as uplifting and
warm-hearted as you would expect as a result. The film has a couple of
quite good scenes, but overall it's nothing more than another "children
in hell" flick, a sob-story archetype that the Oscars are not new to.
5.5/10
Everything Will Be Okay: Longest of the movies on offer, this German film features handheld
cameras documenting a father picking his daughter up from his ex-wife's
house for the weekend, buying her toys, taking her to the amusement
park, and then embarking on a complicated scheme to abduct her out of
the country using falsified documents. Filmed more or less from the
perspective of the daughter, an eight-year-old girl who slowly comes to
realize what is happening, the movie is intriguingly well-made, but has
the unfortunate quality of spending most of its runtime waiting for the
character in question (the little girl) to catch up to what the audience
already knows. Still, the film ends strongly, and has a true-to-life
feel throughout.
6.5/10
Day One: A complex, multifaceted story about how much Afghanistan sucks, Day One
follows an Afghani-American translator on her first day in-country with
a force of US military personnel, as they try to track down a bombmaker
allied with the Taliban and accidentally stumble upon the bombmaker's
wife, currently in labor, whose medical situation necessitates
treatment. Instantly, a hundred complexities of local custom, religious
scruple, guest-laws, and medical training pop up, forcing everyone to
struggle to figure out what to do. The situation is highly contrived,
but the movie gets a lot across in a little time, and has a cohesiveness
to it that the others on the same theme lack.
7/10
And the Havoc award for Best Live Action Short Film goes to...
Stutterer: Admittedly, this is a close one, and in many ways the best of a mediocre lot, but Stutterer was at least entertaining in a way that most of the other films were not. A typographer with a terrible stutter who has been in an online relationship that is suddenly coming offline stresses out over what to do to avoid revealing his crippling inability to speak. The setup isn't revolutionary, and the film ends on a rather pat note, but the film has an interesting style to it, and is written well enough to push itself over the top. Not a great year for the short films, but one perseveres.
7.5/10
Next Time: The Coen Brothers take us back to Hollywood's golden age.
Stutterer: Admittedly, this is a close one, and in many ways the best of a mediocre lot, but Stutterer was at least entertaining in a way that most of the other films were not. A typographer with a terrible stutter who has been in an online relationship that is suddenly coming offline stresses out over what to do to avoid revealing his crippling inability to speak. The setup isn't revolutionary, and the film ends on a rather pat note, but the film has an interesting style to it, and is written well enough to push itself over the top. Not a great year for the short films, but one perseveres.
7.5/10
Next Time: The Coen Brothers take us back to Hollywood's golden age.
No comments:
Post a Comment