And Now for Something Completely Different
One of the things one notices after watching films for long enough is
that movies have their seasons, just like fruit. There is Oscar Season,
late in the year, when the studios release the movies they think have
the best chance of garnering awards from both the Academy and other
ceremonies. There is Blockbuster Season, generally from mid-May to late
September, when the schools are out and the studios drop their
big-budget action and effects showpieces to rake in as big of a
young-male demographic as possible. And then we have the period I like
to call "The Doldrums".
The Doldrums stretch from February
through April, and consist of the period when most studios drop the
movies that they think, in-house, cannot compete with either the
Oscar-dramas of late fall, or the blockbusters of high summer. These
are the films that, for one reason or another, have not inspired faith
from their own producers, and are therefore released against as little
competition as possible, in the hope that the sheer lack of anything
else worth seeing will enable them to do well. Studios don't always
know what they have on their hands, and sometimes a movie can be
relegated to the Doldrums by mistake, because of studio politics, or
just lack of imagination on the part of bosses. But that said, most
films wind up in the Doldrums because they're total crap.
Last
year, just as an example, the Doldrums brought us such scintillating
films as Tron Legacy, Battle Los Angeles, and Suckerpunch (which I
loved, but I admit is clearly a bad film). This year, the Doldrums have
already given me Red Tails (an early candidate for worst film of the
decade), Mission Impossible 4, and would have given me several more
turds had I not managed to stretch out Oscar season deep into February.
Looking ahead, I have to look forward to such shining lights as
Battleship, 21 Jump Street, This Means War, and the Lorax, all of which
are either currently in or about to enter theaters. Having exhausted
most of the hidden gems I can sense coming (there's always a few) and
with six weeks minimum of the Doldrums left to go, my stated goal of a
film a week is likely to lead me into unpleasant places in the near
future.
Which is all a fancy way of explaining why, this week, I
wrung a little bit more moisture out of the last remnants of Oscar
Season by going to see all five of the Academy Award-nominated
Live-action short films. My alternatives were on the order of Tyler
Perry's Good Deeds. Sue me.
Pentecost: Shortest and thinnest
of the bunch, this 11-minute send-up to a single joke is kind of out of
place, given its fellows. The story (if you can call it that) is about
an irish altar boy who is preparing to "perform" (what
do
you call what altar boys do?) at an important mass in his
home parish. The movie essentially plays like a particularly long
Monty-Python joke, with the priests and deacons speaking about the boys
like they're the coaches of a soccer team. The soundtrack is excellent,
and actors have good comic timing and expressions, but there doesn't
seem to be much point to it all.
6/10
Raju: The most "Oscar-like" of
the movies by far, and the one I was certain had won the award until I
got home and found out that it had not, Raju is about a German couple
who goes to India to adopt an orphan, only to find themselves in the
middle of a corrupt kidnapping ring. The write-up makes it sound like
an action film, which it is not, as well as an unflattering portrait of
India's society, poverty, and problems with corruption, which it
absolutely is. Very well-acted and shot, the film is quite
uncomfortable to watch, and gets across the utter alienness of a place
like Calcutta (to a westerner at least), as well as the ugly reality of
many "charities" in the third world.
7.5/10
The Shore: Longest of the five movies, and the one that actually
did
win the award, this movie stars Ciarán Hinds (aka Gaius Julius Caesar)
as a Northern Irishman returning home for the first time in 25 years,
and re-uniting with his ex-fiance and best friend. A careful, gently
meandering film, centered around a legitimately funny sequence involving
misunderstandings, mussel collectors, and a horse, the movie doesn't
have much of a point to make really, save that Ireland is pretty and
it's good to forgive people. A decent film, but light on substance, and
I admit to being surprised that the Academy chose it.
6.5/10
Timefreak: A hilarious send-up
to movies like Back to the Future or Primer, this one's about a guy who
invents a Time Machine and begins obsessively returning to the previous
day to "get everything right". Very brisk and tight, the movie gets a
lot across purely with its editing, and compresses what feels like a
longer movie's worth of material into an eleven-minute running time.
Michael Nathanson, playing the lead, gets the mad-scientist role down
pat, and the film's ending is perfect for its style. A real gem.
8/10
Tuba Atlantic: A movie like this
could somehow only come from Norway. An old man finds out he has six
days to live, and tries to complete his life's work with the help of an
"Angel of Death", a young girl sent to keep company of the dying by her
church group. Despite the subject matter, this is the funniest by far
of the five films, if only because it grants us the sight of an
octogenarian massacring seagulls with dynamite and a machine gun.
Twisted and yet oddball, this is one of the least morose dying-films
I've ever seen, and is filled with dark comedy, hilarious one-liners
(made more hilarious, I must admit, by how odd Norwegian sounds to my
American ear), and a completely ludicrous premise taken to its illogical
extreme by the end of the film. My personal selection as best of the
bunch, and by itself worth the price of admission.
8.5/10
Yes,
I know this film actually won the Academy Award in question already, so
this is kind of a day late and a dollar short, but Piper is still, by
an admittedly small margin, the best of the lot. Pixar's showcase of
how well they can animate animal behavior while still retaining the
emotion and coherence of the story they are telling is an amazing piece
of animation, better by a significant margin than the feature-length
movie it was attached to (Finding Dory). The story of a baby sandpiper
and the hermit crabs she befriends in trying to figure out how to find
food in the tide marks of the beach she lives on is charming and
gorgeous and funny and heartwarming all at once, and even though it's
Pixar again, and even though it's another funny animal short, and
even though some of the other nominees were more serious explorations
of the human condition, Piper is the best-made of all the films on
offer, and the most fun to boot. And so for the second year in a row,
Pixar takes home the Havoc award for Best Animated Short. No doubt they
will send out a press release soon.
