The Screengrab : short film

Oscar Shorts, Part 1: Best Live-Action Short Film

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

For years, the Academy Awards for Best Live-Action and Best Animated Short Film have been lost in the Oscar-night shuffle. Short films have fallen on hard times of late, and consequently most Oscar-viewers take the short film awards as an excuse to make a trip to the kitchen or the bathroom. Thank goodness for Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International, who in recent years have started distributing the Oscar-nominated short films as part of traveling programs in the weeks leading up to the ceremony. By making the films available to theatrical audiences, they're restoring some of the luster to these oft-overlooked categories. At the very least, they've allowed us to care about a race that's at least as interesting as some of the bigger-ticket categories.

This year's five nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film encompass a variety of genres and styles. The most expansive of the shorts, The Tonto Woman is set in the old West, and is based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. It tells the story of a cattle rustler who falls in love with a woman who's been kept in isolation after over a decade spent as the prisoner of the Mojave tribe. Working with a limited budget, directors Daniel Barber and Matthew Brown create a reasonably convincing version of the West, but some of the performances are lacking, and the pacing seems off. Still, Leonard's story is effective, and the film's final line is ideal, although it might've been even more affecting had the story not taken place in flashback.

The biggest crowd-pleaser of the bunch is Tanghi Argentini, a Belgian short about a middle-aged man who needs to learn the tango in two weeks to impress a girl he's met on the Internet. The film falls squarely into the ever-growing subgenre of dancing-salaryman movies (e.g. Shall We Dance?, both versions), and directors Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans do little to distinguish this from its predecessors. That said, the film has a certain amount of charm, especially when the protagonist's goals become clear.

Easily the least of the five shorts, Le Mozart des Pickpockets is a French entry about two down-on-their-luck Parisian criminals who adopt a homeless, deaf boy only to discover that he has a natural talent for picking pockets. The plot might lead one to believe that the film is a cutesy-poo version of a Dardenne brothers film, but the story goes down relatively well. Where the film falls short is by miscalculating what makes the story interesting — by focusing too much on the sadsack adults and not enough on the enigma of the boy, much of the fascination is lost. As a result, the film's punchline feels misguided, and the consequences don't make much impact.

With their abbreviated running times, short films can work in unique ways that aren't shared by feature-length movies. While some filmmakers tell smaller-scale stories, others provide a glimpse into people's lives, unencumbered by the demands of conventional feature-film storytelling. So it is with the Danish film At Night, the story of three women in a hospital's cancer ward. Each woman is a terminal case, and rather than sending them off on inspiring globetrotting adventures (Bucket List-style), At Night simply immerses us in their routines — the long days, the visits from doctors and nurses, the families who come to see many of them, and the long nights during which they form a bond. Produced by Lars Von Trier's Zentropa Entertainment, Christian E. Christensen's and Louise Vesth's film is the most downbeat of the bunch, but it's also truer to the realities of terminal disease than almost all Hollywood portrayals of the subject.

But the best of the nominees is Andrea Jublin's Il Supplente (The Substitute), which tells the story of a substitute teacher who shows up in class one day and promptly begins to raise hell. The opening half of the film goes on a bit too long, but it's bracing in its anarchy, as the substitute cuts the teacher's pet down to size, taunts a fat kid by stealing his prized autographed soccer ball, and more. But where the film really takes off is the second half, when the truth comes out about the substitute teacher. I wouldn't dream of giving it away, except to say that the film's finale is flat-out perfect, not least because it's been set up so well. Most of the other nominated films in the category might have worked as literature or theatre, but Il Supplente is unimaginable in any other form, and Jublin never steps wrong in making it completely cinematic. It's not perfect, but it's the winner in the bunch.

Spotlight on Shorts: "gravida" and the Now Film Festival

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There was a time when short films were a part of practically everyone’s theatrical experience. In the days of double features, short films would be included in the program, sandwiched in somewhere between the serial and the newsreel. Sadly, those days are over. The small number of short films that do get projected tend to do so in a festival context, or as part of the occasional short-film program at your local arthouse.

The rest of them show online, on YouTube or MySpace, or any number of sites that specialize in short films. In the past decade, more websites have brought attention to young filmmakers by mounting online short film festivals, and the currently-in-progress Now Film Festival is no exception. Since October, the festivals review committee has been selecting one submitted movie per week to post on their site. Then the viewers give feedback on the films, and the best-received entries will progress to the final round of voting to be eligible win a new camera package.

There have been a number of worthy films to date, but the best of the lot thusfar is this week’s featured short, Lucas McNelly’s gravida. A far cry from the genre spoofery and juvenile humor many people have grown to expect from online shorts, gravida is a mature character study about a young pregnant woman trying to keep her loneliness at bay. From my original review of the film:

"gravida has much the same power as a good short story. It never overreaches for effect or tries to shoehorn too much into its relatively brief running time. It merely follows a situation to its logical end. We know just enough about its two characters to sympathize with where they’re coming from, and why they do what they do. . . Lucas McNelly has made a serenely confident short film, with which he shows a real facility as a director. He never tries to dazzle the audience with flashy technique or camera work, preferring his style to be dictated by his material. . . McNelly’s direction is subtle enough not to overwhelm the film, but strong enough to assure us that there’s a firm hand on the wheel. I’m eager to see what he does next."

Check out gravida and all of the selected shorts at the Now Film Festival web site, and don’t forget to vote for your favorites on MySpace's film page. The official gravida web site, which features links to other reviews of the film, can be found here.

Video of the Day: How to Sleep

Peter Smith — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Nowadays, we’re lucky if we get to see anything before the start of a feature other than fifteen advertisements and a dozen trailers for movies we don’t want to see, along with an exhortation not to bootleg the film that hasn’t actually started yet. Back in the 1930s, though, moviegoers were often treated to hilarious short films by the literary humorist Robert Benchley. Kino Video has a whole DVD collection of these shorts available, but it doesn’t include our favorite, the Oscar-winning How to Sleep. Luckily, YouTube comes through again. — Leonard Pierce