Butler's Cinema Scene

OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORTS My rating: A- (Opens February 1 at the Tivoli)

No MPAA rating

 Maybe it’s fallout from the silent film “The Artist” cleaning up last year.

In any case, all of the nominees in the Oscar’s current animated shorts competition are wordless. No dialogue at all.

This makes for rather intense (but highly enjoyable) viewing. These stories are told almost entirely through their visuals, which actually requires more dedication on the part of the viewer. With most movies you can close your eyes and figure out what’s going on through the dialogue.  Not here.

MAGGIE SIMPSON IN “THE LONGEST DAYCARE”’ (David Silverman/ USA/ 5 minutes)

Maggie, the pacifier-sucking youngest member of the cartoon Simpson clan, stars in her own short film.

The film follows Maggie’s day at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, where right off the bat infants have to endure a TSA-style frisking (a sign advises that “Your freedom is assured by our probing”).

Maggie is then led past the area for gifted kids (they have their own art studio and orchestra) and left in the “Nothing Special” area where the fingerpaint comes in two colors: “gray” and “bleakest black.”

Mostly the film is about Maggie’s efforts to protect from a violence-crazed kid a caterpillar who during the course of the day forms a cocoon and finally emerges as a gorgeous butterfly.

As you’d expect from a Simpson-inspired effort, “The Longest Daycare” packs a good deal of biting social commentary into its five minutes.  What you might not anticipate is the uncharacteristic sweetness of its central message.

“ADAM & DOG” (Minkyu Lee,/USA/16 minutes)

A playful dog and a naked man explore an environment of lush green forests and sweeping savannas of golden grass. They play fetch. They curl up together to sleep.

Then a naked woman appears and the dog finds he is no longer man’s best friend.

Minkyu Lee’s take on the Biblical Book of Genesis is visually gorgeous and a bit sad.

“HEAD OVER HEELS” (Timothy Reckart and Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly/ UK/ 11 minutes)

Here’s a nifty allegorical fantasy rendered in first-rate Claymation-type animation.

A married couple live in a house floating in the sky. But the emotional distance in their relationship now manifests itself in a strange way.

The laws of gravity have been suspended. One walks on the floor, one on the ceiling.

The two don’t speak to each other. They live their lives just feet apart (key appliances like the refridgerator are rigged to a system of pulleys that allow them to be lifted/dropped from above to below) but for all intents and purposes, they reside in different worlds.

“Head Over Heels” depicts these two slowly rekindling the affection they once shared. Their reconciliation is quietly

compelling.

“PAPERMAN” (John Kahrs / USA/  7 minutes)

This Disney offering, rendered in gorgeous black and white, is both a romantic comedy and a Kafkaesque look at the American workplace.

A young man waiting for the el notices a gorgeous girl. He’s so stunned by her beauty that he forgets to board his train.

Once behind his desk in a high rise office filled with fellow clerical drones (all living in fear of a looming supervisor), our hero notices the girl in a building across the street. Desperate to contact her, he turns the papers on his desk into airplanes, which he sends soaring between their buildings.

But he’s a lousy shot and eventually it’s up to the hundreds of paper airplanes to develop a life of their own and bring this long-distance romance to fruition.

Though a cartoon, “Paperman” has some spectacularly cinematic camera angles…it could easily have been shot as live action. Indeed, its vision of a big city (I’m thinking Chicago) is astonishingly detailed.

“FRESH GUACAMOLE” (PES / USA/ 2 minutes)

This stop-motion effort shows how to prepare guacamole from various household items.

Human hands (that’s all we see of the cook…hands) slice and dice hand grenades (in lieu of avocados). A baseball is chopped like an onion. A red pincushion is diced like a tomato.  A green golf ball is squeezed like a lime.  Green lightbulbs are opened and the filaments removed as if they were peppers.

Finally the ingredients are all mashed together and served with poker chips (standing in for nachos).

Palyful and inventive. Yum.

| Robert W. Butler

 

 

OSCAR NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORTS My rating: B+ (Opening Feb. 1 at the Tivoli)

 

There’s a thematic consistency to this  year’s Academy Award-nominated slate of short live action films.

Children. Old people. Death.

Not many smiles in this collection, but lots of heart-wrenching substance.

 

Wow. Here’s a visually splendid, morally gnarly bit of sci fi/fantasy with a big dose of steampunk sensibility.

Rijckx (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a young man who roams the city streets in a khaki World War I-era greatcoat while toting a bizarre camera.  His job is to take pictures of shadows. More specifically, his work involves going to the locale of strange and bizarre deaths, waiting until through his camera lens he can see the death re-enacted by…well, ghosts, I guess…and then take his “photos” to a Collector of Shadows (Peter Van Den Eede) who lives in a mansion with an endless hallway lined by thousands of shadowy portraits of individuals at the moment of their deaths.

Apparently Rijckx has been doing this for decades. Long enough, anyway, to have captured 10,000 of these images. The Collector notes that having reached this magic number, Rijckx can either return to normal life or continue his work with the camera.

Tom Van Avermaet and Ellen DCe Waele’s film takes our moody hero back to an encounter with a madwoman (Laura Verlinden); now he will try to undo the tragedy which drove her over the edge.

Okay, that’s a clumsy explanation of an eerie, weirdly poetic film. But this haunting short will stick with you.

“HENRY” (Yan England / Canada / 21 minutes)

We first see the aged Henry (Gerard Poirier) sitting at a piano, playing a beautiful piece. He then calls out to his wife (she must be in another room) that he’s going out.  At a sidewalk cafe Henry encounters a woman (Marie Tifo) and suddenly finds himself abducted by men in black.

He awakens strapped to a bed in some sort of prison or hospital. The woman is there, probing his memories, particularly his memories of life with his wife, a fellow musician whom Henry met while serving in World War II.

Our protagonist is confused, alarmed, yet determined to escape and get to the bottom of this mystery.

Savvy viewers will probably figure out early on what Henry’s dilemma is all about, but that hardly matters, given the achingly emotional coda on which Yan England’s French-language concludes. Devastating.

“CURFEW” (Shawn Christensen / USA / 19 minutes)

A black comedy with achingly delicate undercurrents, “Curfew” begins with Richie (Shawn Christensen) opening up his wrist in a bathtub.  His suicide is interrupted by a phone call from his estranged sister Maggie, who says she has an emergency and needs Richie to look after his niece.  She’s exhausted all other possibilities…Richie is her last chance.

 

Figuring that dying can wait another day, Richie bandages up his wrist and soon finds himself on a night out with little Sofia (Fatima Ptacek), a precocious seven-year-old whom he hasn’t seen since she was a baby. Over an evening spent mostly in a hip bowling alley, the two move from wary suspicion to something like genuine affection. It’s a connection of blood that manages finally even to soften Maggie (Kim Allen), a victim of spousal abuse who finally sees in her brother an ally rather than an antagonist.

 

“Curfew” is a slight thing, but the three central performances are hugely effective.

 

“BUZKASHI BOYS” (Sam French and Ariel Nasr / Afghanistan /  28 minutes)

Rafi (Fawad Mohammadi) works in his father’s blacksmith shop in wintry Kabul, Afghanistan. He hates the drudgery and would much prefer to hang out with his orphaned pal  Ahmad (Jawanmard Paiz), a street urchin who lives by his wits.

Both friends are obsessed with Buzkashi, the Afghan national sport, a sort of tribal version of polo in which skilled riders try to make a goal not with a ball, but with the headless corpse of a freshly-killed goat. Ahmad, a born risk taker, swears he’ll find a way to get his own horse so that he, too, can be a Buzkashi player.

Shot on the streets of Kabul (the footage of a real Buzkashi contest, played out in a snowstorm, is spectacular), “Buzkashi Boys” feels absolutely authentic. And the performances of the two boys are remarkable, with Paiz perfectly capturing a sort of Artful Dodger eagerness and Mohammadi employing his soulful, haunted eyes to suggest Rafi’s desperation at being caught between romantic dreams of escape and his far more sobering reality.

“ASAD” (Brian Buckley / South Africa / 18 minutes)

Asad (Harun Mohammed) lives in a coastal Somali village and dreams of being a pirate.

Literally. His older friends go out to sea each day with rifles and rocket launchers, stopping passing ships and holding the crews for ransom.

Though he protests that he’s ready for action, Asad is too small and too young for these adventures. Instead he is apprenticed to an aged fisherman (Ibrahim Moallim) who predicts that someday Asad will return with a catch unlike anything anyone in the village has ever before seen.

Meanwhile our young hero must try to negotiate his way around the armed and triggerhappy rebels that frequent the village.

“Asad” finds tragedy and absurdity in a loose riff on “The Old Man and the Sea.” The players are nonprofessionals, and it sometimes shows.

But technically “Asad” is a small wonder, with cinematography and editing that captures an off-the-cuff, captured-on-the-fly feel reeking of authenticity. And the musical score by Lebanese oud virtuoso Marcel Khalife (the oud is a sort of Middle Eastern guitar) is nothing short of spectacular.

| Robert W. Butler