I've caught almost all of last year's Oscar nominated short films, and there's this recurring theme through three animated films and five live action films where they're all about death. Okay, one of the cartoons was about a hibernating badger, and one of the live action films was about working the late shift at the supermarket, but my god did that feel like death. There's certainly some quality stuff, and a couple deserving award winners, but yikes, it's like Hollywood thinks America's going down in flames and like the Greeks in the last hours of their civilization, our artwork is going to be non-stop death until the very end.
The 2003 Oscar shorts were also released in a collection, and it's a pretty stark contrast in tone. That collection had some lighter fare like "Mike's New Car", the Pixar short with the characters from Monsters, Inc.; "The Chubbchubbs!", a hilarious film about a janitor at a cantina packed with science fiction movie characters and carnivorous fuzzballs; and "Das Rad", a German film about rocks watching the temporary distraction of the rise and fall of civilization around them. The live action films included quite a bit of humor as well, like the Belgian film "Fait d'hiver", which is an urban legend about a man calling his house and having his five year old daughter (who was curiously reminiscent of Bryan's niece) tell him Mommy's playing in the bedroom with "Uncle Wim". The best film in that collection was "This Charming Man", a comedy about a Danish man whose unemployment paperwork gets screwed up, so he has to pose as a muslim asylum-seeker to get a job and takes Danish classes to hit on the instructor, and sees how differently Danish society is views Lars Hansen than they do his alter ego El Hassan. Either the Iraq war or rampant movie piracy must have the Academy a little depressed.
Some things are worth commenting on, like "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello", which in title and in a brief description sounds like a much lighter film than it really is. It tells the story of Jasper Morello, living in a very vertical and airborne industrialized society, navigating an airship into the unknown reaches of the sky with an old biologist on a mission to seek new medicines in the wild places of the world. However, Morello's mission is seeking a cure for a wasting, coughing disease afflicting his whole society, which he and the doctor find in a carnivorous jungle plant, which is kept alive for the journey home by feeding it the entire crew and all of Morello's blood. All the characters appear as black silhouettes against the white walls and grey clouds around the airship, turning a fantastic craft and landscape and a noble adventure into this blighted, diseased, black tale. The use of silhouettes, only shifting to detail to show the diseased, and the hungry, carnivorous plant, things that are impure and not whole, is visually interesting, as is the world of open-decked airships Jasper Morello comes from.
The Oscar went to "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation", which is an imagined attempt by a son to speak to his recently deceased father about his father's life and criminal past, and the bitter, violent anger that poisoned that life. I felt it was a well made film, and I found its style of animation reminiscent of children's drawings, all in bright primary colors, to tell the story of a son who still feels small facing the memory of his father, even after his death.
The live-action films include some wonderfully filmed stories like "The Last Farm" and "The Runaway" which are perhaps better left unspoiled, ironically about the end of one life, as an Icelandic farmer concludes his last day on the farm, and the beginning of another when a man is forced to spend his first day as a father by a small child who shows up at his door insisting to be his son who needs a ride to school. But still, the impact of our fragile mortality lingers over these films like a dying gaul bleeding to death in the seat next to you at the theatre.
I've always liked Kevin Pollack, so the first short I actually watched was "Our Time Is Up", which introduces the recurring theme of death the most directly. Pollack plays a disinterested, ineffective therapist who is diagnosed with terminal disease, who starts brusquely just speaking his mind with his stable of hopeless clients. His unprofessional outbursts and enjoying tweaking their phobias actually challenges them for the first time in their therapy. Being able to ignore the risk that his clients will quit therapy actually allows him to do something to help them. "Our Time Is Up" is an amusing comment on the way death is sometimes the only thing that can force us to live our lives.
The Oscar went to the Irish film "Six Shooter", which is about the weirdest, darkest, most violent, and unmistakably funniest of the whole lot. This was an absolutely bizarre yet absolutely captivating film about a man who has just lost his wife and a couple who've lost a baby to crib death, who end up in a train car with a young man who seems to have no sense of propriety. It's the best movie about suicidal and lapicidal train passengers being entertained by stories about an exploding cow with a climactic police shoot-out I've ever seen, that's for sure. Just a great, bizarre film, well deserving of an Oscar, that touches on death, religion, pain, companionship, courtesy, and police procedure. Seriously, my reaction was what the fuck, and wow.
Besides that I have to add a kind word for "Cashback", a film about working all night in a supermarket, and how to pass the time. It really goes through the expected bits about surrounding oneself with the dregs of the working world for mind-numbing tasks under a fluorescent glare, and the dreary horror of it all. Every worker has their own technique for managing the gray ocean of time. What made it interesting was the narrator's artistic bent and interest in still life leading him to embrace the timelessness void of the supermarket, fascinated by a near-infinite beauty he finds in passing moments. His main obsession is the striking beauty of the female form, that every woman unconsciously shines with in every gesture, and his inner life consists of converting tired, bored female shoppers doing the least sexy thing in the world into beautiful nude sketches. It's all about fascination, when something sublime appears out of the mundane, like plunging through a crack in a frozen lake but falling into warm blue water. This film struck a real familiar chord on the lute strings that I'm told are the strange, strange inner workings of my mind.
And while finishing this up, I did finally catch Pixar's contribution "One Man Band", and it is a cute little film at the end, and it charmed me once the scowling girl picked up the violin and played it herself. Now I can't decide whether to actually watch Cars or just return the DVD now that I've seen the short.
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