Monday, February 26, 2007

The 2007 Oscar Shorts... most of them, anyways

The 2007 Oscar nominated shorts turned out to be a fantastic way to spend an evening, and I really wish they could get these distributed a little more widely, so more people would be exposed to them. Some of the animated shorts from major studios find their way onto DVDs, at least.

The live action shorts were all pretty humorous, a nice change of pace from last year's musings on death and tragedy, and the supermarket. Most of them can't be done justice without spoilers, and their individual quirks lose something in description, but here's my shot at convincing anybody else they're worth checking out. “Eramos Pocos” is an amusing piece about a man whose wife leaves him, leading him to collect her mother from a nursing home and trick her into cooking and cleaning up after him and his son, while claiming his wife is just “er, away on a trip,” perhaps making him appreciate the true meaning of family for the first time through what turns out to be a fairly odd set of circumstances. “Helmer & Son” is a cute story about a man called to a nursing home where his father has locked himself in the closet and won't come out. Trying to coax their father out of the closet brings out a lot of the undercurrents in the family relationships, and draws out a long-awaited confrontation. I thought “Helmer & Son” was hilarious, watching this man try to deal with a surreal situation, while everybody acts like he's the one with the problem. “The Saviour” has to be the most controversial, and the one I'd least like to spoil, dealing with religion, adultery, and gullibility in the suburbs, and what people need to believe to make sense of it all, and definitely well worth seeing. If not for “West Bank Story”, I would think it was an easy favorite for the Oscar.

Binta y la Gran Idea” is a film set in Senegal that's really about two ideas, one big and one little, that Binta and her father have to make the world a little better. Binta and her schoolmates put on a play to put pressure on her very traditional uncle to let his daughter go to school, like her cousin Binta, and maybe change one life for the better. Her father sees how sometimes people miss the point of progress and comes up with his own big idea, and with Binta's help, tries to take it to the government. The scene where Binta's father has a friend show off his new watch that sounds an alarm every day at noon is classic, because his friend so taken with the technology (“It's Swiss!”), but Binta's father can only wonder, what happens at noon? His big idea about how to handle the influx of progress and take what's good from old and new is pretty funny, and “Binta y la Gran Idea” is a pretty neat film.

For me though, the best film out of all of them was “West Bank Story”, about two competing falafel stands in the West Bank, the Jewish-run Kosher King and the Arab-run Hummus Hut. The bitter competition between the two restaurants mirrors the larger conflict in generally ridiculous ways, and I burst out laughing at the first shot of the film, which is several Arab men doing a tough guy strut down the street snapping their fingers in an obvious homage to the Sharks and Jets. The whole film continues as a parody of West Side Story, with some pretty hilarious musical numbers. My favorite line was when this film's Juliet goes out chasing after a customer shouting that he forgot his package of hummus, only to be detained by Israeli soldiers who think she said she's got a package from Hamas. Standing in front of the soldiers in a hideous restaurant uniform with a kabob skewer through the hat, she asks “Do I look like a suicide bomber? You think I'd be caught dead in this?” More than any of the other films, I hope “West Bank Story” gets exhibited to a wider audience, because it's about the best straight comedy I've seen in ages, and maybe its Oscar win will do that.

Several of the animated shorts had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe, and while it's true I have been told I'm easily amused, I still think the films deserve the credit. I always thought the Scrat did more in five minutes to promote the Ice Age franchise than the rest of the movies combined, and “No Time For Nuts” is some of his best work. The Scrat stumbles on a strangely acorn-shaped time machine buried in the snow, and after darting about it in circles sniffing it over, he pushes a button and zaps his nut away, and what follows is the Scrat's chase through time after his nut. “Maestro” shows a singer warming in front of his dressing room mirror with the assistance of a robot arm in a pretty odd style, where the viewer's perspective rotates around the scene. The animation is tremendous in its three dimensional detail, down to showing the reflections in the singer's eyes, and the film is amusing, but it was the kicker at the end that made me laugh out loud.

I could have done without “The Little Matchgirl”, which is a competent but uninspiring retelling of the grim fairy tale done in a traditional two dimensional style, and I suspect it owes its Oscar nomination to nostalgia over the old Disney cartoons, but who knows. One of the shorts not nominated for an Oscar, “The Wraith of Cobble Hill”, is another inclusion that shows off a different style of animation, which I found interesting but ultimately uninspiring. “Lifted” is an almost purely visual short about an alien abduction with training wheels, as a gelatinous teenage alien takes his equivalent of a driver's test. It's Pixar's inclusion, to be released in conjunction with Ratatouille next year, and I'm sure that helped it get to Oscar night, even though it is quite funny.

Of the other shorts not nominated for Oscars, I was blown away by the technical detail of “One Rat Short”, the star-crossed romance of a street rat and a lab rat. An alley rat out on a rainy rooftop catches a whiff of a bag of cheetos blowing around in the wind, and chases it into an exhaust vent, only to accidentally stumble into a lab full of bar-coded rats in cages being experimented on by an automated system with a sinister glowing red eye. He finds a dainty white lab rat with big, watery blue eyes he sinks into, smitten immediately, and tries to take her away from it all. Like “Maestro”, it's a great visual use of what animation can do, moving in three dimensions in incredible detail, since there's no limitations of sets or crew and equipment.

Definitely at the other end of the spectrum in both tone and style, “Guide Dog” is a brief cartoon with a colored-pencil drawing sort of look about a dog applying for a position as a guide dog for the blind. Just watching the dog run through his whole repertoire in the job interview, showing vigilance, ferocious defense of his charge, enthusiasm, etc. all the while spraying saliva as he bounces up and down on his chair is hilarious. When he actually starts his assignments, he has the most ridiculous set of awful circumstances befall his charges, no matter how hard he tries to protect them. I couldn't believe how funny “Guide Dog” is, and I only wish I could find Plympton's other film with the same protagonist, “Guard Dog” (which apparently did get an Oscar nomination). Also absolutely laugh out loud hilarious in a much more low-key manner is “The Passenger”, this film about a kid out on an eerie, stormy day, walking home with his nose buried in a scary book also titled “The Passenger”. He gets on a bus, and engrossed in his book doesn't notice he's the only one on the bus other than this strange looking fish in a plastic bag on the seat next to him. The mood is somewhat creepy, so the kid puts on some headphones and puts on some groovy tunes to take the edge off, to disastrous results. It's also incredibly funny, with such a cool sense of its own style that I really wonder how it didn't make the cut for an Oscar.

The capper to the exhibition was “Gentleman's Duel”, which featured competing 18th century French and English aristocrats each seeking to charm the same woman, and gradually completely losing sight of her in their attempts to one-up each other. Finally, a challenge is made, and they agree to a duel... with giant steampunk robots. France vs. Britain is always an amusing clash of cultures to watch, and this is a cute little film crammed with sex and poodles, so of course I loved it. And I definitely could see myself being clumsy enough to follow in the footsteps of the Englishman who begins his seduction with “My darling, your grace is matched only by your boobies. I m-mean your beauty!”

Unfortunately “The Danish Poet”, this year's Oscar winner, wasn't included in the Magnolia Pictures' collection that I saw, so I can't comment on it. I also never got around to hitting the documentary shorts, which were showing once a day at an obscure theater, not really getting the star treatment. But I do hope more people see some of the great shorts that get nominated for Oscars and occasionally released on DVD, because there's some great stuff in there... every single one of the live action shorts was a much better film than Babel.

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