Short on Oscars

The Nuart Theater screened for audiences the Oscar Nominated Shorts for 2010. Quick capsule reviews follow after the jump…

In the ANIMATED category.

“French Roast,” appropriately from France, is largely a comic silent film about mistaken and prejudiced identities. Cute and affectatious. Made by The Pumpkin Factory using Digital 3D interpolation…

“The Lady and the Reaper” comes from Spain and is mistitled, as it should be called ‘A Hunky Doctor versus the Grim Reaper’. Again, silent digital 3D digital, where suicide is funny, and uses surrealistic imagery. Dr. Strangelove‘s signature end title music “We’ll Meet Again” again accompanies the tail of the piece, and again, used to comic affect…

“Wallace & Gromit’s A Matter of Loaf and Death” shows England’s best animated claymation of course where a new femme fatale bread mogul is in it for predatory business and/or redemptive revenge. It is Nick Park’s most expert W&G edition, with vaunted lighting and action sequences…

“Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” is a fantastical look at a storyteller’s skewed version of a classic, a comical turn at horrific imagination. It’s a brilliant comic ageist fable, with a mix of 2D and 3D digital animation.

Pixar Studio’s “Partly Cloudy” was previously released on the “UP” DVD edition, and profiles a dark cloud’s conceptive proclivities, and the comic harm it causes an innocent stork…

“Runaway” is the only hand-drawn, two-dimensional entry, about an out of control train. It’s highly comedic and utilizes abstract surrealism to express a political ‘message’ of class divisions and economic status, with a wry twist involving chaos theory. Highly imaginative and engrossing…

“The Kinetimograph” is the only dramatic film and is an example, in my opinion of how and why drama is much more of an unenviable task when it is presented in animated form. The story involves an inventor before the turn of the century, and old man in his attic with a film projector. The digital 3D animation is presented in roughly naturalistic and impressionistic design elements in this expository visual sonnet about the art of movie making. It is exquisitely textured but ham fisted to say the least…

The final digital animated short, “Logorama” is ‘transgressive’ according to my friend and screening partner for the night. Of course, she’s a bitter hipster that loves Kelly Clarkson. “Logorama” portrays a utopian apocolypse where ‘Hollywood’ and public media and consumer products quite literally are rocked and fall into the Pacific Ocean. It follows a homicidal Ronald McDonald, who is hunted by Michelin man cops. If there is a message to the film, it only centers around the idea that through image and media saturation, is today’s society inundated by the brand and logos and trademarked influence we all are subject to as consumers…

The LIVE ACTION shorts made up the second section of the programming, and started off with “Kavi,” a USC graduate thesis film. It’s an Indian labor struggle parable where a young man defies odds at a slave labored brick kiln. Drab and hopeless, I felt blatantly manipulated…

“The New Tenants” is a comic drug farce with big names on screen. David Rakoff has just moved into a New York City flat, visited by Vincent D’Onofrio and Kevin Corrigan. It’s a comedy of tragic errors. Helmed by video & commercial director Joachim Back, it is easily the finest crafted of the shorts, and perhaps the most darkly comic film I have seen in some time…

“Miracle Fish” tells the tale of an Australian elementary school boy on his birthday who experiences semi-supernatural events, which save him from a mass murderer. Trite and well constructed, it still aims too high…

Ireland’s “The Door” concerns itself with a story from the Chernobyl aftermath, involving a family of Russian refugees in this manipulative essay on social responsibility and innocent loss. Self-righteous bullshit if you ask me…

“Instead of Abracadabra” is what short films are all about. A shamed and failed son makes good at his father’s birthday party. This Swedish loser comedy has heart and laughs and drama and tension and all things good and wonderful. It’s like cotton candy. Too much of it can be a good thing!