By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — One of the perks of writing this column, aside from my huge salary, is that I get to preview new films. I just had the opportunity to watch the collection of short animated and live action films that have been nominated for the 2013 Oscars in their respective categories. It will open at the Ken Cinema on February 1st. Although none of them have specifically Jewish plotlines, I’m reviewing them because I like short films and have a compulsion to be ecumenical.
The animated films run the gamut from conventional cartoons, computer generated imagery, and stop action animation. PES’ Fresh Guacamole blends and purees unlikely ingredients, some of which are visual puns, into the bright green paste that gets swooped up in chips. You may have that déjà vu feeling seeing it because it preceded screenings of The Artist. John Kahrs’ Paperman never soars very high even though this trite tale is about how a man tries to reconnect with a woman with whom he is smitten by tossing paper airplanes at her office window. Not only is its ending predictable, but the characters are familiar looking probably reflecting Kahrs’ extensive experience at Disney. David Silverman’s The Longest Daycare has a clever premise. Maggie Simpson is dropped off at the Ayn Rand Daycare Center where security is tight and toddlers are immediately classified by a machine as either gifted or nothing special. Unfortunately, Atlas gets shrugged as the narrative shifts to Maggie figuring out how to save a butterfly from a baby who delights in smashing butterflies against the wall.
Timothy Reckert’s stop action Head Over Heels exhibits more stylistic and substantive originality. A married couple has grown so estranged that the husband dwells on the floor and the wife walks on the ceiling of their house that floats through space unable to establish what is up or down. Inhabiting different planes takes effort on their parts to capture the attention of the other and remain at the same level, but sometimes love can exert more pull than gravity.
Adam and Dog imagines what life must have been like for the first dog in the Garden of Eden. The director shoots most of the scenes from a wide angle perspective to encompass the diversity and expanse of paradise. The silhouetted nighttime images are particularly striking. Adam bonds with the dog by feeding him food, throwing him a stick, and being fluent in barking. The dog reciprocates with companionship, lick, and retrieving the stick. The arrival of Eve momentarily threatens to sever the budding friendship, but she succumbs to the canine’s charms too. Based on its narrative and visual richness, I anticipate Adam and Dog will garner the Oscar.
All of the short live action films display technical virtuosity and dramatize compelling stories. The surreal Death of a Shadow directed by Tom Van Avermaet recounts the tale of Nathan, a soldier killed in World War One. Instead of dying, Nathan struck a bargain with the devil to live forever in return for photographing the shadows of 10,000 people in their death throes. Nathan performs this ghastly task in order to be reunited with his lover Sarah, but his dilemma is that if he escapes death, it will doom Sarah’s subsequent paramour to a premature demise. The gallery of shadows, the data base of potential victims, the Jewish names of the couple, and a brief reference to gassing allude to the Holocaust, other genocides, and the wars of the 20th Century.
Yan England’s Henry poignantly portrays an elderly pianist struggling to remember his daughter and deceased wife against the onset of dementia. He alternates between vivid recollections of his family and the frightening Kafkaesque strangers who have abducted and imprisoned him. Henry traverses the permeable boundary between the past and its obliteration several times as his consciousness of his prior life progressively disappears.
Shawn Christensen’s Curfew opens with Richie, a dejected drug addict, sitting in a bathtub of his blood after slitting his wrists. When the phone rings, he inexplicably answers it. His sister, who previously disowned him, urgently needs Richie to take care of her nine year-old daughter Sophia for the evening. Richie grasps the lifeline thrown to him and agrees though it is soon evident from the list of things he is permitted to do with Sophia that his sister still distrusts him. What begins as a combative relationship between Richie and Sophia mellows in the course of the night prompting Richie to reconcile with his sister. While the dialogue and acting are convincing, the insertion of an MTV-like video of Sophia dancing a la The Breakfast Club disrupts the emotional realism of the film.
Sam French’s Buzkashi Boys centers on the friendship of two boys growing up in Kabul. Rafi is a homeless orphan, Ahmad the son a blacksmith. Both share a passion for the Afghani national sport, Buzkashi, a game played on horseback in which the riders push a headless goat carcass towards a goal. Though the boys hang out together in the ruins of a castle that affords them stunning vistas of the mountains surrounding Kabul, the war does not appear to have affected their childhoods. Instead, what dims their prospects of competing in Buzkashi matches is Rafi’s poverty and the insistence of Rafi’s father that his son become a blacksmith. Nevertheless, they persist in hoping to fulfill their dream.
The choices confronting the title character in Bryan Buckley’s Asad are even more stark. While Asad yearns to join his brother’s band of Somali pirates, he also respects an old fisherman who encourages him to catch the biggest fish the village has ever seen. Carrying home a yellow fin tuna the fisherman caught, Asad witnesses a friend terrorized by the teenage commander of a paramilitary group and gets him to desist by giving him the tuna. The next morning he goes to the beach and finds the fisherman bleeding from a wound inflicted by the militia members who stole the rest of his catch. Sent out alone to prove his fishing prowess, Asad boards a drifting yacht that is littered with bodies from a pirate raid gone awry. Seizing the exotic pet of the yacht’s owner, Awad returns home a hero who landed the most unusual animal the ocean ever yielded. The interweaving of harsh circumstances, modernity versus tradition, powerful images, and Asad’s glorious triumph made this film my favorite to win the Oscar.
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