Shorts! - 2008 Academy Award Short Film Nominees

© 2009 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a one-night-only showing of all the Oscar-nominated short subjects, animated and live action, a few days before the ceremony. The public is invited, but the Samuel Goldwyn Theater only holds 1000 people, and the $5 (quite a bargain!) tickets sell out very quickly. Once again our friends Jon and Marion obtained some for us, and on the evening of February 17 the four of us, plus their son, Jason, and two other friends, Kathy and Dave, attended the showing.

This used to be quite the exclusive thing. Only in Los Angeles could you see these 10 obscure but wonderful little gems, the ones that most of the Oscar audience have never seen and know nothing about. On Oscar night America and the world will see 5-second clips from each film, and then the envelopes will be opened and two flabbergasted directors will stumble up to the podium, arguably the most moved of all the recipients that night, because … well, nobody’s ever heard of them, unlike the people who arrived on the runway and were swarmed by the media. And let’s face it, their Oscars are just as golden as the ones for Best Performance, and will look just as impressive sitting on the mantle. Plus, these people work harder than the Big Name Stars. Last year, we saw a stop-motion “Peter and the Wolf” that took the director five years to finish! They know their chances for glory are slim, the money is non-existent. They do it for love … and for the chance to move up to directing something that someone will actually see.

It’s a little different this year, and may become even more different in years to come. Before the show started Jon Bloom, the Academy Governor in charge of the short films branch, told us that these shorts were showing (just on Saturdays, and usually only once) in “all the major markets.” Also, they were available for downloading on iTunes. Some of them have already been posted (probably by the directors) on YouTube, and more will be available there after the ceremony. And they hope to get a television special soon. So, though I admit that I will miss the heady feeling of being one of the few who will have seen them, it’s far, far better that they be made available to a wider audience. As our host for the night, David Frankel, pointed out, everybody has made a short film these days. Excellent video cameras are cheap, a $500 home computer and free software can do things now that it would have taken $100,000,000 worth of mega-computers to do on a $200,000,000 budget only a few years ago. There are literally hundreds of thousands of short films out there. By Sturgeon’s Law, most of them are crap, it’s true … but with that many, a certain percentage will be brilliant. Imagine, then, the quality if you pick only the Top Ten. All of these ten films were awesome, to the point that all of the seven of us had a hard time picking two favorites. I can honestly say that if any one of them were to win, it would be deserved. Yes, I have my favorites, but they were all Oscar quality.

But there is one thing that I suspect will still be a bonus for us LA residents, and that is the Q&A afterwards with the nominees. All but the director of “Manon on the Asphalt” were present. I’d like to have heard more from all of them, but it’s a long night already with ten films, short though they are.

So let the ballots be opened. And the winner is …

ANIMATED SHORTS:

La maison en petits cubes (The House in Small Cubes) (12 minutes. Directed by Kunio Kato, Japan.) Hand-drawn. A series of islands in a vast sea turn out to be isolated houses, and we can see into the water to realize they are the tips of tall, submerged structures. An old man lives in one. There is a trapdoor in the floor, which he opens to drop in a fishing line. One morning he wakes up to find the floor is a few inches deep in water. He gets some bricks and goes up on the roof and begins to build another room on top of the old one. When it is done and he is moving his stuff upstairs, he accidentally drops his pipe into the trapdoor. He gets a diving suit and goes down through a series of deeper and deeper rooms. In each, there is something that reminds him of an earlier time in his life. He is nursing his dying wife. His daughter is getting married. His daughter is growing, then being born, then he is courting his wife.

I suppose a literalist could see this as a sermon on global warming, and that might have inspired it, but it is a wonderful metaphor for looking back on one’s life, and incredibly moving. IMDb.com

Lavatory – Lovestory (10 minutes. Directed by Konstantin Bronzit, Russia.) Hand-drawn. A very simple story, told in the simplest of line drawings, of a woman lavatory attendant who is looking for love. Impossible to describe it beyond that. It’s available on YouTube. IMDb.com

Oktapodi (2 minutes. Directed by Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand, France.) CGI. Two minutes? You’ve got to be kidding! But no, and it works very well. An incredible amount of incident and funny action is packed into the very short film about two lovesick octopi in a tank in a fish shop, and the efforts of one to rescue the other which is about to be turned into eight-legged calimari. IMDb.com

Presto (5 minutes. Directed by Doug Sweetland, USA.) CGI. This one has by far the greatest distribution, and you may have seen it, as it was the companion cartoon to WALL-E, and is on the DVD. It is very, very funny. A magician has two hats. When he puts his hand into one, it comes out of the other. Meanwhile, he hasn’t fed the rabbit that he’s going to pull out of the hat, and bunny is pissed off and determined to teach the magician a lesson until he gets his carrot. The comic possibilities are endless, and they use every one of them. IMDb.com

This Way Up (9 minutes. Directed by Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes, UK.) CGI. The story of two hard-luck undertakers who are trying to get a casket and body from the place of death to its burial place. After a huge boulder crushes their hearse they continue on foot, and things get worse and worse, until they are literally trekking through Hell. IMDb.com

So, my favorite? I usually go for comedy, but one of the two poignant ones is so good I’m going to make an exception. La maison en petits cubes is a little masterpiece. Too bad Mr. Kato spoke no English and his translator was not the best. I’d like to have heard more from him. It's interesting to note that in all 5 of these films, there is not one word of dialogue. It's just not needed.

LIVE ACTION SHORTS:

Auf der Strecke (On the Line) (30 minutes. Directed by Reto Caffi, Germany.) A shy plainclothes security man in a Zurich department store has a crush on a bookstore clerk. With all the cameras at his disposal he is able to spy on her between catching shoplifters. It seems creepy at first. He arranges to be on the train she will be taking, but is afraid to make a move. Then she shows up with another man. He’s crestfallen. But the couple have an argument and she leaves the train. Things are looking better! Now three thugs begin harassing the man, who fights back. The guard watches and does nothing. Let the bastard fend for himself! He gets off the train. The next day he hears that the thugs have beaten the man to death … and he was her brother. The man and woman begin a tentative relationship, but he is crushed by his sense of guilt. And then it stops. I have a distinct preference for stories with some sort of resolution, though I know that a resolution in real life can be illusory. But when I’m being told a story, slightly different rules apply. It’s still a very good film, but I hope it doesn’t win. IMDb.com

Manon on the Asphalt (15 minutes. Directed by Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont, France.) A young woman has been hit by a car and is lying on the street. She can see and hear the people around her, but she can’t move. She knows she is dying, and looks back on her life, and forward, imagining the reactions of those dear to her, and the things she will never do. Quite moving and understated. I kept wondering if she was going to be all right after all, but apparently not. (One of the things she worries about is if people can see her panties as she’s lying there. She’s embarrassed. Don’t you remember your mom telling you to always wear clean underwear so if you get hit by a truck you won’t gross out the EMTs? Well, I thought of a new ending. The first aid guy gives her some smelling salts and she sits up, shaken but okay. And the guy says “You’re going to be fine … and we saw your panties, but they were very, very clean.”) IMDb.com

New Boy (11 minutes. Directed by Steph Green, Ireland.) Based on a story by Roddy Doyle, a terrific Irish writer who wrote the source novel and screenplay for one of our favorite movies, The Commitments. It tells the story of Joseph, around 9 or 10, from some country in Africa, who seems to have come to Ireland to escape violence. (We see some back story of him in a bare-bones schoolroom where his father is teaching, and some of the thugs who infest Africa taking him away somewhere.) The other boys, and one little asshole in particular, immediately start testing him. Joseph is not too impressed, having seen much, much worse than these little Irish pricks can inflict. He fights back, gets in trouble, and in a very amusing scene where he and two others are called on the carpet by the rather incompetent teacher, begins to bond a little with the other boys through their shared dislike for the little tattletale girl who is “just trying to help” and understands nothing about how it is with boys, and their code of silence. They have trouble not giggling at the silly teacher. Maybe things won’t be so bad after all. IMDb.com

The Pig (Grisen) (22 minutes. Directed by Dorthe Høgh, Denmark.) This stars Henning Moritzen, who according to the director (who admitted she was a bit intimidated by him at first) is the Danish Olivier. Asbjørn Jensen goes into the hospital to have an abscess on his butt removed (that’s how he refers to it), and the doctor discovers some polyps that might be cancer. He seems to be comforted by a picture on the wall, of a pig leaping off a pier toward the water. He thinks this pig is his guardian angel. Then one day he wakes up and the pig is gone. All around the bed next to him is a huge Muslim family. The picture of the pig has been removed because they found it offensive, the family patriarch is very sick, and they feared the forbidden animal would upset him. This pisses Asbjørn off. He calls in the hospital administrator, and then his daughter, who is a lawyer. Daughter is chagrined to learn that Asbjørn wants to sue to get his pig back. She thinks it’s stupid … until one of the Muslims insults her, then she’s ready to take it to the Supreme Court. There is argument about whose rights are being violated, Asbjørn’s right to free expression by putting up anything he wants, or “Muslim sensibilities” concerning pigs. The issue is not resolved. Then, when they are alone again, the patriarch speaks for the first time, reveals that he’s been operated on for glaucoma … but he’s still blind! He couldn’t see the goddam pig in the first place! Asbjørn settles down, suddenly the pig doesn’t seem so important. Plus, he doesn’t have cancer. So what’s the pig deal?

(I felt early on that this was inspired by the odious flap over the Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed and Islam in general. The director confirmed that this was a starting point, though the story is much more universal than that. My use of quotes above should clue you in to what I think of Muslim sensibilities, but if you’re in doubt, I’ll spell it out for you: Fuck Muslim sensibilities. Yes, I know Christians have been known to fly off the handle for sacrilege, too, as in “Piss Christ” and the elephant dung Madonna. I don’t recall any death threats from mainstream Christian organizations, however … and in fact, some Christians support free speech, no matter how offensive. Not Muslims. Nobody stepped up and said “For cryin’ out loud, it’s just some silly cartoons.” There are moderate Muslims, I know that, too, but even they wanted the cartoons quashed. I say, suppress free speech all you want in your mosques and in your homes and in your own backward, oppressive countries, but stay out of my free press! That, or move to Afghanistan where you can be with your loathsome brothers.) IMDb.com

Spielzeugland (Toyland) (14 minutes. Directed by Jochen Alexander Freydank, Germany.) A gentile woman in WWII Germany has Jewish neighbors and longtime friends, a couple and a young boy, who are about to be sent to the extermination camps. When her son asks where they are going, she says they’re going to Toyland. Big mistake. Naturally he wants to go with them, and sneaks out. She’s frantic with worry, thinking he’s boarded the boxcar. There is a twist ending that was quite moving, but I felt the film was manipulative and something about it just didn’t sit well with me. IMDb.com