Ireland’s Oscar-nominated short film ‘Boogaloo and Graham’ (ShortsHD)
Every year at the Oscars, the same four or five feature films are mentioned over and over again. Then they come to the shorts category and everybody looks confused since there was never anywhere to see the things. That’s changed in recent years with the increasing popularity (in arthouses, at least) of the Oscar nominated short film programs.
All three programs (Live-Action, Documentary, and Animation) open in limited release this Friday. My reviews of the first two ran this week in Film Journal International.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences votes each year for their favorite live-action short films, it can often seem as if they’re aiming for a smorgasbord appeal: something serious, something off-the-wall, a couple of snippet comedies, and at least something in black-and-white. The 2015 program, now a reliably audience-pleasing fixture on the art-house circuit, chucks that template in favor of more thought-out offerings that for once downplay the quirk…
The Oscar-nominated documentary short ‘White Earth’ (ShortsHD)
There are some years when the nonfiction shorts nominated for the Academy Awards can be realistically seen as a menu of the world’s problems: short dispatches of despair and terror, war and its consequences, from far-flung countries and ignored communities. This year’s program has some of that quality to it as well; there is, after all, something about the form that seems to necessitate the choice of uncomfortable topics. But more than most years, this time the problems at hand are more personal than geopolitical…
Into the Storm: Perhaps running away from the tornado would be wise. (Warner Bros.)
So there’s a big tornado coming. No, make that a lot of tornadoes. What to do? Well, maybe just run right into it with your cameras rolling. That’s the basic premise for Into the Storm, a rather disastrous disaster flick that tries to update Twister for the social media age.
My review of Into the Storm, which blows into theaters for a likely very brief stint starting tomorrow, is at Film Journal International:
Sometimes there’s nothing else to do but shout “Oh my God!” and breathlessly inquire “Is everybody okay?” That is just about the extent of memorable dialogue from Into the Storm, in which a desperate team of storm-chasers, some school kids, and a supersized tornado converge on a small rural burg whose McMansions and car dealerships are just kindling for the conflagration that everybody paid to see…
Which of these Guardians of the Galaxy has an awesome mix-tape on their Walkman? (Marvel / Walt Disney Studios)
It’s big, it’s everywhere, it’s somehow much better than your average Marvel output—even Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Guardians of the Galaxy is playing now throughout the known universe; check it out.
My article “Guardians of the Galaxy out-Whedons The Avengers” is at Short Ends & Leader:
There’s a lot to appreciate—and maybe even love—about Guardians of the Galaxy. The oozing and eager-to-please sprawl of Gen-X references, from Mom’s ‘70s pop music mixtape to hero Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, surfer-dude sly) romancing the green-skinned assassin babe Gamora (Zoe Saldana) by referencing the “legend” of Footloose. Banter threaded slyly through the action instead of airdropped in by executive committee looking for humor beats. A talking raccoon skilled in jail-breaks and bomb-making. David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”. A genocidal villain thwarted by a dance-off. The two-hour running time, practically unheard-of brevity for modern blockbusters. Howard the Duck…
The Oscar-nominated ‘August: Osage County’ – #13 of the year’s top 25 films covered in ‘Eyes Wide Open: 2013’
The best approach to take to tonight’s blitzkrieg of hype, blather, nonsense, tears, bad jokes, and long strange stretches of awkward silences—we’re speaking, of course, of the 86th Academy Awards—might be that proffered by Anthony Lane:
Whether Leonardo DiCaprio or Matthew McConaughey, or neither of them, will be crowned Best Actor is a matter of such brazen unimportance that we have gone crazy trying to call it.
Brazen unimportance, indeed. That being said, it was a fantastic year for film. And if it takes a gargantuan mediapocalypse like tonight’s Oscars broadcast to bring attention to some of those films, if sending actors strutting down a red carpet and answering the same questions they’ve been answering for six months now will get another few thousand people to seek out August: Osage County, then so be it.
I covered many of the Oscar-nominated films in this year’s edition of my annual film guide, Eyes Wide Open — it’s available in paperback or more instantaneously in ebook from. Here’s a quick rundown of the Oscar-nominated films included in the book and where they ranked in my lists:
12 Years a Slave (Best Picture, Actor, Actor-supporting, Actress-supporting, Costume Design, Director, Editing, Production Design, Adapted Screenplay) — #2: “Steve McQueen’s blistering adaptation of Solomon Northup’s pre-Civil War memoir about being kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana is memorably horrific and heroic in equal measures.“
Gravity (Best Picture, Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Director, Original Score, Sound Editing Production Design, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects) — #3: “Alfonso Cuaron’s stunning outer-orbit thriller hinges on the parallel between a character’s personal isolation and the terrifying physical isolation of space.”
The Wolf of Wall Street (Best Picture / Actor / Actor-Supporting / Director / Adapted Screenplay) — “An overly slick comedy with painted-on cynicism.”
Inside Llewyn Davis (Best Cinematography / Sound Mixing) — #9: “The Coen brothers are caught between their Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou? modes in this wintry dream-odyssey of a deadpan comedy swaddled in gorgeous music.”
August: Osage County (Actor, Actress) — #13: “A saga of family and dysfunction—cleanly truncated by Tracey Letts from his 3-hour-plus Pulitzer Prize-winning play—whose dark, acid humor never undercuts the recurring tragedy glowering underneath.”
Frozen(Best Animated Feature) — Honorable Mention: “Disney’s impeccably animated return-to-form is both Broadway-ready musical and sweetly inspirational sibling melodrama where for once the choice for the heroine isn’t which man to choose.”
‘Much Ado About Nothing’ – No Oscar nominations but #18 of the year’s top 25 films covered in ‘Eyes Wide Open: 2013’
Lastly, here’s a few of the films most deserving of gold statuettes that were most egregiously overlooked but made it into Eyes Wide Open:
Stories We Tell — #1: “Sarah Polley’s fractured family history is a beautiful and thoughtful story about how our pasts don’t just happen, they’re created.”
Upstream Color — #8: “A metaphysical love story that baffles and excites in almost equal measures.”
Much Ado About Nothing — #18: “Joss Whedon’s minty-fresh adaptation turns his team of quick-witted TV actors on Shakespeare’s most durable comedy and comes up a winner.”
Last word on the Oscars, as often makes sense, to Anthony Lane:
We are already looking forward to looking back in anger at the awards that confounded our hunches, at our loss of the office sweepstake, at the stop-start tears, the sagging jokes, and the normally rational women who choose, for one night only, to dress like exploded cupcakes.
It’s hard to know what to make of Jia Zhangke’s newest film A Touch of Sin. On the one hand, it’s a docudrama that links together four based-on-reality stories about Chinese people taking desperate measures in horrendous circumstances. But as much as it reminds one of great novels about people caught in the capitalist machinery of the 19th century (Balzac and Dreiser, in particular), it’s also a stylized revenge film with some surrealism thrown in for good measure. Whatever it is, this is not a film to miss.
Winner of the best screenplay award of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, A Touch of Sin is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International; here’s part:
The closest you’ll come to a happy person in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin is the grim-faced loner Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang). Unfortunately, he’s probably a psychopath. The film’s three other major characters are all eventually thrust into a type of insanity, but Zhou is the only one who seems to have both already crossed over and be content with it…
The 2013 Rhode Island International Film Festival ran from August 6–13, with films playing mostly in Providence. It was a somewhat sparsely attended but extraordinarily well-curated event; nothing that a little more publicity couldn’t help.
My overview of some of the films that played ran in PopMatters, here’s some highlights:
Hank and Asha — Surprisingly inventive and adorable little epistolary digital romance.
Cate Blanchett teetering on the brink in ‘Blue Jasmine’
Woody Allen’s newest comedy of social status and anxiety, Blue Jasmine, had a quiet launch this week, almost as though the studio thought that it would sell itself. It might not be his funniest movie in some time but it does feature the best lead performance that he’s directed in years. That would be Cate Blanchett, stepping out of Galadriel’s diaphanous glow and tackling a real-world character with an almost frightening intensity.
Woody Allen knows that sometimes it’s best just to throw characters into the deep end and see if audiences want to swim with them. By the time we meet his newest creation, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), she’s in full meltdown, barely holding it together with Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and enough self-delusion to power a third-party presidential campaign…
Back in 1962, the 36-year-old Mel Brooks was watching an avant-garde film when an old man behind him wouldn’t stop with his grumpy and frustrated running commentary. Brooks turned this experience into his own short film, The Critic, in which he ad-libbed over some abstract animation; borscht belt meets the downtown art scene.
The result was a three-and-a-half-minute piece of genius that won the 1963 Academy Award.
Just in time for the election comes Split: A Deeper Divide, a documentary about the nation’s partisan divide. My review is running now at Film Journal International:
The nation is hopelessly divided; Washington is broken; people only listen to news pre-slanted to their ideology; there is no room left for even-tempered discourse. We have heard all this before, which doesn’t mean that Split: A Deeper Divide, a film about the state of American political partisanship, doesn’t tackle a worthy subject. (That would be like saying that since we have already been told war is hell, every war film after All Quiet on the Western Front has been a waste of time.) But it also doesn’t mean that this film brings anything new to the topic.
Split: A Deeper Divide is playing now in limited release and will be expanded to other markets later in the month.
One of the greater film surprises of 2012 was the blink-and-you-missed-it Sound of My Voice, which came out on DVD last week. My review is at AMC Movie Database:
Zal Batmanglij’s canny and suspenseful head-knotter Sound of My Voice initially seems of a piece with films like Martha Marcy May Marlene, United Red Army, and the new festival film First Winter. It, too, revolves around a small gang of earnest believers following a leader whose motives are suspect at best. Where Batmanglij’s film stands apart is in its unalloyed skill and confidence — this is one of the most assured feature debuts in recent memory — and in his ability to turn this exploration of cult indoctrination into both a profound character study and a nail-biting thriller. But for a conclusion that arrives long before the audience is ready for it to be over with, this would have been the runaway indie hit of the year…
For years now, the nearly perfect organization StoryCorps has been traveling the country and giving people the opportunity to just sit down and tell a story about themselves, a friend, family member, or just life. The recordings (which run the gamut from the quotidian to the heartbreaking) are then stored at the Library of Congress, some 40,000 interviews since 2003. It’s an incomparable trove of oral history that will leave future researchers bowing in gratitude.
Their newest project involves putting some of their stories to animation. The result has a This American Life bounciness to them (mostly due to the music), but with a gutsy level of emotion that’s difficult to explain. John and Joe, about one father’s horrendous loss on 9/11 (StoryCorps aims to record at least one interview for each person killed that day), is one of the more memorable short films not just from this program, but from anywhere in recent memory.
You can watch John and Joe here:
One of the other incredibly heartwrenching shorts from StoryCorps’ 9/11 project is Always a Family, watch it here:
Some of the most discomfiting imagery in films about the Holocaust comes not from wartime footage showing the savage effects on the prisoners or even the ghostly sites themselves. What creates the most emotional dissonance is more often the sight of these places of unbelievable butchery now sitting in well-manicured European suburbs, woven fully back into the fabric of everyday life. It begs the question: How does one live in the shadow of the unimaginable? In David Fisher’s emotional and acidic documentary Six Million and One, he digs into this question on a broader level, in effect asking: What is the point of memory? What and whom does it serve?…
Six Million and One is playing now in very limited release.
Macarena Aguiló’s melancholy documentary about her childhood spent in group safe homes with other children of Chilean revolutionaries is like some home movie for the generation who thought they could change not just the government, but the very idea of family itself…
The Chilean Building is playing now in limited release; it not near you it should be available on DVD and On Demand soon. My full review is at Film Journal International.
All three programs (Live-Action, Documentary, and Animation) open in limited release this Friday. My reviews of the first two ran this week in Film Journal International.
Chris Barsanti 
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