February 25, 2006

MOVIES: Oscar-nominated shorts

Over the next few weeks, audiences in selected cities will have the chance to see the short films nominated for this year's Oscars, in both the live-action and animated categories. Short films don't get much theatrical play these days, so we usually find ourselves sitting through those categories at the Oscars with no clue who any of these nominees are. Both of these programs are entertaining, and if they're coming to your town, they're definitely worth seeing.

Of the live-action films, my favorite was Rob Pearlstein's "Our Time Is Up," which stars Kevin Pollak as a psychiatrist whose approach to analysis undergoes a radical change when he gets some unexpected news. I also very much liked "Six Shooter," the filmmaking debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, with Brendan Gleeson as a newly widowed man who meets a brash young man on a train; it's something of a shaggy dog story with Tarantino-like dialogue, and it beautifully balances the tragic and the rudely comic.

Sean Ellis's "Cashback" gives us the adventures of an art student working the night shift at a supermarket; Ellis gets the tone just right, and some nude scenes that could play as creepy and misogynistic if mishandled come off as sweet and affectionate. Runar Runarsson's "The Last Farm" is an Icelandic film about an elderly farmer tending to final errands before his daughter arrives to help him move into senior citizens' housing; it's a bit on the sentimental and predictable side, but the final images caught me by surprise and were quite moving.

I think the most likely winner is Ulrike Grote's "Ausreisser (The Runaway)," in which a young architect has his life disrupted when a small boy shows up on his doorstep one morning, demanding to be taken to school. Peter Jordan as Walter and Maximilian Werner as little Yuri are both very good, and though the final twists are somewhat derivative, Grote handles them in a most effective fashion.

On the animated side, my hunch is that the winner will be John Canemaker's "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation," which uses photos, home movies, and surprisingly light-hearted animation to tell the story of Canemaker's difficult relationship with his father; in tone, the film reminded me of last year's winner in this category, "Ryan." I thought the film was a bit too long, at 28 minutes.

Also on the long side (27 minutes) is Anthony Lucas's "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello," set against an odd mix of cultures and technologies. Steam-powered airships fly against polluted brown and orange skies; people are dying from a mysterious plague; and there's a vaguely Victorian atmosphere. The characters are presented almost entirely as silhouettes; it's lovely to look at for a while, but eventually monotonous at this length.

My own favorite of the animated films is "One Man Band," directed by Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews at Pixar, the story of two street musicians competing for the attention of a little girl who has a single coin to give away. As always with Pixar, every facial expression communicates volumes, and every gesture is precisely chosen.

The other nominees are Sharon Colman's very funny "Badgered," in which a sleepy badger finds that a pair of noisy crows is the least of his problems, and Shane Acker's "9," an odd movie (already being expanded into a feature) in which a mechanical spider-creature chases a pair of sock-puppet/teddy bear critters across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape; it's fascinating to watch, even if I don't have a clue what any of it meant.

Not nominated this year, but on the animated program as a bonus, is Bill Plympton's "The Fan and the Flower." Plympton's style is instantly recognizable, though less jittery here than it's been in the past, and he tells a weirdly charming love story involving a ceiling fan and a potted plant.

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