I’ll start with the animated shorts, because this
first
one was my favorite. Mt.
Head
(Atama Yama) is a bizarre Japanese fable
of a stingy man … and that’s all I’m going
to tell you. As it began, I thought the animation
was unique and very cool, particularly
compared to the soulless computer-animated entries that
followed. But the film as
a whole won me over – it’s narrated in a sing-song,
Kabuki-style
chant, and it’s
brilliantly inventive and hilarious. Best line
in a movie so far this year: “The man
threw himself into his head pond…” You’ll just
have to go see it to figure it out.
Unfortunately, it’s not online, but you can check
for a screening near you.
I don’t know how anyone could vote for another
contender
after Mt. Head’s riotous
uniqueness, but I’d be willing to be that the Academy
goes for one of the two slick,
computer-animated entries. Mike’s New Car
is a lazy, uninspired trifle using the
Monsters, Inc. characters voiced by John Goodman
and Billy Crystal. The
Chubbchubbs! likewise coasts on
previously
established fame: it’s a cutesy cartoon
populated with sci-fi creations like Jar-Jar Binks,
Yoda, Robby the Robot, and the
alien from Alien(s)3IV
and scored to R&B classics. The other way the voters might
go is Das Rad
(Rocks), a stop-motion animation of two rocks watching
the
world
go by – it looks cool, but it doesn’t really have a
point.
The dregs of the barrel is
The Cathedral,
which looks like a video game, except a really slow and pretentious
one, or one of those air-brushed fantasy posters with
planets and stars and armor-
clad Amazons with swords. Just dreadful.
It was the only short that got absolutely
no reaction from the audience.
The first short in the live-action set turned out to
be
the best. This Charming Man
(Der Er En Yndig Mand) condemns racism,
but in a way that sometimes makes
you wonder if it isn’t indulging in some itself.
Lars Hansen, a native Dane, finds
his identity confused with Pakistani immigrant El
Hassan
and, for reasons too
complicated to go into, he disguises himself as the
Pakistani.
I’m not sure blackface
is going to win you an Oscar, but you never know.
It is quite funny, though, and
really very sweet. It’s also the only one that
really tells a full story.
The next two films had the same gimmick of a
last-second
twist ending that
invalidated everything that came before, but in one,
it was funny, and in the other,
it just felt mean-spirited. Fait d’Hiver
(Gridlock) finds a husband, stuck in traffic,
using his new cell phone to call home, with startling
results. Although you could
argue that this film was a tad callous, it came off as
more of a joke (albeit a joke
that more than half the audience didn’t get. The
people in front of me actually
turned around to ask me what the ending meant – ten
minutes
later). By contrast,
J’attendrai le suivant (I’ll Wait
for the Next One) yanks the rug out from under
you with a rather vicious jerk. It starts out
with
a horrible vision of my future – a
young man announces to a Metro car that he can’t find
a date and he’s tired of being
single, so would any interested young women please make
themselves known – and
ends with an even more horrifying vision of my even
more
likely future. Inja (Dog)
is a message movie, using a young black boy, a white
landowner, and a dog as a
metaphor for apartheid. It’s nicely done, but its
patently poetic-justice ending is too
morality-play for my taste.
And on the way to the Metro after the show, I got to
see
a wrecking ball smashing into
a building, which is just undeniably cool, even if it
was kind of a small wrecking ball.
That was the second fortuitously cool thing to happen
to me today; earlier, I was
waiting in line at the pharmacy, and the guy in front
of me offered me over $6 in
Metro fare cards – he said he was moving to Mexico that
day and didn’t have anyone
else to give them to. Of course, less cool is the
medication I was getting, which I was
distressed to see is prescribed not only for my stomach
condition, but also for (among
an amazingly varied and long list of problems)
bed-wetting.
So now I’m mortified to
think that, the next time I’m unconscious in a
hospital,
a doctor will look at my list of
meds and yell to the nurse, “Get a rubber sheet!
Hurry!”
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