Impossible dreams

Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts

Crit

OK, sensible plan to split the 3-plus-hours' worth of doc shorts into two programs, but it would have been an even better plan to give some hint of that plan on the Criterion website. Instead, my comrades and I showed up expecting a bladder-busting, butt-breaking marathon, only to be dismissed after a perfectly reasonable 2 hours. But unlike the theater, I'll exercise truth in packaging by admitting that I saw only the first 3 of the films listed below on Friday after work; I expect to pick up the other two later in the weekend.

• Kings Point--A lonely crowd of seniors in a retirement resort in Florida; as you might already have suspected, getting old and losing loved ones sucks. This is actually a pretty good film that got blown out of the water by those that followed.
• Mondays at Racine--A pair of Long Island sisters whose mother died of cancer open their beauty parlor one day a month for free services for women in treatment. Yeah, not hard to get emotion out of this, but good golly, this is a heart plumber--beautiful, human, funny, excruciating. It would be my front runner, but for . . .
• Inocente-- . . . this amazing portrait of an amazing 15-year-old artist whose exuberantly colorful paintings belie her homelessness, her loving but abusive mother, and the fact that she blames her 6-year-old self for her father's deportation and the loss of the family home. "I have a lot of impossible dreams," Inocente says, "but I still dream 'em." Besides excellence, what these last 2 films have in common is depressing subject matter transformed into uplift.

Saturday

I seem destined not to see these last 2 unless the tech guy arrives and fixes the projector by 7 or so . . .

OK, I admit it: I'm not the cinema warrior I once was. I learned when I came out of the live-action shorts that the projector had indeed been fixed, so if I wanted to wait until the 7:15 screening . . . and get home about 9 . . . still needing to roast potatoes and garlic for an hour to eat with the film I watch every year about this time . . .

Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't, and if you were counting on me to handicap Redemption and Open Heart for your Oscar party, I have failed you. But aren't you old enough now to have learned that sooner orlater everyone does? And anyway, is it likely that either of these is better than Mondays or Inocente? Long shot.