Oscar-nominated animated shorts
Crit
- Borrowed Time--A Western, a decades-long saga that can be inferred from the end and the beginning. John Ford would have liked to work with this story.
- Pearl--This one is also end & beginning-centric, but the middle is also filled in, for better and worse. Sentimental, but daddy-daughter sentiment, so kinda irresistible.
- Piper--Hyperrealistic Disney cute. Saw this one pre-whatever feature it was pre- (Finding Dory?), and my assessment remains the same: pleasant, nice.
- Blind Vaysha--Not blind, but double-sighted: her left eye sees only the past, her right eye only the future. Without a doubt the class of the program for me.
- Pear Cider and Cigarettes--A promising noir beginning, but ultimately overlong and one-note. And why does the graphic novelist who narrates and (OK, you're not supposed to assume stuff is autobiographical, but I am) presumably created it feel compelled to depict his own wife in classic guy-drawing tits & ass style? Kinda creepy.
Of the unnominated fillers, two stand out: The Head Vanishes, because its surrealism is similar to that of the Yoko Tawada short stories I've been reading (except that Tawada would never sell out the surrealism by giving it a clear real-world explanation, as this does), and Once upon a Line, because it's better than the majority of the nominated films, a spare, beautiful, bitter tale of love, which seems to suggest that the cure for an affair gone wrong is to get on one of those big bouncy balls.
Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, program A
Crit
- Joe's Violin--The most uplifting film in this traditionally downer category features . . . a Holocaust survivor. A Holocaust survivor of a sort I didn't know about: he and his father fled Warsaw for Russian-controlled eastern Poland and spent the next 6½ years in a Siberian labor camp. The titular violin, which he and the brother who stayed behind and survived Auschwitz bought in a displaced persons camp in 1947, he donated to a program instituted by New York Public Radio WQXR to get unused instruments to needy students. Yet another reason Trump was a bad idea. I guess this would get my vote in a strong field without a single sterling standout.
- Extremis--A brutal film about hospital personnel trying to help patients and families make end-of-life decisions. Well made and all but unwatchable (and, I'm guessing, not even "all but" for anyone facing such questions currently or recently).
- 4.1 Miles--The Lesbian movie of the shorts programs. Which is to say it's about coast guard crews based on the island of Lesbos, the titular distance from Turkey, where agents of mostly low character take money to facilitate the passage of mostly Afghans into Europe, often (or maybe mostly) on crafts not capable of making even that short passage safely.
For the other documentary nominees, click here.
Oscar-nominated live-action shorts
Crit
- Mindenki (Sing)--Adult with a win-at-any-cost philosophy faces rebellion from children who just want to have fun, but it's not about sports.
- Silent Nights--Couple meets cute when she tells him that he's the 38th applicant at the 37-bed Salvation Army shelter and he tells her to fuck herself. Things go uphill then downhill, and eventually it's a White Person Saves Dark People story, which I then realized applies also to 2 of the documentaries.
- Timecode--As is often the case in this category, nothing blew me away, but this is probably my favorite: a literal courtship dance between parking garage security guards. Talk about meeting cute.
- Ennemis intérieurs--Police state that persecutes Muslim foreigners, even if they're not really foreigners and not really all that Muslim. It's called France.
- La Femme et le TGV--If you don't know, that's Train à grande vitesse, France's (and Switzerland's, as we learn here) 300kph zoomer, what Acela wishes it could grow up to be. In this one, Elise (Jane Birkin, the day's one familiar face) and Bruno don't meet cute. That is to say, it's their not-meeting that's cute.
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