Oscar: In Focus (Live Action Short Films)

Because I do not react as I am supposed to when confronted with "uncomfortable" entertainment. It doesn't make me uncomfortable. Tuesday I went to Frost/Nixon with a friend. Afterwards I was all "That was fun! It was like a nice showbiz tale, but with Nixon!" and she was all "I guess it was good in that I was tense and really uncomfortable through the whole thing." Yesterday i saw Rachel Getting Married, which various people have described as having "Made [their] skin crawl". Because its so realistically uncomfortable. My skin did not crawl, and not for lack or relating to the family tension. I mean, I gagged at the celebratory white-centric multiculturalism in which no POC characters are developed but rather serve to spice up the "bland white dish"* of dysfunction (not to mention the randomly Indian themed wedding? Everyone in saris and whatnot?), but I wasn't uncomfortable.

But now it's time for...

Oscar: In Focus!

Short Film: Live Action
Will Win: The Pig
My Pick: On the Line

Yeah, I saw the live action shorts. All of them. What?

They actually...all kinda sucked, except On the Line, a nicely executed tense drama about a book store security guard and clerk that i don't want to spoil. Nicely done and the best of the bunch.

Much better than New Boy which begins promisingly with a talented cast of kids negotiating the social waters with a new kid from an unnamed African country in the mix. Trough flashbacks as the new kid is teased and defended we see that his father was a school teacher who was shot by...someone, from some...group... does it really matter? back in Africaland so he has a flashback to that when someone throws water on him and then, inexplicably to laughing with his now murdered dead father as new kid and the bully bond due new kids stop snitching policy and all is heartwarming? Cuz Ireland is a welcoming melting pot and kids will be kids let us all have a coca-cola?

Liberally feel-good melting pot fantasies were big in this bunch. The Pig started with great promise, as an elderly man in Denmark checks himself in for rectal surgery, is freaked out, and finds comfort in a painting of a serene pig hung on his room's wall. I bought him, I bought that, it was all quite charming and I was well on board til he gets a Muslim roommate and the painting becomes some kind of limits of tolerance/multiculti sitcom football--protag wants it up, Muslims want it down, no one suggests anything reasonable and I lose all hope and vomit. I bet it wins.

Manon on the pavement was more a trailer than a fully realized short film, for all the arty wasted shots of those little details you just don't notice tile its all ending--an out of focus chin! Toes! Even without the title you know, as soon la fille Francais** manon get up on her bike and peddles with her basket of letters down a cobblestoned ally that she will end up (beat) On The. Pavement. And then spend the rest of the film imagining how all her pretty young friends will react to the news. That's all. No surprises, revelations, insight, thoughts. A few legitimately nice shots, but way too many head-up-the-ass wanky not nice ones for things to balance out.

And then there's my new nemesis, Toyland. Its German. Maybe I should go to Germany and seek out film enthusiasts and be like "I'm Jewish, perhaps you remember the Holocaust?" as my new life-funding plan. Cuz apparently Germans have a lot of guilty feelings about the Holocaust that result in support for really fucking awful movies, and I should be able to exploit that, right? This piece of drek is a joke. It should have been tacked on to the beginning of Tropic Thunder. It's a manipulative, pointless, exploitative, offensive piece of holocaust mourn porn that isn't even about the f-ing Jews or anyone else marked for extermination by the Nazis. Its about how sad it was for this really stupid shiksa. This lady tells her kid that their nice Jewish neighbors are going to TOYLAND when they're rounded up for the camps. So duh, her kid wants to go. The goyim want to run away to the camps under the false pretense that they are TOYLAND. Every cliched manipulation you can think of is employed. Liturgical music is abused. A teddy bear dropped in a puddle. We learn that the Holocaust was very sad. So it may give The Pig a run for its money.





*bell hooks, right?
**Please go on and correct my French