STRANGE WAY OF LIFE / THE HUMAN VOICE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Here’s another development in the evolving state of the American film industry: right now, you can go see film shorts in the theater, where the shorts are the draw themselves as opposed to being shown ahead of another film—and they aren’t even part of the annual theatrical release of Oscar-nominated shorts, which typically happens in February. We are still months away from Oscar nominations. Although it is arguably relevant that this new Pedro Almodóvar film, Strange Way of Life, will almost certainly be among the five live-action shorts nominated for the next Academy Awards.

There are several reasons why this is a film you can, right now, book a ticket to see in a theater—this one, 31-minute film being the headliner, the title on the ticket. My theory is that the biggest reason would be that there just aren’t enough other releases to choose from, thanks to a constantly changing stew of changing viewing habits in a post-pandemic world (changes that were beginning before it but which the pandemic hastened), and the industry impact of dual strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in the past few months. People weren’t going to movies in droves already (Barbenheimer being the exception that proves the rule), and then studios started postponing high-profile release dates due to their stars being unable to promote the work.

Presumably, that left some holes in the showtime schedule at your local multiplex. Enter Almodóvar, who at the very least has a niche but devoted audience (this includes me). It doesn’t hurt that Strange Way of Life is a Western starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke as past lovers hooking up one last time. Or that the film opens with a young singer-guitarist crooning through one of the most beautiful pair of lips I have ever seen.

Evidently in an effort to make the outing worth the time and effort, this presentation is followed by another Almodóvar live-action short featuring a movie star, this one made in 2020 and starring Tilda Swinton: The Human Voice. This one is 30 minutes long, so, taken together, this “movie-going” outing has a runtime of a whopping 61 minutes, not counting the trailers at the top.

The thing is, it’s very difficult for film shorts to stack up to the best of feature filmmaking, even if it’s made by the likes of Pedro Almodóvar. I enjoyed both of this films, but I can’t say I would call them vital viewing. They were just an option at the movies by a writer-director I love.

Strange Way of Life certainly has the novelty of beloved stars playing gay characters, setting aside the now-longstanding discussion of straight actors taking gay parts away from gay actors. Maybe it makes a difference that Almodóvar himself is gay? Pascal and Hawke are lovely, believable, and nuanced. The story here is about much more than just old lovers reconnecting; it’s about why they are reconnecting: Silva’s son is suspected of killing Jake’s daughter-in-law, and Silva has returned in an effort to either defend or protect his family. This complicates matters between these two men in a way I’d be far more interested in seeing play out in a feature-length film, and I found the way this one ends to be strangely unresolved and abrupt.

There is also one flashback, to Silva and Jake’s younger, hornier days, and it features one of the oddest, and most manic, makeout sessions I have ever seen on film. First they are drinking wine literally getting poured onto their faces until they are drinking it out of each other’s mouths, and then they are jamming hands down the fronts of each other’s pants in ways that, let’s just say, don’t feel natural. It was very incongruous to the rest of the story.

Which is to say: both of these short films have their strengths and weaknesses. The Human Voice is mostly just Tilda Swinton, alone, in a home I suppose we are meant to accept as hers even though we see onscreen that it is built like a live stage set. She spends about eighty percent of the time talking to a recently-parted lover on the phone, gradually revealing herself to be mentally unstable, and we never hear the voice on the other line. I wasn’t super keen on this half-hour profile of a woman who is increasingly hysterical, if not sociopathic. But, Tilda Swinton’s performance is incredible, a solo tour de force. This film might be worth watching for her performance alone.

Taken together, Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice are imperfect but solid pieces, worth the time at the very least for Almodóvar fans.

A pleasant enough half hour to pass

Overall: B

2022 Oscar Nomination Shorts: Documentary

Audible: A-
When We Were Bullies: B
Three Songs for Benazir: B
Lead Me Home: A
The Queen of Basketball: B+ If there's anything reliable about the three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts every year, it's that if you can find a way to watch the Documentary Shorts, they are typically the ones most worth seeing. They are also on average the longest, however, and this year's full set of five combine to a run time of about 160 minutes. Here in Seattle, they can all be seen at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown—and whoever sequenced them did a very good job doing so. The presentation opens with the 39-minute short called Audible, which is beautifully shot and edited, well worth checking out on Netflix, where it is currently available, along with two of the other nominees. This one is about a nearly-undefeated football team at an all-deaf high school in Maryland. This film is so well shot and constructed that it's easy to wonder if parts of it were staged, or if maybe they just got so much great footage that they were able to edit it down to something incredible. Why not make a feature film, then? I would certainly watch a feature film about this diverse group of deaf kids, their current goals as athletes who regularly beat football teams of hearing players, and their aspirations for a far less certain future. When We Were Bullies is a somewhat curious entry, this one set to be available on HBO March 27. It concerns a documentary filmmaker, Jay Rosenblatt, who meats a fifth grade classmate by chance, and they both have vivid memories of a bullying incident they both had participated in. This 36-minute film spends a lot of time talking about the boy they bullied in a particular piling-on incident involving all the kids in the class, and even contemplating the idea of getting an interview with him. Instead, there are interviews with several grownup classmates, and the now-92-year-old teacher (who literally tells Rosenblatt on camera, that people may not want to watch this film because they'll find it "too tedious"). When We Were Bullies would have been much improved by an interview with the boy who was bullied, but I guess Rosenblatt settled for going with what he had to work with. The story remains fairly interesting, just not quite what it could have been. Three Songs for Benazir, a 22-minute short from Afghanistan, also on Netflix, is the only one of these documentary shorts that is not American. That does make it relatively ideal as the piece in the center of the program, as does its run time. There's not a lot in the way of a story arc here, but the cameras follow one young couple, and the fairly uneducated young man's aspirations to join the military. This was before The Taliban retook control of the country last year, which gives this a poignant subtext. It also humanizes regular Afghani citizens in a way seldom seen. It's also much more of a portrait of a couple of average citizens than it is a story. The best of this year's crop of documentary shorts, the one I would vote for winning the Oscar, is the third one available on Netflix, a 39-minute film called Lead Me Home. It does something very similar to Three Songs for Benazir, in that it humanizes its subjects—but it also tells many of their stories, almost uniformly in ways that elicit compassion, hope, and in some cases despair. It was a smart move not to play this one last in this presentation, as Lead Me Home concerns homeless people, particularly those in the west coast cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. The footage was taken between 2017 and 2020, only at the very end getting to points where we see people on what soon became ubiquitous Zoom calls. Admittedly, the film is also sometimes frustrating, as it paints a portrait—often incredibly beautiful, with time-lapse drone shots of sunsets behind skylines—of cities in crisis, but without offering a solution. The end credits do direct us to their website for resources on taking action, but if this film effectively illustrates anything at all, it's that this is a systemic problem that needs systemic solutions, largely legislative. Which is to say, the ways in which this film is frustrating is not a criticism per se: it reflects a problem that commands attention, and everyone should watch this film. Unfortunately, not nearly enough will, but it does underscore why this one most deserves the Oscar. It's a film that is excellently constructed, and sheds light on a societal problem that deserves a wide-reaching platform. It also, crucially, offers several intimate portraits of individuals experiencing homelessness that make it impossible to ignore the fact that these are human beings deserving of all the basic needs that the rest of us spend most of our days taking for granted. The theatrical presentation of this year's documentary shorts thankfully ends on an upbeat note, a 22-minute New York times documentary portrait of women's basketball legend Lusia Harris, the first woman drafted by the NBA and also the first player to score a women's basketball point in the Olympics. I have to admit, because I generally don't care at all about sports, I had never heard of this extraordinary woman, but I was utterly charmed by the present-day interview with her in this short, which is intercut with a whole lot of archival footage from her basketball career. With an infectious giggle, she tells her own story in her own words, without a trace of regret, even after she turned the NBA draft offer down. I did kind of wish there were interviews with other people who knew her; this could easily make an incredibly compelling feature-length documentary. In the meantime, you can view this delightful 22 minutes on YouTube. Overall: B+

2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Robin Robin: B+
Boxballet: B-
Affairs of the Art: B
Bestia: C-
The Windshield Wiper: B Most years, the theatrical presentation of the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts includes three or four "highly commended" shorts, sort of like runners-up to the five nominees, just to pad out the total run time. This is usually because some of the nominees are kids' cartoons as short as five minutes, but this year the shortest of the nominees is about fifteen minutes. Only one of them is truly for children, and it's the opener, Robin Robin, a perfectly charming film from Aardman studios in the UK that runs a good 32 minutes. Aardman is a studio of reliable quality, previously producing many Wallace & Gromit and Shawn the Sheep titles. In the case of Robin Robin, it not only features a charming story about a robin raised by a family of mice, and the voice talents of Gillian Anderson (as a hungry cat) and Richard E. Grant (as a magpie with a mending broken wing), but the uniquely textured stop motion animation is impressive. Robin Robin is a perfect candidate for a television special for the family. Or, you can just head over to Netflix and watch this right now. Others of the nominees may or may not be available online, but honestly Robin Robin is the only one of them I would tell you to bother with. Because this year's other nominees are mostly not for children, the theatrical presentation splits them, and even puts a title card up onscreen to give parents the time to take their children out of the theater, because what's coming up is not suitable for children. The thing that mystifies me is that this title card comes up after, rather than before Boxballet, a 15-minute film from Russia that I would argue is also not for children. This tells the story of the crossing paths of a beat up boxer and a ballerina, and much of the stuff with the boxer is fairly violent. It's slightly cartoony in its presentation, but it's still within the context of a story for adults rather than children—not to mention the handsy dance instructor who borders on molestation. Boxballet has a unique artistic visual style, which I suppose might hold the attention of much younger children who are fascinated with the lines and colors of cartoons, but even for adults, the story here didn't quite land for me. At times I found it hard to follow. Affairs of the Art, a 16-minute film from the UK and Canada but featuring voice talent with British accents, definitively lacks cohesion but still skirted with my own darkly comic sensibility. It's hard for me not to have affection for a film featuring a book called Home Taxidermy for Children. This film is otherwise narrated by a plump, middle-aged woman obsessed with making abstract art, and reminiscing about her morbid little sister who eventually moves to California and uses her own body as art with extensive plastic surgery. The animation style here is wholly appropriate, all of it rendered as pencil drawings with constantly shifting lines, the narrator all the while chatting nonchalantly away about her approach to art. There's not much of a story arc here, but I found it relatively entertaining. Bestia, which is Spanish for Beast and is a 16-minute short from Chile, is the only one of the nominees that I would urge you actively to avoid. I'm astonished this even garnered an Oscar nomination, unless it was just because of the skilled animation of what looks genuinely like well-lit porcelain figurines. The problem is that this quickly moves into "What the fuck?" territory, a woman with a dog either fantasizing or living her dream (I could not tell which) of training her dog to attack—and even sexually molest—people held captive in a basement somewhere. If this film has something to say, I don't have a clue what it is. If it even has a story to tell, I have no idea what it is. Well, wait, so far as I can gather from a bit of online research is that it's an allegory for Chile's deeply sordid history. Maybe I need to have a better working knowledge of world history to appreciate this. All I can think about is the scene in which this lady's dog is eating her out. No thank you, next! Finally, The Windshield Wiper, a 15-minute film from Spain in which the dialogue is curiously spoken in English with American accents, is largely mystifying in its own right, but deliberately so—and is arguable the most visually beautiful of all the nominees, a parade of beautifully rendered portraits. It starts in a cafe, a man posing the simple question, "What is love?" What follows is a series of vignettes, wildly varying in tone but all of them beautiful, that collectively set out to answer that question. We get the answer stated quite simply and directly in the end. It took me a while even to figure out what was going on here, but I still enjoyed the journey. My vote for the Oscar goes to Robin Robin, in spite of it being kind of an obvious choice, but The Windshield Wiper would not be a bad choice either. Even though I still don't have the foggiest idea why it has that title. Overall: B-

2022 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action

On My Mind: B
Please Hold: B
The Dress: B-
The Long Goodbye: C+
Ala Kachuu - Take and Run: B+ This year's crop of live action shorts, as seen in the program in theaters, is well sequenced, I'll give it that: it opens quietly with one of the shortest of the offerings, an 18-minute Danish film called On My Mind, about a guy who comes into an empty bar on the weekend and is dead set on getting a recording of himself singing Elvis Presley's "Always On My Mind" on their karaoke machine. Most of the film consists of just three characters; the aforementioned man, the bar's owner trying to do his taxes uninterrupted, and the empathetic, middle-aged bartender lady. Film shorts have a tendency to hinge on some kind of twist, however subtle it might be, and this one is no exception: we eventually learn the reason for the obsession with getting a recording of this man singing the song. It's both sweet and sad, if a little slight in the end.

Such is the case with the average of this year's five live-action shorts nominated for Oscars, honestly. At least we have the chance to see the nominated shorts in theaters again; last year there was no such chance thanks to the closure of movie theaters due to the pandemic. And if these films prove anything, it's that not even a pandemic can kill a particular, or peculiar, cinematic vibe.

Please Hold, a 19-minute film that is the only one of the live action shorts from the United States, has a compelling concept, even if it plays a little like a second-rate episode of Black Mirror—something none of us have had the stomach for in a couple of years. Set in Los Angeles, it's at least, somewhat ironically, more representative of diversity than a couple of the foreign shorts: directed and co-written by a Latina woman, KD Davila, and starring Latino actor Erick Lopez. Lopez plays Mateo, a young man arrested by automated drones in a relatively plausible near-future, but for one thing in this film that I really could not get past. When Mateo is ordered by automated voices to change into the provided orange jail outfit, he has handcuffs on. Cut to him in his change of clothes, and he still has them on? Maybe the automated booking area somehow uncuffed him temporarily, I don't know. In any case, the whole point of this story is that Mateo never has any idea what he's been charged for, but he can't get ahold of any live human to explain it to him. A majority of this film's run time shows Mateo in his jail cell, frustratingly trying to communicate with an AI-powered screen in the wall, rife with glitches similar to when you're stuck on hold with an automated system. Please Hold touches on the injustices of our criminal justice system, and never even reveals what Mateo's supposed crime was—only that his time in jail has cost him his job and his future. I'm having real difficulty figuring out what to make of The Dress, a 30-minute Polish Film about a dwarf woman working as a maid in a drabby motel. When it comes to the acting and the cinematography, this film is the best of this crop without question. The trickier part is the content, which I think means to humanize little people. Whether it succeeds at that is likely dependent on the audience, and I would sure love to know what little people think of it. Maybe I'm off base—I kind of have no idea—but the fact that this film only depicts the miserable, tormented life of Julka (a truly excellent Anna Dzieduszycka; I want to see her in more self-actualizing parts) strikes me as something pitying and patronizing to little people. "The Dress" refers to the dress she spends a few days trying to find to wear going out for beers with a transient truck driver who has shown some interest and said he will return in a few days. The Dress gets surprisingly frank about Julka's life and this relationship, and spoiler alert: things don't turn out well. I just want to know, why can't we see a movie where Julka actually catches a break? It feels a little like The Dress would have us believe little people face an impossible task of finding happiness in a cruel world, and while that may be the case for some, it feels regressive to be depicting it so vividly onscreen in 2022.  The Long Goodbye, a 13-minute British film starring Riz Ahmed, is my least favorite of this year's crop, while feeling like the one of those with the most potential to win the Oscar. I don't hate the message, which is a very pointed—and violent—depiction of xenophobic paranoia in the UK. I just didn't like how chaotic it was, in its very filming, with wildly shaky handheld camera work even when we follow Ahmed's character around a crowded home as he roughhouses with his large family. A far-right march is shown on the news on television, until said marchers arrive in their neighborhood, and basically attack everyone in the neighborhood, grabbing people in their homes and dragging them out into the streets. After a particularly tragic turn of events, at which nearby police officers look on dispassionately, the soundtrack goes quiet, and Ahmed launches into an acapella rap number, about anti-immigrant sentiment. The rap is very good, what I could make out of the words anyway, but the film on the whole just didn't quick work or click for me. Ala Kachuu - Take and Run, a 38-minute Swiss and Kyrgyz co-production, is both the longest and the best of the live action shorts this year. I usually run out of patience for the longer films that are supposed to be "short," but Take and Run held my attention from start to finish. This is the story of a young woman who is kidnapped and forced into marriage, as part of the local tradition of her people. This isn't a period piece, either; it's set in the present day, with the woman briefly escaping to the city to live with another young woman who made it out of her village, shaming her mother in the eyes of their community in the process. The film ends with a note about how often this kind of kidnapping still goes on, driving home the point of the very well-executed fictionalization of one such story that just unfolded. Thankfully, this one ends with far more hope for its main character than The Dress does, and makes for a nice end to this entire presentation of all five films. It should be noted that not all such women find an escape, but this one makes many failed attempts and also spends a fair amount of time in emotional distress, particularly on her wedding night. Overall, all of these films are worth at least considering, and most are worthy of close attention. But, i>Ala Kachuu - Tale and Run is the one I hope wins the Academy Award.
Overall: B

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary

Life Overtakes Me: B-
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl): B
In the Absence: B+
Walk Run Cha-Cha: A-
St. Louis Superman: A- It never comes as any surprise that the cumulative run time of the Documentary Shorts is always the longest among all the Oscar-nominated shorts. This year they clock in at two hours and forty minutes, beginning with this 39-minute Swedish-American film Life Overtakes Me. Ironically, I struggled to stay awake during this film about children affliced with a phenomenon called "Resignation Syndrome," in which they become totally unresponsive, as if in a coma. To be fair, my response was not entirely the film's fault; I started the presentation eating a box of Cheddar Squares crackers with pimento cheese dip, and maybe it was that that just about put me into a coma. That said, the subject being objectively compelling notwithstanding, I would still argue this story would work better in print than as a film. It certainly deserves attention, this increasingly common response to trauma among refugee children facing the stress and threat of deportation back to their dangrous home coumtries. On the upside, you can watch it on its own whenever you want, on Netflix. Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) is similarly quiet and subdued, and thus faced a challenge in waking me up, but at least the children here were not all in some version of a coma. On the contrary, this 39-minute British short filmed in Afghanistan details young girls being educated in Kabul, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be born a girl. Curiously, they are also taking lessons in skateboarding. I never quite gleaned why skateboarding, in particular, as an extracurricular activity, but it's certainly something that brings joy into what might otherwise easily be joyless lives. In the Absence, a 28-minute film from South Korea about a horribly botched 2014 rescue effort for a sinking ferry boat which ultimately resulted in the removal of the country's president, is arguably the most exciting of the bunch. It just starts off much more promising than it ends, as the opening moments feature clips from emergency phone calls and has a real-time feel to it. There are even select clips of dashcam footage and cell phone videos which are either heartbreaking, a wonder to behold, or both. Learning the totally incompetent moves were staged just to make it look like the authorities were doing anything successfully at all, just because their president was watching, made me wonder how that nation functions at all. Then, learning that this one incident resulted in the successful removal of said president, I felt a pang of jealousy. After that, with the revelation that certain things about it were still being kept secret under new national leadership, I realized, oh right—it's never that black and white. In any case, most of this film is quite gripping, although I was mystified that it never reveals why the ship sank in the first place. Turns out that's rather complicated, but still, it would have been nice to get some sense of the cause, as opposed to just the response, as both apparently were the result of a disastrous mix of incompetence, recklessness and carelessness. A lot of people died. Walk Run Cha-Cha, on the other hand, would qualify as the most delightful and sweet of these five documentary shorts, this one a far more uplifting twenty minutes. It follows the dancing hobby of elderly South Korean couple Chipaul and Millie Cao, who long ago escaped to Los Angeles from Communist Vietnam. We see a lot of footage of them in dancing classes, some at family gatherings, and in the end a very well-produced staging of the entire dance they've been working on. I was surprisingly moved by it, and although it likely has no real chance of winning the Oscar, as soon as I saw this, I kind of wished it did. But then I saw St. Louis Superman, a 28-minute film about 34-year-old Missouri State Representative Bruce Franks Jr., which is unfortunately the only one of these short documentaries that cannot currently be found in full online. This man, also a Ferguson activist whose own brother was killed in crossfire at the age of nine, as well as a battle rapper, is an inspiration, and once I finished watching this one, I decided this is the one that really deserves the win. Apparently a piling on of related challenges regarding violence in his community, and its effect on his mental health, resulted in Franks choosing to resign, but that should not discount the achievements he had while in office, which are impressive of any junior representative, let alone one with the specific challenges he faced. We can only hope this man can one day return to politics and help change this country for the better, which this film movingly depicts him doing from the start. Overall: B+

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action

A Sister: B+
Brotherhood: B
The Neighbors' Window: B+
Saria: B+
Nefta Football Club: B Much like the animated shorts, this year's crop of Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts are largely devoid of much in the way of lightheartedness. As presented in theaters this week, the program begins with A Sister, a 16-minute Belgian film detailing a phone call to Emergency Services. There are only three characters: the man driving a car; the woman in the passenger seat placing a call she claims to be to her sister about care for her child; and the emergency services worker, a woman, who actually receives said call. It's maybe not that plausible that a man who sexually assaulted a woman and is now driving her to some undetermined place would just allow her to make a phone call to anyone, or trust that she is actually calling her sister. But, the tension in the phone call between two women who have to speak largely in code is effectively gripping. Funny how the Animated Shorts featured Daughter and then Sister as titles, and in the same year the Live Action Shorts feature A Sister and then Brotherhood. Clearly they're grouping them together this way on purpose. Anyway, Brotherhood is a 25-minute Tunisian-Canadian film about a Tunisian family whose eldest son returns from fighting in Syria with a very young, pregnant bride in tow. Apropos of nothing, what struck me the most about this show was how all three boys are covered in massive amounts of freckles. As it happens, director Meryam Joobeur found the two redheaded brothers by chance and later convinced them to be first-time actors in her film. That does deepen how impressive the final product is, although if you know little of the details of local sociopolitical issues in the Tunisian region, some measure of the story will not retain the intended impact. The Neighbors' Window, a 20-minute Ameican short set in New York City, was in the end my personal favorite of these five, and would get my vote for the win. I have a feeling Brotherhood has a better chance, and I'll freely admit that The Neighbors' Window just speaks to me as a more typical American voyeur. It's a bit of a modern, more bittersweet riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window, dealing with the consequences of spying on neighbors in an apartment in the building directly across the street. In this case, it's an early-middle-aged couple (Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller) with three young children, who become somewhat obsessed with the free-spirited twentysomething couple across the way. It's less sexual than it is wistful, this couple seeing a sort of youthful freedom they have lost. A plot twist comes regarding that young couple, as you might expect, and it jolts the older couple out of their self-pity. It sounds a little hokey, but in writer-director Marshall Curry's hands, it has a surprising finesse. Saria is also an American film, 23 minutes, but set in a Guatemalan orphanage and based on the true story of 41 teen girls who died in a fire in 2017. It is a fictionalized dramatization, but one that sheds a global light on a horrible event that plenty of people in the rest of the world don't know about. I certainly didn't, and thus this film succeeds at its stated intent that these girls' lives not be forgotten. Apparently these girls' caretakers did not bother to even open the door they were locked in with a fire for nine minutes, and to date there has been no prosecutions of any kind. That is obviously disgusting, and hopefully the exposure of this film puts some much needed pressure on local authorities. Nefta Football Club, a 17-minute film from France but also set in Tunisia, comes the closest to being a light-hearted story: two young brothers find a lost drug mule wandering the desert hills with headphones on its ears. Cutting back and forth with the older couple of men who cannot find the mule, the two brothers find packets of cocaine in the baskets draped on either side of the mule. This puts them in a potentially very dangerous situation, of course, but the amusing ending deals with the ultimate fate of the cocaine, as the older brother tries in vain to find locals to sell it to, and the younger brother finds an innovative use for it in his local soccer field, or more accurately in this country and on this terrain, football pitch.
Overall: B+

2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Hair Love: B+
Daughter: B
Sister: B
Mémorable: B
Kitbull: B+ [“Highly Commended"]
Henrietta Bulkowski: B
The Bird & the Whale: B+
Hors Piste: B
Maestro: B For some reason in the past I tended to expect to enjoy the animated batch the best out of all the Oscar-nominated short films, and yet, in recent years it's the genre that tends to have the weakest batch overall. This year is no exception, although several of them feature impressively unique animation styles I have never seen before. On top of that, this year they are uniformly melancholy in one way or another. Among the five animated shorts in this program that actually earned nominations, without exception they deal with either death, disease, or some kind of violence. Amazingly, not even the one short by Pixar Animation Studios artists (in this case still 2D animation) stands apart from this theme. It even extends to two of the four "Highly Commended" shorts that are included, just to pad out the overall run time and make it feel worth going to a theater to see them. The other two of those extras are the only ones of the total nine shorts here that evidently have no purpose beyond just being fun, and those are . . . fine. The first in this presentation is the 7-minute American short Hair Love, which is maybe the most light-hearted of all the five nominees, even though it features a woman (voiced by Issa Rae) who is a mother with cancer. It's because this woman is in the hospital that the story we see is of a man attempting to do his daughter's hair for the first time. Given that this is a black family, these are characters not often seen in animated shorts, and that alone makes it more worthy of attention. Overall I enjoyed this short film, even though the animation itself is not much better than adequate. The story is memorable and affecting, however, and once you see the other shorts it's up against, you see that this one is the most worthy of the award. Things just get sadder from there, although I must admit I found Daughter, a 15-minute short from the Czech Republic, the most difficult to follow. In this story, a grown woman is regarding her father apparently on his deathbed, and we get flashback memories from both of them. This film has by far the most impressive animation out of any of the nominees, with stop-motion animation captured with camera work that feels like live hand-held camera footage. I was truly impressed by how this short film was shot—I just couldn't quite glean a clear picture of the story, or any kind of plot. I spent most of its run time basically lost. Sister, an 8-minute short from China, presents a "what if" where the narrator imagines what it would have been like to grow up with a sister in a country that had a one-child policy for over thirty years. This is also stop motion but with what look like dolls made of fabric, and the issue it tackles is thorny at best: forcing women to have abortions is objectively a violation of human rights, but from the perspective of Chinese national pride, without the policy the country would not only not be nearly as prosperous as it is now, it likely would not be prospering at all. That's not an excuse by any means, and it's always good to consider the ramifications of a policy like this, and particularly the many misguided means of executing it. Mémorable is yet another short film about the frustrating effects of dementia in a person's old age, a 12-minute French film featuring a man losing his memory and his wife who is increasingly frustrated with him. The man is a painter, and thus the animation style here is a sort of stop-motion with 3D figures made out of brushstrokes of paint. It's hard to explain, but the animation here is sort of too good, paintings brought to life in a way that has a sort of "uncanny valley" effect that just gave me the creeps. The five Oscar nominees are rounded out by the 9-minute Pixar film about an unlikely friendship between a streetworn kitten and a pitbull, who we learn maybe halfway through is being used as a dogfighter. This film did indeed have the deepest emotional impact on me, as Pixar films often tend to do, but again, the animation here is almost shockingly rudimentary given the studio behind it. And who wants to be thinking about animal abuse when watching a Pixar short, anyway? Starting off the four extra "Highly Commended" shorts is Henrietta Bulkowski, a 16-minute American short that also has its own very distinctive kind of 3D stop-motion animation style. The title character is an airplane obsessed young woman voiced by Christina Hendricks, who cannot be the pilot she wants to be because of a hunchback. She builds a plane in a landfill, where she meets a police officer with stunted legs voiced by Chris Cooper. Rounding out the all-star cast is Anne Dowd as the narrator. The story has a nice message about loving every part of yourself as a whole human being, but its execution is still a little odd and meandering. The Bird & the Whale, a 7-minute short from Ireland, is animated entirely with oil paint on glass, and has arguably the prettiest animation of all these films. Once again though, the story is surprisingly sad: the chance meeting of a baby whale that has been separated from its pod, and a caged bird that is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Together they struggle to survive, and I suppose it could be said they only both manage to do so on a technicality. The way this one ends is meant to be uplifting, I suppose, and yet I still just found it to be a bummer. Hors Piste, French for "Off Road," is a 6-minute short and one of only two in this entire program that exists just for the viewer to have fun. The animation is slick and textured, the story amusing in a way that barely obscures the darkness of its humor. This is the misadventures of a couple clueless mountain rescuers attempting to bring an enjured skier down from the mountan, and basically finding countless innovative ways to injure him more in the process. Maestro, by far the shortest film in this series at all of two minutes, is a French short with spectacular CG animation rendering a bird, and many other animals, singing a short opera and being conducted by a squirrel. Now, I truly hate squirrels, but in this case I can tolerate one for two minutes, if he's conducting an opera performance of forest animals. Overall: B

2019 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS: DOCUMENTARY

Black Sheep: B
End Game: B+
A Night at the Garden: B+
Life Boat: A-
Period. End of Sentence: A- Black Sheep, the single nominated documentary short not from the U.S., is a 27-minute film from the UK with a sensibility all its own. This one examines racism and its effects one one young black man in a rural British context. Cornelius Walker, fantastically lit with his face against a backdrop as he speaks directly into the camera, relates his mother and father moving him to the country after another immigrant child was stabbed to death in their London neighborhood. Cornelius was immediately met with racist abuse in his new small town, until he goes out of his way to emulate and fit in with the very kids who initially tormented him -- right down to bleaching his skin to make it lighter, and purchasing blue contact lenses. Much of this is recreated with very well executed flashbacks, but what is most compelling is present-day Cornelius wrestling with the evolution of his identity. This is a truly unique perspective, albeit with a strangely abrupt ending. End Game, as you might imagine is rather sad: it's a 40-minute Netflix documentary about palliative care for terminally ill patients at a fairly posh medical facility in San Francisco. The cameras focus on about five different patients and the imminent challenges they face, although particular focus is put on two of them. In its way, even as it slightly evades clearly important questions of class and access to care (even with a fairly diverse group of subjects, one Iranian and another Asian American), it's the most emotionally affecting of these five short films. A Night at the Garden, at a mere 7 minutes, is by far the shortest, and arguably the most haunting, of this year's documentary short nominees. It's simply seven minutes of footage of a 1930 "pro-American rally" that occurred at New York City's Madison Square Garden. With 20,000 people cheering as police beat a man who attempts to protest, and a huge number of them engage in Nazi salutes, this might as well be called 1930 Trump Rally. It's hard to watch, but creepily illuminating -- a reminder of a dark history for our nation, which is clearly not relegated only to the distant past, and of the need to endless vigilance. The 34-minute Life Boat both the longest and pehaps the best of this bunch: a look at rescue missions in the Mediterranean by Sea Watch, a European nonprofit that rescues as many refugees as they can as they flee persecution, war, and worse from their native African and Middle Eastern countries. I really waffled between whether I thought this or Period. End of Sentence was the best of these five films, and somewhat reluctantly settled on this one, which is very effective at putting human, individual faces on people far too easily generalized, stereotyped or outright ignored by the media and the rest of the world. These people appear to be doing incredible, heartbreaking work. And that leaves the cleverly titled Period. End of Sentence, the likely winner of the Academy Award in this category -- and it would not be undeserved. With the help of students in a school who helped fund the project, a group of women in a village outside Delhi, India utilize one man's invention to mass produce sanitary pads at low cost. They then sell them at local markets, to a rural population for whom menstruation is such a taboo (the "biggest tabboo in India," says one man) that they know very little about it. This is the seed of a quietly feminist revolution and it is undeniably exciting to witness. Overall: B+

2019 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS: LIVE ACTION

Mother: B-
Fauve: B
Marguerite: A-
Detainment: B+
Skin: B Mother is a 19-minute film from Spain that consists solely of a series of phone calls between a young mother, and the six-year-old son on the other line, whose dad has mysteriously left him alone on a beach in France. As it happens, this woman's own mother is in the apartment, so the two women are the only characters ever seen onscreen. (The boy is the only other voice heard.) The "story," such as it is, is simply this young woman becoming more and more hysterical as it becomes clear her son may have been abandoned and she cannot figure out exactly where he is. It ends with no resolution to speak of, leaving me to wonder what the point was -- to illustrate a typical mother's nightmare? Skilled performances notwithstanding, a short like this makes me wonder how slim the pickings are when film shorts are put up for Oscar consideration to begin with. Fauve is the second of two Canadian live action shorts up for contention this year, this one, at 16 minutes, the shortest of the bunch. A couple French-Canadian kids are just hanging out on abandoned railroad tracks, and, eventually, a surface mine. And basically, their youthful ignorance of nature and physics gets the best of them. I won't spoil what that means exactly, except to say that this one turns surprisingly dark. With again only three characters, though, this short does also illustrate how a little can go along way. And then there's Marguerite, a 19-minute film, also French-Canadian, that gets my vote as the best of these nominees. Here we have only two characters: the title character, an elderly woman in need of daily in-home assistance, and her much younger woman caretaker. We see plenty of their routine before a phone call from her partner reveals the caretaker to be gay. The way Marguerite's face changes at this revelation made me slightly nervous, but it turned out to be something much more bittersweet than negative. Eventually, we learn what decades-old memories this triggers in Marguerite, and as she tentatively opens up to her caretaker, it becomes something quite moving -- and, in its way, a sad reminder of how different things were for people half a century ago. If you're looking for something truly disturbing, look no further than Detainment, a 30-minute film from Ireland about the youngest convicted murderers of the 21st century. Based on actual interrogation transcripts, two 10-year-old boys are interviewed separately about what they did with a random toddler they spontaneously decided to abduct from a shopping center and do heinous things to. Thankfully, none of the specific horrors are depicted onscreen; the story that unfolds here is how the two boys start off with total denials and conflicting accounts, until bit by bit, increasingly horrible truths come out. If nothing else, this one serves as a cautionary tale: never let your young child out of your sight for a second, no matter how harmless it may appear to be to do so. Live-action shorts often have a "clever twist" at the end of them, especially American ones, and the 20-minute Skin is no exception. (To be fair, the real difference year is that only one of the shorts ends with such a twist.) When this one ended, foremost in my mind was to wonder whether the director was white or black: Guy Nattiv is a white guy. And, okay, it does seem difficult to imagine a black director creating a film this pointedly about a racist being taught a lesson. Skin has "white guilt" built into its DNA, albeit with more subtlety than usual. This film is generally competently made, although the final moment is about as predictable as it gets. Overall: B

2019 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS: ANIMATION

Bao: B+
Late Afternoon: A-
Weekends: B
Animal Behaviour: B-
One Small Step: B+ [“Highly Commended]
The Wishing Box: B
Tweet Tweet: B This year's set of animated shorts, better than average but falling short of particular greatness as always, starts with the one short many of us already saw, as it was presented last year prior to screenings of Pixar's Incredibles 2. It's an 8-minute short called Bao, American and about an Asian mother's evolving relationship with her son -- as represented by a dumpling. I think. Honestly this one went, at least in part, kind of over my head, although the animation is up to typical standards of Pixar excellence and still has charm to spare. Who knew a dumpling could be so adorable? Late Afternoon, a 10-minute short from Ireland, proved to be my favorite of the bunch, alternately wistful an melancholy though it was. This one will hit particularly close to home for anyone who's had a family member suffering from dementia. Here, an elderly woman's mind washes back and forth between current reality and other eras of her life, as her grown daughter packs up the stuff in her home. The relatively rudamentary animation here is well suited to the subject, and is well rendered particularly as the old woman struggles to hold onto her memories, moving from joy to sorrow and back at regular intervals. The end result is something quite moving. The longest of this year's animated crop is the 15-minute Weekends, an American short detailing a young boy as he grows accustomed to visiting his father on weekends shortly after his parents' separation. Eventually each parent finds a new romantic partner, with varying results of which the child has limited understanding. The water color animation is very pretty, but the length of the story exceeds necessity. I really wanted to love Animal Behaviour, the 14-minute short from Canada about several different animals in a group therapy session, as it's the kind of thing that's right up my alley. What's not to love about a group of characters so diverse it includes not only a dog, a cat and pig, but also a bird, a gorilla, a praying mantis and a leech? And they all have their own mental issues -- I just wish those issues had been explored with a little more cleverness. This one seems to coast a bit on its concept alone, although I will admit it still got a few good chuckles out of me. One Small Step is the one animated short nominee with two countries of origin: USA & China. This 8-minute short details the astronautical ambitions of a girl as she grows up struggling through school, at the expense of noticing the attentions and assistance of her cobbler father. He regularly mends her shoes, she regularly fails to notice until she has finally reached her goals and then it is too late. This one also has excellent animation, which is somewhat ironic given how little of the story calls for it as a necessity (as opposed to shooting it as live action). Honestly, the most deeply affecting moment is the clip during the end credits, with one of the directors so excited to hear his short was nominated he starts crying. Three of the nominated shorts feature clips of this sort at their end, it's always a nice thing to see. Often these presentations feature five nominees of such short average length that several "Highly Commended" extras get tacked onto the end. This year there are only two, the first being Wishing Box, a 6-minute American short with impressively crisp animation and slightly lacking in substance. I pirate discovers his monkey can pull anything it wishes for out of an otherwise empty box, much of it fruit it wants to eat. Once the pirate's greediness gets the monkey on board (so to speak) with wishing for riches, a fairly predictable lesson is learned. Tweet Tweet, a short from Russia, is arguably among the most intriguing of all the shorts here, and I would submit that it was more deserving of a nomination than, say, Animal Behaviour. Being intriguing does not mean it necessarily makes sense, however: the entirety of its run time features human feet on a tightrope that runs across the screen, along with a bird. There are clearly profound metaphors intended here, though I couldn't tell you what they are. The animation is excellent, though, and a lot of thoughts about both Russian history and of life and aging is packed into its twelve minutes. Overall: B