Titles: The Danish Poet, West Bank Story, Maestro, Binta & The Great Idea, Helmer & Son, One Too Many, The Saviour [Plus Bonus Films: A Gentlemen’s Duel, Guide Dog, One Rat Short, The Passenger, Surviving the Rush, The Wraith of Cobble Hill]
Studio: Shorts International/Magnolia Home Entertainment 10084
Video: Varies from 4:3 to 16:9, color & B&W
Audio: DD 2.0, PCM stereo, various languages
Subtitles: English
Length: 190 minutes
Rating: ****
It always saddens me when Oscar time rolls around again, that names of some of the films and the people involved in them are mentioned, but nobody has seen any of them or heard anything about them. This usually applies to many of the international films, the shorts and animated films. Theaters, in their greed to get as many warm bodies thru the gates as possible, and also due to the increased running lengths of many features, just don’t show shorts of any kind any more. At least this DVD series from Shorts International is doing something about it, although some time after the mention of the films on TV. (There is a similar DVD for the 2005 nominees.)
Collections of shorts can be a grab bag sort of situation. Some past ones have had only one film in them I ever desired to view again. This new set of films nominated for the 79th Academy Awards does better: there are only a couple here that I didn’t like at all and several I would like to show to others. The six bonus shorts are a nice extra.
The two shorts which won Oscars in the live action and animation categories are clearly the winners of the collection. West Bank Story is a live action musical about competing food stands on the West Bank, using West Side Story style choreography and story to put a satirical face on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. The production values, acting and singing are super professional, and I broke up at the shishkabob-thru-the-head caps which all the workers in the Palestinian falafel stand had to wear. Sure, it seems a rather shallow response to a serious situation, but there’s no denying it’s funny. The 15-minute animated short The Danish Poet is a Norwegian production in partnership with the Canadian Film Board. That latter association almost assures it’s going to be well worth watching, and it is. The story of a young poet traveling to Norway to visit his favorite author is touching, beautifully drawn, and has many subtle little visual gags.
Other fine entries in the collection are The Saviour (from Australia), about a Jehovah’s Witness canvasser who gets a little too intimately involved with one of the housewives he visits. Also Helmer & Son (Denmark), concerning a son called to a senior care center because his father has locked himself in a closet. The only one which seemed flat to me was one of the two Spanish films, Binta & The Great Idea.
Of the bonus shorts, I found the clever A Gentlemen’s Duel delightful, and was amazed by the realism of the lab rats in One Rat Short. They seemed too realistic to be CGI and two natural in their movements to be puppet animation. With the Pixar feature Ratatouille such a big hit, and rats showing up on the screen in several other films, it looks like the rat may be replacing the penguin as the hot animal in movies. But the two rats in this tale of unrequited love really looked like the real thing, unlike Ratatouille.
The Wraith of Cobble Hill was a gritty and rather depressing black & white puppet animation, but the soundtrack – especially when fed thru DTS Neo for surround effect – was a work of genius in using muffled voices and sounds that one might hear from adjoining apartments in a ghetto flat. It was better than many discrete 5.1 soundtrack effects. The one short that seemed a total waste of time was the crude and tasteless story of a movie theater staff’s very bad night, Surviving the Rush.
– John Sunier
