March 4, 2010: French Roast French Roast is an 8-minute animated short film from France, nominated for the 2009 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. A man sits in a French cafe and orders a coffee, but then can’t find his wallet, so he stays and continues ordering coffees while he tries to figure out […]
March 1, 2010: Instead of Abracadabra Instead of Abracadabra is a live-action short film from Sweden, running 22 minutes. It was nominated for an Oscar for 2009, but did not win. After a disorienting opening, during which a man stands in his house looking out the window at a mother and son moving in next […]
March 1, 2010: The Door The Door, an Oscar-nominated live-action short film from Ireland running 17 minutes, opens with a man on a motorcycle approaching an abandoned fairground, with military guys chasing him through this otherwise deserted landscape. He steals a door from a house, strapping it to his motorcycle and riding away. What’s this […]
March 1, 2010: Miracle Fish Unfortunately, Miracle Fish has been deteriorating in my memory since I saw it, which is a shame since at the time, aside from a few points, I thought it was pretty good. Miracle Fish is an Australian live-action short-film Oscar nominee for 2009, running about 17 minutes. Walking a fine […]
March 1, 2010: The New Tenants The second of the Oscar-nominated live-action short films for 2009 that I saw, The New Tenants is the one with the most star power on hand, and ultimately was the one to win the award. I was surprised to see it win, since I figured that sombre films representing […]
March 1, 2010: Kavi For the first time, my local movie theatres were showing all of the Oscar nominated short films before the Oscar show. They packaged up all of the live-action shorts on one night, and the animated ones on another night, in the week leading up to March 7. This was of course […]
February 28, 2010: Burma VJ Burma VJ made me feel like a bad person. Here we have groundbreaking video footage smuggled out of Burma, depicting the mistreatment of monks during a protest in 2007, in a place where journalism is actually illegal. The world is seeing for the first time a crack in the armour […]
February 28, 2010: Un Prophète I feel like I want to say so much about Un Prophète, and yet I know that I shouldn’t. This Cannes grand jury prize winner from last year is a complex and violent 2.5-hour tale which never lets up for a minute through its run time, brilliantly depicting a young […]
February 27, 2010: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince It’s a good thing that the lengths of my movie reviews don’t need to correspond with the run times of their subjects. The Harry Potter films all tend to be lengthy, in the 2.5-hour range, but I find less and less to think or write about […]
February 26, 2010: Nine This film, Nine, had a bunch of strikes against it by the time I’d merely seen the poster. Director Rob Marshall was the man behind Chicago, Best Picture winner for 2002 and the movie I had to accept as an Oscar-winning musical in order to get it out of Hollywood’s system […]