I am, admittedly, about a week late to this short. Here hit the web last Tuesday, which might have something to do with the lack of immediate effusive praise: Oscar nominations tend to hog all the attention, especially when it comes to those of us that spend our days writing about the movies. Unfortunate, because I would venture to claim that this 15 minute jewel from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love) is plenty more attractive and tightly produced than many of the features up for this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a gorgeous and calmly reverential piece of commissioned work that absolutely entrances, further making the point that beauty really is entirely inexpressible in words.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try out utmost. There’s an aesthetic perfection all over this film, not simply an enticing attribute but the entire point of the production. The Luxury Collection is a group of almost impossibly chic hotels and resorts under the Starwoods label, and their collaboration with Waris Ahluwalia is both out of love for art and a desire to showcase their properties to a wider audience. Here was shot at three of these hotels: The Equinox in Vermont, the Phoenician in Arizona and the Royal Hawaiian. They’re pretty stunning.

But before we get into the details of this film’s pristine images, let’s talk about commissions. They tend to throw a wrench in any attempt to categorize short film as theoretically distinct. Funding and interference might be the biggest obvious difference between short cinema and its feature counter-part. These smaller films aren’t made to sell tickets as part of a theatrical release.  There is no overriding studio structure that manipulates a production to get big box office, or Oscar nominations. The content of a short is (almost) never determined by a producer and his or her assumptions about what the general public wants to see.

Yet there are also music videos and commissioned shorts like this one that are designed to advertise something specific. Rather than shooting for the general appeal of a mass-audience studio picture, Guadagnino and Ahluwalia were tasked with a very precise mission: show the beauty of The Luxury Collection’s hotels. Does that somehow hurt Here’s artistic credentials? It’s certainly a more explicit kind of commercialism. Do we need to put a film like this in a separate category, alongside TV commercials and away from the kind of short film work that gets nominated for Oscars?

Before making that call, let’s look at the film itself. (Ideally in HD and full-screen, of course)

It really does feel like a master class in creating cinematic beauty, taking the initial goal of showcasing these hotels and expanding it out into the broader reaches of cinema. Our character is a quintessential Hitchcock blonde taking a mysterious trip across the country, led along only by a series of minimalist clues. Up the Hudson by train, across a marsh in a tiny boat and into the mountains of Arizona, we follow her relaxed pursuit with interest but without anxiety.

Agyness Deyn has the poise (and hair) of Tippi Hedren and the wardrobe of Grace Kelly, though the latter has been brought up to a more 21^st Century speed. Every little detail of the film’s visual style is perfectly arranged, from beautiful little props that would have fit perfectly into North by Northwest to the equally Hitchcockian focus on transportation in style. Here is a breathtaking evocation of the great director’s Hollywood hits.

Yet there is another strand of cinematic tradition that becomes equally obvious as Guadagnino’s short moves forward. Blogger Angela McCormack at Portable does an astute job listing as many Wes Anderson references as she can find, and there may very well be more lurking in this lush film. Of course this is no surprise: Ahluwalia and co-composer Jason Schwartzman are both Anderson regulars, while co-creator Tilda Swinton will be appearing in his newest film this spring . Beyond the bathed yellow scene in the Vermont hotel and the appearance of a hawk, Here has captured the spirit of Anderson’s work and used it to temper the power of its Hitchcock influences. The props may be given the legendary director’s focus, but they have the quirky younger man’s ornate sense of style. Deyn’s mildly amused characterization is reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum, not so much burdened by malaise but just generally unimpressed.

Sure, Guadagnino could have his actress appear just as wowed by these luxurious locations as we in the audience undoubtedly are. Yet that could easily undercut the artistic style of the short. Deyn and her wardrobe are part of the beauty of this film, part of the lush atmosphere that we presumably can expect at a Luxury Collection hotel. That’s the idea, anyway. And here we are again, back on that tricky issue of commissioned art.

I’ve focused on the referential aspects of Here more than describing the surface level of beauty that remains the most impressive element of the short, partially to stress that no film so conscious of its influences can be written off simply for having an explicitly commercial element. I also tried to avoid talking about the details of its aesthetic value because it frankly isn’t as easy to explain. Beauty is not only subjective but also often beyond words. On some level that’s why we have visual art in the first place, and it speaks to Guadagnino’s strength as a director of elegant cinema.

Here isn’t just beautiful, it’s about beauty. It’s a meditation on the relationship between travel, discovery and the extraordinary potential of any new encounter. Financed and inspired by The Luxury Collection, it adds the influences of Hitchcock and Anderson and turns out something much more complex and compelling than any commercial.

All of the nine shorts Yahoo and the Sundance Film Festival have put on the web are pretty good. It’s an impressive crop, and I’d say more consistent than a lot of the stuff festivals have put online in the last year. Yet in any batch of films a few rise to the top. I’ve rounded up the other seven, and the oddly consistent problem they have. Here are my two favorites and some gushing about why I think they’re absolutely worth your time.

Long Distance Information, by Douglas Hart

I suppose it doesn’t reflect too well on my attention span that one of my picks is the shortest film on the list, but oh well. While it may not be excellent because it cuts out before the eight minute mark, that comparatively small running time makes the brief screenplay even more noticeably tight. There’s not a single wasted second.

Writer/director Douglas Hart’s film is one of subtle relationship shifts. That applies not only to the emotional connections between the father and son at the center of the story, but also the physical structure of the set. Are these two rooms in the same building, or are they not on the same continent? Is this a tightly-knit family, or has it been years since they’ve spoken to each other? We spend the entire film changing our minds.

Click on the images to go watch the films

Yet none of this is accomplished through any pyrotechnics, in either the screenplay or the visual style. It’s only an exceedingly well-choreographed narrative. Little details about the characters are slipped in one at a time, giving us glimpses of a family picture that only seconds later we’ll need to revise. Peter Mullan (talented actor and scariest living Scotsman) is at the center, holding a balance between the vague reacting that keeps the story open and the minute character detail that lead us on. Excellent work all around, until an inevitable final twist that somehow manages to avoid overstepping.

The Debutante Hunters, by Maria White

For a second I was sort of hoping this short would turn out to be a contemporary Southern Belle reality show in miniature, TLC goes to Sundance. Thankfully, I didn’t get my misguided Toddlers-and-Tiaras-induced wish.

There are women in the South who hunt. They’re also role models. This documentary short from Maria White focuses on a group of mothers and daughters in the Low Country of South Carolina who have built a little community for themselves. Shotgun in hand, these ladies venture out into the wilderness to track down game and bring it home for dinner. Deer, turkeys, boar, and the rest of thePalmettoStatemenagerie.

Of course, there’s so much more to it. This is a family tradition, fathers and mothers teaching their daughters to bring in pigeons and other fowl from an early age. There’s even a mother/daughter hunting team in the mix. Heartfelt interviews and buoyant trips out into the forest bring a humane touch to the film, which could easily have been lost amidst all the animal shooting.

The centerpiece is the cookout these friends organize once they’ve all gotten the best game. It highlights not only the sense of tradition and community, but also how smart this turns out to be. It turns out that one deer can feed a family cheaply and healthily, and for a long time. This isn’t just hunting for sport, though the women involved get a great deal of fulfillment out of the act itself. It’s a marriage of good planning and a sense of family fun.

And I say this as someone who would be much too queasy to even think about shooting poor Bambi’s Mother myself.

Maybe I’m a bit cynical. That’s not true. I’m excessively cynical. I could claim it comes naturally once you’ve seen too many movies, but that doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse. And the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s online shorts are a perfectly illustrative example of why any exhausted approach to new movies is a bad idea.

American independent film has arguably hit a point of stylistic ferment. There’s a ton of exciting and innovative new work produced every year, but there’s also a growing list of aggravating indie film trends. Documentaries about cute old people doing something unexpected en masse, raucous banter-heavy family comedies, quirky teenagers that talk like cynical 30-somethings. It’s true that each of these styles initially caught on because of some genuinely excellent films, but that doesn’t make the inferior ones any less irritating. If I were to say “oh, it was just another bad Sundance movie” a lot of people would have a pretty clear stereotypical image, though it might vary based on the individual.

All of that drives the cynicism. You can sense a dreadful movie in its first few minutes; it’s so easy to put it into a box. Yet take heed! Apparently it doesn’t always work that way (I know, duh). Sometimes that instant recognition is right (see Jesus Henry Christ). But often it’s totally wrong. Seven of the nine Sundance online short films had me convinced for a good 1-3 minutes that they were going to be predictable and frustrating. Each one of them proved me wrong.

Click on the images to go watch the shorts!

Una Hora por Favora, by Jill Soloway

I got pretty invested in the apparent genre of this short film rather quickly. The set-up is as follows: a single woman inCalifornia, constantly harassed by her mother, ends up hiring a day laborer to come fix her shower. Lonely and neurotic, it becomes inevitable that she’s going to hit on him. Movies about middle-class white urbanites having a roll in the hay with the help, without any effort to resolve the whole objectification-exoticizing thing, are really irritating. Mercifully, this turns into a satire and by the end has supplied enough ridiculous neurotic behavior that I’m confident it knows what it’s doing. I think.

Henley, by Craig Macneill

Sometimes a short film can be a bit too long. It sounds silly, but it’s actually a lot easier for a short to overstay its welcome than a feature. Shorts need to validate every second. Henley just takes too much time to wind up. Ted is nine years old and has an unsettling hobby, like many of his Sundance-y brethren. He collects dead animals from off the road by his father’s motel. For most of the short he just keeps gathering and experimenting. Director Craig Macneill is very deliberate in slowing down the kid’s process of inspiration. Yet the last half is redemptive, and the final moments of the short show that Macneill really does know what’s up.

Odysseus’ Gambit, by Àlex Lora Cercos

Documentaries about the really entertaining and socially excluded person hanging out in the park (or any other public place) often come from a genuinely selfless place and turn out to be impressively self-indulgent. I worried about Odysseus’ Gambit from the beginning, but that was mostly because I really need to get my cynicism checked out by a doctor. Admittedly the intertitles aren’t the best device and the audience could easily build a story without them (they could certainly be in a better font). But once Saravuth gets around to telling his story things lift off. Sometimes a human life gets caught in the mess of a filmmaker desperately trying to tell it. By the end of this short, its subject’s fascinating character absolutely gets through.

’92 Skybox Alonzo Mourning Rookie Card, by Todd Sklar

Bros acting ridiculous can get really tiring, whether or not they are actually brothers. Adults acting like adolescents, especially in some recent “homecoming of age” movies (™ Christopher Campbell), behave badly and only learn once the plot forces them into obligatory heartwarming Act III. Todd Sklar miraculously doesn’t let that happen, despite some early warning signs: comically large diner orders, inexplicable childish costume choices and other irritating antics. Yet the relationship between these brothers feels genuine by the end, and somehow you end up liking both of them. It does feel top heavy in structure but there’s enough humor to keep you going for the very empathetically written last few minutes.

The Arm, by Brie Larson, Sarah Ramos and Jessie Ennis

Children talking like adults, if those adults were disaffected 30-somethings, are arguably Diablo Cody’s fault (and I’m not even one of the bitter Juno haters.) Texting jokes can easily go the route of terrible New Yorker cartoons. When you put the two together, failure is practically guaranteed. Jessie Ennis, Sarah Ramos and Brie Larson (who may have picked up the teenager-speak thing on the set of The United States of Tara) pull this off with flying colors. Two teens have a relationship that consists entirely of text messages. One of them dies, while texting. What’s the emotional impact? Is there an emotional impact? Whimsically metaphorical instead of moralizing and oblivious, The Arm asks some questions without presuming to know all the answers. That’s why it keeps both funny and intriguing throughout.

Aquadettes, by Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari

Old women synchronized swimming is not, at core, enough for a movie. Not even a ten minute movie. Thankfully, these two filmmakers are much less concerned with making us awwww for the duration of their project à la Young@Heart than they are with telling a single story. Margo is getting older, and uses the swimming pool and medical marijuana as a way to cope. We learn about her life from a simple one-to-one perspective, seeing her truth instead of (only) how cute she is. It’s refreshing and delightful.

Dol (First Birthday), by Andrew Ahn

I have seen this film too many times: A single cultural event brings a family together, but the gay protagonist is left isolated either internally or explicitly and it becomes an opportunity for conflict, growth and a heart-warming conclusion. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet is excellent. Many other films are not. The one biggest weakness they have is their inability to let loose the reins and give the audience an opportunity to gather up emotions independently. Writer/director Andrew Ahn gives us a little space. There’s no open conflict but there’s also no painfully obvious guilt. There is only the basic element of longing, a wish for the real traditional values of family that might not be open to some because of the so-called “traditional values” that stand in the way. With an unexpected closing shot that oddly enough recalls last year’s Sundance hit Like Crazy¸ Dol shows us the ambiguity of a gay Korean American’s life without needing a thematic cudgel.

As I noted yesterday in my round-up of the animated short Oscar shortlist, Warner Bros. is pushing hard for a nomination for their new Sylvester and Tweety short. I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, which is playing in front of Happy Feet Two, would be the first Looney Tunes to go to the Academy Awards since 1963′s Now Hear This. Sylvester and Tweety themselves were nominated four times in the ’40s and ’50s, winning twice. I haven’t yet seen the new short, so I have no idea if it lives up to the extraordinary legacy of Warner Bros. cartoons at the Oscars, but I’m eager to find out.

In the meantime, let’s take a look back at the last time these two rambunctious pets made it to the podium. 1957′s Birds Anonymous would mark the fourth Oscar victory for the Looney Tunes series, and the second for a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon. It’s a wonderfully light-hearted spoof of the dark and often heavy-handed melodramas of the time, influenced by the growth and success of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s also one of the most successful films Friz Freleng directed before Warner Bros. closed their animation studio in 1963, causing him to then start his own production company (DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which would create The Pink Panther).

But that’s another story, however exciting it might be. The creative genius of Freleng is only one component of the great success of Birds Anonymous, the other being the great voice acting of Mel Blanc. The diversity of vocal styles just in this single short is extraordinary, all supplied by that singular voice actor. There’s a reason that Blanc, despite having died in 1989, seems to be a central point made by the FYC campaign for I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat.Voicing the distinct personalities of Sylvester and Tweety is one thing, but in Birds Anonymous Blanc lends his unique skill to a range of feather-chasing felines. I’m sure that in 1957 no kid in the audience would have had any idea these cats were all voiced by the same man.

As for the story and the overall style of the film, Birds Anonymous is just an all-around winner. The dark angles of the opening scene, setting up Sylvester’s absolute dedication to capturing his prey, work perfectly to create a clever tongue-in-cheek satire. The characterization of addiction manages to be funny without excessively trivializing the real Alcoholics Anonymous, and the portrayal of these redemption-seeking felines manages to balance warmth and sharp humor. It’s hilarious, it’s well-animated, and it’s a nice reminder of the heyday of American theatrical cartoons.

Today the Academy announced the 10 animated shorts that have made it onto the shortlist for the Oscar, to be given out in February. Only three to five of these films will be nominated, but even getting this far is an incredibly exciting accomplishment. Therefore, instead of just copying out the list and moving on, let’s talk about them a bit.

Of course, at this point some of the films are easier to learn about than others. The Sylvester and Tweety short even has a For Your Consideration page, while others have almost no online presence. The ten look to be a nice blend of techniques, with representation from stop-motion, traditional and computer generated animation. There’s also a bit of an international presence, with films from Argentina, the UK, France and Poland. The always-present National Film Board of Canada also appears twice on the list. There are veterans of the industry (including former Oscar nominees) alongside very new filmmakers.

Only one of these shorts is available on the web and I haven’t caught any of them at festivals this year, so this’ll be a somewhat basic preview. However, as things become more available I’ll try reviewing them individually. Once I’ve seen them, anyway. For now, here’s a round-up with some trailers.

Dimanche, by Patrick Doyon (National Film Board of Canada)

Patrick Doyon, according to his blog, is a Montreal-based illustrator and animator. He’s won a number of awards for his work in both areas, but it seems that Dimanche is his first major foray into animated film. (He does have a pretty delightful 10-second clip on his vimeo page, however.) Here’s the trailer for the short, which looks like the kind of clever and light-hearted traditional animation the NFB is so great at producing:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg (Moonbot Studios LA, LLC)

This short appears to be a fascinating blend of techniques, from CG animation to work with miniatures. Co-director William Joyce has been in the biz for while, having written and illustrated over 50 children’s books. He’s got 3 Emmys as the creator of Rolie Polie Olie, and his stuff has been on the cover of the New Yorker. The film has both a website and an iPad app, and is available on iTunes.

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat, by Matthew O’Callaghan (Warner Bros. Animation Inc.)

Believe it or not, this one actually has its own For Your Consideration website. Sylvester and Tweety return to the screen, accompanied by an old Mel Blanc recording. It’s playing in front of Happy Feet Two, which should still be in theaters just about everywhere. Warner Bros. is pushing the legacy of Looney Tunes at the Oscars, which I’ll get right behind if the short itself lives up to it. This could be Sylvester and Tweety’s fifth Academy Award nomination.

La Luna, by Enrico Casarosa (Pixar Animation Studios)

I have been dying to see this for ages. Pixar’s one film in the running, the press for this Pixar short has already begun. It’s based on an Italo Calvino short story, is the longest short film the studio has ever done, and it looks marvelous. Apparently it’s a blend of CG and watercolor work, which is the kind of experimentation big studios should absolutely be doing more of. Here’s a clip:

Luminaris, by Juan Pablo Zaramella (JPZtudio)

Juan Pablo Zaramella, a stop-motion animator from Argentina, has won a number of films on the festival circuit over the years. A bunch of his stuff is on Vimeo, which I promise I’ll look at and report back about soon. In the meantime, I am mostly just excited that there’s stop-motion on the list. Here’s the trailer:

 Magic Piano, by Martin Clapp (BreakThru Films)

I can’t even find a trailer for this one, unfortunately. However, it’s an exciting prospect nonetheless. Martin Clapp was an animator on Peter and the Wolf, which picked up the Oscar in this category a few years ago. If this is another exciting stop-motion film with a musical theme, then I am all for it.

A Morning Stroll, by Grant Orchard (Studio AKA)

Based on the work of Paul Auster, this promises to be a strange and delightful piece of work. I can’t find much about it, but it looks cool. There’s nothing like a good story of man vs. chicken. Studio AKA has the trailer:

Paths of Hate, by Damian Nenow (Platige Image)

This one is a bit hard to figure out. The film’s website calls it “a short tale of beasts, which lie dormant deep in the human soul and push them into the abyss of blind hatred, rage and anger,” which is pretty intriguing but not so helpful about the plot. The trailer helps a bit, showing us a fire fight in the air with some really promising airplane animation.

Specky Four-Eyes, by Jean-Claude Rozec (Vivement Lundi!)

This French film, without a trailer online (that I can find, help me out if it’s out there), does have a profile on the uniFrance Films website. It’s played a number of festivals as well, including Aspen ShortsFest. It’s about a kid who doesn’t quite like it when he gets glasses, which ruin his near-sighted world of fantasy. Sounds like the kind of stuff the Academy loves, and I’m eager to see it.

Wild Life, by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby (National Film Board of Canada)

Finally, animators Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby return to the Academy Awards conversation. Their 1999 short When the Day Breaks was not only nominated for the animated short Oscar, but won the short Palme d’Or at Cannes. (Read about it in a Cannes shorts post I wrote for Spout this spring.) Adamant about their continued use of hand-drawn animation, these two filmmakers produce creative and empathetic work that makes the term “traditional animation” seem absolutely ridiculous. There’s a making-of video on the NFB website, and here’s the trailer.

I must say that the most exciting thing about today’s National Board of Review announcement for me was the Best Actress honor for Tilda Swinton. Firstly, it’s refreshing when these groups shake things up a bit and keep the competition going. But more than that, I think Swinton is one of those actresses who enrich just about every conversation, Oscar season or otherwise. Her strength isn’t simply that she’s an extraordinarily talented actress, but that she chooses projects and collaborations that dare to enrich and extend art and cinema as a whole. Too many of the leading female performances raved about this awards cycle are in safe and uninteresting movies, which is never a problem for a Swinton picture.

But enough general gushing. Let’s go back to an early point in Swinton’s career, one of her very first film roles. A year after appearing in Caravaggio, her first collaboration with Derek Jarman, the director asked her to star in his contribution to 1987′s Aria (which I covered earlier this week, as a tribute to Ken Russell).  The music is the famous Depuis le jour from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, a sweet ode to young love. It’s a gorgeously simple short from the often provocative director, as earnest in its beauty as the music itself.

An old woman stands in period costume, taking her final bow as a great operatic star. Yet in this moment of joy she reflects. Jerman intercuts 8mm videos of an early romance, Swinton as the effervescent and now faint memory of a long-ago young girl in love. The aria plays over it all, Leontyne Price sweetly warbling in youthful exaltation. “Et je tremble délicieusement/Au souvenir charmant/Du premier jour D’amour!” – “And I tremble deliciously/at the delightful memory/of the first day of love!” As the melody twirls along the young lovers gradually move from black and white to color, transporting us to a seaside romance that sparkles in the past.

In December of 1986 Jarman tested positive for HIV, and this short is the first project he took on after his diagnosis. It has therefore been said that Depuis le jour is a farewell to cinema. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, but this can definitely be seen as a transitional moment in his oeuvre. There’s an empathetic understanding of mortality in this quietly profound musical piece, a balance between loss and the persistence of memory that puts everything into perspective. Certainly derived from deep and personal reflection on the part of its director, it’s a meditative and almost ethereal work of art.

It’s also the second, and first significant collaboration between Jarman and Swinton. From this short until the director’s death in 1994, Swinton was cast in every single one of his films. A bittersweet combination, the beginning of a grand partnership and the beginning of the end for an extraordinary life in the cinema, Depuis le jour is absolutely worth your time.

I’m not exactly stoked about the New York Film Critics Circle awards, given that I thought The Artist was kinda slight. No matter! One thing the NYFCC did right was extend a special award to Raoul Ruiz, who passed away in August. His last film, the epic Mysteries of Lisbon, is one of my favorite features of the year. Magnificent in scope and sporting some of the most stunning cinematography I have seen in ages, the near-6-hour epic is everything I love about ambitious narrative cinema. There are few directors as deserving of this sort of special recognition as Ruiz, and it gives us a great excuse to take a look at one of his early shorts.

From one angle, Colloque de chiens seems like a perfect example of the French New Wave’s influence on a younger generation of filmmakers. Ruiz arrived in Paris in 1973, after Augusto Pinochet’s US-backed coup in his native Chile, and by 1977 had made a number of films in France. This particular short is almost entirely made up of narration and still photographs, evocative of La jetée and other similarly experimental French films of the 1960s. Bourgeois characters find themselves in doomed relationships and meaningless affairs, the sort of characteristic malaise you’d find in Godard’s work. Yet by the late 1970s all of that was getting a bit old, and Ruiz is most certainly doing something new with this complex little film.

The story itself is the sort of long, sweeping drama one might find in a classic Hollywood women’s picture. A young girl discovers that her mother is actually not her mother, and that she was born an illegitimate child with no known father. Crippled by this information, she grows up and has a sordid series of relationships with older, wealthy men. Eventually she settles down to marry a high school sweetheart, but things inevitably turn to murder and increasingly complicated narrative twists.

However, all of this is distanced from the audience via voice-over narration and still photography. None of these characters get to speak, or even move. We are detached from the drama, granting us more freedom to reflect on how formulaic this kind of torrid storytelling can be. The violence, the sex and the manipulation seem like little more than basic pieces of any melodrama, no more organic than the blocky and uninspired creatures enacting them. Ruiz drives this point home even further with his occasional canine interjections, footage of dogs barking at each other with no further context. The conflict between these token bourgeois characters is little more than a colloque de chiens.

Yet I cannot shake the notion that Ruiz is also driving in other directions with this short. Certainly the critique of melodrama is there, effective and biting, but there are other elements that go beyond this singular purpose. Henri, the leading man in this tale, is played by a woman. Colloque de chiens is not a Douglas Sirk memoir so much as it is a forerunner of Pedro Almodóvar‘s remixing of the genre. The element of sexual similarity and eventual sex change, evocative of The Skin I Live In and Law of Desire, complicates matters. The very solid roles into which melodrama places men and women become nebulous and permeable.

I could easily continue raving about the subtle implications of Ruiz’s varied and fascinating directorial choices in this short. There’s some particularly creative work in the latter part of the film involving weapons as symbols. The short becomes both narratively and visually cyclical, perhaps to suggest that these stories are in a way self-fulfilling prophecies. There is so much packed into these twenty minutes, a reminder of how short film need not be as bite-sized in concept as in running-time.

I love stop motion animation. For whatever reason, despite having seen countless shorts and features using the technique, it blows me away almost on principle. Everything, from the Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam to Wallace and Gromit and that episode of Community, sends me into awe as I think about the process. These little movements, each artfully choreographed down to the slightest detail, are suddenly stacked together for kinetic experiences that often feel much more alive than regular live-action filmmaking. It takes you back to the very basics of cinema.

And of course new technology has only sent creativity through the roof. People can now make shorts with their phones, like that Aardman video set on the beach that was released this summer. Shorts are being made everywhere, inspired by our new world of technology in unexpected and delightful ways. Address Is Approximate is a shining example of this exciting trend. Put on the web just a few days ago by The Theory films, this delightful distraction uses Google Maps to show just how small the world can be these days.

A lonely office toy wants something more. It’s a familiar concept, a character that we’ve come to know and love both through Pixar (Wall-E, Toy Story, etc) and some really clever short films (Terminus and REACH both come to mind). Yet with the world at his fingertips, he can grab a toy car and take a journey across the country. Filmmaker Tom Jenkins, who directed, animated, edited, lit and produced this video, has painstakingly captured a great number of Google Maps images and turned them into a clever narrative. At one moment we even see this toy jumping up and down on the mouse, clicking over and over again as Jenkins must have done himself. It’s both an adorable little story and a stunning show of what can be done with stop motion animation.

Also, the music is pretty great. The only component that Jenkins seems not to have done himself, the track is by The Cinematic Orchestra. They’ve also done scores for the early experimental films Entr’acte and Manhatta, which are both excellent and can be seen on YouTube.

There’s a bittersweet awkwardness that happens when you discover someone’s work only as a result of their passing. I’ve never been familiar with Ken Russell‘s extraordinary and controversial filmography, despite the many times friends have recommended him. I adore Women in Love but I haven’t seen any of his other features, and from what I hear that’s hardly a representative work. I’ve seen clips of The Devils on YouTube, but have never gotten around to watching the full film. And so, as the film community mourns, I spent some time this morning reading some wonderful obituaries and poking around the web to see if he’d ever directed shorts. I found something entirely unexpected, enigmatic, and hermetical.

Aria, released in 1987, is one of those anthology flicks that opens to great excitement at Cannes and then goes absolutely nowhere. There isn’t much of a market for these things, at least not since the ‘ 60s, and it’s a shame. This particular film tasked 10 celebrated directors to each make a short film around a single opera, giving us a unique opportunity to see how artists like Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman and Robert Altman relate to specific pieces of music. Russell’s contribution is Nessun Dorma, a haunting seven minutes wrapped around one of the most darkly powerful arias in the operatic canon.

He opens with a lone woman, her neck girded by astrological rings, treading the air as if drowning. A group of attendants, dressed in golden ornaments that evoke the most ancient of civilizations, anoint her body with bright red jewels and intriguing glyphs. The air of ceremony fits marvelously with Puccini‘s stately music; Turandot, the opera from which this aria is taken, is a grand tale of love and death at the Chinese Imperial Court. Yet as this strange ritual moves forward, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that something much more ominous is going on here.

Suddenly, as tenor Jussi Björling bursts in with the aria proper, everything is revealed. Russell cuts to our stately figure suddenly bloodied on the ground, the victim of a dramatic car crash. The royal attendants are doctors and nurses, dressing her wounds just as they ceremonially added decoration to her naked body in the dreamscape. The medical operations are just as systematic and orderly as their mystical counterparts in the first half of the film, casting modern medicine as an ancient and occult practice.

With a stylistic sensibility that evokes the magic of Fellini, Russell has used a single piece of music and one woman’s violent accident to collapse the boundaries of time and reality. Turandot, after all, is set not simply in China (faraway enough for a turn-of-the-century Italian like Puccini), but in the legendary and distant past. Its music takes this ancient inspiration and combines it with Puccini’s ground-breaking technique, creating its own lyrical universe on stage. Russell’s film is a beautiful extension of this otherworldly setting, a brief glimpse into human tragedy that takes the emergency room into another dimension altogether.

Give it a look. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to finally watch The Devils.

Based on characters from Chanse’s one woman show, the short takes the form of student Suzette Law’s final project for an Ethnic Studies class on Asian American artists. She follows around Truth Is Real, a local poet whose work is almost impossibly awful. We get to see bits of performances, as well as interviews with everyone from the local artistic establishment to a barista at the cafe where Truth Is Real drives away customers. Everyone is played by Chanse herself, who plays around with voices and mannerisms to really bring these characters to life. It’s like a miniature “A Mighty Wind” set in the Bay Area.

Yet beneath all of the great one-liners, “Asian American Jesus” has at its core a witty interrogation of Asian American identity. Truth Is Real isn’t just a terrible poet. She’s a great way for Chanse to poke fun at the things Asian American artists are expected to address. One poem, “Refugee Song,” goes off the rails when Truth Is Real admits that her mother wasn’t a refugee: “she was born in Daly City, actually.” In another performance she takes a break to let the audience know that “another” is spelled “an\Other,” because – “That’s right, I’m fuckin’ with language.”

Everything from the cultural and academic establishments to local art is lampooned here, but it’s a lampooning with wit and intent. It also keeps the humor going, mostly due to Chanse’s uncanny skill with delivery and Gomez’s very effective pacing. The characters are well-conceived, the jokes mostly hit home, and on the whole it’s great to see this kind of work from two emerging artists. Have a look: