by ·Comments Off on Serotonin Shorts

Moomin (Zach Dorn)
Desktop video (cellphone in portrait mode) dude telling story of trying to win a claw-game moomin for his Canadian girlfriend. After they break up he combs through their text messages emphasizing the in-joke importance of the moomin, then fails to win one in an online app. Fine as a short opener, demonstrates the difference between cute and good.

Love at First Byte (Felizitas Hoffmann & Theresa Hoffmann)
Sentient public transit surveillance system falls in love with a passenger. Blurry and repetitive, Katy has tried to forget this ever happened.

Example #35 (Lucía Malandro & Daniel D. Saucedo)
Cubans love Santiago Alvarez! Reversed and inverted images, okay, but leave your colonoscopy footage at home, please.

No Elements (Barbara VojtaÅ¡áková)
A broken-up couple had shot lots of film around the city and down by the river, her film project that he’d picked up during their relationship and now wants to take over and complete, while she is ambivalent. Nice reversed-footage tricks.

While The Night Falls (Amir Aether Valen)
You Are Not Here (Nastia Korkia)

Afraid I didn’t take notes on these two, but recall that Katy was concerned about consent in the Russian funeral film. That movie’s director Korkia was returning to T/F after her feature GES-2 played last year.

by ·Comments Off on Unfriended (2014, Levan Gabriadze)

“What is a troll?”

Cyberbullies get murdered by ghost of their victim, five stars. Much of the terror here is in degraded video and waiting for sites to load. Unfortunately when I think of this movie, instead of the cool stuff like the one guy’s suicide by blender, I keep lingering on the last two seconds, which unwisely leave the desktop and show us the ghost. But movie also had positive outcomes, getting me to put the post-it note over my laptop camera again. Fun how the movie sets up Blaire, whose desktop we’re in, as a friend, paints her as a victim, then as her friends turn against each other and die, it’s revealed that she’s just as bad, and finally worse.

Blender boy is Terri from the movie Terri, and two of the girls are TV stars. The director is from Georgia (the country) and his followup was an “animated documentary” about a painter/puppeteer. The writer worked on the Sleepy Hollow series, and the gaggle of producers are the only ones who returned for the sequel.

How did Karl Krumpet’s 25-second vacation video get eleven million views??