by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: A

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

by ·Comments Off on More Shorts watched August 2009

I’d considered declaring August to be Shorts Month and watching hundreds of those, so I stocked up, but the inspiration had fled by the time the month rolled around. But we can’t let all these shorts go to waste, so I still watched more than usual.

73 Suspect Words and Heaven’s Gate (2000, Peggy Ahwesh)
Fun gimmick videos, one displaying the “suspect words” found by running the Unabomber manifesto through a spell checker, and the other listing off the search keywords of the Heaven’s Gate cult’s website. In the first the text appears quickly and fades out, and in the second the words flicker constantly.
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Apocalypse Pooh (1987, T. Graham)
scenes from Apocalypse Now and Winnie The Pooh inexpertly combined. Actually the lipsync and some of the shot selections were pretty wonderful. I’m pretty sure nobody will ever care about this movie again now that a hundred thousand video mashups are clogging youtube, but it’s a cute piece of cult history. The poor video quality would turn on the guy who made Out of Print.

Thanksgiving Prayer (1991, Gus Van Sant)
William S. Burroughs hatin’ on America, being a general bummer, as is the fashion among leftists around Thanksgiving time. Decent video but I far prefer Ballad of the Skeletons with Allen Ginsberg.
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Szalontudo (2006, Szirmai Marton)
That joke where guy 1 thinks guy 2 has stolen his food, so he starts eating from the other side, and they glare at each other eating the same food, then guy 2 walks off and guy 1 sees his food still untouched… he was eating guy 2’s food! Ah! This was terrible, with gross squishy chewing sound effects. Won an audience award in north-central Spain where they’ve never heard that joke before.
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Le Vol d’Icare (1974, Georges Schwitzgebel)
I think it’s primitive animation made on a lite-brite. Or maybe it’s HyperStudio version 0.1. Story of icarus, I suppose. I liked the flocks of birds. What is that, a harpsichord?
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Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005, Peter Tscherkassky)
Pumping stutter-motion! Variable-speed lock-groove dude in a Leone western having a death-dream. Ends with words “Start,” “End” and “Finish” overlapping as the guy, appearing to be on fire, runs with mirrored graveyards above and below him.
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The Adventurer (1917, Charles Chaplin)
Weird to see Charlie as an escaped convict threatening cops with a shotgun. But there’s plenty of ass-kickin and cliff-jumpin so it’s alright. I forgot the encoding quality is garbage on my copy of these… must buy a better one.
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Inflation (1927, Hans Richter)
Rich people, money, poor people, more money, stock traders, more and more and more money, digits rushing at the screen whilst speed-adjusted carnival nightmare music plays until the whole damn thing comes crashing down. Only two minutes long! An achievement.
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Yellow Tag (2004, Jan Troell)
In the old days we were close to our farm animals but today governments require tracking ear-tags. Fun movie… maybe didn’t need the classroom and religious art scenes, but it makes up for that in the end by going all wacky with shooting galleries and suited men raining down outside some kinda UN building.
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Crac! (1981, Frédéric Back)
Animated story of the creation and long life of a rocking chair, accompanied by drum and fiddle music. It’s much better than it sounds.
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Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961, Stan Brakhage)
Arrrrgh, another birthing movie! Why did nobody warn me? Apparently the title is Brak-code for “vagina.” Once I got over the initial shock, this is excellent. Hand-processed frames over live-action film, intense.
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by ·1 Comment

IMDB says ’87, websites say ’90 but the movie’s own credits say 1989, so there.

It’s not the first time I’ve watched a painfully low-quality downloaded video of a rare art film on J. Rosenbaum’s list of 1000 favorite movies only to come out scratching my head… and it won’t be the last. It’s impossible to tell if the handheld b/w photography is any good because my copy was so poor, but hey it might’ve been.

JR himself says the movie “charts the adventures of a nearly naked heroine who leaves the corpse of her dead lover in a country house, goes to a bar and sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to her house to die. The film manages to approximate the transgressive poetic prose of Bataille (a mixture of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor) while celebrating female sexual desire without the usual patriarchal-porn trimmings.” That’s Georges Bataille, famed French semi-philosophical writer, whom I know nothing about except from glancing at his wikipedia.

Marie drunkenly wrestles/dances with a dude in the bar:
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JD Rhodes: “The film’s events more or less follow those of the story. Ahwesh has said that she was drawn to adapt the text because she liked ‘how Bataille does not explain the emotions of the characters’. The camera actually seems to savour its exteriority to the events of the profilmic. The use of silent film intertitles, all actual lines culled from the original Bataille story, reinforces the exteriority of the film’s narration.” Aha, Rhodes also says the cinematography is often under- or over-lit, so my bad copy might not have been as bad as I thought.

Me, I didn’t get it… but then I’m not all that deep, and while watching a nude woman romp through a “purposely” amateur-looking super-8 movie is still more interesting than the recent Batman flick, I never sit there thinking “ah, it’s exactly this film’s deceptive slackness that constitutes its philosophical and even political rigour: only through its superficially amateurish (often hilarious) elisions and dilations, its mordant tautologies and wilful omissions, its hokey dialogue and its raw display of female sexuality can the film succeed in forcing the kinds of questions it does from its viewers.” [Rhodes again]. Nope, just another WEIRD ART FILM to me.

Rhodes: “We think of Pasolini here, of Jack Smith, of Warhol.”
Me: Exactly.

Marie with the deadman:
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