Jason Sondhi
This is the second part of our coverage of the 9 in-competition short films Tribeca (Online) has made available, and the 3rd (and last) post overall in our coverage of Tribeca 2011 Online Films. You can still see part 1 and our post on the 9 retrospective shorts, but you only have a few more days to catch them.
Overall a really strong showing this year for Tribeca, mostly because of their revamped portal. This was a festival that tried to do web-based on-demand packages last year and got some really bad reviews for it from people who couldn’t see what they paid for. This year they not only went free, but designed the most sophisticated, outreach and marketing platform I’ve yet seen for a film festival’s online component. Good job guys!
The shorts have been a mixed, bag, I expected better from the retrospective shorts program, but all in all there were a few gems that made the experience worth my time and worth yours as well. Let’s have a look at the last 4 short films.
*****
Terms: dir. Jason LaMotte | U.K | 12 min | 2010
“A father and son face off in this darkly amusing tale. The father, returning to find his son has set fire to their house, offers the boy a deal: He’ll give him a 50-yard head start, and he’ll only put one bullet in the chamber. The son decides to negotiate.”
A rather striking film visually, director LaMotte adapts an idiosyncratic short story by Irish writer Mike McCormack. The literary aspirations are apparent in the dialogue, but the pleasure of the Coen-esque dark humor gets weighed down by exposition and overly vague and portentous declarations on the meaning of “home” and assertions that the duo is anachronistic to these “modern times”. A promising film that collapses under its own weight.
5/10
FESTIVAL LINK
Year Zero: dir. Richard Cunningham III | USA | 24min | 2010
“A month after a bacterial parasite began to plague New York City, a survivor remains barricaded his bedroom, trapped by the zombies beating at his door. Eating captured insects and drinking from a leaky pipe, he ekes out the numbed existence of someone caged and isolated. This animated zombie apocalypse tells the story of man’s slow breakup with the world that was.”
A solid enough entry in the growth industry of zombie-media, Year Zero is enjoyable, yet fails to distinguish itself in any way. Narrated by the main character, isolated and bored, the film isn’t true horror, being mostly psychological. And yet that psychology isn’t emotional enough, nor philosophical enough to be truly exceptional. Nor does the film wade into the pool of the survivalist genre with any satisfying level of detail, explicating with any plausibility our main character’s ability to survive. Plus, the animation is not even animation!
Its exciting to get a break from from the rote live-action drama’s, but this genre piece is ultimately unremarkable in most every facet.
5/10
FESTIVAL LINK
Summer Snapshot: dir. Ian McCluskey | USA | 10 min | 2010
“One day at a mountain river a group of friends in their twenties drive along winding forest roads, hike a secret trail, and spend a sun-soaked summer afternoon skinny-dipping, strumming guitars, and circling a campfire. Artfully rendered as a home movie from the 1970s, Summer Snapshot is a poetic reflection on the fleeting window of time between youth and adulthood.”
This is a really lovely, NSFW film, that is interesting for being a documentary of a constructed sort, what with the crew of volunteer subjects, and the 70’s era trappings. One of the last films to be shot using Kodak’s discontinued Kodachrome, the film succeeds wildly in its goal of creating an idyllic scene and infusing it with nostalgia. I mark it down a little bit though because the film will undoubtedly bore many viewers.
7/10
FESTIVAL LINK
Crash&Burn: dir. Rick Rodgers | USA | 18min | 2011
“Two middle-aged musician friends in New York City give rock-and-roll one more try and form the incendiary duo Crash&Burn. They immediately encounter turbulence and glory when Burn announces that he is going to become a she and begins taking huge doses of hormones. Rock and friendship fight to survive in this poignant, hilarious story.”
This film is superior in most every facet, yet on the whole feels less than the sum of its parts. Rick Rodgers applies a surprising visual flair to the proceedings, Burn is a game, warm and honest character, and the topic of gender reassignment naturally raises one’s curiosity. Yet the film was often a chore to sit through. A couple of rationalizations for this: first Crash and Burn’s liberally-used music sucks, second, the documentary relies on Crash and Burn to tell the story, so there is very little of the story actually happening. Of course it could have been watching the film at 3am, so let us know in the comments if it worked for you.
6/10
FESTIVAL LINK