The DVD Report #53

Short films have been a staple of the movies since the beginning. From the 1930s to the early 1960s, short films – both live action and animated, were part of the movie going experience for everyone. Though there were no specific rules about their exhibition, the shorter films, roughly those running ten minutes or less, were generally shown between films on double feature programs while longer ones, those running up to 40 minutes, took the place of the second feature when the main feature was longer than two hours.

Though they were combined on one laserdisc and recently distributed together theatrically, Criterion has released two short films from celebrated French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse in separate packaging befitting their unique place in movie history.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) annually bestows its Oscars on short films in special categories for which designated voters must attend special screenings to insure that they have seen all the candidates. Rarely does a short film break out of the mold and find itself competing in another category. Clocking in at a mere 34 minutes, Lamorisse’s 1956 film, The Red Balloon not only managed to land a nomination outside of the short film category, it actually won that category.

The Red Balloon holds the distinction of being both the shortest film and the film with the least amount of dialogue to win a Best Screenplay Oscar. In fact the film about a boy and his balloon has practically no dialogue at all. Beautifully photographed in vibrant colors on the streets of Paris with the director’s young son, Pascal Lamorisse, this enchanting film is the perfect vehicle for introducing children to the wonders of world cinema.

Lamorisse’s 1953 film, White Mane, about a young fisherman who captures a wild stallion, clocks in at a slightly-longer 40 minutes. Beautifully filmed in black and white in the south of France, this is another fine film for children. A new English narration to this multi-award winner is provided by Peter Strauss.

Largely unseen at Oscar time, the short films that were nominated for last year’s Oscars were packaged together and travelled the country as A Collection of 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films. That collection has now been released on DVD. Included are the live-action winner The Mozart of Pickpockets and animated winner Peter & the Wolf as well as live action nominees At Night, The Substitute, Tanghi Argentini and The Tonto Woman, and animated nominees Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven. Two additional animated nominees, I Met the Walrus and My Love, are not included.

First up is the Danish At Night written and directed by Christian E. Christiansen, a grim, sparse, yet strangely life affirming 40-minute short about three girls, aged 18 to 20, living and dying in a hospital’s cancer ward at Christmas time. The film is somewhat reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in its more dour aspects.

Next up is the Italian entry, The Substitute, a farce that is jarringly at odds with the short film that precedes it. Even at ten minutes it seems mercilessly too long. There is no writer’s credit, but one can assume director/star Andrea Jublin is the guilty party. With an over-the-top performance that makes Roberto Benigni look reserved in comparison, Jublin and the most obnoxious kids you’ve ever seen act like idiots over a signed rubber ball.

The winner, a 35-minute French short, The Mozart of Pickpockets , takes the center position in the program. A deft comedy about a couple of inept pickpockets who glom onto a deaf-mute kid who teaches them a thing or two, it was written and directed by Phillippe Pollet-Villard. Though charming, it is not the best of the lot. That would be the next short in the program.

The 13-minute Belgian charmer, Tanghi Argentini, won twenty international awards before being nominated for the Oscar that it sadly lost. Written by Geert Verbanck and directed by Guy Thys, the short holds a special place in the hearts of members of Oscar Guy’s discussion board as Geert (aka Sijmen) is a long-time member who attended this year’s Oscars as a guest of the producer and kept us apprised of all the events leading up to and following this year’s ceremony.

His little movie is a sophisticated gem about an office clerk with the internet screen name of Bing Crosby who gets a co-worker to teach him the tango in two weeks in order to impress a woman he met online. There is a very sweet O Henry-style surprise ending that may not be what you’d expect, but it is perfectly fitting. It’s really quite a treat.

Taken from a story by Elmore Leonard, The Tonto Woman, with its screenplay by Joe Schrapnel and direction by Daniel Barber, clocks in at 36 minutes but plays like a full length feature. Exploring issues that recall films as disparate as John Ford’s The Searchers and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, this little film is about a desperado, played by Francesco Quinn, who meets the love of his life, a young woman kidnapped as a newlywed and held captive by various Indian tribes over the course of eleven years.

The three animated shorts all employ stop-motion animation as opposed to traditional hand-drawn cartoon presentations.

The Canadian Madame Tutli-Putli, which kicks off this part of the program, is about a woman traveling on a night train in the 1920s. It’s lovely to look at, but what does it all mean? Written by Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerboski and Maciek Tomaszewski and co-directed by Lavis and Szcserboski, it’s open to the audience’s interpretation.

The French Even Pigeons Go to Heaven, written by Karine Banaux, Olivier Gilbert and Samuel Tourneux, and directed by Tourneux, is a deft comedy about a priest trying to trick an old man into accepting his death with the aid of a time machine with the old man outsmarting both the priest and the Grim Reaper. It’s very funny.

Finally, Suzie Templeton’s Peter & the Wolf produced in the U.K. from Sergei Prokofiev’s timeless tale proves the best of the three, showing us that Oscar voters of these specialized categories can get at least one of their selections right. Elaborately produced in a big, bold color production, the story of a boy who is not afraid of the big bad wolf is, at 30 minutes, the longest of the three animated nominees.

One of last year’s most audacious films, I’m Not There, features six actors interpreting various aspects of the life and career of Bob Dylan. Oscar nominee Cate Blanchett plays a character named Jude who looks and talks the most like the real Dylan, while the others, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin play characters that embody just one of his aspects. None are named Dylan.

Avant-garde director Todd Haynes’ films are never particularly straight forward, and this one is no exception. In Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, he used Barbie and Ken dolls to tell the story of the anorexic singer with the beautiful singing voice; in Safe he had Julianne Moore play a woman slowly dying from ailments caused by the environment; in Far From Heaven, his most mainstream film, he didn’t so much hold a mirror up to life in the 1950s, he held it up to what it looked like in half-hour television situation comedies of the period.

Much of the dialogue in I’m Not There is taken from Dylan’s mumblings of the mid-1960s, which, unlike his songs, were far from profound. The Blanchett segment features Michelle Williams as a fictional character patterned after Andy Warhol’s superstar Edie Sedgwick and ends up mining the same territory as last year’s Factory Girl with Sienna Miller as Sedgwick and Hayden Christensen as a singer modeled after Dylan, referred to simply as the “musician”. The Blanchett and Whishaw segments are in black and white, the others in color. The score consists entirely of Dylan songs, some of them recordings by Dylan, while others are sung by imitators. As I said, it’s audacious, but it’s not for all tastes.

One of the first films to be released on DVD eleven years ago, Clint Eastwood’s seminal romantic drama, 1995’s The Bridges of Madison County, was released only in full frame format. It has finally been re-mastered in its original aspect ratio and given a spiffy Deluxe Edition release as befits its place in Eastwood’s canon.

Taken from a popular, if soppy, novel, Eastwood’s film improves immensely on the source material as it tells the poignant tale of a National Geographic photographer who wanders into the life of a frustrated Iowa farm wife and brightens her lonely existence for a few days, the memory of which lasts a lifetime. Eastwood’s laid back acting style perfectly suits the character of the photographer and Meryl Streep who has more Oscar nominations than any other performer, really earned the one she got for playing the long-ago Italian G.I. bride whose husband and children are conveniently away attending the Illinois State Fair.

It’s a simple story told in flashbacks as Streep’s children gather for her funeral, but keep a box of tissues handy because by the time those now-grown children get around to carrying out her last wishes you will need them.

Restored to its original brilliance, Anthony Mann’s1964 epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire was filmed outside of Madrid on the largest set ever constructed for a motion picture. Mining more or less the same territory as the Ridley Scott’s Gladiator four decades later, the film, which features the usual blend of real life characters with historically-accurate ones for dramatic effect, has long since been eclipsed by such TV productions as I Claudius and Rome. Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Christopher Plummer, Alec Guinness, James Mason, John Ireland, Mel Ferrer, Omar Sharif and Anthony Quayle head the huge cast. There was serious talk of an Oscar nomination for Mason at the time, but the only bid the film ended up getting was for Dimitri Tiomkin’s score. Available in both a Deluxe Edition and a Limited Collectors’ Edition with a booklet and lobby cards, the DVD package lists two discs, but there are actually three, the third being an Encyclopedia Britannica documentary on the sets built outside of Madrid to scale replicas of the buildings of ancient Rome.

-Peter J. Patrick (May 6, 2008)