Lots of good short films on at the E.I.F.F. I’ve thought for years that they should have a short on with every feature (unless it’s a three-hour arse marathon or something), and this year still only a few of the features do have shorts in front. Let’s face it, shorts are helpful to people rushing from one screening to another and arriving late, they bring in extra punters because often the short filmmakers and their families are in attendance, and they provide ADDED VALUE to a screening of a feature which may be on general release in a month’s time anyway, and is now screening at a vastly inflated rate. Moviegoers deserve something extra.
My newly-graduated student Jamie Stone has TWO films showing. One of his Three Minute Wonder animations (SPACE TRAVEL ACCORDING TO JOHN), co-directed with Anders Jedenfors, shows in the first McLaren Animation programme, where the other stand-out is Will Becher’s THE WEATHERMAN. I wasn’t sure whether to add or deduct points for Becher’s use of Ennio Morricone’s magnificently silly theme from MY NAME IS NOBODY. In the same programme, Sally Arthur’s A-Z was a visual and aural treat of surpassing charm.
Jamie’s live-action short FLIGHTS, which plays chicken with the boring social realist misery genre, before flipping into something utterly joyful and upbeat, screens with the feature TIME TO DIE.
With Martin Radich’s gross-out tragedy CRACK WILLOW, I saw a short from Australia called HEARTBREAK MOTEL, memorable for great lighting and sweatily intense performances, and a spectacle as grotesque as anything in the main feature: a tall man dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy, an idiot grin plastered across his strange features, his eyes seemingly taped up into a faux-oriental squint, capering nimbly before a horrified “john”. “This isn’t quite what I had in mind,” the customer whimpers, queasily.
shadowplay 