Category: Shorts

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Flesh Of God
(Carne De Dios)

Director – Patricion Plaza – 2022 – Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – France 16+ – 21m

*****

When a travelling monk falls prey to a fever, the folk remedy administered by an old woman causes him to experience bizarre hallucinations – from the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Official Competition section

(Warning: not suitable for work or for those of a sensitive disposition. Potentially offensive to religious i.e. Christian viewers. Also, spoilers.)

In a prologue, a young girl races through a field of crops but runs into a monk, who squishes the mushrooms she’s carrying in her bag with his foot, feels her face and checks out her teeth before she flees.

Some time later (or perhaps some time earlier), the profusely sweating monk falls off on his donkey beside his walking guide and wakes in a nearby hovel, or it might be a church, tended by an old woman muttering unintelligible rituals as she attempts to heal him. The perpendicular bars of the roof’s sole window form a makeshift cross on which hangs a Christ figure, but when mushrooms resembling the ones trampled at the start are placed in the initially reluctant monk’s mouth, glowing sprites exit his body and enter the Christ figure, which assumes a monstrous aspect and attacks him.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Two Strangers
Who Meet
Five Times

Director – Marcus Markou – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 12m

****

A profound meditation on our common ground, our differences, and the factors which apparently come out of nowhere to can drive us apart or bring us together – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Life. Paths that unexpectedly cross. While cleverly doing exactly what it says on the title, this achieves a meditation on those meetings with other people that prove cathartic, those moments in which our lives can turn on a knife edge.

The first meeting we see, which is actually the second time they meet, involves two men at a cashpoint, one (Laurence Spellman, who is also one of the leads in the same director’s new feature The Wife And Her House Husband, 2022) losing it while the one in front of him (Sargon Yelda) takes what seems like a ridiculously long time to perform what should be a simple task of withdrawing some money. (Of course, there can be a reasonable explanation for this – the machine isn’t working, it swallowed the card, it’s been tampered with by fraudsters – but none of that applies on this occasion – the ATM appears to be working properly.)… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Piggy
(Cerdita)

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2022 – Spain – Cert. 18 – 99m

*****

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2018 – Spain – 13m

*****

Fat-shaming, bullying, overbearing mothers, growing up as the local butcher’s daughter, and more – feature based on short is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 6th

Sara (Laura Galán) is attempting to navigate the difficult waters of adolescence. It isn’t much fun if you’re different and cliques of your contemporaries gang up on you. In Sara’s case, she isn’t just fat, she’s also introverted and shuns people, which compounds the amount she gets teased. She often works in her father’s butchers shop, so bullies can easily put together insults based on fat and flesh and pork and meat. A clique of three, thinner girls – Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Maca (Claudia Salas) and their unwilling hanger-on Claudia aka Clau (Irene Ferreiro) – call her Piggy.

It’s Summer, and everyone is going down to the Madrigal (Waterfall) festivities at the pool on the river, where a mysterious out-of-towner is lounging about, but Sara sneaks down there later for a swim when she hopes nobody is around. She’s just getting into the water when the stranger (Richard Holmes) surfaces innocently, startling her.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

London Korean
Film Festival
(LKFF)
2022

Alienoid

LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 17th

The London Korean Film Festival kicks off tonight with Alienoid (Choi Dong-hoon, 2022), the first instalment of a two-part SF epic which mashes up ideas from Hollywood SF and time travel fare Alien, The Terminator and Back To The Future with epic Korean period dramas. The plot apparently involves a robot guard, prisoners trapped in human brain cells, time travel back some 600 years and a MacGuffin known as the Divine Blade. Cast includes Kim Tae-ri (The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook, 2016).

Friday 4th sees one of the director’s earlier blockbusters, the heist movie The Thieves (Choi Dong-hoon, 2012) in which five Korean criminals head for Macao to steal another MacGuffin, a 318-carat diamond called ‘Tear of the Sun’ worth over $20 million. The latter film is presented in collaboration with the V&A’s current exhibition Hallyu! The Korean Wave. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with director Choi.

The Festival bows out in two weeks time with two naval warfare blockbusters, again epic historical productions, this time the first two parts of a proposed trilogy.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies Shorts

Memories
(Memorizu,
メモリーズ)

1/ Magnetic Rose (Kanojo no Omoide, 彼女の想いで)

2/ Stink Bomb (Saishu Heiki, 最臭兵器)

3/ Cannon Fodder (Taiho no Machi, 大砲の街)

Directors

– 1/ Koji Morimoto, 2/ Tensai Okamura, 3/ Katsuhiro Otomo

– 1995 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 113m

*****

Executive producer Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime anthology adapts three of his dystopian-themed manga stories into animation – out on Blu-ray from All The Anime, Monday, 12th September, details below review

The film that made Otomo’s name and the one with which he’s most frequently associated is Akira (1988). It wasn’t his first film, though. Previously, he was one of nine directors who collaborated on the uneven portmanteau Robot Carnival (1987), a compendium of different animated stories based around robots of various types. One of the other directors was Koji Morimoto.

Memories is loosely similar – it only has three stories (and three directors), allowing each of the segments a bit more room. Its three episodes are very different yet perfectly complement each other. Otomo directed the third section Cannon Fodder.

Parts of the roughly two hour Akira drag, while Otomo’s later Steamboy (2004) gets lost within a massive set piece after a near perfect opening first reel or so.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Dance Movies Shorts

Boxballet
(Boxbalet,
БоксБалет)

Director – Anton Dyakov – 2020 – Russia – 15m 15s

*****

A pencil-thin ballerina becomes involved with a rough, stocky boxer. Some things seem destined not to be… And yet… – nominated for Best Animated Short in the 2021/22 (94th) Oscars

Olya and Evgeny live near each other’s flats. When running to catch the subway train, tall, thin ballerina Olya’s movements are grace personified, the epitome of precision timing. The world of shorter, stocky boxer Evgeny, whose face is a patchwork of scars from his career in the ring, couldn’t be more different. Should she object to the hands of her choreographer on her leg when he’s showing her the position she needs to achieve? Is he being a little overly fresh? She’s unaware of Evgeny buying booze from the local shop and drinking it at home.

Then one day, he sees her in distress and rescues her cat from a tree. She invites him in for a cup of tea, but his embarrassment there causes him to know a cup off the table, breaking it. She takes him to an art gallery, a shooting gallery, roller skating. He retrieves her bag after she’s robbed in broad daylight. He goes to watch her at the ballet, but sees her drive off with her choreographer.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Ladies
Of The Forest
(San-na-mul
Cheo-nyeo,
산나물처녀)

Director – Kim Cho-hee – 2016 – South Korea – 29m

*****

A woman descends from the heavens in search of a mate, but lands in a forest where the pickings are slim – part of a strand of films celebrating actress Youn Yuh-jung at LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 4th to Friday, November 19th

The source of this plot is a folk tale known as The Fairy And The Woodcutter or The Heavenly Maiden And The Woodcutter. There seem to be a number of variants of the story – a good, much longer summation can be found here – but, broadly speaking, it concerns a woodcutter so poor that no woman will marry him. He lives alone with his mother. One day, he hides a deer from a hunter and in return, the deer offers to grant him a wish. He wishes to be married. The deer tells him of a pool to which beautiful maidens descend from the heavens to bathe. If he steals the clothes of one, she’ll be unable to return and he’ll be able to make her his wife. He must not, however, return her clothes until she has birthed three children, otherwise she will use her clothes to fly back to the heavens.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Scenes With Beans
(Babfilm)

Director – Ottó Foky – 1976 – Hungary – 12m

*****

A metal space bird approaches the bean planet to observe various aspects of life upon it before being discovered then shot at with a missile in this remarkable stop-frame short – out on MUBI as part of the animated shorts season Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations on Monday, September 20th

Framed by a story of a giant alien metal bird observing a planet from space, this is primarily an excuse to create numerous scenarios using animated kidney beans and butter beans to stand in as people in a 3D, model animated world. It’s the sort of film where you constantly marvel at the inventiveness of shooting scenes in a particular style of animation which, were they shots in a live action documentary, would simply appear banal – but in the form here presented prove completely compelling.

A crescent moon resembling nothing so much as a croissant floats past the planet. The approaching giant bird looks like it could have wandered in from the Clangers stop-frame BBC TV series (Oliver Postgate, 1969-72, 1974) except that it’s less a character like that show’s fabled Soup Dragon than a tech-equipped space opera craft with a visual recording device that has a calibrated viewfinder like a camera or a periscope.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Drive
(Pulsión)

Director – Pedro Casavecchia – 2019 – Argentina – 7m

*****

A series of disturbing vignettes brings to mind work by Lars von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch – available to watch on YouTube (see below) from Wednesday, September 1st 2021

This Argentinan short, although computer generated, has the feel of stop-motion. It brings to mind work by Lars von Trier, the Brothers Quay, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. A narrative conveyed by a series of disturbing vignettes (think: the opening minutes of Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) is put together with the same kind of fastidious technical attention to detail you find in the Quay Brothers’ films. A couple of scenes borrow directly from one of the murders in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), but in a clever way that shocks you much as those scenes in Psycho originally did. There’s a Lynchian feel about the whole thing – not just in the strange, quasi-industrial sounds recalling Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) or the weird lighting and heavily controlled mise-en-scène, but also in the overall feel of strange and terrible things happening within families and local communities, people adrift within the darkness of human existence.

One single viewing is not enough for this film which really only reveals itself on repeated viewings.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Three Brothers

Director – Aleem Khan – 2014 – UK – Cert. – 17m 11s

****

A teenager must take care of his two brothers when their father vanishes – available as an extra on the After Love Blu-ray released on Monday, August 23rd

It’s not entirely clear what’s happened to London teenager Hamid (Zain Muhammad Zafar) and his two younger brothers Humza (Yousuf Hussain) and Billy (Muhammad Mujahid-Ali Shahzad). An opening family video complete with dropout at picture bottom shows the parental hassle of getting the three boys into the car for a trip, then mum (Sona Vyas) and dad (Kulvinder Ghir) driving, then – presumably – a car accident (because the picture cuts out) in which the mother is kiled (because she’s never seen again (apart from as a presence in a photograph). This is mashed up with footage of the brothers, most notably Hamid caring for his chicken and inspecting eggs he keeps in a little electric-powered hatchery device in his bedroom.

Neither parent is around and there are dire warnings on the phone from school about how this can’t go on. There’s a parents evening coming up, so Hamid takes the other two and sends them in to the classroom alone, but his teacher (Kate Russell-Smith) comes out and demands he stop walking away down the corridor and take off his mask.… Read the rest