dir: Ray Tintori, 6min—Sheer exuberance. The web is populated with a lot of lo-fi, shoestring budget work, but admittedly few have a vision or voice. That does not apply to Jettison your Loved Ones, a student film by young up and comer Ray Tintori, which oozes with charming quirk and character.

It is almost detrimental to my cause of getting you to watch this film to try and summarize it, but here it goes: A man serially obsessed with faking his own death, sires a son who destroys most of the world, but this son along with his wife, the greatest swordsperson in the world, rises up against the totalitarian regime that’s emerges from the wreckage. It sounds like a mess, but its good!

This recommendation is brought to us via the Vulture Entertainment and Culture blog, an online component of New York Magazine. The blog has a few different sections, but I only pay attention to the Vulture Picture Palace, a short film blog that is basically a corporate, legit version of ShortoftheWeek. If you enjoy short film, (and why else would you be here?) It is definitely worth some of your time.

In discussing the film on the Vulture blog, one of the commentators brings up Wes Anderson. This is a more than apt comparison. Wes first got noticed through a B&W short, and his work, like Jettison Your Loved Ones, shares a Po-mo reverence of vintage styles and forms. Moreover, the use of narrative voiceover and the character eccentricities, presented in a manner of fact way through vignettes, betrays a young filmmaker in love with Mr. Anderson’s style. (But really who isn’t? Don’t hate.)

Still, bless Wes, Hipster icon he is, he never gets unhinged like this. He never goes this BIG—crossing that line from improbable to implausible, without batting an eyelash.

Most of all that’s what to admire regarding Jettison Your Loved Ones, that Tintori is able to tell a story this expansive in the limits of the short film medium. We are used to wordy dialogue with one or two sets when it comes to short film production; a focus on minor human dramas accentuated by ironic twists. But Tintori blazes through an epic with Speed. Hokey perhaps, but exhilarating and a lot of fun. Check it out. Also this film is on a DVD from Indiepix that features the previously reviewed film Spin!

dir: Devi Snively, 7 min—

Not only is free time a vague myth, but my blood pressure is breaking gauges and giving me the look of an over-ripe tomato. This isn’t the time to search across the Net for something new for Short of the Week. No, what I need is some comfort food, a film I know well, and that watching once again will give me a few minutes of relaxation. I need a movie that will make me laugh and won’t take up a lot of time. Oh, and I need ’60s-sounding surf music. I’m not sure why I need the last one, but let’s just go with the flow.

I first saw Teenage Bikini Vampire as a festival submission four years ago and I couldn’t help but giggle. It’s just one of those films. I’ve since seen it ten or twelve times, including on the semi-big-screens of otherwise dour film festivals where it always brings the audience to life.

Sadie is an average teenage girl, with the normal teen issues of growing up and finding herself, except she’s a vampire. Being sunlight-challenged is not doing anything good for her social life. She just wants to dance, go to the beach, and maybe spend some time with the cute surfer dude, but a suntan is not in the cards. Her younger siblings can play with severed limbs happily, but what’s a high school girl to do? It’s up to her loving, murdering parents to find an answer.

The film is structured around one conceptual joke (a good joke, but still just one), and that’s all it would be without the deft hand of writer/director Devi Snively who adds in a dream sequence from a different era and a tune that you’ll be singing next time you find yourself in a convertible on a sunny day. She turns what could have been an internet joke-video into something quite enduring, almost sweet, in an Addams Family kind of way.

The budget is low, and it shows, but it doesn’t harm the joke, which actually plays better with a stagey atmosphere. It’s easy to think of Teenage Bikini Vampire as a skit in the repertoire of a travelling comedy troop, and I could imagine a lengthened version being put on by garage theaters all over the country.

Teenage Bikini Vampire may be the finest low-budget vampire beach movie of all time. As soon as I find another, I’ll let you know. Until then, this one will do nicely.

Watch Teenage Bikini Vampire online at: YouTube

dir: Marta Mackova, 5min—Café is a stylish short revealing the imaginative interplay in a bar where a lone girl sips her drink and eyes up the talent. She has her gaze and aspirations set on the quiet guy diligently reading his book. Meanwhile the (buxom) bar girl tidies up the tables much to the delight of the (diminutive) customer who is unable to take his eyes from her undulating figure.

28-year old Marta Mackova is from the Czech Republic though she graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2006. Café was her graduation capstone. Marta has an eye for the etiquette that governs such manoeuvres between the sexes and the skill to suggest a yearning with the merest shift in the shoulder line—though subtle is not a word to describe the reaction of the little man to the large woman.

There is a well-tuned sense of timing in her work—the comedy of the situation unravels at its own pace. She has worked with some skilled people in Prague, obviously learning her craft well prior to her arrival in the fine city of Edinburgh, my grandfather’s birthplace. Café is coupled with a collection of movies by other young Scottish animators that are well worth a look. Marta has her new website up and running and Café is featured there as well.

Watch Café online at: nk-sd | MartaMackova

dir: Igor Zimmermann, 2min

Before you can even get through to watch Daylight the site hits you up with a snippet of an electric loungecore version of Yesterday, over the picture of a crystal finned model staring off into the middle distance; that’s the point he pretty much had me.

I don’t know much about the details of the film or the man himself for that matter (his site is one of the sparsest I’ve seen) outside of what’s written below it: “A film created for the runway of Beckmans fashion designer Sarah Törnqvist. Based upon her themes of sadness, insomnia and disconnect from reality.”

The film’s approach of featuring lone models placed in stark muted spaces, which are gradually filled with light is haunting and pretty much compels you to paint a world around them based on the little you know. Also the cinematography by Marcus Palmqvist and Martin Steinberg is lusciously combined with jump cuts and speed ramps. A part of my brain couldn’t shake the feeling (or hope?) I was seeing sections from a new Vincent Gallo or Gus Van Sant film.

While you’re on Igor’s site take some time to explore his other pieces. I’m trying to find a way to have him style my life.

Watch Daylight online at: igorzimmermann.com

The 3D animation, done in 2001, holds up extremely well today. In full effect is the natural, handheld camera look that’s become a necessity in quality 3D animation today. Even the main character’s facial expressions, the bane of most 3D animators, are appropriately exaggerated to express emotion.

Ruairi is a director with great foresight and a strong understanding of the medium in which he dabbles, be it pixels or people. His latest short, The Silent City, is a live-action that dwells in the same sinister science-fiction realm. Ruairi’s next film is rumored to be a live action adaptation of the well-respected 1988 anime, Akira.

Watch Fifty Percent Grey online: YouTube | Spike

dir: Lisa Chang & Newton Thomas Sigel, 21 min

The story follows Alice (Selma Blair), a single woman with a pain deep inside of her that no doctor can diagnose. She seeks out a Specialist who sets off on a surreal expedition inside her and discovers something astounding—she’s completely empty—”A woman with nothing inside her but a cold, hard breeze.” His photos come back showing a vast frozen wasteland (not unlike the rural Alaskan town I grew up in). But rather than search for a cure for her pain, the Specialist takes her to universities around the world gaining accolades for his discovery. No one it seems is willing to help Alice, so it takes her own strong will to shift this story from one of exploitation to self-reliance.

Shot by Sigel himself, The Big Empty seems almost like a playground on which the cinematographer was able to experiment with new techniques. Lighting and color play a large role in defining the film’s somber mood and Alice’s inner pain. Unique POVs put us in strange places. The film is a hefty 21 minutes yet the story progresses at a nice pace and continues to reward you to the end.

If haven’t yet had the chance to check out the YouTube The Screening Room, The Big Empty is the perfect excuse. Thankfully, past films will remain archived online, so you can go back and catch all the previous films as well.

Watch The Big Empty online at: YouTube

“John Stamos is here, and he’s pissed!”
“He’s in the vents!”
“Ahhhhhhh!”

The pinnacle of postmodern feature cinema (among well-known films) is 1999’s Being John Malkovich. Its plot twists seven ways and is always happy to take a side road to nowhere before continuing on its merry way. During its convoluted trip, it sweeps along the title character, played by the real Malkovich in over-the-top form, and completes the picture with the likes of best friend Charlie Sheen, played by the real Sheen making fun of his own image. But the world of short film has its own postmodern peak: I Am Stamos, and it’s no copy of Malkovich.

You know lead actor and producer Robert Peters. Trust me, you do. You’ve seen him in a dozen movies and television shows. You’ve never heard his name, but you’ll know his face. Upon seeing it again, you won’t be able to drudge up where you saw it the first time, but you did…sometime. He’s a character actor who plays sidekicks, clerks, and salesmen. In I Am Stamos, he is Andy Shrub, a character actor that plays sidekicks, clerks, and salesmen. Let the self-referencing begin!

Andy’s sick of being stuck in wacky roles. He wants to be the lead. But, as it’s clearly and non-too-gently explained to him, leads don’t look like him; they look like George Clooney or Rob Lowe, or John Stamos. Depressed at his birthday party, he makes a wish. He wishes to look like Stamos. Well, it doesn’t come true in the conventional way. Andy still looks like Andy to the naked eye, but to the camera he is John Stamos, and the dollar possibilities spring immediately to mind. It isn’t long before the real Stamos is out for blood.

In only eighteen minutes, I Am Stamos says everything there is to say about Hollywood’s obsession with beautiful people, and branches out to jab at our entire society’s blindness when it comes to the more attractive member of either gender as well as their opposites. Not that it sets up a “good plain folks verses evil pretty folks” dichotomy—anything but. It just presents it all as quite silly. It also manages to lampoon film and television production in general. That sounds a bit heavy, but it isn’t. Theme comes after jokes, and there are a lot of them. I’ve seen I Am Stamos twice on festival screens and the audience was howling the whole time.

You won’t find a more skillfully made short. I can’t find any information on its production costs, but unless a lot of people worked for free (and brought their equipment and expand-o-matic sets with them), its budget could eat that of many indie-indie features. How often do you find funny and appropriate original music in a short? It’s no surprise that Peters has no problem getting to the heart of Andy Shrub and a pleasure to see all the fine comedic support he gets from Clint Howard, E.E. Bell (another character actor you’ll know when you see him) as well as by Stamos himself, who will make you forget that whole Full House atrocity.

There’s only one John Stamos…and his name is Andy Shrub.

Watch I Am Stamos online at: YouTube | Spike

Owned by MTV since 2006, Atom has been adopted into the Comedy Central family who describes its new member as “our punk-rock label… where you’re purposely encouraging development that’s supposed to f*** with the system and break down boundaries.”

So, what’s happened to all the thousands of un-funny, dramatic shorts that once called AtomFilms.com home?

Poof. All have been permanently removed from the site (including one of my own).

Why choose comedy?

“In the online viewing experience, you’ve got to grab the viewer immediately,” says Atom, and “there’s not a lot of viral tearjerkers.” Atom is simply reiterating what many have known for years—that the nature of short films (particularly online shorts) is one well-suited to comedy.

That got me thinking about Short of the Week. A quick look at our comedy category shows that only 10 of the 60 or so best online films are comedies. It’s clear that our film selections have been chosen based on their depth, innovation, provocation, and memorability more so than their “viral appeal”.

The truth of the matter is, when you run an advertisement-based revenue model as Atom does, you need to generate as many views as possible (Atom receives nearly 2 million visitors every month). This model tends to promote films with strong attraction and initial appeal—take a look at YouTube’s Most Popular videos—over the audience favorites.

If this model tends to favor comedy as a genre, other models, such as direct sale of digital copies, would no doubt produce a uniquely different genre distribution. A quick look at the list of short films on the iTunes Store shows that only about half are comedic. A large slice of the pie, certainly, but one that leaves another big slice largely ignored by Atom and the online film community.

The movie commences with an alarm clock and scream as our hero awakens to discover that inadvertently and inconveniently he is a she. The effect of such a life changing experience is the subject of this hilarious romp through Parisian cafés, nightclubs and pavements. Arthur’s febrile wit encompasses the distracting effect on Geraldine’s relationship with his girlfriend, the impact his red headed good looks and curvy frame has on men whom, in a previous existence, had been work colleagues or soccer opponents. It is also the tale of a man’s reconciliation with the inner woman that lurks within. Well perhaps not.

Geraldine does however come to terms with his real self and capitalize on his fame, as celebrity, champion of women’s rights, politician, red carpet walker. There is even a frantic scene at the end as his ex-girlfriend tears along country roads to get him to the altar on a motor cycle. But does she want to lose him?

Viewing the film again for the review I am struck by the beautiful simplicity of Arthur’s drawing, the strong use of colour and the panoramic vistas of the Parisian landscape seemingly effortlessly rendered by use of Flash and After Effects for compositing. Each frame has the appearance of a well-crafted comic postcard.

There is a real zip to the tale, as for eight minutes or so the ramifications of the bizarre scenario are explored with the satirical touch that works so well because Arthur does understand his world. His later movies, L’eau de Rose and La Revolution des Crabes, are well-regarded in the festival circuit and recommended viewing for fans of animated shorts, particularly the latter which has much to say of revolutionaries and is also very funny. Arthur is also a contributor to the monthly comic magazine Fluide Glacial.

Watch Geraldine online at: ArthurDePins.com | YouTube

dir: François-Xavier Goby, Matthieu Landour and Edouard Jouret, 5 min—The one thing that surveying films in all their vast variety on the internet teaches you is that great work can spring up from anywhere. A kid working away on a laptop in his bedroom is just as likely to blow you away with creativity and talent as something that’s come out of a high profile production house. That being said, there are films that pretty much come with an implied seal of approval that guarantees your time won’t be wasted, and, when it comes to animation, France’s Supinfocom is at the top of its game. That’s not even a judgement call on my behalf, last year 3D World magazine after applying criteria such as festival prizes won and student film distribution gained, ranked the school No. 1 worldwide.

Which is all I suppose a round about way of saying that when I stumbled across En Tus Brazos—the tale of a once great, now crippled Tango dancer, his wife and their break from the world of now into the glories of imagination and the past—even though I didn’t at the time know it came out of Supinfocom, I wasn’t surprised to later find out that co-directors François-Xavier Goby, Matthieu Landour and Edouard Jouret’s created En Tus Brazos as their graduation piece.

There are so many elements of En Tus Brazos that alone would make it worthy of a mention. From the use of light and reflections, to the framing of the action and subtle camera moves, whether it’s the gentle pushes and pulls in the couple’s apartment or the achingly beautiful final shot that reveals so much about the couple’s relationship and how the accident has transformed their roles, but perhaps in doing so strengthened their dedication to one another.

En Tus Brazos has the perfect balance of sparsity and detail in that it delivers what all films should, but few manage—to build as rich a world as possible by providing the most amount of story, setting and mood with the bare minimum of exposition.

Animation, much more so than the other disciplines of filmmaking allows creators to actually place the viewer square in the middle of their imaginations and deliver a story as it was originally conceived with the minimum of compromises. That being the case, I’d happily sign a five-year lease to take up residence with Goby, Landour and Jouret’s creations, if only for the opportunity to join the tango too.

Watch En Tus Brazos online at: EnTusBrazos.fr