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Beauty, humor in year's shorts

By Kelly Jane Torrance
February 15, 2008

An animated short version of "Peter and the Wolf" co-produced in the United Kingdom and Poland uses only music without words.

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It's hard for even the most die-hard film fanatics to see every Oscar-nominated film. There are, however, two categories you can knock off in a single afternoon or evening: live-action shorts and animated shorts. Landmark Theatres' E Street Cinema today starts screening the five nominated films in each category in two separate programs.

Live-action shorts:

I'm glad I'm not a member of the academy who has to vote for one of these films. They're all so very good and so very different that it would be impossible to choose a favorite.

Il Supplente ("The Substitute") is a hilarious Italian comedy. A group of high-school students gets a rather extraordinary substitute teacher one day. He seems tough at first, disciplining a student with the line, "As Mao said, 'Punish one to educate 100.' " But when he immediately adds, "Even if you, Fatty, are more than one," we see he has a sense of humor. The short is "dedicated to those with difficulties with conduct," and I leave it to you to decide who has more of those difficulties here, the students or the teacher.

The Belgian film Tanghi Argentini is just as fun. A middle-aged man makes a date to meet a woman with whom he's been corresponding online at a tango event. He has just two weeks to actually learn the dance he claims to already know, and desperately enlists the help of a dance-crazed colleague to teach him. The ending of this film is surprising and fabulous, but chuckles abound along the way.

It's hard not to laugh at the exploits of a couple of incompetent criminals in the French short Le Mozart Des Pickpockets. Richard and Philippe (played by Philippe Pollet-Villard, who also wrote and directed) are separated from their pickpocketing gang when the police catch the others. They're followed, though, by a child who may or may not belong to one of the arrested lowlifes. Though seemingly deaf and mute, the child soon earns his keep with a new scheme to steal wallets. As Philippe says, "We were pathetic. By God's grace, the child came to us."

The final two entries are compelling dramas. The Tonto Woman is a British Western based on a story by American writer Elmore Leonard. A cattle thief comes upon a white woman shunned by her community after she was kidnapped and spent 11 years as a slave to the Mohaves. He is immediately intrigued by her, but the woman's husband, who can't even look at her, refuses to let her go.

The Danish film At Night could teach self-indulgent American directors of three-hour-long movies a thing or two: It packs a feature film's worth of feeling into just 40 minutes. It centers on three young women living in a cancer ward — or as one of them calls it, "death row" — over the winter holidays. As I said, it's hard to pick a favorite amongst these five, but "At Night" was the only one that brought tears to my eyes, and it did so more than once.

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