An Evening of Some Mighty Good Short Films
© A.J. Malouin 2010
We’re just in from last night’s evening of short films, presented by Sleeping Bear Films at the Maple Art Theatre in Birmingham, Michigan, USA. It’s too bad these six films don’t get wider distribution, as they show the current health (Alive and Kicking!) of independent films in the short form. The films screened tonight covered everything from a tale of dark and hilarious sex education, to the denouement of a gangster relationship during The Great Depression, to the trials and tribulations of The Great Lakes Electric Football League. We cannot give complete credits because we don’t have access to them but here’s a brief description of each film:
“The Fall”
(Rating: 10. See our side-bar page “How We Rate Movies”) Length: 14 minutes.
As kids do everywhere, two young girls attach sinister motives to a very mildly eccentric man who lives in their neighborhood. His house has very little furniture and he seems to spend all his time listening to Police Band Radio. “All the better to plan his next crime!” the girls decide. They promptly therefore begin their investigation of the man’s life, snooping around his property, looking in his windows, going through the boxes in his garage. What they find in one of those boxes leads to a total, and in the end tragic, misunderstanding of who this man is.
“The Butcher’s Daughter”
(Rating: 7.) Length: 24 minutes.
A 14-year-old girl living quietly in the countryside with her father during The Great Depression has her life turned around during the course of one afternoon when two of her father’s former colleagues in the city drop in. The colleagues need a favor from her father in the worst way. In the end, the girl helps out with the favor also, thereby proving that the acorn never falls far from the tree — or, in this case, the tommy-gun.
“Buzz”
(Rating: 5.) Length: 18 minutes.
When I wuz a kid, I had an electric football game. Little plastic football players moved around on an electrified football field (no pun intended!) on two little metal plates that stuck out from their base. The plays took forever to set up, the movement of the players was erratic, and the whole concept was abandoned in a matter of days. Now, 40 years after this tedious game has died out in everyone’s lives and memories, a group of middle-age men continue to pledge a rabid fanaticism to the game. They are the defenders, players, combatants, and comrades of The Great Lakes Electric Football League! Their addiction to this (stupid) game would be laughable IF they were not so enthusiastic and so dedicated to it. The filmmakers here have found a wonderful wonderful totally quirky story to document. Better yet, we here are only degrees of separation away from interviewing them.
“My Own Private 8 Mile”
(Rating: 8.) Length: 3 minutes.
It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s complete. The writer/director here has achieved a perfect and poetic pacing of the narrative that accompanies his video of a road made more famous by a longer film with a shorter name. The sights and blights of a road that marks one of the boundaries of Detroit, Michigan, USA, are given full-throated homage by a man who has traveled this road every day for years.
“Late Bloomer”
(Rating: 5.) Length: 13 minutes.
If you’ve read H.P. Lovecraft, you know that horror lurks Everywhere in day-to-day living. Our seventh-grade protagonist finds this to be the case on the day on which he walks into the classroom to find a diagram of the (human) female reproductive system pulsating at him from the blackboard. He and his male and female classmates will Never be the same after their sex-education teacher encourages them to mouth repeatedly the word “vagina.” The fact that her name is “Miss Lovecraft” gives the game away far to early, but the timing, rhyming, and pulsating of the voice-over dialogue is purely (in a darkly comedic sort of way, only!) mantra to these unwary seventh-graders. Kudos, and hold off on the Doctor Ruth!
“Lobos”
(Rating: 6.) Length: 15 minutes.
The incredibly still, flat plains of Spain’s mid-section have always, by definition, made for incredibly beautiful films. For a longer example of this, se “EL espiritu de la colmena” [“The Spirit of the Beehive.”] Here is a much shorter example. In a schoolhouse on the delicious Spanish plain, a boy is sent out of the room for misbehaving. He leaves in the middle of a reading of the Spanish legend about a white and a gray wolf. After school, he is forced to write 50 times, “I will not misbehave in class.” Inasmuch as he has now missed the school van home, his substitute teacher must walk him home, through the woods. (I know, I know! A stand of woods in the plain of Spain!) When the boy falls and hurts himself, the earlier classroom legend of the two wolves takes on a more-immediate interpretation.