Live Action Shorts A
This year at the Phoenix Film Festival I decided to focus most of my attention on the short film portion of the festival. Short films are interesting because you only have a limited amount of time to get the story you want to tell across to the audience (duh). It is important to note that even though I may not like some of them I applaud the filmmakers and respect the hell out of them for actually following through on their idea and putting their heart on their sleeve for the world to see.
Missing Piece
This one was about a mom who after seeing her kids off to the school bus has an apparent psychotic episode as she tries to clean the house. It was supposed to be a parody of the horror genre, but it came across more as someone who is vaguely aware of the horror genre, but mostly makes straight to video kids movies.
This is Normal
This was absolute amazing. It was actually one of the shorts I least looking forward to seeing, but it ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever seen, let alone one of the best shorts. The story follows a deaf woman who is a candidate for cochlear regeneration surgery. She must deal with the ramifications it has on her life and her relationships with her friends and family. If the filmmakers decided to turn this into a feature length flick I would camp out for it. This right here is worth the price of admission alone.
The Best Friend
The Best Friend is a little romantic comedy that is about, you guessed it, best friends and how one girl always gets the guy and the other doesn’t. This one was funny and light hearted and all, but I felt it was kind of (unintentionally) demeaning toward women.
The Architect
The Architect is a little horror based short about an architect, what? I know, who gets a job at a big firm, but apparently they can only afford storage sheds for offices and use #2 pencils. That stuff was outdated when I took architecture in school 10 years ago. Anyway, he somehow falls into the paper and later falls into some abyss.
Next Life
Do you believe in reincarnation? This filmmaker does and goes to great length to show that the main character and his grandma do too and they devise an elaborate hand shake so they will recognize each other in the next life, only to be reincarnated, know the handshake, but not know what it’s for.
The Sidekick
This is what Mystery Men and Super probably strove to be, only this one involves their bumbling pals. After Max gets fired by his superhero boss he must find what’s important to him in this C-list studded comedy short.
Watcher of movies. Writer of books. I love doing both and sometimes I even write about movies. Follow me on Twitter so you can keep track of my boring and uninteresting life @redsixx.
