This week we feature Run Wrake’s visual companion to excerpts of Howie B’s first album, Music for Babies. They compliment each other remarkably well by distorting natural sounds and images until they seem as if they’re from another world entirely.
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CAPSULE: CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (U.S. EDITION) (2007)
DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti
FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen
PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List. Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.
COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts. The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find. Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art. But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.
For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality. We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.
The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the Continue reading CAPSULE: CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (U.S. EDITION) (2007)
SHORT: RABBIT (2005)
DIRECTED BY: Run Wrake
PLOT: A young girl finds a magical dancing idol when she cuts open a rabbit.
COMMENTS: Run Wrake’s Rabbit is a beautifully frightening, and award-winning, parable about greed that taps into the ancient, grim fairy tale tradition of placing children in harm’s way to illustrate a cautionary point. Rabbit, however, turns that motif on it’s head by making the children the villains. With it’s storybook graphics and text labels hovering over background objects as if it were an animated reading primer, Rabbit creates an eight-minute universe we’ve never seen before, one which is so unflinchingly original it can never be recreated. Like a talking fish out of Grimm’s fairy tales, the golden idol is one of those mysterious folklore creatures with it’s own weird rules and a slow-boiling intolerance for human folly that inevitably leads to tragedy for those unwise enough to abuse its patience. The irony of using innocent looking but thoroughly rapacious children in this sordid scenario isn’t done for shock value alone—although it is shocking, delightfully so—but rather speaks to our deepest suspicions about human nature: that we’re corrupt from birth, and must unlearn our instinctive childish badness.
Although it’s no Saw VI, Rabbit contains some quick and absurd violence and gore. If you find any depiction of darling little boys and girls with ponytails and ruddy cheeks slaughtering innocent woodland creatures for personal gain disturbing, no matter how tastefully done,then you’ll probably want to stay away from this one!
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: