As usual, the Live Action Short category in this year’s
Academy Awards is a collection of some of the finest filmmaking you’ll likely
never see. It’s such a shame that there’s so little commercial market for these
movies. Like most previous years, the five nominees include one comedy to brighten
the mood if you choose to watch all five as a single program.
Dekalb Elementary
is inspired by a real 911 call. A disturbed young man walks into a school with
a rifle wanting to die. He threatens the receptionist and a few other employees
as the school goes into lockdown and the police arrive. He feeds instructions
to the receptionist to give the dispatcher over the phone to then pass on to
the police on scene. Through about ten harrowing minutes the receptionist uses
compassion to talk the perpetrator down as he begins to regret his decision.
Director Reed van Dyk maintains the tension across the film’s running time and
the unfortunate reality is that the subject matter would play s timely in any
month of the last few years.
In The Silent Child,
a young deaf girl receives help from a social worker to prepare her for school,
but the uphill battle is with the mother whose ignorance of the difficulties of
deafness and desire for her daughter to be “normal” are powerful. This is the
most heartbreaking of the entries and for that reason I suspect it will win the
Oscar. It’s a beautifully told condensed story and a message film about the
importance of having resources in place for deaf children in schools. The film
packs an emotional wallop in its 20 minute running time. (this film did go on to win the Oscar)
For a brief respite and a bit of levity the program turns
to The Eleven O’Clock in which a
psychiatrist argues with a patient who suffers from the severe delusion that he
himself is a psychiatrist. Director Derin Seale lets us think we know who’s
who, then teases us with doubt, then makes us doubt the doubt until, during a
word association exercise in which each man believes the other to be the
patient giving responses, our heads are spinning and we’ve fallen into a
post-fact abyss. Under these circumstances who can say where reality begins and
ends?
My Nephew Emmett
takes place during the final hours of Emmett Till’s life before he was beaten
and murdered at age 14 for whistling at a white woman. It also shifts the drama
away from the victim himself and onto his Uncle Mose, with whom he’d been sent
from Chicago to live. Mose is an old-timer who knows what’s coming the second
he gets the news of what his nephew’s done. This man has probably seen things
most of us wouldn’t dream up in our worst nightmares. He is caught in the
desperation of trying to protect the boy and the rest of his family. As a
feature film this might have been a contender for Best Cinematography with its
dark brown, burnt umber, and earthen tones.
In Watu Wote: All
of Us (also inspired by true events) a bus crossing the very dangerous
border between Kenya and Somalia is set upon by Muslim extremists who go around
executing Christians. The Muslim passengers band together to protect a woman
who (it is revealed earlier) lost her husband and son to Muslim terrorists. The
final ten minutes are among the most tense moments put on film last year.
No comments:
Post a Comment