Short circuit

The Cinéma du Parc presents this year’s liveaction
and animated Oscar non-feature nominees

COMIC UNDERTAKING: This Way Up

by MARK SLUTSKY

If you want the advantage in your Oscar pool this year, you’d do well to head to the Cinéma du Parc before Sunday night. That’s because the Parc will be showing the nominees for two of the toughest Oscar nuts to crack—Best Short Film (Live Action) and Best Short Film (Animated)—and seeing them could give you the crucial edge in the race to win that $50 prize.

In the Live Action category, I liked Auf der strecke (On the Line) a German-Swiss co-pro directed by Reto Caffi about a security guard obsessed with a bookseller in the department store he patrols, and whom he shares a subway car home with every night—it’s an interesting story of parallel guilt.

Manon sur le bitume (Manon on the Asphalt) is a poetic look at the last moments in the life of a young woman; it’s poetic and sad but somehow cheerful at the same time—a very nice film from writer/directors Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont. New Boy, directed by Steph Green and based on a Roddy Doyle story, is a poignant and sweet story of an African immigrant kid’s first day at school in Ireland. I’d be happy if any of those three films took the prize, but frankly, I’m in this thing for the money, so I’m putting mine on Spielzeugland (Toyland), a maudlin, sentimental and thoroughly mediocre German film about little kids, a teddy bear and the Holocaust.

On the animated side of things, Lavatory Lovestory is a cutesy, mostly monochrome romance about a woman who works in a loo and her secret admirer. Oktapodi is a Finding Nemo-esque saga set in a Greek village by recent grads of France’s Gobelins Ecole de l’Image. Smith & Foulkes’ comically macabre This Way Up tells the picaresque tale of a pair of undertakers escorting a coffin to a gravesite.

I’d say vote for Kunio Kato’s haunting, strange piece of underwater melancholy La Maison en petits cubes if animation giants Pixar didn’t have a horse in this race. Doug Sweetland’s Presto, which showed before Wall•E, is a brilliantly funny story of the struggle between a magician and his performing rabbit, and it’ll be hard to beat.

THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT
FILMS 2009 OPENS AT THE CINÉMA
DU PARC THIS FRIDAY, FEB. 20