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Bite-sized bellylaughs >> What's on the menu for Eat My Shorts
by RUPERT BOTTENBERG You can think of Eat My Shorts and Eat My Twisted Shorts, the two short-film collections running at Just for Laughs, as buffets for your brainpan. Not to say that you'll be nourishing your noggin with these smirk-inducing smorgasbords; it's more like a-bitta-this, a-bitta-that, quick calorie injections for the channel-surfing type. Eat My Shorts was concocted by artistic director Jean Guérin and producer Ezra Soiferman. A quick note on the latter: two summers ago, when Eat My Shorts made its debut, Soiferman had submitted a hilarious number called Pressure Drop, about old folks passin' the dutchie. Now look where the kid is! Then again, Eat My Shorts also introduced South Park and Kevin Spencer to Montreal audiences. Let's take a look at this year's spread, and see if we can't predict what the next Big Thing will be:
Eat My Shorts Ostensibly, the safe, family-oriented stuff, the "nice" side of Shorts nonetheless manages to push a few of what high-powered media wizards call "hot buttons." Take the Australian short The Date, a stern reminder to read the fine print on that last box of rubbers you bought. Or dig Cheeezcake, an artful, abstract take on g-strings and pasties: the twist at the end is a sweet payoff. Truthfully, though, if it's titillation/gross-out you want, jump ahead to the Twisted stuff. Too bad if you do, because you'll be missing four of the funniest films this year. The centrepieces--main dishes?--of Eat My Shorts, slightly longer than most submissions, are as hilarious as any feature in the theatres right now (unless The Deer Hunter's at a rep somewhere).
For a little local flavour that will leave a bad taste in your mouth, Stéphane Thibault's Le Beau Jacques is the ticket. Basically, it's just "quality" time spent with his two nutty, housebound, ultra-Québécoise aunts. One just sits there and pops bubble-wrapping while the other obsesses to a near-psychotic degree over Villeneuve's status at the Grand Prix '97. Thank goodness the ladies' impenetrable jouale gets subtitled, so we can catch the choice lines, like when she calls Jacques her "little Jew." The closer's the winner, though. The Fields brothers' Script Doctor is a 10-minute medical drama in a clinic for fucked-up movie scripts, milked for every gag available. The situation gets heavy when an ink-soaked screenwriter stumbles in with an unsalvagable Batman 5. No script doctor needed for this short, though. Every joke is dead on the money.
Eat My Twisted Shorts Okay, fine, here you go. The nasty stuff. You've got your fat, naked freaks on pogo sticks (I'm Busy), Hollywood powerplay/poo-poo humour (The Pitch) and the world's most elegant jack-off joke (Tea). You've got not one but two episodes of old people getting repellently sexual (Embrasse, Life Is Good and Good to You). Plus, in the tradition of David Letterman's monkey-cam, Cedric's World straps a camcorder to the back of a mangy mutt and gives him an oily French-guy voice-over.
Every night from July 1525, 6pm (Eat My Shorts) and 9:45pm (Eat My Twisted Shorts), at the NFB Cinema, 1564 St-Denis, $5.75, $4.50 students and seniors
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Let's start with Mark Feldstein's Karaoke Knight, a filler bit for Showtime. It's a faux mini-doc on a maxi-chump, some guy who's made karaoke (he pronounces it "ka-rah-ho-kay") his calling in life. Then there's I Created Lancelot Link, Jeff Krulik and Diane Bernard's 12 minutes of pop archaeology. They managed to locate and reunite Stan Burns and Michael Norman, the pair responsible for the late-'60s kiddie-vision oddity Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Couch potatoes and terminal shut-ins will of course remember that show, with its cast of actual chimps, all dressed up and engaging in... well, monkey business, obviously.
A few familiar names/faces pop up this year. Ewan McGregor makes an appearance in the Scottish short Desserts, a beautifully shot gag on the "don't eat that, you don't know where it's been" theme. Animation maverick Bill (The Kiss) Plympton gets plain mean--okay, pretty weird, too--with Surprise Cinema, a cartoon Candid Camera squeezing yuks out of death, mutilation and tender man/octopus love. Also, Jason Reitman, who last year brought us the clever, Tarantino-esque Operation, returns. His new one's called H@, and it's a flawlessly crafted little "fuck you" to the banks.
The closer is by Montreal's own wacky wunderkind Jesse Brown. It's called I Fuck the World, and there's no point in giving away the punch line--the title already did.