Review: The 15 short films up for Oscar are, as always, a wildly diverse collection of stories with some genuine standouts.
The all-you-can-eat buffet of the short films nominated for Academy Awards — five each in three categories: Live-action, animated and documentary — gives moviegoers a reminder that not all stories take 90 minutes or three hours to tell.
The live-action program is dominated by one 40-minute film: Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which may deliver the most Anderson-style whimsy in the shortest amount of time possible. (If you want more of the same, Anderson made three other shorts based on Dahl stories, and all four of them are streaming on Netflix, though you have to dig for them.)
The story goes through narrators like Russian nesting dolls: First Ralph Fiennes as Dahl, recounting the life of idle rich man Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who tells of a story he learned of a doctor (Dev Patel), and the doctor’s account of a man in India (Ben Kingsley) who trained himself to see without his eyes. It’s charming, with rapid-fire narration, deadpan performances and Anderson’s gift for perfectly composed tableaux.
And although “Henry Sugar” is the favorite to win the category, that’s not the film in this category that tugs hardest at the heart strings. That race is a dead heat between two stories about the after-effects of violence: Director Misan Harriman’s “The After,” starring David Oyelowo as a London man who loses everything dear to him in a random attack, and director Nazrin Chadhoury’s “Red, White and Blue,” with Brittany Snow as a single mom dealing with the reality of trying to obtain an abortion in red-state America.
The other two live-action nominees, also worthwhile, are: “Knight of Fortune,” a droll comedy from Denmark about grief, and “Invincible,” a dark drama from Quebec about a troubled teen in juvenile detention.
Among the animated films in competition, I have to admit a personal bias toward “Ninety-Five Senses,” because I know the filmmakers, Jared and Jerusha Hess, the Utah husband-and-wife team behind “Napoleon Dynamite.” The movie, produced by the Salt Lake Film Society’s MAST filmmakers’ incubator program, depicts an old man (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) describing the five senses. The story has a brutal twist in the middle, and goes down some dark and fascinating roads.
Also quite effective is director Tal Kantor’s “Letter to a Pig,” a French/Israeli production in which a Holocaust survivor tells his story to a high-school class, where one girl’s imagination gets swept up in his horrific tale.
The remainder of the animated program, all good: The Iranian “Our Uniform,” which uses fabric to reminisce about the filmmaker’s hijab-wearing school years; the French “Pachyderme,” a remembrance of a girl’s childhood visits to her grandparents’ lakeside cottage; and “War Is Over!,” a World War I allegory featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over).”
(Shorts International, the company that distributes the Oscar shorts programs, has added two more animated shorts to fill out the program — since the five nominees run about an hour in total.)
The documentary program isn’t quite as good as the other two compilations, but there are some gems.
My favorite is “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” in which director Sean Wang interviews his Taiwan-born grandmothers — ages 94 and 83 — who live together in the Bay Area. (Wang cast one of them as his fictional grandmother in his narrative film “Di Di,” which won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.)
For filmmaking prowess, the best may be “The Last Repair Shop,” directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers, which tells the stories of the people who work for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s music department — lovingly fixing instruments used by students who otherwise couldn’t afford them. The camerawork is lush, and the movie ends with a musical interlude that’s simply beautiful.
Nearly as compelling is “The Barber of Little Rock,” in which directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner follow Arlo Washington, a financier and activist working to bring economic opportunity — and economic justice — to the underserved parts of Arkansas’ state capital.
S. Leo Chiang’s fascinating “Island In Between” makes the political personal and vice versa, as he goes back to his native Taiwan — and, in particular, the island of Kinmen, which is physically closer to mainland China but politically and emotionally linked to Taiwan.
The favorite to win the category is also, to me, the weakest of the five. In “The ABC’s of Book Banning,”director Sheila Nevins (the longtime head of HBO’s documentary department) talks to Florida school kids about the books that have been banned, restricted or challenged across the country. Nevins also talks to some of the authors whose works have been targeted, including poets Amanda Gorman and Nikki Giovanni. The urgency of the topic, and the fury audiences will surely feel about it, far outweighs the pedestrian filmmaking.
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Academy Award-nominated live-action short films
★★★1/2
Academy Award-nominated animated short films
★★★1/2
Academy Award-nominated documentary short films
★★★
The animated and live-action programs open Friday, February 16, and the documentary program opens Friday, February 23, all at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated; the live-action program is probably R for scenes of violence; the animated is probably PG-13 for stylized depictions of violence; the documentary program is probably PG-13 for thematic content. Running time: The live-action program is 140 minutes, with one short in Danish and one in French, both with subtitles; the animated program is 80 minutes, with one short in French and Hebrew, one in Farsi, and one in French, all with subtitles; and the documentary program is 140 minutes, with two shorts in Chinese, both with subtitles.