Celebrating AFI (shorts set)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: D Shorts: B-
Besides
Sundance and all the festivals and schools you know, The American Film
Institute also has a deep involvement in the filmmakers of tomorrow. The new DVD Celebrating AFI also celebrates some decent filmmaking in a
collection in which all the shorts are interesting and worth seeing. Some of them are exceptional. They are:
Family Attraction (Brian Hecker, 1.33 X 1, 1998) -
This is a Science Fiction tale of sorts where an “extinct” nuclear family is on
display at the local zoo. Suddenly, the
unhappy husband (Chris Penn) decides to run away when the trash collector
forgets to close the white picket fence.
Obviously, anyone could jump over it, but it becomes an unintended act
of subversion. By the end, a world we
have never seen before is revealed and the short can be taken two ways: 1) Stick with the traditional family or
suffer or 2) Thought is a great ideal, the idea of the “happy nuclear family”
is a stereotypical fraud and a trap, something created artificially to be
viewed like “happy” television. Too bad
Hecker did not (or for budgetary reasons) could not go farther.
Chili Con Carne Club (Jonathan Kahn, 1.33 X 1, 1993) –
The oldest and silliest short has to do with a guy choosing between having a
real relationship with his girlfriend or losing out on women altogether and
being part of the men-in-long-underwear hell of the title. It is rendered literally as a prison, but the
solution is problematic and dysfunctional.
Too bad, because this could have really worked, but Mel Gibson does show
up.
Shangri-La Café (Lili Mariye, 1.85 X 1, 1999) –
The gem of the set involves a Japanese family owning a restaurant in the early
1960s, but pretending to be Chinese. Things
get ugly when some “official” white man shows up and has them stick a
discriminatory sign in the window. This
is a great short that deserves a much wider audience than indie-short curiosity
and expectation limit.
Bar Time (Ernst Gossner, 1.85 X 1, 2001) –
An older man goes to a bar with a somewhat care-less attitude when a young punk
tries to rob the place. It becomes a
battle of wills between the two of them and the bartender. The only twist is that the soundtrack has
exaggerated sounds and a constant echo throughout that seems to be the
production sound and is overdone. It is
still above average.
The Car Kid (Tricia Brock, 1.66 X 1, 2001) –
Brad Renfro is very unrecognizable (again) as a mentally handicapped kid who
befriends a musician (James Franco from Sam Raimi’s Spiderman), who finds out the handicapped kid is a musical
prodigy.
Fair Play (Joanne Wread, 1.66 X 1, 2000) –
A young boy is forced to live out of a van with his loser father, when he
decides to try and sneak out to play baseball with some neighborhood kids. His father wakes up and ruins that, but he
finds himself at a sports shop that will offer him a change of perspective in
his life. Ed Asner and John Heard also
star in this solid work.
The
varying aspect ratios of the films are not a problem, though the letterboxed
material does not benefit from anamorphic enhancement. Shangri-La
Café had the best image and the oldest, Chili Con Carne Club, has the below-average poorest. The
Car Kid was shot on the Digital Beta format. All the shorts have been remastered in Dolby
Digital 5.1 AC-3, but none of them take anywhere near full advantage as this is
ambiance and clarity remixing of the often low-budget sound. The last four films benefit the best. There are no extras, but the collection here
is strong enough that you will not mind that at all.
- Nicholas Sheffo
