Months ago, I took special care to have the Friday of the Festival off from work. As it turned out, Friday was my heaviest movie day for JFF. I took in one documentary, one feature film and ten shorts.
Elephant Palm Tree is a quiet and austere slice of life concerning an elderly black couple with marriage problems. The ending was the biggest problem for me with this short. The short as a whole felt incomplete and the message, well, incredibly depressing. That’s not saying that a short doesn’t have the right to be depressing, but the downer ending on this one made the entire escapade seem nigh pointless. Six out of Ten.
Moondance is perhaps the most entertaining short I saw, and I’m proud to say that it was created by some film students at my Alma Matter of Florida State University. Basically, it’s Kill Bill told as a fairy tale where Little Red Ridding Hood dispatches characters that have fallen under the spell of the Big Bad Wolf. There’s also a bit of Xena Warrior Princess, here. Great use of locations, costumes, and decent actors. Nine out of Ten.
Pee Shy is the story of a red headed boy in a Boy Scout troop with the inability to pee and tell scary stories (separately, that is). That all changes one summer when the troop stumble upon something in the woods. The story is charming enough, if not predictable. The main deficit is the actors. The Scout leader is supposed to be a jerk, but he overacts his part just a tad. The kids, on the other hand, are a little wooden (I know, all kids can’t be Haley Joel friggin Osmet, but they could have cast a kid in the lead role who could speak lines convincingly). Seven out of Ten.
Ryan is actually the Oscar winner for Best Animated Short earlier this year. The technical achievement is amazing as the narrator leads us through a mirror and we see characters in terms of their mental states. In the case of the narrator and an older animator he goes to interview, their creative output has been troubled and this is represented, among other things, by thickets of colorful wire that explode from their heads. It’s a very surreal piece where the young animator takes audio recordings of his interviews with him and then reinterprets the interviews with his own visual style. Nine out of Ten.
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