Change Your Image
relyea-51507
Reviews
Ridder Lykke (2022)
Best of All the Shorts
I watched a dozen short films today, the live action and animated Oscar Nominees, plus two other animated shorts included to make the program long enough. This was the best.
I've seen it derided as a one joke comedy that wears very thin, and this would be true if it were a comedy. And indeed there was a scene, you'll know the one, where most of the people in the theater were laughing uproariously. I found myself attempting to get into the fetal position and unable to stop crying.
We don't do death well as a culture. Apparently the Danes don't either. Only the senior morgue attendant has been able to come to terms with death, and for him it has become banal. The acting is excellent, though Jens Jørn Spottag stands out as another man trying to come to terms with saying good bye to his wife.
This isn't to say that there is no levity here. There is a "meet cute" between Torben and Karl, and a simply amazing letter from Torben to his late wife. It must be seen to be believed. But ultimately all the performances are powerful examples of how poorly we deal with it.
Red, White and Blue (2023)
It's Almost As Though If a Film Is About Important Enough Issues Nothing Else Matters
Not to give anything topical away here, but even the substance may be a spoiler.
The movie begins with a low end waitress staring in disbelief at a pregnancy test as a patron looks on. We quickly learn that she is so broke that she has to have her children at work in an empty booth and can't afford $2 for a pancake breakfast. At home that night she plots the distance to the nearest place to get an abortion and tries over and over to make the finances work. The next day the patron asks how much she needs, because she could tell that she wasn't keeping the baby and we're off to the races.
And really, that is all the suspense build up in the movie. Despite the presumed attitudes about abortion, everyone is just as helpful as can be. It's as though everyone concerned thought that it was enough to show how difficult it can be to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy in this country then you don't have to bother making a movie. An example: during the "epic road trip", Brittany Snow can barely rest her eyes on the road, to the point where I was expecting a car crash.
So this is the spoiler part. There is no plot twist, gut-wrenching or otherwise. Instead we're provided with a big "gotcha" moment. The team says, in effect, you think you've been watching a movie about one thing, but in fact it is about something else, and it is only with the "gotcha" that you realize how silly the movie really is. You realize that, regardless of how good the performances are, one of the casting choices is so poor as to destroy the message, a la Ender's Game. Or at least severely weakening the impact.
There is definitely a story to be told here, even with the same plot details, but the producing, directing, and casting is lazy which destroys it. One can believe that these things happen in Arkansas, but you won't see it here.
Soleil de nuit (2023)
Unsure What This Movie Is Trying To Say
I watched this film as a part of the Manhattan Shorts series over thirty hours ago, and it has stuck with me in the way that the other nine have not. It is a simple film, as is the nature of shorts, but the limitation does not make them incapable of being profound. On the contrary, when your canvas is ten minutes, you have time for one big idea. Thus, the IMDB plot summary pretty much tells everything that happens in the movie.
This type of movie, with an aboriginal Elder (in this case a First Nations Elder) is almost required to (attempt to) imbue the audience with some message. I have spent much of the time since trying to figure out what that message is. Surely a movie would not be made that is a response to the coverage of the Nick Sandmann incident complaining that we give Elders too much authority (in much the same way that families of the "9/11 Victims" were accorded special status to weigh in on how to prosecute the "War on Terror"), and yet I've been unable to come to any other conclusion. Even if such a movie could be made, there is simply no way that it would become part of a festival, so I must be mistaken, but I can't see how. My hypothesis is that the message may be akin to one espoused by W. P. Kinsela in his Silas Ermineskin stories which is to say that there are many First Nations who disagree strongly with what they see as the hypocrisy and corruption of the chiefs/elders.
A final note: if Larissa Corriveau is the mother of Nina Corriveau, which I have no way of knowing, then it would make the latter Metis, and therefore be much more likely to have a strong personal connection to the message. By all means, watch this movie and attempt to decode it. In the end, it was very frustrating for me.