Calgary International Film Festival: Comedy Shorts (2012)
- BEAR (dir. Nash Edgerton, Australia, 2011) Easily the best and greatest film of the collection. Too bad it was first since the rest had a hard time measuring up. A man goes through great effort to surprise his girlfriend with a gift on her birthday, but the sheer horror of his good intentions and their consequences are blindingly hilarious.
- BOYS NIGHT IN (dir. Brian McElhany and Nick Kocher, USA, 2012) Multiple episodes of the same joke: a guy's friend comes over and it gets increasingly gay.
- GAMES PEOPLE PLAY (dir. Two Trick Pony, USA, 2012) A very dull and clichéd story with board game themes. Too bad. I like board games.
- GROOVE YOUR LIFE (dir. Vincent Burgevin and Frank Lebon, France, 2011) A dark comedy about a music group you can call to follow you around and jazz up, oops, groove up your life. A suicidal man gets a second chance.
- BUYER'S MARKET (dir. Nathan Fielder, Canada, 2012) I really enjoyed this tale of a squatter foiling a real estate agents sale. A really gross moment makes this epic.
- SPECIAL DELIVERY (dir. Graham Lester George, Spain, 2012) This was close to the best I saw in this set. Some great comic moments when a postman accidentally drops a lit cigarette through the mail slot.
- DAD DRIVES: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER (dir. Daniel Beirne, Canada, 2012) A father gives his mature son the sex talk - pretty funny and uncomfortable.
- BLITZEN TRAPPER MASSACRE (dir. Joshua Homnick and Rainn Wilson, USA, 2011) Rainn Wilson of The Office fame goes on a killing spree. Not funny, not even once.
- LAST WORDS (dir. Tony Yacenda, USA, 2011) This was just crass and irreverent without being funny at all.
- PARACHUTE (dir. Martin Thibaudeau, France, 2012) Skydiving hustle which leads to awkward decision making - fun enough.
- CANOEJACKED (dir. Jonathan Williams, Canada, 2012) I don't remember much about this except that it was some dark humour about escaped convicts and I laughed.
- TALKING DOG FOR SALE: TEN EUROS (dir. Lewis-Martin Soucy, France, 2012) An old joke gets the film treatment, so if you've heard the joke, you know the punchline. I had heard the joke before.
- THE PROCESSION (dir. Robert Festinger, USA, 2012) A funeral procession is interrupted, a great set up for comedy, but it just falls flat with boring dialogue and cliché.
To complete my first viewing of The Matrix films, I watched this collection of animated shorts that flesh out some of the side stories from the live action films. Each of the nine animations are produced by a different production company and carry very different styles with them. It is clear that some of the films direct their efforts to emphasize very different aspects of the Matrix flicks: style, philosophy, and action.
This DVD compilation of short stories feebly attempts to tie them together with the universal theme of being. The problem is that any story that has a character of any kind has this theme. What I'm trying to say is that the stories don't work together at all.
This is a response to Paris, Je t'Aime - a collection of short films by various directors demonstrating the vibrancy of one of Earth's largest and popular cities.
