Old-fashioned moviegoers who still love the cinema experience have endured some sprawling spectacles in recent years. Both recent “Avatar” series releases were over three hours long, and the two “Dune” films were just under. Whether this length trend is for wicked, or for good, is in the tired eyes of the beholder.
The Academy Award nominees that open in theaters Feb. 20 are proof of the power of small spectacles. The so-called Oscar Shorts are films that keep it brief while saying a lot.
“In a short film, every single word, every single frame is important to telling the story. There’s no time to waste,” said Richard Beer, the director of programming at downtown Vancouver’s Kiggins Theatre.
“I love it when a short almost seems like it’s scenes borrowed from a bigger film,” Beer said. “Like you’re getting dropped into the middle of someone’s day. You don’t know everything, you don’t know all about the characters — but you really connect with them.”
In upcoming weeks, you can catch the generally overlooked-but-excellent Oscar Shorts at the Kiggins and Liberty theaters in three stylistic bundles: live-action films, animated films and documentaries. Check theater websites for the details about which lineup is playing when.
(At the Kiggins, you can pre-purchase an Oscar Shorts punch card that will save a few dollars on ticket prices — plus, you’ll receive a ballot for making your own Oscar Shorts awards predictions after screening all the films. The most accurate predictor of wins, which will be announced March 15 at the Academy Awards ceremony, gets some Kiggins merch.
How short is short? The animated films average 13 minutes long. The live-action films average 22 minutes and the documentaries average 30.
Beer, a professional cinephile whose background includes everything from producing and marketing films to judging them for film festivals, said the year’s bundle of live-action films surprised him for their humor and their storytelling power.
“The live-action films were my favorite this year,” Beer said.
Fans of British TV and Harry Potter films will recognize actors Stephen Fry and Miriam Margolyes (aka Professor Sprout) in a sweet, sentimental story of unlikely thespian connection called “A Friend of Dorothy.” Also set in England, but a couple of centuries earlier, is the genial feminist humor of “Jane Austen’s Period Drama,” which roasts men’s befuddlement about women’s reproductive plumbing. Beer said it reminded him of Monty Python’s sharp-edged silliness.
The live-action films take a stark, sobering turn in a weird science-fictional tale called “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” In the colorless dystopia of this 36-minute movie, the exchange of paper money has been replaced by slaps to the face — and kissing is punishable far more severely than that.
“The richer you are, the more bruises you have,” Beer said. “You wear your wealth on your face.”
It’s a good example of a film that drops you into a strange new reality and leaves you hungry for more, he said.
“It’s so surreal and fascinating,” Beer said, “I could have seen more of that world.”
Courage, imagination
Serious and weighty subjects always dominate the documentaries category, and this year is no different. Two of the documentaries explore journalism itself.
Get out your handkerchiefs for “All the Empty Rooms,” which follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on an independent, yearslong project to document the silent bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. And “Armed Only With a Camera” is an unflinching — sometimes brutally graphic — biography of Brent Renaud, the first American journalist to die reporting the war in Ukraine. Renaud’s adventures in war zones and other troubled places — like gang-dominated Honduras — bring immediacy to desperate people and situations it’s easy for most Americans to ignore.
And yet, Beer said, this year’s lineup of documentaries also highlights courage.
“There’s a sense of hope, a sense that people are standing up,” he said. “There’s a sense of determination.”
As always, this year’s lineup of animated films is a diverse display of imagination and technique, featuring everything from an Old World fable presented via old-fashioned stop-motion puppetry (“The Girl Who Cried Pearls”) to a middle-aged guy fantasizing about all the fun he’ll have in his fast-disappearing future (“Retirement Plan”).
The animation mix always includes one slickened-up, Disney/Pixar-style confection, and this time it’s the hyper-cute environmental fable “Forevergreen.” (It made this writer’s teeth hurt.) Contrast that with “The Three Sisters,” a simple comedy about isolation and competition where the spare, bold animation styles does all the storytelling work.
“It’s dialogue-free and it tells a great story,” Beer said.
Cinema gateway?
Movies may be getting longer, Beer said, but there’s an opposite trend too: teeny-tiny TikToks and other wee videos that seem to have captured America’s eyeballs. Just lately, Beer said, folks in cinema circles are lamenting a recent article in The Atlantic that explores the shortening attention spans even of university film students, who cannot sit through traditional feature-length films.
“Getting them to sit and watch films in the theater is darn near impossible,” he said.
Perhaps the Oscar Shorts are just what the doctor ordered now, Beer said — both for shrunken attention spans and for people who stopped going out to the movies during the COVID-19 pandemic, and never came back.
“There’s a real sense of reeducation,” he said. “Maybe this short-form content … is the gateway to bringing people back. It’s like a sampler. You’ll get portions of things and you can see what you really like.”