APRIL 4, 2003|Aspen's Wheeler Opera House is a great deal like Vail's Vilar Center and Telluride's Sheridan Opera House: it's a beautiful old building in the middle of a beautiful old city, and it doesn't have enough leg room unless you sit in the front row of the balcony. Gifted, however, with talented projectionists and, when the Aspen Shortsfest rolls into town, a consistently stellar line-up, the Wheeler venue is cozy with the feeling of rarefied privilege--the poor (filmmakers, media) and the rich (everyone else) united for five nights in the appreciation of the short-film format. A little less than four hours away from my home in Littleton, Aspen is another planet. Seventy degrees and sunny when I left this morning, tonight found me walking the eight blocks back to my hotel in a driving, pelting snow by restaurant picture windows full of the bold and the beautiful. Bracing and jarring and so often perfectly manicured contradiction, Aspen turns out to be the perfect environment for a film festival.-Walter Chaw

Fits & Starts (USA, 11min., Vince Di Meglio, **** (out of four))--Deadpan brilliant, Di Meglio's film is a deconstructionist tour de force that attacks the precepts of the filmmaking process with an absurdist's sense of humour. The picture's technical virtuosity slyly undermines expectation at every turn, the courtship of its young lovers occurring over the chugging of bottles of orange drink and unusual woo pitched via pre-recorded cassette tapes, concluding with an unexpectedly rousing, spot-lit serenade. A blend of the best parts of Kaurismäki and Lynch (and Svankmajer, and Nick Lyon, and so on), Fits & Starts is a harbinger for a major experimental talent and, frankly, a kind of minor masterpiece in and of itself.

Thomaschek's Plan (Germany, 14min., Ralf Westhoff, **1/2)--A story of the divided German state finds a young man training with his small East German town's postman Thomaschek in order to get in fighting trim to catch a train bound for the West. Slight though massing a nice tension by the end, the strength of the picture is its fine-grained cinematography--a style that strongly favours reads of realism.

Turn Around (Australia, 13min., Samantha Saunders, **)--An Aboriginal version of The Sure Thing, Samantha Saunders' Turn Around is a road-trip romance between a man seduced by the promise of a dream woman and an ordinary woman who proves to have all the qualities the man didn't know he needed. The Aussie product marginally interesting only because of its all-Aboriginal cast, it occurs that pictures like Rabbit-Proof Fence and the fierce Once Were Warriors are better representations of the emerging cinema culture.

What the Doctor Ordered (USA, 13min., James Hawkins, *)--Unspeakably insipid, I believed that it was a joke until the pocket uplift (a baby girl affectionately called "Popsicle" of all things) reared its saccharine head. The tale of a paediatrician and his stricken charge and a quick lesson in masturbation to seal the tot's future legacy (something uncomfortably akin to the relationship of the filmmaker to his film), What the Doctor Ordered resorts to the usual gags (an old lady catching doc perusing a girlie mag) before reaching for uplift in the "true story" of a sick kid and his own private Patch Adams.

Twin Towers (USA, 34min., Bill Guttentag & Robert Port, ***)--The winner of this year's Oscar for Best Live Action Short, Twin Towers appears to be the product of serendipity as a documentary on the NYPD's elite emergency response team was in the process of production just six months prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Combining footage of heroic cop Joseph Vigiano engaged in hazardous duty from the previous docu with interviews of friends and family post-9/11 (an event that claimed Vigiano's life), the picture is emotional and affecting if necessarily uneven and, to an extent, almost sadistic in its inevitability.

Tom Hits His Head (USA, 11min., Tom Putnam, ***)--Kineticism the rule of the day, Tom Hits His Head looks a great deal like a Harmony Korine film while feeling a great deal like an "Upright Citizens Brigade" sketch. It follows the trail of titular Tom post-concussion as he develops a pretty good case of severe anxiety disorder, molding along the way a pithy insight into the malady of the modern man. Adrift in the mendacity of the 9-to-5, the frenetic surreality of the bit (a visit by a baby doll Satan while Tom's on the toilet is a classic) serves ultimately as a spot-on satire of the aspirations that haunt the quiet hours.

John and Mia (Denmark, 22min., Christian Dyekjaer, ****)--Reminding of Marius Holt's feature film Øyenstikker, Christian Dyekjaer's John and Mia is a simply extraordinary picture about fathers and daughters and the breach that often grows between parents and their adult children. Subtle and uncompromising without taking a particular side, the beauty of the piece lies in its ability to suggest deeper echoes in the broaching of topics as thorny as pornography and alcoholism--and suggest them without becoming proselytizing about them. At once delicate and potent, John and Mia, particularly a powerhouse performance by Dick Kaysø, is valuable work.

Atomic Love (USA, 8min., Michael Dante DiMartino, **)--An exceptionally slight piece, a combination of computer-rendered backgrounds and traditional animation techniques, Atomic Love details a date between a lovelorn girl and a fifties-era robot. The very definition of "cute," the picture gains some measure of interest in a pair of fantasy sequences in which the girl reveals a Carrie-esque yen for peer vengeance and the bot a vintage Disney dream of chivalry. Though it looks good, the pacing's off for the most part and while it scores once or twice, the pay-off just doesn't seem to justify the perceived length.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (USA, 14min., Tiffany Shlain, **1/2)--Agreeably Pro-Choice, what works about Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is its canny send-up of educational reels, jumping from Chinese dry cleaners to endangered frogs over a series of archived images and stock footage. As the film becomes increasingly focused on the reproductive rights debate in the United States (while taking a broadside swipe at China that doesn't exactly find its mark in first speaking of the country's over-population problem, then of its limiting of offspring), though, it slides into soapbox melodrama to the extent of introducing a morality play of a conservative senator's daughter who dies during an abortion made uncomfortable by her dad. That it's tiresome is no question--the real shame is that its hysterical conclusion betrays the intelligence and good humour of its body.

The Paddock (Australia, 5min., Peter Carstairs, *1/2/****)--A long tracking shot of a brown Australian field centred by an old white pick-up is the dominant image of The Paddock. Overlaying it is a mordant monologue voiceover questioning the ultimate rewards of being a sheepherder and the difficulty for men to express existential angst. There's probably a place for this film--and that place is 1950.

Promise Land (UK/Scotland, 14min., Gili Dolev, **1/2)--While there's no denying its rage and energy, the Gili Doley's animated screed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict starts out well but becomes increasingly predictable. Following a series of twenty-year-olds celebrating their birthdays in the midst of conflict, the movie reserves its final shot for a the media covering it, causing one to rightfully wonder if there is any structure to the piece--or real focus to its ire.

Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl (Canada, 9min., Brad Peyton, **)--Owing a tremendous debt to Tim Burton, Brad Peyton's ode to weird is a cartoonish live-action fable about a little dead girl looking for love. With the same perverse gift-giving (married to the same good intentions) of The Nightmare Before Christmas (and the same set and character design), the film is really not much of anything except a mildly comic, mildly dark romp.

Hyper (USA, 6min., Michael Canzoniero and Marco Ricci, **)--Structured around the ways a man tries to save time, the piece by the end is about the ways that women are time drags and the best laid plans of men are doomed to failure. The style is chaotically pleasing, but the rest of it feels weightless and free of any greater insight beyond the typical stand-up routine.

back to coverage index for the 12th Annual Aspen Shortsfest