Education of the Modern Doctor: Marcus Welby vs. House 
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.
With the Oscars less than three weeks away, lots of folks are scrambling to see every nominated film before the big day. Newsflash: It just isn’t possible. Sure, you can catch every Best Picture nominee, but only one of the Best Foreign Language Film nominees has been screened in San Diego, and just two of the documentary features have come through town (a third, Wim Wenders’ Pina, opens this week). Documentary shorts? Forget about it.
But on Friday, Feb. 10, all 10 of the other nominated short films open at the Ken Cinema for a weeklong run. It won’t help you attain an unattainable goal, but it’ll provide two terrific film-going experiences: Part of what makes this program—divided up into live-action and animated—so good is that we rarely get to watch short films on the big screen, and since every film has been nominated for an Oscar, you end up with a number of excellent entries.
Perhaps most impressive is Pentecost, a comedy about an altar boy and a priest. Peter McDonald’s Irish film, in the live-action category, does everything you want a short film to do. It’s funny and quirky and doesn’t mess around by trying to cram a feature-length story into a short film. That’s the trap into which I felt two of the films fell: Raju, the story of a German couple trying to adopt a 4-year-old boy in India, and The Shore, which explores a reconciliation between two Irish friends 25 years after they last saw each other. The Norwegian entry Tuba Atlantic was better, although this tale of a young woman who tries to help an old man end his days peacefully, went overboard on eccentricity.
My favorite of the bunch (which, I’m sorry to say, probably guarantees it won’t be a winner) is the American film Time Freak. A little more than 10 minutes long, it’s very funny—the inventor of a time machine keeps going back to yesterday to try to do everything perfectly. It’s by far the cleverest of the batch, exactly what I want in a short film. Director Andrew Bowler doesn’t take his material too seriously, making it all the more enjoyable.
Then there’s the animated program, which, due to shorter running times, will also include several non-nominated pieces, including Amazonia, by San Diego’s Sam Chen. All told, there are nine shorts on this bill, which is often the most interesting of all the Oscar-nominated films, simply because the movies here tend to be more imaginative than anything else.
Still, CGI animation has ruined the old-school stuff for me—I found myself fairly uninterested in the Canadian film Sunday. But Wild Life, also out of the Great White North, was beautiful. Directors Amanda Forbis and Windy Tilby tell the tale of an Englishman trying to be a Canadian cowboy in 1909, through what feels like moving oil paintings of a desolate landscape, combined with a wry and witty concept. A morning Stroll perhaps had a little too much of the CGI thing going on—it was smart but a little soulless. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was gorgeous, using modern technology to celebrate the past.
The movie, about a jazz-age New Orleans resident who ends up being caretaker of a magical library, nods to Hurricane Katrina, The Wizard of Oz and certainly Buster Keaton and is designed to help you remember the way the best books you ever read made you feel. It felt almost sacrilegious to watch it on my iPad.
But easily my favorite was the Pixar short La Luna.
The animation is clean and flawless, and it wordlessly does what the best of Pixar’s work does: tap into the emotional reservoirs that we recognize but often can’t access. It’s a lovely little film, though, again, calling it out like this means there’s no way it’s gonna win.
Write to anders@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com. You can follow Anders on Twitter at @anderswright.
