If you've been paying attention to Facebook lately, you'll probably have had someone share this video. Ma'agalim is the kind of film that is amazingly beautiful, well-produced, and at its heart, a music video. This one aims to recreate a penny arcade machine that tells a story of love and live. And beyond. It's beautifully animated, and most importantly, it's sweet. 

This one completely reminds me of this year's Oscar winner for Best Animated Short, Bear Story. They have more than superficial similarities, but they both have amazingly well-developed visual style and are well-worth searching out. 

Until  this morning, I had never seen an Indian documentary that really impressed me. I love-hate Bollywood, enjoy some Indian drama, and while Tamil and Hindi cinema is hit-or-miss, I can't say that it bores me. Indian docs have tended to. 

Not 36-24-36.

The docu looks at the Indian idea of beauty and how it relates to the Hollywood ideal, and then it goes broader, and into areas I had no seen coming. The depth is there, and there's nothing here that's not been said a thousand times before in docs around the world, but it uses a very stylish technique, coupled with well-done interviews. That much is easy, where it gets more difficult is in the details.

The examination of Barbie's effect on young girls is really the key to the early portion of the doc and sets up all the other ideals, because it really exemplifies what beauty means, but also what American consumer culture means around the world. A fair bit of the footage about the Barbie section is from Japan or Korea (and, of course, the song Barbie Girl) and there's also the effect on Indian girls. It's something I never thought of, because I grew up in the US during the peak of the Barbie craze, that Barbie would be exporting our cultural form of beauty to the entire world. I never in a million years would have pegged it to the rise of the New Bollywood form of beautiful, away from the traditional standards, or even the 50s ideal represented by actresses like Madhubala. It's such an interesting lesson and a doc that anyone interested in understanding how modern India arrived at the beauty concepts of the now.  

​​​​The first year I programmed for Cinequest, I had little impact. I think three films I watched during screening made it in. One was a comedy, and a really good one, about a small animal Vet. It was called Small Emergencies, and it’s still one of my all-time favorite comedy shorts. 

Remember back when making a faux documentary was at least a bit novel. Yeah, we’d had This is Spinal Tap and a few others, but we hadn’t been handed The Office or Modern Family yet. Heck, Blair Witch was only a couple of years in the rear-view. The idea here is that we’re coming into the world of a vet who specializes in mice, lizards, snakes, hamsters, goldfish, and the like. The way it’s set-up, it feels more like E.R. than one of those Emergency Room A&E shows, which makes our slightly-clueless, but perfectly timed hero a sort of goofy George Clooney, which helps the short over all. His chain-smoking, bitter nurse is an equally well-done addition. The best gag, one that had the entire audience in an uproar in the theatre, has the strings clearly visible, and yet it works HARD!

Watching this with 15+ years of distance, I can’t help but compare it to the nearly-decent-and-cancelled series Animal Practice. In less than seven minutes, Small Emergencies delivers as many laughs as that entire series did over its one season… even if it didn’t have Joanna Garcia Swisher in it. 

Let's be honest, Catalog is basically the film equivalent of a 52 mile-per-hour fast ball over the heart of the plate. It's John Whitney, Sr.'s legendary 1961 animation, created using a modified Anti-Aircraft Gun Director that controlled a camera. Using techniques like the slit-scan and light effects. 

The film is fascinating, and it also helps us understand the evolution of computer graphics in a way that you might never consider. 

At about 7 minutes, it's brief, and it's not at all story-telling. It's imagery, pure and simple. The forms change in color, in shape, they ungulate and shift, along with a simple but powerful soundtrack. The effect iS the film. The film is nothing but the images playing and moving, and that's what early computer graphics were in the day. Up through about 1975, the computer graphics world was not at all about telling stories, but about images and demonstrating the capabilities of computers, NOT of producing usable graphics. That's not to say that some did not create simple stories (The Flexipede and Birdlings are two), but they were more about the technology than the story. By the mid-1970s, computer graphics were all about adding effect to larger productions - films, and especially, television commercials. Westworld, Futureworld, and especially, Star Wars, all moved computer graphics into storytelling. It wasn't until the late 1980s that graphics became the bigger things, and by the time we got Terminator 2 in 1992, things had evolved to the point where computer graphics were not only adding to the story, but making it possible. The big one is Toy Story, which was the final proof that a film could be entirely enabled by a computer. These computer animated films were not the extension of the philosophies of the creators of the films that used computer graphics to tell the story, but of the work of people like John Whitney, Sr., and Bell Labs, where the technology is the reason for the creation, but they'd added the reality that you must include a story to make it palatable, and thus, profitable. 

There's no scarier words to read when you pick your genre for the 48 Hour Film Project than MUSICAL. It's sunk many crews over the years, and lead to some truly awful. Awful. I mean, Species 2-level awful films. When they go well, it's a good thing, and when they're 100% awesome, that's flat-out rad! 

​Beyond Forever Studios managed to make the most entertaining and balls-out funny film of San Jose's 2016 48 Hour Film Project with Making Magic, a fairly simple musical that features only 4 actors. The story is a classic: a woman's husband has left her for a younger woman (a Cheerleader!) and her best friend comes up with the idea of summoning a demon to deal with the bastard. Problem - two do not a summoning circle make, and thus they invite a third to complete it. She's not sure, but things go forward, and eventually, they summon a demon. You know, the demons you want, you can't get, and the ones you can get, you don't want. Same as it ever was...

​The songs are great, and delivered with absolute gusto, especially by Casey Semple. She's brilliant, and gives everything she has to just about every frame. She took fantastic material and turned it into something even better. Drew Campbell as our demon is pretty freakin' hilarious. His delivery is wonderful, and though I don't think we ever see Semple and Campbell in the same shot, but when they're 'interacting' it's the peak of the film. 

Overall, this is probably the most entertaining film I've ever seen come out of a 48 Hour Film Project.

I had the honor of Judging the San Jose 48 Hour Film Project again this year. I love the energy these teams being to creating films over the course of a weekend, and while the films tended towards the weak in the days when folks were submitting them en masse to Cinequest (2004 or so), the quality now rivals a lot of what we see in festival short programs. This year, we got a set of films that were phenomenal, and I'm going to be writing a few of them up. 

The winner of Best Film was Stonewood. It's one of those films that is genre, but in a way that you only slowly wake up to. It's a horror film. Or maybe a science fiction film. Or perhaps a party film. Or maybe it's a drama. From the first first frame, there's a disquieting sense of off-ness about it, something is strange, even in the rather simple party that's going on. When I watched it for the 5 time, I started to note the way the camera lingers, maybe only an inch off of center, producing shots that are weighted to one side or another. That is such a simple trick, and one that gives the film a heft. 

And then there's Dana Morgan. 

The winner of Best Actress, she drives this film by going from being Mrs. Dalloway to Jamie Leigh Curtis in Halloween in the blink of an eye. It's amazing how she portrays her fear, terror, and perhaps her revoltion of being trapped. You'll understand when you watch what I mean. She powers this film into the meat, and her performance is genre excellence!

There are inherent dangers in 48 Hour films. Sometimes, to fit in the required elements, there's a crowbarring that happens. Some filmmakers make this work for them (mostly in the comedies), and if I have to look up what the elements are afterwards because they were so seamlessly integrated, that's a great sign, and that's what happened here. There's the length, for one thing. Short by both necessity and rule, these films sometimes have to rush through material to make it happen. Luckily, here the turn happens quickly, hitting hard, though leaving less time for impact. It barely matters because what we get is a combination of precise editing, intelligent shooting, great acting, a smart script, and just a good, simple, genre storytelling. The perfect 48 Film Project project!

I watch a lot of shorts that give one impression, and then turn on you. It's a bit of a cliche at how frequent that is as a theme, but there's a flip side; when it hits you right, it's amazing. Civil War is one that does it right, and keeps doing it right after the twist. 

A man is out hunting, and then he becomes the hunted, with gun shots, grenades, and even cannon fire going off all around him. It's a visceral attack, as if it's coming at his soul, and it's powerful. Carlo Bruno plays the role of the hunter well, and the cinematography is well-placed, the story well-paced, the meaning well-taken. Some of the bullet effects are a bit obvious, but I still managed to lose myself into the story. it's a wonderful little film and one I can't wait to re-watch. 

In my rookie year as a Short Film Programmer for Cinequest, I had three favorite films. One, not a great movie, Bleach, was one that moved me because it featured a few great actors known from 90210 and Night Court. There was a Seymour Cassel short short comedy that I loved (Custody?) which was one I went back and forth on over and over as to whether it was brilliant or thoroughly flawed. 

Then, there was Copy Shop. 

Copy Shop is the story of a guy who ends up making photocopies of himself. That's the basic, but it's well more than that. The real impressive stuff is the use of the setting. No dialogue, in black-and-white, the film tells its story on paper. Literally. The paper is a presence in the film, and not only as the setting, full of wrinkles, creases, and smudges, but as the venue. We're brought into Copy Shop in a way that isn't how you would normally present a film. Not unlike Don Herzfeld's Rejected (and various Chuck Jones cartoons) the paper on which the 'drawing' occurs is an important avenue. The different, of course, is that the 'drawing' in Widrich's case is footage, and brilliantly fun footage as well.  

The film is great, and the Making of... is also wonderful!

I am a sucker for a short short comedy. If you can get a punch line across in less than 4 minutes, draw me in enough to make me care, and then swerve me just right, I'll be super-happy. Marina Bruno's Failed is exactly in that vein, and her work on it, from the exceptional cinematography that is obviously influenced by both classic car chase movies (and it made me wanna watch The French Connection again) and the more post-modernist movies that were built upon them. The lead actor, Vettore Renato, is grizzled and perfect for the hard-driving driver. He plays the role perfectly, so that when the end hits, it really hits. 

This is a simple film that is completely made by the little touches. You're thinking one thing, The Transporter, Driven, Hitman, and you're given another thing, and it ends up making everything work. It's a fast film, and a damn fun one.