The Eleven O'Clock | The Los Angeles Short Film Festival is awesome, and many of my favorite shorts have played there over the years. This year, the winner of Best Comedy was an awesome Australian Short that takes a classic arena for comedy, the misunderstanding, and then plays with it. It also has therapists and pitch perfect timing. The big thing here is that there's a twist, and it makes utter sense, but it doesn't feel telegraphed, nor out of left field. It hits the enviable sweetspot that M. Night Shaymalan used to dwell in. It's funny, and the interaction between our four actors is so dead-on, at times deadpan, and at other points, merely silly. It's an ideal length too! Highly recommended! |
The Domestic Life of a Housecat by Marnie Ellen
Marnie Ellen is a stunning visualist. Her film The DOmestic Life of Housecats is one of those films I would call a Video COllage. It is a series of images that come together not in a story form, but in a nearly meditative form of visual beats and hammering interconnections. It is a filom that is presented b y the film maker, but it is a meaning that is derived from the audiences experience of it. The interactions between the sound design consisting of voice mails, a deconstructed sex tape, and the magnificent visual poetry that uses heart imagery and duplicative repetition in a form Man Ray would have adored, leaves the viewer with work to do, and for the best. Marnie Ellen is an experimental filmmaker to watch, and one I can not wait to see much much more from. |