It is always a pleasure to find yet another reminder that clever writing matters more than hundreds of millions of dollars of effects. In fact, there is only one effect in this film, and it is one of the simplest imaginable. Instead, what we have is something very simple — two men sitting in a […]
Read more "They’re Made Out of Meat (2005)"It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a short film. In fact, there are untold numbers of them floating around, although few of them are really noteworthy. Many are poorly made, or worse, poorly written, some are vanity projects, and quite a few are nothing more than demo projects, showing off, say, the director’s exploding […]
Read more "Doctor Who Anime (2011)"It’s amazing how much you can do with so little. Here we have a very simple film, a mere four minutes long, and yet it still manages to come up with a few clever ideas and to wring a smile or two out of us. Something goes wrong with Ray’s mini-Hadron collider, and the end […]
Read more "The Palindrome Paradox (2013)"This is a very solid piece of work. Here we have a retro-Eighties short SF film, which manages in a very short span — a mere 21 minutes — to establish two interesting characters, build a fascinating future, throw in a bit of conflict, a few fights, and a trip to the moon in a […]
Read more "Moonshot (2016)"Among the most loved of all those Japanese Chanbara (Samurai and sword fighting) films is the series about a blind master swordsman and masseur named Zatoichi. He was played with a great deal of humor and human warmth– not to mention incredible swordsmanship — by the great Shintaro Katsu. And I must say, it is […]
Read more "ZVP (2017)"This is not a film for little boys. Or for the timid. Two years before Shinya Tsukamoto burst onto the Underground scene with his bizarre cyberpunk-ish body horror film, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, he created this insane forty-six minute short, about a sad little boy who is bullied because he has an electric pole growing out […]
Read more "Adventures of Electric Rod Boy [Denchû kozô no bôken] (1987)"There was a certain amount of fuss over this one — made to celebrate the Twentieth anniversary of Cartoon Network’s Toonami block, it also marked Mamoru Oshii’s first production for American TV, albeit made by the Japanese animation powerhouse, Production I.G. However, while this one is frequently described as a combination of live action and […]
Read more "Sand Whale and Me (2017)"