Short Films
I recently attended a Short Films night.
"Boxer" didn't really excite me, despite the awards it had won. There were a few pokes at bureaucracy and various justifications people employ to do things, but it didn't go anywhere apart from the surreal situation.
"Happy Country" depicted some very real elements of the immigrant experience, but didn't properly depict a narrative arc.
There was an interpretive dance short, which was pretty. The wacky yet dilapidated Taiwanese architecture in the background caught my eye.
"Booth Story" was quite a touching story about a man with nothing else in his life raising a duck. There's not much more to it, but the sentimental but bleak message about there being just a couple of "moments" in life had an impact.
"The Not-So-Great Eugene Green" was a cartoon with all the traditional trappings - caricatured character designs, exaggerated emotions, physics-defying feats. The love interest subplot was unresolved, making it very different to the other open-and-shut storylines; perhaps it's just an expression of the creator's feelings on the subject.
"Lucky" was an amazing work of light-scribing, with a distinctive style to the application of the technique.
"Celestial Avenue" was a strange cultural cross-over story; I can't work out whether it was actually neocolonial cultural appropriation. I enjoyed the short because of its storyline and pastiche of Chinese movies and karaoke, the not-that-bad Cantonese and Mandarin, and the humorous depiction of encounters with a foreign culture. However I couldn't ignore that the Chinese characters (the ideograms) didn't fit (some of the discrepancy was intentional), and all the main parts and main production roles were filled by Caucasians. The contrast between approaches to exotic food (the guy thinks dim sims and spring rolls are the full extent of Chinese food, the woman wants to try the weird stuff, and the restaurant manager thinks she won't like it) was nice, and the positive (though exaggerated and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) depiction of a usually marginalised or over-exoticised culture is a good step. The short felt like a reconciliation with something just deeper than an image of Chinese culture design specifically for a Western audience; it would have been improved by tightening its appeal for an Asian audience.
"Boxer" didn't really excite me, despite the awards it had won. There were a few pokes at bureaucracy and various justifications people employ to do things, but it didn't go anywhere apart from the surreal situation.
"Happy Country" depicted some very real elements of the immigrant experience, but didn't properly depict a narrative arc.
There was an interpretive dance short, which was pretty. The wacky yet dilapidated Taiwanese architecture in the background caught my eye.
"Booth Story" was quite a touching story about a man with nothing else in his life raising a duck. There's not much more to it, but the sentimental but bleak message about there being just a couple of "moments" in life had an impact.
"The Not-So-Great Eugene Green" was a cartoon with all the traditional trappings - caricatured character designs, exaggerated emotions, physics-defying feats. The love interest subplot was unresolved, making it very different to the other open-and-shut storylines; perhaps it's just an expression of the creator's feelings on the subject.
"Lucky" was an amazing work of light-scribing, with a distinctive style to the application of the technique.
"Celestial Avenue" was a strange cultural cross-over story; I can't work out whether it was actually neocolonial cultural appropriation. I enjoyed the short because of its storyline and pastiche of Chinese movies and karaoke, the not-that-bad Cantonese and Mandarin, and the humorous depiction of encounters with a foreign culture. However I couldn't ignore that the Chinese characters (the ideograms) didn't fit (some of the discrepancy was intentional), and all the main parts and main production roles were filled by Caucasians. The contrast between approaches to exotic food (the guy thinks dim sims and spring rolls are the full extent of Chinese food, the woman wants to try the weird stuff, and the restaurant manager thinks she won't like it) was nice, and the positive (though exaggerated and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) depiction of a usually marginalised or over-exoticised culture is a good step. The short felt like a reconciliation with something just deeper than an image of Chinese culture design specifically for a Western audience; it would have been improved by tightening its appeal for an Asian audience.