Director Patrick Rea has a great skill for misdirection, where you think you’re going somewhere in a story, but suddenly you’re in a completely different avenue, plot wise. Patrick Rea delivers another really fine short film called “I Do” that begins like every Patrick Rea movie to date. Something is amidst, and the minute we enter in to the scenario, we want to know what is happening. When we finally do, it’s outstanding.
Director Jared Skolnick’s “The Earth Rejects Him” is one of the most surreal horror films I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s not often I can watch a movie with a baffled expression and still recommend it as a great film. Not many indie directors know how to direct child actors, and director Skolnick brings out the best in his young cast. Ellis Gage gives a very memorable performance as this young boy who finds himself in an extraordinary predicament and has no idea how to handle it without becoming homicidal.
Director Christian Anderson’s short horror film is a short I hope turns in to a feature film. I intend to buy it. And re-watch it. Every time I think there can’t be any new material mined from the horror hero gamut, someone always surprises me. “Hell’s Belles” is a fantastic short horror film about two ghost fighting babes named Adria and Helena.
In terms of plot, “The Hourglass Figure” really isn’t anything I haven’t seen before. It feels like a re-iteration of the Twilight Zone story “A Special Kind of Stopwatch” later remade in the eighties with a domestic twist called “A Little Peace and Quiet.” The premises are basically the same in tone and emotion. A busy and over worked house wife finds that she can get the quick fix to peace, quiet, and rejuvenation with a supernatural time stopping device.
Writer and director Minkyu Lee presents a hypothetical and bittersweet animated short about the first dog ever created. Somewhere along the line after the creation of man and woman, God figured he’d create a dog. The dog however had to find its purpose in nature, and “Adam and Dog” garners an interesting story about man and dog eventually became best friends in nature. Upon the creation of man, the dog found his way around the startling and often frightening landscapes of the world, and Lee presents us with vast and fantastic terrain in which the dog travails.
Basically, “The Longest Daycare” is a much more advanced and intricate sequel to Maggie Simpson’s adventures in daycare that pays homage to Looney Tunes while also giving the character Maggie some depth. We only saw a portion of it in the episode “A Streetcar Named Marge,” where Maggie united her fellow babies to reclaim her pacifier in the spirit of “The Great Escape.”
I think anyone could connect with the characters in “Paperman.” Particularly the mal protagonist of the short animated film who may very well have met the girl of his dreams at a train stop, and can do nothing but hope they will meet again. When he sees her in an office parallel to his work high rise, he does everything he can to garner her attention.