Philadelphia Weekly

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It used to be the part of the show when you'd go to the can, and maybe sneak outside for a cigarette while you were at it. Sandwiched somewhere in that dead-zone middle 90 minutes between a garish musical production number and the Dead Celebrity Applause-o-Meter, the Academy Awards for Best Live Action and Animated Short Films were previously most useful as an unpredictable spoiler to wreak havoc on ballots during Oscar pools.

But a couple years back, those sly folks at Magnolia Pictures finally figured out that people might enjoy seeing the much ballyhooed Oscar-nominated shorts, and began packaging them as a theatrical experience. The good news is that un-commercial, short-form filmmaking-- once restricted to festivalgoers and adventurous YouTubers--is now available as an evening out at the Ritz.

The bad news is that this year's short film nominees are almost as pedestrian and uninspiring as their feature-length counterparts.

It all begins brilliantly, though. Director Reto Caffi's Swiss-German production Auf Der Strecke (On the Line) follows a sad-eyed security guard wallowing in a retail wasteland. With the lovelorn, hangdog expression of a slightly younger Brendan Gleeson, the extraordinary Roeland Wiesnekker pines for an elusive book clerk (Catherine Janke) who shares his miserable subway commute in silence, night after night. These two are pulled together by a bad misunderstanding, and a gross act of cowardice on his part.

Caffi has constructed an exquisite miniature here--a fleeting gray-toned glimpse of brokenhearted middle-agers stranded in a big-box purgatory. Be forewarned: That final shot will haunt you for days. It's all in the eyes.

There's much less traction to be found in New Boy, despite its being based on a fine short story by The Commitments writer Roddy Doyle. Director Steph Green relies too much on cutesy reaction shots of her star Olutunji Ebun-Cole, who plays a displaced African immigrant having a bit of trouble settling into his new Irish Catholic school. The fractured time line slowly doles out the young lad's tragic history, but Green remains so fixated on cute kids cooing, any chance of capturing Doyle's irony is undercut by her Gerber Baby Foods commercial sensibility.

Denmark strikes back with The Pig, a vaguely unhinged Gran Torino-like jeremiad against oversensitive Muslims that only really makes sense in light of "the offensive bomb-throwing cartoon" that regrettably cost several lives a few years back. Henning Moritzen stars as an elderly prostate surgery patient who grows inexplicably attached to a painting of a pig on his hospital room wall. Once the artwork is removed "out of cultural sensitivity" for his uber-religious Islamic roommate, the old man damn near loses his mind.

Writer-director Dorte Hugh obviously has a lot to say about intolerance, and the picture ultimately espouses a live-and-let-live sensibility that should seriously be embraced by all faiths. But the film is somewhat cloddish and riddled with bad butt jokes, and Moritzen's at least three sizes too big for the room. I never thought I'd long for Torino's subtlety, but here we are.

And because this is the Oscars, we must eventually confront the Holocaust. Jochen Alexander Freydank's Toyland is such dreadful Shoah kitsch, it almost makes the tawdry Skinemax perversions of The Reader appear respectable in hindsight. Barely 15 minutes long, it's still so tacky, cloying and unspeakably vulgar, this vile piece makes Life Is Beautiful look like Schindler's List.

The animated lot doesn't fare much better. Padded out to feature-length by a bunch more shorts that remained unavailable for screening at press time, the brief, unmemorable selection is distinguished only by Presto, a predictably flawless Pixar contraption--godfathered by The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle genius Jay Ward--during which a fed-up rabbit gets the best of his magician overlord by using the latter's magic top hat in insidious, increasingly hazardous ways.

This particular vignette ran before Wall-E in most theaters, ensuring that it's the most widely seen short film of the year. In a rare case of Disney's might making right, Presto deserves the gold.