Six Anthologies Featuring One Good Short

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Apr. 7, 2009

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“Merde” (from Tokyo!)

Dead of Night (1945): Few things bring you up just to let you down like the anthology film, in which directors make shorts and churn out some of their worst work. But there are some winners. This British horror quartet proved influential with Robert Hamer’s “The Mirror” and Alberto Cavalcanti’s “The Dummy,” in which ventriloquist Michael Redgrave believes his wooden companion is alive.

 

RoGoPaG (1963): Half of Jean-Luc Godard’s work during the 1960s was for packages, including this one for Pier Paolo Passolini’s giddy fit of anticlericalism featuring Orson Welles as a director making a Jesus movie on a city waste ground.

 

Lumière and Company (1995): This great idea—get 41 directors to shoot with the Cinematograph, one of the first motion picture cameras—results in mostly forgettable pap. But David Lynch’s contribution is wonderful—a series of seemingly unrelated images that, when put together, are fucking freaky.

 

Three ... Extremes (2003): Featuring sorry work from Park Chan-wook and Fruit Chan, this trio features “Box,” a short from the prolific Takashi Miike (Audition) whose fractured look at memory is some of his best work.

 

Eros (2004): In this love-themed trio, Steven Soderbergh whiffs and Michaelangelo Antoinioni embarrasses. But it starts so well, with Wong Kar-Wai in a tale of unconsummated lust between a tailor (Chang Chen) and a call girl (Gong Li).

 

Tokyo! (2008): Where Paris, Je T’aime couldn’t produce a passable short between its 18 directors, this three-fer—with Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho—at least gets things above the line.

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Tokyo!
By Sean Burns

Anthology films are like communism or the rhythm method—things that work much better in theory than actual practice. Sure, the prospect of teaming up a bunch of top-shelf directors for similarly themed shorts is certainly tantalizing, but as indicated by every attempt from New York Stories to Paris, Je T’aime, the best you can usually hope for is a mixed bag with maybe one gem buried in there somewhere.

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Posted Apr. 7, 2009 | Comments: 1