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Helen M Jerome reviews
Future Shorts
- Cert:
- Cat.no: FSD100
- Running time: 120 minutes
- Year: 2008
- Pressing: 2008
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
- Languages: mainly English, also Spanish, French, Russian, Swedish
- Subtitles: English (on foreign language shorts)
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £14.99
- Extras: None
- Vote and comment on this DVD:
Directors:
- various, including Jamie Thraves, Nacho Vigalondo, Kim Chapiron, John Harden, Slava Ross
Cast:
- various, including Vincent Cassel, Martin Freeman, Bat for Lashes
Very much an arthouse kind of Now Thats What I Call Short Films, this is the first proper DVD release of Future Shorts ambitious project to make their passion accessible.
Short and sweet, sixteen small but perfectly formed films here show the amazing range of talents currently working at the cutting edge. Indeed, some are so much on the edge that they embrace taboos like John Hardens monochrome La Vie dun Chien (2005), in which a scientist enables man-on-dog love through synthesising a drug that allows humans to become animals, before changing back. Weirdly, darkly comic, it satirises societys hang-ups and the knee-jerk reaction of those wishing to control anything other than the norm all in just 13 minutes.
La Vie dun Chien won best narrative short at the LA Film Festival, and award-winning shorts pepper this selection. Slava Ross Meat (2004) and Jonas Odells Never Like The First Time (2005) have been deservedly showered with international awards and both deal with sex, but in very different ways. Meat has a Russian single mother selling sex to make ends meet to the anguish of her young son. While First Time uses four, real, first-hand interviews about “the first time”, then dramatises their recollections with four very different styles of animation. It sure aint Creature Comforts, but it is endearing and honest especially the final story.
The oldest by some distance, but still one of the freshest, most enjoyable films here is I Just Want To Kiss You (1989). Starring a young, wiry pre-fame Martin Freeman, it takes its inspiration from all those hip French New Wave films with Belmondo, and is yet another beautifully-lit, black & white study.
Another fine bit of menacing acting comes from Vincent La Haine Cassel in La Barbichette (2002). And you simply have to see the surreal, Oscar-nominated 7:35 In The Morning (2003) from Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo, with its café setting and chorus of singing, dancing breakfasters. Jojo in the Stars, (2003) by Marc Craste has won a BAFTA and Cartoon dOr, and is peopled by a mix of eerie, malevolent and innocent robot-like figures. Can love triumph against adversity?
Funniest and shortest shorts are the deadpan Neighbor (2003) and the simply animated Procrastination (2007), both from the US, and both just two minutes long. Perfect.
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.