Wholphin No. 5

Edited by Brent Hoff

I've basically given up on movies, but Wholphin gives me so much hope for the genre of short films and documentaries.  Maybe I'm just losing all vestiges of an attention span for visual media, which makes sense since we're kind of heading that way as a culture, or maybe it's just that the selection process for these DVD magazines are just that good...

Anyway, issue five has some great stuff in it.  'Death to the Tinman' is a fantastic short about a man who keeps losing body parts, to get them replaced by a mad scientist friend.  This plays havoc on his relationship, especially when his soul- and mind-less body gets reattached as a meat puppet, and his girlfriend decides she prefers its company.

The highpoint of the disc is 'House Hunting' a short film based on a Michael Chabon short story, concerning a young couple who are shopping for their first home, and unstable real estate agent that is showing them around (played brilliantly by the guy who played McManus in Oz).

On the documentary side, there is 'One Day With the SLA', showing what life is like among the Sudan Liberation Army in Darfur.  'Drunk Bees' is about just what it sounds like, and 'Piece by Piece' profiles championship Rubik's Cube players.

'American Outrage' and 'Chonto' were on the Best Of disc I've already watched.  This disc also has two creepy videos - 'Madame Tutli-Putli', an animated short, and 'Echos Der Buchrucken', which is a very disturbing science fiction/surrealist short.

The DVD menu videos include a guy throwing a balsa-wood plane off a cliff, a film of a drum set getting shot to hell by two men with guns (I love the sound when you shoot a cymbal), and a video showing the ability of the man who invented the right-click mouse to hang on to the side of a tree using one arm and one leg.

Good stuff, all around.