Wholphin No. 14

Edited by Brent Hoff

I'd fallen behind on Wholphin lately, and I don't even know why, because each disc is full of great shorts.

The strongest piece in this edition is Pioneer, directed by David Lowery and starring Will Oldham, as the father of a young boy who asks to be told the story of his missing mother.  Oldham's story is beyond incredible, involving many fantastical elements that are too horrifying to be told to a young child trying to sleep.  The long, quiet shots are full of menace, but also a certain sweetness.

Chicken Heads, directed by Bassam Jarbawi, is another strong short.  It's set in Palestine, and shows the stresses of living there on a sheep farmer and his two sons.  The story doesn't address the troubles, giving us instead a story about an ibis that gores the family's prize sheep, which is the youngest son's fault, but they are lurking in the background throughout.

Soft, directed by Simon Ellis, is yet another strong short, showing the actions of a father and his teenage son when they are targeted by a group of British thugs.  These two films go well together.

In Quadrangle, director Amy Grappell examines the polyamorous love square that her parents found themselves living in back in the 60s.  This is a pretty powerful piece, made more interesting by running both of her parents' accounts simultaneously on a split screen.

I Am A Girl! is a Dutch film about a young transsexual that explores the topic in a very straight-forward manner.  Feeder is a very short piece that was filmed from the back of a man's throat while he eats, drinks, smokes, and makes out with someone.  Don't watch it while eating.  Styrofoam shows a woman tying a prodigious amount of Styrofoam to her bike before riding away to recycle it in China.  It's kind of incredible.

Inside Report From Fukushima Nuclear Reactor Evacuation Zone straight terrified me, as two journalists drove into the excluded area, and their Geiger counters kept raising.

As always, something for everyone on a Wholphin disc.

Wholphin No. 13

Edited by Brent Hoff

I've really fallen behind in watching these Wholphin's lately (I blame it on getting a PVR for my TV, and discovering some high quality late-night reruns and some wonderfully low quality bad reality shows).

Anyway, this thirteenth edition of Wholphin has the second dramatic turn of young actor Alejandro Polanco, in 'Mosquito'.  Polanco caught my eye in the wonderful movie Chop Shop, and it's very nice to see him again.  In Mosquito he plays a teen in New York in the 70s, who is stuck somewhere between playing with the little kids and avoiding the older ones.  He's awkward and fanciful, and really doesn't fit in, but has an inner strength.  Jeremy Engle's short is the best thing on this disc.

'Successful Alcoholics' is a very funny short film directed by Jordon Vogt-Roberts, and co-written by co-star TJ Miller.  As the title suggests, this is a comedy about two high functioning alcoholics, who drink to escape the tedium of their lives together.  It's fantastic.

The French and Hungarian co-production 'The History of Aviation' is spell-binding.  Director Balint Kenyeres sets up these long set-pieces in this period piece about a group of upper class people enjoying a picnic on some cliffs, until a little girl goes missing.  This looks like it was a very expensive short.

'Crossbow' is an Australian short by David Michod about a teenager who has horrid parents, and who one day decides to carry a crossbow outside when police are called to break up the parents' party, with predictable results.  The narration in this film is great.

'N Me for Myself', a Greek short, is very interesting.  It's about the challenges faced by a man with only one arm.  'Arsy-Versy' is an odd documentary about a Slovakian man who studies bats for a hobby, and is a true eccentric.

Dash Shaw provides an animated series of shorts called 'The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century AD', a surrealistic look at the future, and the future of art modeling.  The biggest laugh on this disc comes from 'Delmar Builds a Machine', but I can't discuss why without spoiling it.

In all, another very good outing from the fine people at Wholphin.

Wholphin No. 11

Edited by Brent Hoff

I kind of fell off on my plan to work my way through every issue of Wholphin, the DVD magazine put together by the fine people at McSweeney's (I blame it on my new obsession with Storage Wars and other so bad it's addictive scripted reality shows on A&E).

Anyway, this issue has one of the best short films I've ever seen on a Wholphin - Ramin Bahrani's 'Plastic Bag'.  Bahrani is the director of the incredible independent film Chop Shop, and he turns the same passionate and meditative eye that he used in that movie to a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog, which is both perfect and funny to me).  The bag is trying to return to the woman that first brought it home from the store - the love of his life.  It ends up in a landfill for a very long amount of time, after which there are no more people around anywhere.  The bag eventually makes its way to the Pacific Gyre, the vortex of plastic larger than the state of Texas that is currently having a catastrophic effect on the ocean's ecosystem.  This is a very intelligent and caring short, and I was very impressed by its power.

Also of note here were two shorts focused on the baseball player Dock Ellis.  One is an animated piece, which shows one of his LSD trips while playing professionally.  The other is an interview with him, wherein he talks about some of the things that players used to get away with.  The two pieces work very well together.

'The Six Dollar Fifty Man', directed by Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland is an interesting look at bullying in New Zealand, and features an incredibly disturbed looking child.  He creeped me out.  I was also creeped out by the women attending 'Bitch Academy' in Russia, where they are learning to get men.  Asshole men.

'Wagah' is an interesting documentary about the only border checkpoint between India and Pakistan, and the daily flag-lowering ceremony that attracts thousands of spectators.  There is a lot of ceremonial foot-stomping.

'Out of Our Minds' is a very disturbing and beautiful film.  It's directed by Tony Stone, from a concept that came from Melissa Auf Der Mer.  It connects three stories of death in the forest - one is a car wreck, another is about a Viking who is murdered, and the third has loggers cutting down trees which splatter blood everywhere.  This is a silent film, with pulsing music by Auf der Mer.  It's pretty fascinating, and gorgeous.

This DVD also shows us naked scientists running around Antarctica, shouting young lovers, and an actor hanging out with a bear.  Where other than Wholphin would you ever find such diversity?

Wholphin No. 10

Edited by Brent Hoff

This issue of Wholphinhas a number of excellent short films, with a bit more of a Hollywood presence than I'm used to.

First though, it opens with a condensation of the best documentary I've seen in ages, Audience Of One.  In it, the filmmaker travels with a church group who are working to produce a massive-budget Biblical science fiction epic that tells the story of Joseph, despite the fact that no one in their group has experience making movies, and they don't have the money they need.  Why are they doing this?  God told their pastor to.  Upon watching this shorter version, I immediately ordered the full-length film, and it is currently making the rounds of all of my friends.  It's brilliant.

Among the short films on this disc, three stand out.  'I Love Sarah Jane' is a zombie short featuring some Australian teenagers who have lost their families.  What makes this work so well is the performances of the two leads - Brad Ashby and Mia Wasikowska (of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland fame).  Jimbo, the young boy, is so in love with Sarah Jane that the entire zombie thing doesn't even bother him.  It's a very good film.

'Teleglobal Dreamin'' is an interesting short about a man who has gone to the Philippines to train call centre employees.  One of the women who work at the place take him out on the town, and starts to spread the rumor that he is actually the American actor Brandon Fraser.  This leads to scenes of him getting mobbed for autographs, and even abducted.  It's a funny film, and very well acted.

The third of the Hollywood-connected films is Natalie Portman's authorial and screenwriting debut, 'Eve'.  This is an excellent study of aging, as a young woman spends the night at her grandmother's, and gets taken along on her date with a recently available widower.  It's funny, touching, and in the way it dances around the subject of the girl's mother, shows that there is much more going on under the surface than the viewer is aware of.

Also of note on this disc is Jonathan Demme's biography 'Joe and Linda Flooded Out of Holy Cross.'  Joe and Linda are older residents of New Orleans, and they have both reacted to the events of Hurricane Katrina very differently.  Linda just wants to clean up their house (clearly the two are hoarders to some degree), while Joe is not able to move on from the topic of the city, what happened during the storm, and how things are now (at the time of filming).  He's a broken, angry man, and watching him sound off on the topic for twenty minutes is heart-breaking.

Also included here is 'He Was Once', a film that equally disturbed and annoyed me.  If you hated the old Davey and Goliath Christian propaganda cartoons (and who doesn't), you may be interested in this, but I found it unwatchable.

The DVD menu films include 'Hunt and Gather', in which a man rides around on a bicycle modified to carry a ladder, which he uses to climb up to power wires festooned with tied sneakers.  He then shoots down the sneakers, and replaces them with the ones he is wearing.  It's funny the first couple of times, but it gets old.

Wholphin No. 8

Edited by Brent Hoff

It's hard to know what to expect out of one of these.  The eighth edition of Wholphin starts out strong, but I kind of thought that this one had a few more skipable pieces compared to earlier entries in the series.

The first film, Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' is an incredible study of characters in a youth detention centre.  Denim, the man in charge, is a pretty conflicted guy.  It's clear that he loves everyone in the facility, from the angry and damaged teenagers in his care to his staff, particularly Natalia, who is carrying his baby.  The problem is that he's not so good at expressing himself with her.  What comes naturally with the kids is impossible for him where Natalia is concerned.  It's rare to find child actors as skilled as the ones that play explosive, goth-y Jaden, and quiet brooding Mark.  Great stuff here.

'Kids + Money' is a documentary I've seen before, but it remains very powerful in its depiction of kids with insane opinions of what they are owed by the world, who casually drop hundreds of dollars for items of clothing and expect weekly manicures.  I like how the filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield, doesn't let her own opinion enter into the film; the kids show how vacuous they are just by speaking.

'Love You More' plays like a prequel to the British TV show Skins.  It's about two teenagers, a boy and a girl, who both like the Buzzcocks.  When a new single comes out, they knick it from the local record shop, and go back to the girl's place, where they make love while listening to it.  This is an excellent study in fumbling teenage desire set against working class London.

'Hidden' is a very powerful animated documentary.  That sounds odd, but it works here.  The subject is Giancarlo, a twelve year old boy who is living in hiding in Sweden, so he won't be deported.  He talks about growing up alone in Peru, where he worked as a shoeshine boy and ran from the police.  Now that he is in a 'safe' country, he still has to watch his steps around the authorities, and can't ever make friends at school in case they figure out what's going on.  The filmmakers interviewed the boy, and then animated his account, helping to protect his anonymity, and giving his story true visual power.

Another animated piece is 'From Burger It Came', a Terry Gilliam-esque story about the AIDS hysteria of the animator's childhood.  'Great Man and Cinema' is an attempt by an American to make a North Korean propaganda film, for reasons I don't really understand.  It fell flat.

From here, things get pretty bad.  'My Friends Told Me About You' is an experimental film that manages to be exceptionally boring while working very hard to be cool and profound.

Equally dull is the triptych of films that make up the DVD menus.  Dave Eggers hired three different actors to trash his brother's bedroom.  James Franco's sequence is ridiculous, both in his behaviour, and in the tediousness of it's length.  Marginally better are Creed Bratton and Maria Bamford's versions of the same general thing; luckily they are shorter.  I will say that the interview with Bamford about her character and her own rage is hilarious.

Wholphin No. 7

Edited by Brent Hoff

I find I do not tire of watching Wholphins.  Each one is so diverse, with the only discernible criteria for entry being excellence.

This seventh volume of the series, which collects short films, documentaries, and pieces of animation, contains some pretty impressive stuff, including what has probably been my favourite Wholphin selection to date.

'Glory At Sea' is an incredible twenty-five minute film by director Benjamin Zeitlin.  It's a surrealistic exploration of grief and longing in a post-Katrina-like landscape.  It opens with a young girl narrating.  She, alongside many of her neighbours, is floating at the bottom of the sea, feeling pity for people still living.  She realizes that one of the people around her is still alive just as he is thrown back to land.  Once there, he sets about building a boat which he can use to find the love of his life.  Other people in the community come to help him, bringing with them items they feel are imbued with luck.  Eventually, their ramshackle craft is ready, and they set out to find reunion with the people they've lost.  I found this film to be immensely moving and very beautiful.

Also on this disc, I enjoyed 'The Discipline of DE', a short directed by Gus Van Sant while still in school.  It's an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs piece, wherein the narrator proclaims the virtues of his philosophy of DE - Do Easy.  I imagine that this philosophy, which has you repeat actions until they are done correctly, could really catch on with people on the autism spectrum.

'Cold and Dry' is a cool short from Norway which examines the social ramifications of improved cryogenics technology, as people opt to preserve themselves in the picture of health, because of any number of personal issues they would rather avoid.

'Choque' is a cool Spanish film about what happens when pride, machismo, or a desire to save face prevent people from backing down from situations that they can not reasonably extricate themselves from, as a man learns when he gets into it at a basement amusement park with some younger guys.

In terms of documentaries, this Wholphin provides a few excellent ones.  'Refugee All-Stars' features the band from Sierra Leone of the same name.  There is plenty of their music to help punctuate their stories, as they begin to travel to other refugee camps to spread their example of refugees who find ways to maintain relevance in society.

'Nutkin's Last Stand' is an odd documentary about the fight against the gray squirrel in Northern England.  The grays are squeezing out the red squirrels that make that region their home, and people are mobilizing to put an end to this.  There are a few odd moments featuring your typical eccentric Brits - one woman has a squirrel tearing around the inside of her home, while another man, whose job is to dispatch the trapped grays, describes them as being 'only good for shooting'.  Later, the scene where a couple sample squirrel pancakes was perhaps a bit much for me.

'Notes From Dimension X' is a tantalizing short cartoon about a man who has been trapped on a desert planet for many years, waiting for a crystal to light up and transport him.  This is a perfect example of when a short is too short, as there was enough interesting material here, discussing memory and how it can fade, to satisfy in a much longer piece.

There's other stuff on here too - a description of an artist's love affair with an alien, an animated film about an autistic young man's return to a Six Flags park after three years, and the usual DVD menu shorts, but they didn't particularly stand out to me.

Wholphin No. 4

Edited by Brent Hoff

There are so many various pleasures contained in an issue of Wholphin.  One could paraphrase Forrest Gump, and compare it to a box of chocolates, but it's going to be a box that doesn't have one of those weird, unrecognizably flavoured, oddly shaped confections that you mean to avoid, but always end up eating first, and the taste lingers, tainted subsequent chocolates.

This fourth issue had some films I saw before, when I watched the 'Best Of' disc, but still found much to enjoy.

It won't matter how many times I'll see Taika Waititi's 'Two Cars, One Night'; I will be happy to watch this short film over and over, as it's brilliant.  Three Maori kids are hanging out outside a bar in New Zealand.  It's great.

There are two short films on this disc that manage to pack in all the emotion and content of an entire feature-length movie in their short spans.  'High Falls', directed by Andrew Zuckerman and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard is a wonderful film about a couple that keeps secrets.  'La Chatte Andalouse', directed by Gérald Hustace-Mathieu, is about a young nun who fulfills the wishes of a dying artist by trying to finish her installation, which involves casting in plaster the penises of two men.  This film is incredible, and soars above the potential crassness of its plot.

'Schastlivy Vmeste (Happy Together)' is a Russian sitcom based on the American show Married... With Children.  The original show is kind of funny, more for the picture of life in Russia that we get.  The redubbed versions, done by comedians, were actually just annoying.

'Cheeta' is a cute short chronicling Jane Goodall's birthday message to the famous Hollywood chimp.  'site specific_Las Vegas 05' is a very cool series of aerial views of LV that make the town, the desert, and the Hoover Dam look like a model train set.  Very cool.

This issue of Wholphin addresses America's war on terror, and Western perceptions of the Middle East, in a number of different pieces.  'Tom's War on Terror' is a two minute short that shows how pervasive Islamophobia is in the US.  'Heavy Metal Drummer' is a very sweet, Napoleon Dynamite-esque short about a teenage boy in Morocco who wants to play drums like his metal heroes.

Then there are the documentaries.  'Strange Culture' is about an artist, Steve Kurtz, whose wife died suddenly one night of heart failure.  The authorities that responded to his call were alarmed by some lab equipment he had in his house for an art installation, and he was charged as a terrorist.  It seems that the largest piece of evidence against him was an invitation to a gallery opening that had Arabic script on it.

There is also a bonus disc that shows the third part of 'The Power of Nightmares', a BBC series that was serialized over the two previous Wholphins.  It's premise is that the American neoconservatives and Osama bin Laden basically socially constructed the War on Terror for their own purposes.  It doesn't go so far as to accuse them of collusion, merely that they both took advantage of events to create the problems that have crippled the world for the last ten years.  It's fascinating stuff, and I suppose only time will tell how much of it is baseless, and to what degree it is correct.

Good chocolates, all.

The Best of Wholphin Vol. 1

Edited by Brent Hoff

Since I've been getting so much enjoyment out of McSweeney's lately, it only seemed right to give their DVD magazine a chance too.  I'd always wanted to try it, but I'd never gotten around to picking up an issue.  When McSweeney's had a recent fire sale (so far as I know, there was no actual fire) and sold a bunch of these DVDs off for only $1 an issue, I knew it was time to get caught up.

The whole purpose of Wholphin is to create a larger audience for short films, cartoons, and documentaries that otherwise do not reach very many people.  Because I like to be chronological in all things, I started with this collection of the 'best of' the first five issues.

There is a lot to like on this DVD.  The disc starts with 'Two Cars, One Night', a twelve-minute short set in New Zealand and featuring three Maori children who are left outside a bar in their parents' cars.  The one boy, Romeo, begins a flirtatious interchange with the girl in the other car.  It's sweet watching him prance and preen for her.

Two documentaries collected here really stood out.  The first is a half-hour excerpt from the film American Outrage, which shares the story of Carrie and Mary Dann, two elderly Shoshone women who have been the targets of the American government's efforts to steal valuable land in Nevada for the gold within it.  This is a powerful film, which documents the aggressive and unjustifiable actions of government agencies that have kidnapped and killed their livestock.  It's amazing that the UN has ruled on the side of the Dann's, yet nothing has been done.

The other powerful documentary is 'A Stranger In Her Own City', a profile of Najmia, a young girl living in Sanaa, Yemen, who refuses to wear the veil, and who spends her days playing soccer with boys or riding her bicycle.  She is a symbol of defiance in a deeply conservative part of the world, and her spirit and strength are infectious.

I also enjoyed the lighter side of this DVD, such as 'The Pity Card', a pilot for a comedy sitcom that makes light of a young woman's ignorance of the Holocaust, and 'The Delicious', a strange comedic short about an obsession that involves polyester pants suits, scissors, and dancing.  'Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?' is a sweet short by Miranda July.

'Walleyball' is a three-minute chronicle of a volleyball game played over the wall that makes up the Mexican/US border.  'Chonto' is a slightly creepy animated film about a rock star's love for his monkey, and 'Heavy Metal Jr.' is a hilariously serious documentary about a Scottish heavy metal band made up of twelve year olds who sing about Satan at a county fair.  'More' is a very cool little cartoon about greed and technology that reminded me of Metropolis, even without the soundtrack by New Order.

I'm very happy that I have three more issues of this quarterly to plow through, as I really enjoyed the diversity of the films on offer here.