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Los Angeles Latino Film Festival Comedy Shorts Program 2
Directed by Mating Call
While the 7 comedy shorts of program 2 were not all the works of Latino filmmakers, they were however featuring in the cast, the script or behind the camera a discernable Latino seasoning. As with most short programs, you get some kind of tossed salad, which might result in an even more uneven combination as comedy is a difficult genre, at least to be effective.
The program opened with Nacho Manubens' Onanismo, the young filmmaker featuring himself as a teenager who, you guessed it, has become a great master at this art. I'm not sure if it's somewhat an autobiographic story—and the festival president Edward James Olmos wrapped the Q&A before I got my answer—, but I didn't think it was either funny or original, mostly because most of the latest American teenage comedies have worn out this theme. Coincidently, the hilarious Sexo Con Amor also featured at the festival the same day offered a successful variation on the same theme, mostly because it involved a middle-aged woman instead of a teenager.
Underdog, Scott Leberecht's autobiographical story of a young kid struggling for acceptance in a high school wrestling team was amusing in a cute way but didn't bring anything new to the genre, maybe suffering for having been watched only a couple of weeks after the goofy Dodgeball.
Jorge Aguirre's Every Thursday Is Salsa Night about a Latino lawyer learning salsa with the office maid so that he can impress a young woman at a salsa club was also amusing, thanks particularly to the white American character, but didn't go past the anecdotal.
Vivien Lesnik Weisman's The Secrets to the Ascension of the Actor wasn't that hilarious but certainly entertaining. However, the ending reserved a good surprise—a joke about joining the Screen Actor's Guild—as Weisman, also in the lead role, wrote herself into the script as a director, in some self-parodic mise-en-abime.
In English Please by Bianca Halpern, a comedy about mistaken identity on a blind date, widely used its low budget—one could recognize some of the locations on Melrose—, but it relied too heavily on standard comedy gags to really create a real thrill.
Coraly Santa Liz's El Anillo was a highlight of the program with its fun and inventive story of a lost ring which, during a party, passes from hand to hand, before getting back to the original owner. Like most of the other shorts, it did suffer from a video look but when story and pace are treated in an effective way, this undoubtedly compensates to go beyond the look of the film.
Shot in black & white, Patricio Serna's Mating Call only showed a woman and a man screaming in a park so that they can find each other but was the strongest piece here, thanks to its absurd and fun approach as well as its experimental-like look. It was also the proof that using a different look allied to an original content might be the key to overcome the amateurish look and feel that handicaps most low-budget shorts.
Fred Thom
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Los Angeles Latino Film Festival Comedy Shorts Program 2 review
