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Best of Resfest Shorts Vol. 2 review
:. Director: Various
:. Running Time: 1:41
:. Year: 2005
:. Country: USA
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I've never been a big fan of shorts as they are restricted by their format, privileging style over content, and too often looking like the showy class exercises from some Hollywood wannabees eager to show us all their tricks. But the arrival of digital video on the market, at a very affordable price, has opened the doors to a new breed of creativity, free of any academic rules, allowing anybody with a camera and a computer to create his own work. Taking advantage of this discreet revolution, Resfest, a global festival promoting innovation in film, art, music and design in the digital age, has compiled some of its most representative entries on a series of DVDs.
From the amateur videographer to the pro, the underground artist to the animation wiz, they're all here, sharing their creativity and obsessions. Wacky, polished, personal, arty or odd jobs, each of these films offer a different facet of this new creative and cultural movement (a great asset of these DVDs is that the extras mention on what material these films were shot, thus allowing amateur filmmakers to know what kind of results they could obtain with each system).
The Best of Resfest 2 features a pretty strong collection, starting with David Birdsell's fun Bad Animals, where a bus rider is chased by mean-spirited furry animals. The award-winning Copy Shop by Tom Schroeder, is the tale of a man who duplicates himself ad infinitum with a copy machine. There are certainly echoes of David Lynch in his cinema and even though this is a more polished work than other entries, it loses some of its impact by dragging. In terms of stop-motion animation, Suzie Templeton's Dog is a visual treat, but suffers from its depressing story. In the same style, but in another genre, Mark Osborne's More features some clay creatures, prisoners of a Metropolis-like world, with a soundtrack by New Order. There is also Delisions in Modern Primitivism, an absurd documentary from Daniel Loflin, following a young man who, thinking tattoos and piercings aren't enough, pushes scarification to an all new level, through the bullet of a gun. Zen and the art of landscaping by David Kartch provides a funny look at a dysfunctional family. There are 12 shorts on this DVD and there are only a couple of disappointments here, the boring "award-winning" Helicopter and the brief and pointless Counterfeit—see William Friedkin's cult To Live & Die in L.A. for a great take on the subject.
The Best of Resfest 3 is more contrasted, alternating between great & weak works. The most interesting piece here is undoubtedly The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, a documentary from Matt McCormick, which explores how a new artform, mixing paint and urban shapes, was born from graffiti removal campaigns. Tim Hope's Jubilee Line shows a metro ride, inserting 2-D characters in a bare 3-D world. The filmmaker brings beauty to his edgy computer-based vision of a city without entity, which isn't that far from Lars Von Trier's experimental Dogville. In S.D. Katz's Protest, a glossy commercial-looking vehicule for an environmental message, we see elephants slowly falling from the sky in the heart of New York City. Starched, by Cath Le Couteur, is a stylish and ironic film about a vengeful housekeeper. There is also Historia del Desierto from Celia Galan Julve, another creepy stop-motion piece about the story of a woman serial killer, with a tone reminiscent of Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango. Among the anecdotal shorts filling up the rest of this DVD, one will especially regret the presence of the poor-looking and idiotic Rail Road, which contradicts Resfest successful mission of bringing us innovative creations.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Movie Reviews: 2012 - present
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