I did everything for you. “Money” is a word used to describe Kobe Bryant the athlete because he was the guy you gave the ball to with no time on the clock. Everyone could rely on him whether coach, teammate, or fan because we knew the chances were that a good look at the hoop would result in a basket. He was “money.” As a result of the career that proved this point, Kobe accrued a lot of money in the literal sense of the word too. And with that…
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Take me instead. Everyone knows or should know who Emmett Till was. Many label his death as a major catalyst for what would become the Civil Rights movement—it occurring in August 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott following in December. At only fourteen years of age this Chicago native was accused of whistling and flirting with a married white woman while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. Her husband and his half-brother tracked down where he was staying and abducted him at gunpoint during the night before leaving his lifeless body…
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We’re all gonna die today. There’s a moment in Reed Van Dyk‘s DeKalb Elementary where the young, mentally unstable white male shooter (Bo Mitchell‘s Steven Hall) exits the school in search of a suicide-by-cop scenario. He opens fire on the police—receiving bullets in return—until the courageously calm black female receptionist (Tarra Riggs‘ Cassandra Rice) asks him to come back in so as not to hurt himself. It’s a surreal exchange because you place yourself in her situation and realize you would probably start silently praying that the cops do grant…
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I’m sorry if this is weird. How do you show someone that what he considers innocent or “normal” is anything but? You flip it. You turn the victim into perpetrator and vice versa so that they can begin to understand the position they so involuntarily place others in as though it’s their right. But even this isn’t enough when the insidious nature of abuse is so intrinsically linked to a warped and archaically outdated cultural bias. This is why you can’t ask a chauvinist how he’d feel being objectified because…
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Tell us yours and we’ll tell you if it’s special enough. A short film like Olaf’s Frozen Adventure epitomizes the law of diminishing returns: for audiences, not Disney. The studio is surely making a ton of merchandise money with little work involved considering the characters are already at their disposal. We’re talking a couple directors, a writer, and some songs proving a small price to pay in order to ensure another year goes by where children remember who Elsa (Idina Menzel), Anna (Kristen Bell), and especially Olaf (Josh Gad) are.…
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The latest Pixar short from longtime animator, first-time writer/director Dave Mullins is quite the deceiving little gem. LOU—a play on the missing letters from an aging school playground’s “Lost and fOUnd” box—starts out as an irreverent yarn wherein a baseball-eyed “creature” made up of discarded items with a hoodie for a body watches the children as they play before running out to collect abandoned toys when recess is over. We laugh at the fantastical situation, at this character that could easily turn into something of nightmares if not handled in…
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“I thought we got rid of her” The story behind Krisha is a fascinating one. Writer/director Trey Edward Shults was readying his feature debut when the acquisition of resources necessary to finish proved too difficult. So he took what he had already filmed and fashioned it into this short—one that ultimately won a Special Jury Award at SXSW before its critical acclaim got his mind and ambition back on track to place the full expanded version before cameras. It’s a personal story dealing with emotional demons (autobiographically and fictionally) he…
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“I think I’m strange” Writer/director Julia Ducournau‘s Raw might be taking the horror world and cinema in general by storm this year, but its success wasn’t simply born out of thin air. Its Cannes-winning feature takes a lot of inspiration from the artist’s Cannes-winning short Junior back in 2011, another story about a young girl’s metamorphosis. Whereas the former deals more in atmosphere, mood, and nuance, however, its predecessor is far more obvious in its machinations. Rather than present its genre-tinged affliction as a genetic aftereffect of sexual awakening, its…
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“Was it really that small?” A good cause and effect tale is hard to come by within an era of more is more popcorn fluff filled with contrivances nobody can feasibly ignore. But that’s exactly what Elias Plagianos delivers with short film Shoot Me Nicely. This is not to say there aren’t any coincidences involved to help propel the narrative forward, just that these moments arrive in a way where lead character Sean Wheeler (John Behlmann) has a choice. The coincidence doesn’t seal his fate one way or the other,…
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“Let’s hope it’s not her” We each possess a blind spot, one seeking to shield the horrors of life we know exist regardless. It manifests a sense of optimism in that we are safe because we live morally or that those we trust are inherently good. The opposite—to live in constant paranoia believing tragedy is inevitable—is not living at all. That’s how you imprison yourself, wall off your emotions, and ensure no one will get close enough to hurt you or deserve mourning. But we need physical contact and emotional…
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“Yes. I realize I look … like the Hamburger Helper.” The idea of a “deal with the devil” tale is to show how—if at all—the victim caught with his/her soul on the line can escape. The fun is in the torture of this latest riff on Faust by his malicious benefactor and the payoff the inevitable bittersweet end. But what if it didn’t have to go that way? What if the victim that always proves to be a good person who made a regretful mistake out of hubris is exactly…
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