DVD: Wholphin 4 - I Want Short Shorts!
Reviewed by Tim Milfull
In a world that sometimes seems obsessed with feature-length films, it's refreshing to find a forum for the short film. Many people believe that shorts are simply a stepping stone in the process of building and developing one's filmmaking skills to the point where it's time to embark on a feature. But with the development of new mediums in the form of webisodes and an almost insatiable hunger for mobile phone content, new audiences are finding out what short filmmakers and lovers have been raving about for decades: there are many things that shorts can achieve that features cannot come close to, and the editors of the DVD magazine Wholphin are at the forefront of short fans.
Wholphin 4 is the current issue available (5 is coming out in the U.S. in spring), and like its predecessors, is jam-packed with the odd, beautiful, bizarre and undefinable. In the two-minute Tom's War on Terror, director Cameron Fay offers a wry observation on the paranoia rife in North America post-911, while the strangely mesmirising site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 from Olivo Barbieri is almost impossible to describe, floating far above the Nevada fantasy city and varying in viewpoint from wild panorama to dizzying macroscope, or are we viewing some weird simulcra of the Capital of Kitsch?
New Zealand's Taika Waititi offers a deliciously suburban reminiscence of the days when some of us were left in the car outside the pub when Dad went in to see a man about a dog. I have a few friends who spent their entire childhoods tantalised at the thought of that dog that never eventuated. Two Cars, One Night doesn't exactly feature any canines, but Waititi manages to capture the same exasperation, innocence and adventure experienced by countless children waiting for their parents.
Speaking of dogs, High Falls, directed by Andrew Zuckerman, features real-life married couple Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal playing a married couple thrown a challenging bone involving a dog, while their best friend watches on nursing some secrets about both. Secrets and mystery play a key role in an intriguing excerpt from Lynn Hershman Leeson's documentary Strange Culture, which examines events behind the arrest and attempted prosecution of a performance artist accused of manufacturing biological weapons. More questions are asked than answered in this disturbing insight into elements of the PATRIOT Act, which empowers authorities to drastically infringe personal rights.
There is much more to Wholphin 4, including a wonderfully dysfunctional pre-teen death metal band, a Moroccan Black Sabbath fan—or was that Metallica?—a re-subtitled episode of a Russian version of Married with Children, footage of Tarzan's talented mate Cheetah, who has a penchant for painting, and the final episode of Adam Curtis's BBC documentary about the strangely similar obsessions of fundamentalist Muslims and New Order Neo-cons—The Power of Nightmares has yet to find distribution in the American market, and given its alarming revelations, it shouldn't leave many surprised as to why.
Suffice to say that yet again Brent Hoff and his editorial team have compiled an impressive collection of the weird and wonderful. And if you can't wait for Wholphin 5, check out the Wholphin website, which has a boon of web-only shorts that will blow you away - my recent favourites include the poignant Extended Stay, the surreal Neuro Economy and a wonderful experiment in recontextualisation with Uro Justo.
Wholphin 4
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