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The title of this Oscar-nominated animated short could be THE LADY, THE REAPER & THE DOCTOR, or THE REAPER VS. THE DOCTOR. An old lady lies down to sleep. In the night, her spirit rises from her body and she meets the grim reaper who promises to reunite her with her beloved husband. Then all of a sudden she is yanked back to life via the efforts of a cocky doctor and his buxom nurses.

Javier Recio Garcia’s dark comedy pits the reaper and the doctor against each other for the life of the lady. At a break-neck pace, the film throws gags at the audience that felt like LOONEY TUNES meets SCOOBY-DOO turned up to 11. The film has great timing in how it quickly sets up its gags and delivers laughs. But the fast-paced second half works all the better because Garcia takes time to set up the scenario in the first place. He handles a tone shift perfectly, resulting in more sustained humor for everything that follows.

This is one of the best shorts nominated for the 2010 Oscars. The clever plot sets up a nice battle of wills that ends with the right dark laugh that the entire film warrants. It has a way of turning “happy ending” upside down.

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All five Wallace & Gromit films have been nominated for Oscars. Director Nick Park has won for three of them. A GRAND DAY OUT lost to CREATURE COMFORTS, directed by Park. His track record has been outstanding. A MATTER OF LOAF AND DEATH takes the thriller plot that has become a standard of the series since THE WRONG TROUSERS.

Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his devoted dog Gromit start a bakery, of course, using one of Wallace’s Rube Goldberg contraptions to bake bread. Wallace was inspired by his crush on the Bake O Lite Bread spokeswoman Piella (Sally Lindsay). When they meet, Wallace is smitten and so is Gromit with Piella’s poodle Fluffles. But it’s a bad time to get into the bakery business. It’s not the recession, but a serial killer that’s knocking off doughboys around town.

Plotwise this isn’t the strongest of the series. The by-the-numbers plot rises though thanks to the heat of Wallace and Gromit. The comic duo bakes a great deal of wit into the standard receipt that even if all the ingredients don’t produce an original dish; the cooks have never failed to serve entertaining comfort food. Like any good series, some episodes are weaker than others, but it’s the characters that keep us coming back. Gromit is determined as ever to protect his clueless owner, but this time around he gets a chance at love. The sweet romance is the best part, because it’s about time that Gromit gets more than Wallace in the end.

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Fabrice Joubert’s SIGGRAPH-winning CG short is among the 2010 nominees for Best Animated Short Film. The story is simple — a snooty rich man realizes that after finishing his meal he has left his wallet at home. He begins ordering cappuccino after cappuccino, only raising his bill more. As he tries to figure out what to do, a homeless man comes in and out of the café, a little old lady sits down next to him and the police arrive looking for a bank robber.

Jourbet does a good job of pacing the film, building one moment upon the next until the ending is at the crazed pace. The film attempts to throw expectations of these characters on their ears. While this isn’t done in a subtle way, the juxtapositions are humorous and provide a nice element of irony. As for production values, the CG animation is crystal clear. I particularly loved the detail on the homeless man and his lion’s mane like beard. They also employ an interesting film trick of placing the lead character in front of a mirror, so when people exit the café in front of him, you see what is going on outside behind him. The simple composition adds to the growing tension of the chaos, because there are no edits to break the suspense. FRENCH ROAST isn’t gourmet brew, but it goes down like a good cup o’ joe.

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Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain, known collectively as H5, are the creative force behind this interesting short, which was nominated for 2010 Oscar. In a world made completely out of corporate logos, Ronald McDonald goes on a violent crime spree through the streets of a city much like Los Angeles. Michelin Man Mike and Michelin Man Mitch are cops who set out to stop his bloody rampage.

That description highlights the potential of the premise. That’s why the resulting film is a bit disappointing. For all intents and purposes, the film takes a standard action/disaster flick plot with all the requisite adult humor and casts corporate icons as the characters. In the end, the film works as a satire of Hollywood films more than the corporatization of America, which the logos seem to suggest.

Ronald McDonald, Bob’s Big Boy, etc. cursing for 16 minutes gets tiresome real quick. The use of the logos works the best when they are woven in in ingenious or unexpected ways. For example a Parental Warning label is used brilliantly and you’ll never look at Mr. Clean the same again. But too often it’s just logo overload. They’re crammed in wherever they fit best without any comment. It’s like if Pixar’s CARS wasn’t about racing or driving, but about space exploration. Because the film ends up being a benign critique of Hollywood filmmaking, the film looses a great deal of its edge by not setting its satirical eye on the corporations whose logo star in the film. I don’t blame the filmmakers for not wanting to risk getting sued, but without a critique of corporate excess, the logos come off as simply a gimmick.

Of all the animated shorts nominated for the 2010 Oscar, this is the one that takes the most risk, both creatively and thematically. But in the end, I can’t recommend it outright because of the thematic confusion. It kept me wanting more. There was one moment where the film hinted at the film it could have been. Ronald McDonald is racing down the street and is thrown from his motorcycle after hitting the Weight Watchers logo. Now that’s the special sauce I wanted more of.

Welcome to the final weekly This Weekend’s Film Festival. When I started this column is 2007, I threw together playlists of films I had already reviewed. As time went by, I began watching films specifically for the column. Sometimes the full five films were reviewed specifically to be featured in this column. It has been a time consuming adventure. It is time I no longer have thanks to a new baby on the way and other creative endeavors I want to focus more attention to. The archives of this column will still live on and a special edition may pop up from time to time. Hopefully this move will allow me more freedom to catch up with new home entertainment releases and classics that I haven’t seen before. I’m also starting a new less-time-consuming column on weekly Blu-ray and DVD releases, which can be found in the Blu-ray Screening Room starting next week.

For this week’s addition, the release of COCO BEFORE CHANEL has inspired a fashion-themed installment. In addition to a fashion icon bio-pic, two films deal with the fashion industry directly and the final two films are movies that influenced fashion. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading.
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Gia Carangi is considered by many to be the first supermodel. She changed the way models interacted with the camera. She had a natural, dangerous, sex appeal that couldn’t be faked. But like so many young stars of the 1980s, she partied hard and paid the price. Thanks mainly in part to a powerhouse performance from Angelina Jolie, this HBO bio-pic has a residence that outshines many TV movies.

Gia (Jolie) was working at her family diner when at a Philadelphia nightclub she got picked out of the crowd by a photographer and given the keys to her success. He sets her up with an interview with top agent Wilhelmina Cooper (Faye Dunaway, CHINATOWN) who gets her her first paying job. That job led to her shooting legendary full nude art pics in front of a metal fence. At that shoot, she met make-up artist Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell, TV’s LOST), who would become her lover on and off until her tragic death.
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Along with REAR WINDOW and PSYCHO, VERTIGO is one of the Hitchcock essentials. The master filmmaker crafts mood, emotion and psychological depth through 24 pictures per second. It’s a thriller with a hero and villains, but none of those really matter because they blend and meld over time in a film that becomes a dark character study in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was so in control of his craft and story that he could switch perspectives midstream and actually increase the viewers’ immersion in the picture. In his day he was often dismissed as making simple “genre pictures,” but in reality there is nothing simple about them.

Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart, REAR WINDOW) is a cop who following a tragedy has left the force. He suffers from vertigo due to a fear of heights. He brags to his longtime friend Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes, TV’s DALLAS) that he might become a man of leisure. She hints that maybe he could spend some of that leisure time with her. But he seems uninterested in the glasses-wearing fashion illustrator. Scottie gets a call from an old school pal named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore, 1960’s THE TIME MACHINE), a big shipping tycoon. Gavin believes that his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak, PICNIC) is possessed by a mysterious woman in a painting named Carlotta Valdes. Scottie starts to follow her and one day saves her after she jumps into the San Francisco Bay. Scottie is smitten by the gorgeous blonde and doesn’t want to believe that a spirit is driving her to commit suicide.
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Of all the classic Universal horror films, THE WOLF MAN is my favorite. So I had high expectations going into this remake. At best I was hoping that I would get the tightly woven thriller plot and characters of the original with a modern sensibility. What I received was the latter only, in all the worst ways possible.

Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro, TRAFFIC) returns to his family estate in England after his brother is found savagely murdered. He has been estranged from his eccentric father Sir John (Anthony Hopkins, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) ever since the tragic death of his mother when he was a child. He tells his brother’s mourning fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA) that he will get to the bottom of the tragedy. So he goes to see the gypsy Maleva (Geraldine Chaplin, THE ORPHANAGE) where upon he is attacked by a beast and saved by the gypsies who fear that he his now cursed. Investigator Abberline (Hugo Weaving, THE MATRIX) comes to watch Lawrence and he might have good reason.
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With the Coen Brothers’ brilliant A SERIOUS MAN now on DVD and Blu-ray, This Weekend’s Film Festival takes a look at the Jewish experience on film. There is a 1960s tale of Job. A Holocaust survival story. A search for one’s Jewish heritage. A look at anti-Semitism. And finally a musical that is often called the quintessential Jewish film.
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Many a commentator has called this film the quintessential Jewish film, while others have called it the opposite. The broad story of a father sweating over the marriages of his daughters is common to any religion or culture, but the details of this film are seeped in Jewish tradition. There is a simple philosophy about how one should live ones life that anyone can find poignant. And it’s filled with great songs.

Tevye (Topol, FLASH GORDON) is the milkman in the village of Anatevka, Russia in 1905. He embraces tradition and finds comfort in it. But his oldest daughters Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris, THE COTTON CLUB), Hodel (Michele Marsh) and Chava (Neva Small) have different ideas about following traditions regarding the use of a matchmaker to find husbands. Tzeitel is set up with the old rich butcher Lazar Wolf (Paul Mann, AMERICA, AMERICA), but she’s in love with her childhood sweetheart, the poor tailor Motel (Leonard Frey, FINNEGAN’S WAKE). Tevye is uneasy about the political unrest brewing, so when Hodel falls for the Marxist Perchik (Paul Michael Glaser, TV’s STARSKY AND HUTCH), Tevye really has to consult God for advice. But just wait until he finds out who Chava wants to marry.
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