When you're subsisting on Hollywood leftovers, midwinter can be a woeful time at the movie theaters. But it's also an opportunity to sample new flavors of film, from handmade appetizers to reconstituted 3-D epics.
Of course, the big event post-Super Bowl is the Academy Awards. If you want to sink the competition in your Oscar pool, you need to swim with the littler fishes — the films in the documentary, foreign-language, shorts and animation categories. A good place to start is at the Tivoli, which will be screening the nominated live-action and animated shorts through next Thursday.
The arrival of the shorts is an annual occurrence that always warms the heart, because most of these filmmakers are working for love, not money. That's especially true for the animators, whose films tend to be more whimsical and less narrative than the live-action shorts.
With an obligatory tip of the hat to "La Luna," the moonlight male-bonding fable from the perennial nominees at Pixar, the likely winner in the animated shorts category is "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore." It's about a Buster Keaton-ish book lover who's transported over the rainbow. Like most of the animated shorts — and probable best-picture winner "The Artist" — it's dialogue-free.
Best-picture honorees usually come from directors who started with live-action shorts. Most of this year's nominated shorts are about conflict — between an altar boy's religious duties and his love of soccer ("Pentecost"), between two friends on opposite sides of Northern Ireland's sectarian strife ("The Shore"), between a dying Norwegian and his brother in New Jersey ("Tuba Atlantic") — yet they also tend to be redemptive.
Likewise, don't let the subject matter scare you away from this year's nominees for best foreign language film, such as the Polish Holocaust story "In Darkness" and the Iranian Alzheimer's drama "A Separation" (both of which are coming to local theaters soon); or the nominated documentaries, including "Pina," a 3-D dance documentary that opens locally today, and "Paradise Lost 3," a sequel about a trio of wrongly convicted child killers who were recently freed in Arkansas.
If you want a sneak preview of next year's Oscar-nominated docs, you might get it at the world-class True/False Film Fest on March 1-4 in Columbia, Mo. In 2008, the talk of the town was "Man on Wire," which went on to win the Academy Award. And big-name documentarians such as Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side") sometimes make Columbia their first stop after collecting golden hardware in Hollywood. (As of this writing, festival passes were still available at truefalse.org, where this year's complete film schedule was posted after we went to press.)
Closer to home, you may be transported to a higher plane by "My Reincarnation," a documentary about a revered Tibetan Buddhist and his modern European-born son, which screens today through Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in Moore Auditorium at Webster University.
Filmed over the course of 20 years by Jennifer Fox, the documentary profiles Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, who is considered a reincarnated deity by Tibetan Buddhists, and his son Yeshi, who was raised in Italy and rejects the religious legacy. The only hope for the extended family of exiled Tibetans is an intervention — by the Dalai Lama himself.
"My Reincarnation" is an unprecedented glimpse behind the saffron curtain. For more information visit the Webster Film Series website at webster.edu/filmseries.
And if you really want to get far, far away, you're probably already in line for today's 3-D re-release of "The Phantom Menace," the first sip of George Lucas' "Star Wars" six pack. With the collectible 3-D glasses for sale at local Wehrenberg theaters, you might look at Jar Jar Binks in a whole new way.
