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The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience – Diva & Schaffer (2019)

A rap musical mockumentary of 30 minutes about two successful baseball players. Say what? Yep, there you have this amusing Netflix short in a nutshell.

Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were stars in the 1980’ies. Their story has highs, lows, abuse of steroids, lots and lots and money yet difficulties with social relations.

The story is told as some sort of rap musical, or as the creators call it a: “visual rap album”. Quite amusing actually!

Meridian – Curtis Clark (2016)

Weird, this 12 minute short is up on Netflix as a film and as a two episode mini series, but both episodes are the same.

“Meridian” is a film noire style film in which a police officer is sent out to find a mysterious woman who may have witnessed the disappearance of a man. The film is moody and interesting and then suddenly stops as if it was a pilot for a series to come.

Up The River – Leon de Levita (2024)

A minimalist short (20 min) taking place in Suriname.

A man in the early stages of dementia who lives in some small village near a river, decides that he wants to visit his brother, whom he has not spoken for 50 years, one last time. He wants to try to get his brother get his life back together. The man and his grandson take a boat to where the brother was last known to live.

Spoken in the local variety of Dutch, accompanied with native language curses and swearings, grandfather and grandson speak of memory loss, the past and life in general. Nothing much happens, but “Up The River” is a descent watch.

Land Of The Heroes – Sahim Omar Kalifa (2011)

An Iranian short (17 minutes) of which the title eludes me.

In this slow and minimalist film we see two mothers and three children in some remote shed in the Iranian landscape. The children collect weapons which the mothers repair for some future use. Mostly we watch the children bullying each other.

Nothing much to watch, but perhaps the atmosphere and to get a feel about the hopelessness of Iranian country life.

Columns The Movie – Gustavo Garrafa (2022)

I did not manage to finish this 34 minute short. It is a science fiction. The visuals are weird. I kept wondering if it was just-not-good-enough animation or just bad acting and filming. It appears to be the latter. The Italian language sync is off, characters move ‘woody’, I did not even get to following the story which ‘on paper’ sounds somewhat interesting or register the special effects which have been complained about.

I guess this is an low budget scifi which did not turn out too well.

Two Distant Strangers – Free & Roe (2020)

Carter wakes up in the bed of a girl he apparently picked up the night before. On leaving the apartment building, he gets picked up over a triviality, gets into a fight with the cop and dies on the spot. Immediately he wakes up again in the same bed.

The concept of reliving a day is not new in film. Just as in other films, Carter tries to evade his destiny by running, not leaving the door, taking other routes, talk to the cop in question, but every time he ends up dead. No matter what he does, the white cop intents to kill the black man. This is exactly the message of this short film (32 min) film, which ends with a long list of black people killed by white cops.

Notes From Dunblane: Lesson From A School Shooting – Kim Snyder (2018)

In 1996, the small Scottish village of Dunblane was struck by a school shooting. In 2012 a similar thing happened in Sandy Hook, USA. The Scottish priest wrote his American colleague. He recognised many things that were happening in the USA from his own experience. The two started writing, built a friendship and eventually, the 80+ year old Scot travelled to America for the first memorial of the shooting there.

Using original footage, but also deeply personal interviews with both priests, Snyder manages to give an idea of the impact such an event has on people. Not just direct family, but the community as a whole. Even when in Scotland very strict gun laws were implemented after the Dunblane shooting, nothing much happend in the USA, so the same thing happens there again and again.

The Basement – Jeremy Lunt (2008)

An Amazon Prime short (28 minutes) which Amazon lists for 2017 and IMdB.com in 2008.

Two hotel employers explore the extensive basement of the hotel. There appears to be something down there.

Set as an interview looking back at past events, this poorly acted minimalist film aims at being more of a creepy horror than a gory one.

Elektrika Diena – Vladimir Leschiov (2018)

I am not a big fan of animation, but this minimalist short (9 min) is quite amusing. It is a bit of an old silent film about an electrician trying to solve a power outage. Subtle humour including jokes that you can only make in an animation.

John Was Trying To Contact Aliens – Matthew Killip (2020)

A short (16 min) documentary about John Shepherd who from an early age was obsessed with the idea of contacting extraterrestrial life. He started to teach himself to build equipment and over the decades a small box became a room full of equipment and eventually even an extra building next to the house of his grandparents who rose him.

Shepherd continued his project for decades, living as a hermit in rural USA. Then he ran out of money and had to abandon his life’s work. This documentary looks back on his active years.