Lou, The Demented Cartoon Movie & Alone
Reviews by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or on demand, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews” or “Home Viewing”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
June 16, 2017 – Cars 3 – read the review of the Pixar sequel that improves on the previous entry in the Cars franchise in the REVIEWS category of TheMovieGuys.net.
June 17, 2017 – Lou
Cheating a bit here, I’m lumping in Lou, which I saw on the 16th in front of Cars 3, as the movie for today. It’s the latest short from in an exceptional run of short movies delivered up by Pixar Studios. Dave Mullins, animator on half a dozen of Pixar’s Oscar-winning features, directs this story of the contents of a Lost & Found box coming to life. You heard me. Just when you thought there were no more subcultures that Pixar could bring to life, they start making up ones of their own.
The “Lou” of the story is the pile of clothing, toys and sports items that inhabit a lost and found at a playground. Also inhabiting the playground is the local bully. Eventually, Lou and the bully go head to head because someone has to stand up to the bully, and it turns out Lou is made up of items he’s stolen from the other kids. Pixar even finds time in the short film format for a third act turn that upends the whole film and deepens the characters. It’s worth noting that this is all done wordlessly, like many of the greatest Pixar shorts, and the studio works magic and goes miles with music and character expressions, and Lou’s expressions in particular are very impressive, given that he’s made up of a pile of things that can keep morphing and changing.
It’s exciting, imaginative, heartfelt and funny, much like the best Pixar offers up in the short film format.
June 18, 2017 – The Demented Cartoon Movie
Or, how to make thirty minutes fly by. The Demented Cartoon Movie truly lives up to its name as a series of goofball encounters between stick people, pretty much all of which end up with everyone exploding. That’s it. Occasionally, the film cuts to a couple more stick figures who are watching The Demented Cartoon Movie, but their fate is similar. So what the film crucially needs to do is have a breakneck pace and oddball sense of humor, which is offers up over and over again. Seriously, discussing the plot is pointless, there’s a production of Romeo & Juliet that keeps getting interrupted by exploding lead characters, there’s a trip to Mars that tries to be successful, but keeps exploding, and a mad scientist who tries to commit evil doings, but has to deal with his damsel in distress’s head coming off.
Again, these are stick figures, but the low-rent animation is on purpose, and the speed of gags wins. Check it out below, or start watching half way through, or cut to the end. It doesn’t matter. It’s demented.
June 19, 2017 – Alone
Before I comment on another short film called Alone, let me just say that because there is no vetting process on YouTube, anything can be called a short film. If you submit a short film to a festival, the fest is going to accept your work if it is like a film. You can shoot ANYTHING, call it a short film and put it on YouTube. So if you search for short films, just know you’re going to find shorts that don’t even meet the criteria of “a film”. I don’t know what to tell you in terms of how to differentiate one from another before you start watching, so I’ll simply say, “Good luck!”.
These were some thoughts I had going into another Alone short, but it’s kind of unfair to state them here because this Alone isn’t horrible. From the beginning, the photography bodes well for this being something promising. Then the audio isn’t so hot, but fear not, there’s not much dialogue! This is essentially another short about loneliness, but one with mystery and an interesting reveal, as opposed to the last loneliness film I saw, which was just a character walking around, depressed. Kavya Krishnaswamy directs this story of a nine to five working girl who comes and goes from work, but doesn’t do much else. Some disturbances in her banal home life prompt her to purchase a camera to survey her apartment while she’s out. The end result is intriguing statement on fear and voyeurism. Not in the high-end of thrillers, but certainly can be called “a film” (that’s more of a compliment on YouTube than you think).
