It's an arts & culture week for the boy. On Wednesday we went to see "Radiohead 2" - directed by Denise Clarke, today a grey and rainy day and so I decide to take him to see "Art City Shorts" at the Uptown Screen (Downtown Calgary).
I like shorts, and the blurb describes it as a "select" group of shorts from around the world.
I'm thinking something like "World's Best Commercials" or "Festival of Animated Shorts" and am kind of looking forward to a pleasant surprise.
And surprised we were.
Now there are at most maybe 8 other people in the theatre with us, which is a good thing, it marks the possible quality of the film. Great films don't necessarily attract wide audiences. And so we're a bit early and we kill time in the lobby (a great, period lobby) and then find our seats and wait for the show.
The boy, he asks me about it and I dismiss his questions with "I don't know anything" - he'll be impressed, I know.
The film is introduced by a member of the Art City group, who explains that there will be 6-8 shorts in the film and it will last about 45 minutes.
And there's a brief flash on the screen of the film, before it begins - "visual art, architecture, and design" or words to that effect, and for a moment I'm worried that maybe this won't be his cup of tea, but I take solace - I enjoy architecture, design, visual art, and so at least one of us will be happy...
It opens with a hand, hanging down and dripping obviously fake blood, then cuts to an elevator going up through a building, then back to hand again, to some tiles on the ground, back to hand, no speaking, just the images. And we think it's sort of the opening credits thing and after 2 or three minutes of this the next film is introduced. From Iran or the middle east someplace.
Black and white, if it's artistic it has to be black and white: a bathtub, draining. Filling with water. Letters in Arabic appear on the tub, small, tiny subtitles below in English, more characters, tub fills with water, washes characters away, no speaking.
The boy begins to laugh, yet another one of dad's arts and culture adventures gone terribly astray, and I'm laughing as well.
Other shorts, 2 men, one cutting another's hair, then wrestling in a room, one on top of the other shouting "You're going bald! You're going bald!".
More random films, we stay, it's only 45 minutes after all, we watch them all. An animated one with clay, perhaps 1, 2 minutes long tops, purple claymation figure sprouts rainbow fungi, then a brief flash of the "Funded by the National Film Board of Canada". It's as if the filmmaker is somehow mocking the sponsorship that made this piece of crap possible.
I'm aghast. I mean, the NFB has produced some great stuff, this isn't it. Not at all, not by a long shot. What was the proposal for this grant?
It's quickly become the "WTF" film festival. More shorts. Completely random assemblages of film, current media, all "Art" in the way that art should be spelled with capital "F". One film, a particularly inept montage of media clips culled from countless hours of bad TV, recalls to the boy the quote by Banksy from "Exit through the Gift Shop" when Banksy realizes that Mr. Brainwash isn't in fact a filmmaker, he's just a moron carrying a camera ...
Now we have a laugh, me and the boy, after the film (a few patrons walked out), we laugh about the high "Art" tone of the pieces, the lack of adjectives to describe them, we laugh at the idea that these films were somehow "Selected", implying that somehow other films were rejected, and what could have been more rejected than the films we just saw, and I try to get him to put a finger on the best and worst film, but there's no finger he can put and that's it.
The WTF film festival, sponsored by Art City, no longer showing at the Uptown but don't be sad, you didn't miss a thing. 45 minutes could be far, far better spent watching peoples submitted pet clips on You Tube.