Reviews

Academy Award Nominated Shorts 2007

Unchallenging and underwhelming

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | February 13, 2008

2.0 Stars

“Madame Tutli-Putli”

The selection of live-action and animated shorts nominated for Oscars this year is an unchallenging and underwhelming lot. Two exceptions: Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski’s stop-motion animation piece “Madame Tutli-Putli,” about a woman on a nightmarish night train, has the look of an animated Egon Schiele drawing — menacing, delicate, macabre. And Alexander Petrov’s “My Love” is a dreamy Russian love story. But in the animated batch, “Peter and the Wolf” and “I Met the Walrus,” a pen-and-ink version of an interview with John Lennon, are unamusing, and though “Même les pigeons vont au Paradis/Even Pigeons Go to Heaven” is visually exciting (time machines, crooked salesmen), it’s also predictable. The live-action selections range from the maudlin (a cancer ward in “At Night”) to the exuberant (students and teacher in “Il supplente|The Substitute”). And “The Tonto Woman” could be a romantic subplot to There Will Be Blood, albeit with phony accents. Russian + French + Italian + Danish + English | 222 minutes | Coolidge Corner Theatre

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