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Friday, March 29, 2024
Tuba Atlantic

"Tuba Atlantic", a film about an elderly Norweigan man on his deathbed and his friendship with a teenage girl, has a good shot at winning the Oscar for Best Short Flm. You can catch all the nominees at Sundance Cinema.

'Tuba Atlantic' an Oscar Short favorite

Last week at Sundance Cinemas in Madison I witnessed a Norwegian teenage girl engage in a seagull-killing rampage with a heavy machine gun, a neurotic time machine inventor succumb to his OCD and spend a year trying to make one rather unremarkable day in his life perfect, two Irish estranged boyhood best friends reunite after 25 years, a young German couple become embroiled in a secret child-abduction ring after adopting a young Indian boy in Kolkata and a young Irish lad brazenly defy the Catholic church in the name of his one true love-football.

And I saw it all in a hundred-minute runtime. No, this wasn't some eclectic post-modern piece of time-and-space-defying cinema. It was the collection of narrative short films nominated this year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the 2012 Oscars.

While most moviegoers never get much of a chance to see short films, every year Sundance Cinemas provides the rare opportunity for Madisonians to do so.

The theater is currently showing three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts: Narrative Live Action, Animated and Documentary. Each weighs in at about the length of a normal feature-length movie runtime, with individual shorts ranging in length from 10 to 30 minutes. And as you can tell from the aforementioned loglines, these Oscar nominees range drastically in tone and genre from gritty thriller, to sci-fi comedy, to touching character drama.

"Time Freak" is the sole American nominee this year in the narrative live action category. Written and directed by Andrew Bowler, the film is an eleven-minute short-but-sweet play on many of the time travel clichés and tropes that abound in sci-fi stories.

When Evan, a neurotic quantum physicist, invents a working time machine, rather than live out his dream of visiting ancient Rome, he gets fixated on reliving the day before over and over a la Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day" in order to have the perfect conversation with his neighborhood crush and not have a fight with his dry cleaner for failing to have his clothes finished on time.

The short functions on two levels: riffing on the abundance of over-used time travel clichés and exploring just how a real, flawed individual might make use of such a grand technology for incredibly insignificant ends. Ultimately, "Time Freak" is certainly amusing, but too much of a one-note piece to have a real shot at winning the Oscar.

My favorite short flick among this year's contenders for Best Short Film would likely be "Tuba Atlantic". The film has already won a gold medal at the Student Academy Awards as the best foreign student film, and I expect it will take home the Oscar this weekend as well.

Directed by Hallvar Witzø, this twenty-six minute black comedy follows Oskar, a cranky old Norwegian bachelor living alone on the coast who finds out he only has six days left to live and decides to spend it doing what he loves doing most-killing the damn seagulls that perpetually defecate all over his property.

Since Oskar doesn't have anyone to take care of him, and Norwegian law is strict regarding medical care, he is assigned to Inger, a teenage girl hoping to join the ranks of the "death angels"-public servants who provide company to those on the verge of death-by staying by Oskar's side until he dies.

This odd-couple pairing establishes the black humor relationship dynamic that plays out on screen as generations collide, with each teaching the other a little something they never learned on their own. Oh yeah, and there's a giant makeshift tuba built to broadcast all the way over the Atlantic, from Norway to New Jersey.

While all of the Oscar-nominated short films this year are currently playing at Sundance Cinemas, they will also be available through iTunes and several Video On Demand services beginning Feb. 21. Check them out and have a few extra categories you actually care about come Oscar night, and perhaps a leg up on your friends in Oscar-betting.

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Have a different Oscar-nominated short film that you think should win? Let David know at dcottrell@wisc.edu.

 

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