You know how a movie can get so hyped up that by the time you see it your only possible reaction is, “that’s it?” Well, it definitely works for short films, though it’s not often enough that shorts gain so much attention. I mean “real” shorts, the kind that play at film festivals, not funny skits and user-generated YouTube videos (feel free to argue that many of these count as shorts; I won’t necessarily disagree). And yes, Spike Jonze’s We Were Once a Fairytale, which stars Kanye West, did play at a film festival (Los Angeles), so I guess that makes it a “real” short. And now it’s been leaked online (temporarily by Kanye, himself) just in time to make a (presumably) good companion piece to Jonze’s box office winner, Where the Wild Things Are.

After all the Tweeting and bloggery I noticed centered on the film last night and today, I’m pretty underwhelmed. I appreciate the stop-motion animation at the end, but otherwise I guess I just can’t really stand Kanye’s persona here  — fictionalized or not — and would have stopped it short had I not heard there would be some trippy shit eventually. Also, I’ve now learned that I need to stop watching TV shows and short films online while I eat my lunch. Between this and The Office wedding episode, I hope to never see someone vomiting (even if its rose petals) while I’m chewing food again. Besides, I’m far more interested in another upcoming Kanye collaboration, with animator Bill Plympton.

Check out other film bloggers’ reactions to the short after the jump:

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Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (2006) by Michael Bell-Smith. Courtesy EAI. from Why + Wherefore on Vimeo.

The Zero Film Festival, dedicated to serving “a niche in the independent film community, which has been under appreciated and ignored” by “screening self-financed and zero budget films from filmmakers all over the world”, kicks off tonight with a party in DUMBO, Brooklyn. They’ll be screening short films by some familiar names, including Lena Dunham, Mary Bronstein, Zach Clark and Aaron Katz. According to the fest, Katz’s SXSW 2008 selection Let’s Get Down to Brass Tacks will screen, and Dunham will premiere a new short called Misfire, “about two friends discussing the semantics of a reply to an IM, but it ‘misfires’ when they accidentally hit send.” The lineup also includes Mike Smith’s Chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (see chapters 1-12 above). There’s more info on the event and the fest here.

The producers of Tokyo!, three short films by two Frenchmen and a South Korean, aim to do for Japan’s metropolis what New York Stories did for the Big Apple or Paris Je T’Aime for the City of Lights. That the two Frenchmen are indie darling Michel Gondry and former film critic/Pola X director Leos Carax, and the South Korean Bong Joon-Ho, who made an international splash with The Host, would seem to lend these three very different takes on a single subject some serious cache. Unfortunately, only two directors rise to the occasion, leaving a gaping hole in an otherwise thoughtful trilogy.

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• The Hollywood Reporter has already summed up this year’s festival despite there still being a few more days left. The trade calls both the fest and its films “surprising, quality-filled and not as depressing as some expected.”
• Despite this year bringing quality, though, it didn’t necessarily bring buyers. The L.A. Times has a look at how this year was a buyer’s market, particularly noticeable in the low purchase prices and alternative distribution models. And many of the titles picked up, including The Winning Season, Adam and Black Dynamite, were apparently bought for their “broad” audience appeal over their quality.
• AJ Schnack at All these wonderful things writes on the terrible lack of documentary acquisitions so far this festival.
• Marc Webb, whose feature debut, 500 Days of Summer, premiered at this year’s fest, has already made a deal for his second film. He’ll direct The Spectacular Now, another coming-of-age drama also to be scripted by his 500 Days writers, for Fox Searchlight.
• indieWIRE has the 2009 shorts winners. Jury Prizes went to Short Term 12 and Lies while Honorable Mentions include The attack of the robots from Nebula-5, Protect You + Me, Western Spaghetti, Jerrycan, Love You More, I Live in the Woods, Omelette and Treevenge.
• Most of the coverage of Sundance yesterday consisted of report and commentary on the “Dude vs. Film Critic” non-fight. Karina’s mostly first-hand account can be found here.

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival doesn’t kick off until Thursday, but there are already a few acquisitions and other news of note to report:

• Sony Pictures Classics has picked up both James Toback’s documentary Tyson (which Karina saw at Cannes) and Carlos Cuaron’s Rudo y Cursi. SPC co-president Michael Barker explained the reason for pre-buying: “It’s an advantage to have a company attached, to be able to answer questions, knowing what you’re going to do with it.” SPC also has Davis Guggenheim’s new doc, It Might Get Loud, at the festival.
• Though not U.S. distributor-related, congratulations must go out anyway to Cherien Dabis (who recently was interviewed on SpoutBlog’s Media Diet) for selling Canadian and international rights to her new Sundance-bound film Amreeka to Entertainment One.
• The documentary short you’ll be watching ahead of Thursday’s festival opener, Mary and Max, is actually a commercial for Sundance sponsor Honda. It will be one of the three shorts that have just gone up today on the automaker’s “Power of Dreams” website.

Yesterday, guest blogger Kevin Lee put two shorts by members of the Court 13 collective on his list of the 5 Best Music Videos of 2008, Benh Zeitlin’s clip for O’Death’s “Lowtide,” and MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” directed by Ray Tintori. For those unfamiliar with these guys, Zeitlin’s the director of the much-lauded short Glory at Sea, on which Tintori is credited as writer and production designer; and Tintori directed the 2007 festival hit, the Wes Anderson-does-Frankenstein-in-the-style-of-Guy Maddin short Death to the Tinman, which Zeitlin also worked on. The filmmakers, who are mainly based in New Orleans, also worked on the Obama campaign earlier this year, and made a couple of videos for that cause.

Tinman is one of my favorite shorts of the past few years, and I’ve embedded it after jump. You can currently watch the 25-minute Glory at Sea on YouTube, thanks to Wholphin.

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MoMA sent over a press release this morning about an event called Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts, which looks very cool. Curator Ron Magliozzi and silent film accompanists Steve Massa and Ben Model have put together a program of silent slapstick comedy shorts that “explore social, cultural, and political subjects”; they’ll be screening these, followed by shorts comissioned from contemporary comedians including Nick Kroll and ThunderAnt, AKA Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.

The press release doesn’t reveal exactly what they’ll be showing in terms of silent films (when I think slapstick silent comedy I think Fatty Arbuckle, but unless the comedy of being fat is a cultural issue, I’m not sure his work qualifies), but I hope the contemporary response pieces fall somewhere along the lines of ThunderAnt’s Boink!, embedded below. It’s a mock, New York Noise-like public access indie rock show, featuring special guest Sadaam Hussein, who strums an acoustic guitar in his “home recording studio in Manhattan” while talking about the life of a dictator in the language of a jaded old punk rocker.

The MoMA program takes place January 6; there’s more information at their website.
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Michael Tully informs us that the Wholpin boys have made our much beloved Glory at Sea available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. The 25 minute short is embedded above.

The big love for Let the Right One In and high expectations over the impending release of Twilight has sparked some chatter about vampires as a symbolic narrative construct — or, as Jeff Wells puts it in a post condescendingly titled “Girls Vampire Club,” “the romantic whatchamacallit vampire metaphor.” At this point, it’s not even much of a metaphor: in the fifteen years between the birth of the Buffy franchise and the release of the two teen vampire films named above, the plight of the brooding but well-meaning undead has become so synonymous with teenage alienation that fiction about the convergance of the two “outsider” groups has just about run out of points to make. It’s become refreshing to see vampires function as unambiguous villians, an evil to be dealt with sans angst.

And so you’ve got to give it up for Barackula, just a little bit, just for refusing to engage in the “vampires are romantic subjects too!” cliche. This short, online-only musical (which we first learned of months ago, before it went online, but only got around to watching after last week’s election) re-imagines a young Obama’s circa-1990 induction as president of the Harvard Law Review as song-and-dance-off between our hero and a clan of literally bloodsucking would-be lawyers. Its not exactly a game-changer as far as musicals go, but it’s exceptionally narratively tight and polished for what amounts to a dramatic user-generated campaign ad, and its anticipation of what would become the major themes of the campaign all the way up to Election Day is truly remarkable.

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When I was on the Shorts jury at CineVegas last summer, we gave the top prize to Man, Myna Joseph’s short, tense drama about two adolescent sisters whose bond is tested when one goes on an ill-advised internet date. Although unfortunately it’s not embeddable, New York Magazine has posted the 15 minute film (which also played at Sundance, SXSW and New Directors/New Films) online. You can watch it in two parts on Vulture.

“Narrative Jackass.” That’s the genre shorthand Micheal Tully has invented to describe Benny and Josh Safdie’s latest short film, There is Nothing You Can Do, and it’s pretty fitting.

The film was shot by Josh on a tiny prosumer video camera on a real-life, New York City bus crowded with both actors and unknowing actual riders. It stars Eleonore Hendricks from The Pleasure of Being Robbed as a young mother, and Benny Safdie as an irate businessman who complains that the noise coming Eleonore’s baby is distracting him from reading his newspaper. Various regular Safdie associates, including Ronald Bronstein, are planted around the bus, and when Benny starts harassing Eleonore, some of them rise to her defense.

The Safdies and crew pull off the street theater element so flawlessly that I’d love to see them turn this into a regular series––but not so regular that average New Yorkers start to recognize their troupe.

You can watch the short here.

Mike Jones points to the above teaser for Tripping with Caveh, which he describes as “a nifty series in the making from I‘m a Sex Addict director Caveh Zahedi.” As the teaser explains, Tripping with Caveh did start out conceptually as the first in a series, allegedly inspired by John Lurie’s Fishing With John, but it ultimately became a single 30-minute short film, in which the filmmaker ate chocolate-coverage magic mushrooms with Will Oldham. The film was released in 2004––two years before the similarly-vibed Oldham vehicle Old Joy hit the festival circuit––and is now available for rental via GreenCine.

In addition to the above trailer of sorts, there’s a clip from the film, of Caveh egging Oldham on to eat the mushrooms, on Zahedi’s web site.

• Torture pornographer Eli Roth is in talks “a baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino is apparently still talking to Brad Pitt about playing the lead role in the film, but nothing has been finalized.
• Pineapple Express and the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are opening today because their distributors want to “get a jump on a weekend full of Olympics coverage, which shifts into high gear Friday with the Opening Ceremony.” The “high end of expectations” would have David Gordon Green’s stoner comedy beating Batman at the box office. Emphasis on the “high.”
• A theoretical SAG work stoppage be damned, Ang Lee will begin shooting Taking Woodstock this month, his ensemble film about the “aspiring interior designer” who offered up his parents hotel as the concert’s base of operation. Meanwhile, a new 40th anniversary Woodstock DVD is in the works, with at least an hour of concert footage added.
• Prada has commissioned nine short films inspired by Prada, which Prada will then have edited into a feature about Prada, for viewing on the Prada website.

• The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
• “I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
• Blah blah blah Inglorious Bastards, blah blah blah believe it when I see it and only care on a much colder day in hell than that.