The Best of Resfest Shorts, Vol. 1 Movie Review

This compilation DVD features 16 short films from four years of the RESFEST travelling film festival, and as with any collection like this, it's a hit and miss affair -- albeit one with plenty of nudity.

The short "Snack and Drink" is a predecessor to Waking Life, proving that in-your-face, bizarre rotoscoping works best when it's given in sub-four minute chunks. It's still not really about anything, but Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta make the most of following a curious, autistic subject.

"Pasta For War" is a clever and gorgeously produced remaking of wartime propaganda films with ragatoni and bowtie pasta in lieu of marching soldiers and airplanes. "Vision Point" is an interesting experiment in fast-motioning a cross-country trip to the speed of 6,000 miles per hour.

"Tongues and Taxis" is good old-fashioned, low-grade animation that makes Beavis and Butt-head look sophisticated. It's hilariously absurd, featuring a giant severed tongue that eventually does battle with a walking taxicab.

While some of the shorts are good, much is idiocy, which has almost become a matter of course in compilations like this, giving us nonsense for the sake of nonsense produced in the hopes that it will be mistaken for art.

"11:11" is narrated by a computer and features a drive through a desert intercut with non-sequiturs. Totally stupid.

"Cirkus" is nonsense about a woman's desire to commit suicide, I think. Its nearly-random collection of jump-cut images would be the worst part of the disc were it not for the making-of documentary (longer than short itself) that follows it. Wretched.

Scraping the bottom is the nearly 17-minute documentary "Deformer" about skateboarder Ed Templeton and his (primarily nudie) art, punctuated by a pathetic, whiny, droning voice-over that makes this 17 minutes seem like 70. Awful.

The DVD features commentary tracks from the filmmakers, which come off exactly as expected. In other words: no surprises here.