Can't Tango, Won't Fort

The plan was to keep Friday simple with fairies, food and film at the VMFA, only the drip was missing.

I barely made it to Amuse before the sun set, a shame given the wonderful western skyline visible through the wall of windows, but darkness is coming so early now.

Taking a seat at the end of the bar put me inches from where the absinthe drip should have been but wasn't.

An inquiry revealed that with the hordes descending for the "Hollywood Costume" exhibit, the drip was exiled for the sake of room for waiting customers.

I understood and I'm thrilled the show is so popular right out of the gate, but Amuse has got to understand that they're the ones who created green fairy junkies and they're the ones who've got to be able to feed those habits even now with the ruby slippers in residence.

Translation: they retrieved the drip from the kitchen and started one for me STAT, albeit not intravenously.

Well, that was a close one.

I moved down a stool to allow a fresh-faced trio to sit together and listened with amusement as they looked at the Hollywood-themed drink menu and began discussing alcohol.

The guy in the group said he wanted no part of the Lion's Roar, a cocktail of Old Overholt rye, Strega, Luxardo Maraschino, bitters, black peppercorn essence and Dolin dry vermouth.

Why not, you ask? Because it had vermouth.

"That was the first thing I stole from my parents' bar when I was sixteen and I drank the whole bottle," he said with clear distaste.

The bartender explained that A) it was undoubtedly cheap vermouth and B) vermouth, like wine, goes bad fairly quickly.

"You mean it doesn't have to taste like urine?" he asked earnestly, causing the bartender and I to exchange glances. What in the world?

"I wouldn't really know what urine tastes like. I don't think most people would," the bartender said diplomatically.

"Well, then you've never been in a frat house," he said, as if that explained everything.

I just took another sip of my absinthe drip and kept my eyes straight ahead.

For dinner I had a bowl of Tuscan kale and potato stew with house-made lamb sausage and two bites in, a server I know came over to tell me there was Billy bread in the house.

Now, I already had Amuse's superb herb focaccia in hand and thickly buttered, but she was thinking the Billy bread would be a better sopping vehicle with its crunchy crust. Right she was.

By the time the drip and stew were history, it was the bewitching hour for me to scuttle downstairs to the theater for the James River Shorts, an evening of the best of a juried competition for short form films.

On the way down, I heard about how fabulous my tights were and then stopped next to a security guard to admire the tangoing couples in the atrium below.

I have the tights, possibly even the legs, for the tango, but not the coordination.

Once in the Cheek theater, I found a good seat and settled in to be impressed.

"Anna Walks In" had a girl smoking (unconvincingly, I might add) and telling a strange story from her childhood in front of a clock that never changed time.

The audience laughed throughout "Return to the World of Dance," a parody about instructional dance videos.

This one taught the viewer how to make a post-modern dance with a few simple steps and their easy kit.

Just so you know, creating a manifesto was one of the steps, as was smearing butter on toast in one stroke.

"We will keep you posted on new developments in dance as they occur," the narrator intoned hilariously.

"Nitro" was the tragic story of a small town by that name in West Virginia's chemical valley (something I didn't know they had), which had been founded in 1919 and peaked in the '50s and '60s, with companies like Dow and Monsanto employing most of the town.

Using old footage, the film told the story of an explosion of Agent Orange which coated the town in the toxin, causing health problems ever since.

"Daybreak" was a series of animated drawings telling the story of a character laying in bed observing everything in his room - the cracks in the walls, the radiators, the windows- and the imaginary world he imagined through them.

The story ended with the character getting up to start his day, but the surprise came during the credits.

"This film was made on paper this size," it said, showing paper smaller than a Post-It.

"We're not kidding," the next frame read and showed a storyboard of dozens of little pieces of paper.

Knowing that now, I wanted them to restart the film so I could appreciate it all over again on a whole new level.

"Steak" took place in Richmond in a typical Fan-looking apartment with two guys who were convinced one of their roommates was a murderer.

On the plus side, he was cooking dinner for them.

When it became clear they needed to discuss the matter, one said, "Fort!" and they built one out of blankets in the living room so they could talk in privacy.

I'm inclined to think that only guys would yell "fort" to signify meeting time.

After a brief intermission, we saw the saddest film of the night and the one that took the People's Choice award, "Take Me Home," about a husband with a wife who had dementia.

The patient husband tries to accommodate her wishes but she clearly has no sense of reality, asking to go home whether she was at the nursing home or at home.

At the end, he erases her voice from their answering machine and replaces it with his own. Cue lump in throat.

And the soundtrack by Recluse Raccoon was a haunting accompaniment.

"Dwell Dig Shake" was the longest film by far at 29 minutes and told its black and white story in three parts.

The protagonist, an epileptic, finds an old VHS player in the trash and returns to his childhood home to dig up a time capsule he buried in 1998.

Back at home, he looks at a tape from the capsule made in 1995 showing him as a little boy. His roommate comes in and watches for a bit, commenting about the era.

"I miss the '90s," he whines. "Fatboy Slim and Nintendo 64 were the only good things about the '90s."

As if. A comment like that makes it easy to guess the age of the filmmaker.

The final film was "Puppy Dreams" about a high school girl trying to adjust to living with her Dad, finding out she has mono and that her friend is hot for a boy she once made out with.

The young actress playing the lead had a face you couldn't take your eyes off of and the film was one of three first prize winners tonight, along with "Anna" and "Daybreak."

Leaving the screening, everyone around me was talking about how fortunate we are to have the James River Film Society and events like this shorts competition.

Tell me something I don't know, people.

I made one last unplanned stop on my way home at my neighborhood joint, Bistro 27, for a nightcap.

Like last night, I had Graham's LBV 2008 porto, only this time with chocolate mousse and a Portuguese-speaking graduate student in broadcasting and journalism.

Asking me about my career path through radio, publishing and webcasts, he wondered how I'd gotten into broadcasting and journalism.

Not being particularly post-modern, I explained that I'd done it by going to school for art history.

I'm not kidding. You should see my storyboard.

Destination: L. City

You could say short films get short shrift.

Actually, James Parrish of the James River Film Society said just that tonight at VMFA during the opening of the two-night James River Shorts screenings.

The event came about after the JRFS acknowledged that the shorts weren't getting their due as part of the larger James River Film festival.

I'd thoroughly enjoyed last year's event, so here I was back again for this year's.

First, there was a late lunch at Best Cafe, which was populated somewhere between almost empty (my last few lunches) and completely mobbed (my last few Thursday Jazz cafes), meaning practically perfect.

We scored the wine of the evening, Primal Roots, a red blend of syrah, zinfandel and Merlot, along with ham and bean soup and a salad with chicken, but notable for its other ingredients: grapes, strawberries, candied walnuts, goat cheese and red onions.

We finished our Primal with a triple chocolate ganache before heading down to the Cheek theater for the shorts.

A jury of five local cinephiles and a visiting guest, filmmaker Lyn Elliot, had decided what we were to view tonight out of the many entries received.

After having seen the twelve finalists, I have two conclusions.

There's a lot of interesting short-form films being made in 2012 and there are several recurring themes.

See: falling rain, nudity and the appearance of scratched film.

"Lot 22 (Concession 5)" had a vintage feel, with occasionally flickering images of farms, fields and animals.

It was followed by technical difficulties (the filmmaker having insisted on a high-res showing), causing one of the JFFS guys to announce in the dark, "This is part of the transition to the digital age."

Eventually after some storytelling in the dark, we saw "Simple Machines," a black and white film that told essentially the same story as Koyonasqatsi but in a fraction of the time.

A seed sprouts and grows in time lapse photography before imagery of machines and large metal things take over.

Nature lost, technology inevitable.

"L. City" was exquisite, beginning with a jittery black and white shot of a man on a train and moving onto animation to describe the heartbreak of a woman gone and a man for whom time stops in her absence.

I was smitten with the beauty of the black and white pictures that made up this film.

"Alphabet" was a stop-motion film with a white Gumby-like figure trying to scrawl a message on a cave wall for mankind (Gumby-kind?).

"THEM" he wrote as bad things happened all around him.

Like a light show at a music performance, "Nothing to Undo" was a series of changing images.

Our first silent short of the night was "Footprints in the Snow," which caused the guy sitting behind me to start drumming his fingers in lieu of a soundtrack.

Not everyone is comfortable with silence.

The imagery of scenes of a snow-covered landscape were so vivid I could almost feel the cold of the snow-laden branches just outside the windows.

One good thing about a silent film though, is no one talks or chatters.

I heard a few coughs, but otherwise silence as people took in the white landscapes.

"Eye Pieces, Number 1" was not novel, but the footage of an eye blinking continued to multiply, first into two eyes, then four, sixteen and eventually 64.

By then, the eyes shown were responding to each other, looking sideways and askance.

It was well executed and I laughed out loud several times at the eyes' antics.

A brief intermission allowed for some mingling and then we were back at the shorts.

"Evolution" was adorable, full of animated  crayon drawings of monsters.

Sometimes they were eating each other and another time, two met, followed by a plethora of hearts coming up from them (successful first date, I suppose) and then a pile of babies appeared as a result.

What have we learned from this, kids?

Turns out the filmmaker used students from Fox Elementary to hep him with this one.

"That gets the sentimental vote," my companion said to me.

"Parva Sed Apta Mihi" was the longest short at seventeen minutes and it showed California streetscapes, vendors and religious iconography as words floated across the screen to Latin and accordion beats.

By the end of the film, I knew that the title meant, "Small, but enough for me."

I don't even have time to go into the wisdom of that philosophy, but feel free to stop by my tiny Jackson Ward apartment to discuss it at any time.

We returned to animation with "You, Everyone and Everything," a story of a young boy, the bugs in his life and his bad dream.

Luckily, all's well that ends well when he awakes and Mom and Dad are waiting at the dinner table for him.

If only life was always that easy.

A bit heavy-handed but still clever was "Changed Landscape," where for each day of the week shown (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday), we heard random headlines, weather reports and horoscopes over shots of the same pattern of scenes: animals grazing, a beach, a herd on a hillside.

Life.

By the end, there were no days of the week and the landscape had, well, changed.

"Movements" was another experimental film, this time of shifting patterns.

Once we'd seen all the films, we had to vote for the People's Choice award while guest juror Lyn Elliott decided the real winners.

Like me, she picked "L. City" as the best short, probably for the same reasons it had struck me: outstanding camerawork, breathtaking cinematography and a heartbreaking story of lost love.

That same film had lost by one vote the honor of people's choice award, which went to "Evolution,' no doubt for the students' charming contributions.

Wasn't it W.C. Fields who refused to work with kids because they stole all the attention?

Some things never change.

After hearing the winners announced, my companion and I went our separate ways and I went out to meet my friend Holmes for a drink.

We convened at Amour wine bistro where Holmes had dinner and I enjoyed a cup of tonight's soup, lamb and lentil while sipping bubbly (sparkling Vouvray, if you must know).

Holmes was flying solo tonight because his beloved was all stopped up, but we made the most of each other's company even without our favorite Richmonder.

With no dates to keep us on track, the conversation ranged all over creation, but one anecdote stands out.

I'll tell you that the punch line was, "At least she had a heater in her bedroom," and leave it at that.

Only Holmes.

But he was just as funny when I expressed surprise that he'd guessed that I'd been at the James River Shorts screening.

"As if you'd have been anywhere else?" he said mockingly.

Well, of course not. They say that brevity is the soul of wit.

I'll go as short as I need to as long as I get the wit.

The Beauty of Brevity

Good things, when short, are twice as good. ~ Gracian


That philosophy was no doubt the genesis of the 2011 James River Shorts Festival. That or an acknowledgment that attention spans have become length-challenged.

It was the first year for the festival, which attracted 78 short film submissions, the top fourteen of which were shown tonight at the VMFA.

And the shorts varied widely in subject matter. Some were animated or stop motion and some were live action.

My favorite, "Solo Piano," was actually still photographs with a piano piece for background music.

A piano on a NYC sidewalk was photographed as people walked by it and stopped to play its keys.

Thinking it was a lighthearted piece about the randomly placed instrument pulling in people, I was saddened to eventually see men come along and destroy it, chopping up the wood and carting it away.

It ended with two young people showing up with dollies,apparently hoping to move the piano to their home.

It was a mini-tragedy in five minutes.

But there was humor, too. "The Pervert" used old '60s film footage to construct a tale of a nice boy gone astray after finding a pornographic magazine on the siddewalk.

"Another Dress, Another Button" was a stop-motion piece about the extra buttons that come with clothes.

Put in a bowl still in their tiny Ziplock bags, the buttons escaped and played games, only to hurry back into their baggies when the girl got home.

An artsy 16 mm film was "Watercolors," a silent movie with an impressionistic feel. The images of nature reflected in moving water truly looked like paintings.

Extremely touching was "My Son" about a choreographer dealing with cancer while raising a young son and continuing to dance and teach.

She saw her son as standing between her and death, while the little boy just saw her as Mom.

Especially beautiful was "The Leaf Woman and the Centaur," a combination of black and white drawings with vividly colored animation telling the story.

My friend and I had visited Amuse before the screening, enjoying a new-to-Amuse wine, Felino Malbec, which turned out to be wonderful blood-thickener on this unexpectedly cold evening.

With a local cheese plate and 40 minutes, we enjoyed a short repast to prepare us for the short films we were about to see.

Not aware of Amuse's limited hours, my friend was surprised to learn that they wouldn't be open for us to return to once the screening was over.

In fact, you could say that some good things, when short, are not twice as good.

A couple of things, Amuse's hours not being one of them, immediately come to mind to substantiate that.

But not tonight's films. Like well-written short stories, they delivered and were over.

Call it bite-sized films at their best.