cortometraje from corto = short + metraje = footage
I see the term cortometraje so often in my YouTube wanderings I’ve chosen it as the title for what will be at least a couple of posts.
Recently while talking with friends I realized I hadn’t posted some of my favorite short-form films. I do this out of selfishness to a certain extent, so I can refer to them more conveniently than on a playlist. These join many other shorts, with these themes, some of which overlap…
- dance1
- lavatory scenes
- urban/rural dissonance
- the lost language of Polari
This group of ten deals more or less with affection between individuals, from equivocation to fixation.
Merv Has a Thing for Charals!
First, per usual, a cartoon. Mervyn Cumberland Weems’s pronouns are she, her.
Don’t Tell the Bros
Funnyman Petey USA is a guitar rocker who can’t kick a synth habit. “Don’t Tell the Boys” is a bromantic ballad that hints at the comedic side he honed during the lost years of Covid.
Norwegian Frankie Sunshine attended film school in Los Angeles. His first film, Forsaken, was made there in 1994, and made “to tell my parents I was gay:-),” he says via Facebook. Bølgene (Waves), 1998, is his second Norwegian film, based on the short story by Øyvind Ellenes from his 1996 collection Fortellingen Gjenfortelling (The Story Retelling). I love this film (oops… I slipped) because it contains a line I use in secret in place of the L-word, which has been corrupted. (Don’t tell the boys…)
Danny Rivera spent a lot of time in his series My Straight Roommate, which needs little introduction except to say that he gets mopey in an endearing way. Then there’s his scene lifted from the 2012 YA novel by the recently departed Benjamin Alare Sáenz, who did his undergraduate work here in Denver at St. Thomas Seminary. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’s screen adaptation (2022) was released three years after Rivera’s. Curious as to whether Rivera had been true to his source, I read the book, and he is.
Lasses with Axes
Have some fun with Kristen Key. She’s as deadpan—just this side of Tig Notaro—as the thumbnail for this video is garish.
Key’s forerunner—another gal with a guitar—is musician Cheryl Wheeler, who was featured solo on her “Arrow” and with Dan Seals on her “Addicted” on American Music Shop, an early ’90s show I never saw, but which included many household names, including the television debut of a quartet known as the Dixie Chicks. (Seals’s “Addicted” went Number 1 on both the U.S. and Canadian country charts in 1988; Wheeler tells the story behind their AMS appearance and why she expected her last verse to be cut.)
Wheeler is one of the subjects of the 2021 documentary Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music, about the women behind the, well…, men. Like Tim McGraw, Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, who sang their songs. The film’s director T. J. Parsell was skeptical when, having just moved to Nashville, he was contacted for a pitch by a friend in the stained-glass business. “You know, everybody’s got an idea for a film,” he said in an October interview that year. If a film about lesbian hitmakers in the shadows seems unlikely, Parsell himself only entered film school at 50—to adapt his book about being sent to an adult prison as a kid and his life beyond. In another interview, Parsell talked about having to put his own gay sexuality “on the shelf” in the software business in the ’80s and ’90s, “and I know what that cost me.” Continuing: “Not long into the project, I began to scratch my head and wonder, how much of what these women were dealing with was because they were gay, and how much was because they were women.”
My favorite live track of Wheeler’s is “Gandhi/Buddha” because of the intro about marrying her partner Cathleen, which she nearly throws away despite its lengthy delivery. Unfortunately, the best version, shot at a little club somewhere, has been pulled from YouTube, but you can get a taste from the following audio. Start playing at 1:04:53.
Not Lost in Translation
Adrià Llauró is a filmmaker from Barcelona. Alirón is the collective cheer upon the victory of a beloved contestant. But there’s only anguish in Marc’s face.
Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho (I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone) is the germ from which sprouted Brazilian Daniel Ribeiro’s feature film The Way He Looks.
Is It Hot in Here?
Jenny Hagel, who cowrote and appears in Tech Support, may be recognized by viewers of “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” on Late Night with Seth Meyers. You might want to slip into something a little more comfortable because it’s going to get a little steamy.
And another steamy one…
Malo Día
Paris, je t’aime, a portmanteau (sorry…) directed by more than a score, was to be set in all twenty of the city’s arrondissements but two were dropped. Gus Van Sant, not particularly surprisingly, sets his segment in Le Marais, which has been home to nobles, Jews, Chinese, working-class, and of course those of a particular persuasion.2
Plus One
Perfume Genius is collaborating with choreographer Kate Wallich on a series of performances that unfortunately bypasses Denver.
I have ten more in the, mm…, pipeline.