Wholpin no. 6

"Movies began in the short form, but quickly shorts became nothing more than ballast for features, and then, come the '60s, were not even that. (Anthology-style TV series may count — think of each "Twilight Zone" episode as a 24-minute short — but look how that format has fallen out of favor as well.) Filmmakers continue to make them, largely as résumé-builders, but a substantial audience has never been acculturated to appreciate them.

We could use a broad variety of semi-annual DVD "magazines" releasing shorts into the public bloodstream, but Wholphin is already much better than that — like Eggers's other periodicals, it's a magazine/program with a distinctly ironic personality, an endlessly entertaining point of view and a rabid hunger for what's brand new and supercool, internationally, in this least market-impacted region of moviemaking. Not just any decent short is allowed through the door — the Wholphin philosophy runs toward the eccentric and politically radical, while largely excluding the abstract-underground school and the earnest political doc. Anyone at all would be well-served by catching up with volumes one through five (editions have come biannually since 2005), which have already included, amidst eye-popping nature footage (trap-jaw ants, drunk bees, etc.), re-dubbed Russian sitcoms and excerpts from idiosyncratic features, and some of the most spectacular and vital shorts I've ever seen: Anthony Lucas's "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello," Bill Morrison's re-edited lost film "The Mesmerist," Alice Winocour's lobster tribulation "Kitchen," Olivo Barbieri's eye-defying "site specific_LAS VEGAS 05," Ray Tintori's junkyard Oz neo-myth "Death to the Tinman," the Oscar-nominated mega-retro-animation "Madame Tutli-Putli," inexplicable chapters from Spanish astro-surrealist César Velasco Broca's "Echos Der Buchrücken" and so, fabulously, on. Wholphin No. 6 does not disappoint, from the electrifying science fiction of Catherine Chalmers' digi-vid insect close-ups (used, as Wholphin is wont to do, as menu-movies, as well as an independent entry, "Safari") to Matthew Lessner's "Darling Darling," a domestic absurdism starring Michael Cera and featuring multiple dubbing options, involving either John Cleese or Daniel Handler, but not both. But the best spoonfuls range from an excerpt from Weijun Chen's doc "Please Vote for Me," in which Chinese grade-schoolers are instructed to wage classroom campaigns that quickly devolve into all-too-familiar democratic skullduggery; Adam Keker's "On the Assassination of the President," a mock-classified-briefing film that whips up a computerized Pynchonian conspiracy lather in just six minutes; "Lucky," Nash Edgerton's slam-bang snatch of harrowment that barely gets from a locked trunk into a hurtling car's driver seat; and Randy Krallman's "Force 1 TD," which matter-of-factly, and sweetly, mates gangsta life and seeing-eye Shetlands. Each Wholphin comes with a rather McSweeney's-ish booklet of interviews and statements, where the queries most often answered are, how and why in the hell did you do that?
Source: www.ifc.com/film