For Short Film Saturday for most of the coming year I will revisit the animated shorts that were presented in snippets by the King of Cartoons on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And here you’ll get to see the whole thing.

The films I share in my 31 Days of Oscar posts tend to get lost in the shuffle, so I’ll be featuring them on Short Film Saturday to give them their due.

The films I share in my 31 Days of Oscar posts tend to get lost in the shuffle, so I’ll be featuring them on Short Film Saturday to give them their due.

This film is not currently available on any streaming platform.

Fernanda Torres, is now a it more well-known in the US after having earned an Oscar nomination for I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui) last year. However, when she was younger she was the first the first Brazilian woman (or woman from any Latin American country) to win Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. She tied with Barbara Sukowa and was very worthy of the honor.

Writer/Director Arnaldo Jabor refers to this film as a sort of psychological playground. It is a that a a minimalist drama experimenting in negative fill an quite nearly stagebound and focused on two actors. However, the intensity and proximity to the actors is a trick that only film can pull off.

The cultural impact of Eminem’s “Stan” is already indelible what with the word becoming synonymous with obsessive fandom, even being added to the dictionary. However, while that cultural artifact comes from a misapropriation of the intent of the song, the music, lyrics, and video still stand as a tremendous fusion of creative power. One of the rare 21st century tracks to even offer an extended video that expands on the story of the song, and stars Devon Sawa when he was in the midst of making some of his most popular works. Enjoy!

Despite dropping a reference to it in the music video section of my series Once Upon a Time in the 80s, I never featured the first vide MTV ever played in its own post. And that’s rather strange seeing as how “Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t merely a footnote in musical history but rather prophetic, that and song and images are quite memorable as well. Enjoy!

This year I intended to start profiling national film archives that host a lot of great content online at the start of the year as part of my long-inactive By Any Means Necessary series. More than halfway through the year, I am finally doing it.

This idea started late in ’24 when I started noticing how many countries had such sites and I started perusing and bookmarking them.

Even before Conan’s Estonia joke at the Oscars, I’d seen some films on their site. As this archive is less likely to be well-known I’ll spotlight it today.

Today is Võidupüha, an Estonian holiday, which commemorates their victory over Latvia in the Battle of Cēsis. So I am featuring Arkaader, a joint project of the Estonian Film Institute and National Archives of Estonia, to host many historical films online; short and feature, narrative and documentary. Many of the films are free-to-stream. Others are available to rent for a small fee.

Any of the places I feature will have plenty of places to explore, due to the fact that they’re more likely to be dialogue-free I recommend starting with this curated list of animated shorts. There are also music video and experimental films. Most of the films typically have subtitles.

While watching a recent episode of Welcome to Wrexham I noticed they once again used a snippet of an old British Pathé newsreel featuring Cardiff City and Wrexham. British Pathé has a vast online library of digitized newsreels, so I decided to search it out. Sure, enough I found the match in question. Not much footage of live sports about 100 years ago, when they were it tended to be mostly random snippets, most people would have gotten the narrative of the game from newspapers. However, old newsreels and snippets of actual events (referred to as actualities back in the day) are some of the best time capsules we have. They’re peepholes into a past mostly confined to the written word. Enjoy!

“You just ruined my perfect season, Señor You-Just-Ruined-My-Perfect-Seasòn!”

I’ve avoided posts like this in the past because once upon a time I found it too granular, a concept thatwallows too deeply in minutiae; but with the existence of a sites like Get Yarn which helps people clip the tiniest most obscure lines in cinema and on television, a short post about why one particular line-reading is perfect along with a video example is not that outlandish.

Not Another Teen Movie is one of many comedies my brother and I have been obsessed with for years that I’ve noticed has picked up a cult following after coming and going without fanfare during its initial release. This was crystallized for me for this film when I saw David Ehrlich wrote a piece on it about a decade ago.

Much of the dialogue sticks with me from this parody of teen movies from the ‘80s to the early 00s, but the line in question especially. 

To understand why, first the set-up (if you’ve not seen this moview yet reading this won’t spoil anything; the film is so outlandish one can’t really “spoil it”). Austin (Eric Christian Olsen) and Jake (Chris Evans) are high school rivals. They have a standard teen-movie bet going (I bet you can’t turn so-and-so into prom queen) and in this scene Austin is mad because they’re both quarterbacks on their high school football team, Austin left the final game of the season injured, Jake subbed him and lost it.

The only other thing that adds humor to the line I’ll examine is that Jake’s redundant putdown format was introduced earlier in the film…

The introduction of the format

The callback and the aforementioned perfect line-reading

I realized recently this dialogue kills me and the line reading is so perfect for the following reasons:

1. Eric Christian Olsen’s delivery of this, like many of his character’s idiotic dialogue in this movie is perfect.

2. He dips into Spanish (with the honorific) and French (with the accent). Whether that was scripted or his contributionthe confusion on the accent is brilliant.

3. The redundancy of these putdowns works in the film because he’s playing them dead-serious, not even approaching tongue-in-cheek which makes more subtle joke like that in a film with all manner of humor (many of them broad or crass) slide by most viewers.

4. Olsen’s commitment to this preposterous greeting also acts as a microcosm of the perfect confluence of intelligently crafted stupidity and instinctual ridiculousness that make this film what is. 

While it’s true explaining a joke kills it, but that’s if you didn’t get it in the first place. If you love or loath one it’s worth examining why. It was a sudden epiphany that had me realize this silly, practically a throwaway joke, really encapsulated what works for me about this film.

I hope to write up more of these types of lines, not just in comedies but first I had to kick the topic off at long last.