Shorts – not pants

A very quick film review as I sit at Mumbai Airport. Caught this little number of the flight from Heathrow.

Shorts

“What’s wrong with you? Oh buddy where do I begin?”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: boy finds magic wishing stone and everything goes mental. Only in the wrong order.

Robert Rodriguez is a very hard director to pin down style-wise. Having done everything from Spy Kids to Sin City – horror, action and kids’ flicks. This is very much one of the kiddie ones and definitely one more aimed at them than one that’ll capture too many adults as well.

Set in a weird town owned and run by one Mr. Black, all of the adult inhabitants work for his company that make a multi-use device called the Black Box. Our protagonist Toe (Jimmy Bennett) is bullied at school by Cole’s two children, Helvetica (Jolie Vanier) and Cole (Devon Gearhart).

Toe tells us the story, but it’s done as a series of shorts presented in the wrong order. Imagine a mad kids film done in the style of Pulp Fiction and you’re kinda there. He tells us how he finds a magic wishing stone which causes all sorts of problems (we all know wishes in films never work out as they should) in a series of episodes featuring the kids and adults of the town.

As I said earlier, this film will appeal a lot to children, but not to much to accompanying adults. It’s not bad, but doesn’t have much of that humour that would go over children’s heads while making adults giggle. There are little aliens, sentient growing snot, rocket cycles and the like. In fact, the first scene into the credits features two of these and it’s pretty cool.

I kind of enjoyed it, but I’m glad I didn’t bother seeing it at the cinema. It whiled away 90 minutes on my flight, though.

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