Reviews

Very briefly...it's a gorgeous work of CGI and 2D animation, but the story is so blisteringly boring that it doesn't work. The grandmother just yells at the kid listening to the story, and that is supposed to be funny. Things like, "do you think the fairy did this?" to a headshaked no, "YOU BETTER BELIEVE SHE DID THIS!!!" It's a lot of yelling in the place of comedy, and there is nothing redeeming about her version of the story.

It's flat, uncharming, and unfunny. Nothing happens in this version that we don't already know, and despite the apparent fact that Grandma is trying to do nothing but scare her storytell-ee, it fails to give us any reason to listen. Easily the weakest of the nominees this year, I believe Partly Cloudy was far more deserving of the coveted nomination. This is no waste of time by any means, but it is not a deserving Oscar nominee.

Well, in our Film Directors: Gus Van Sant class the other day, we were subjected to "No Skin off My Ass" (Don't tell me why -- our professor seemed to think that there was Van Santian qualities to the film. Aside from the homosexuality, I'm not seeing it). What I can tell you is that I don't know if I've ever been so ashamed of being a film student. Apparently, if you're obnoxious and pretentious enough to make a (pun extremely well intended) masturbatory film such as this, you can have some professor somewhere like it and subject a class to it.

"No Skin Off My Ass" shouldn't be regarded as a movie -- it's a pet project taken entirely too far, and if it were accepted as just that, I wouldn't be rattled. However it's that "oh look how different! oh look how risky!" attitude that makes credible pictures lose their credibility.

For instance, earlier this year, Bernardo Bertulucci had some characters running around perpetually naked in "The Dreamers". There were other elements to the film, though, and he wasn't just showing naked people for the sake of showing naked people.

Bruce La Bruce's film is a mockery of the word -- it seems like he may have just made it to get intimate with Von Buecker, and then later felt a need to put a story together in order to hide his selfish ways.

I almost urge people to see this just to understand where these thoughts and comments come from, but I know that unless you were in a classroom setting, you wouldn't be able to take more than 10 minutes without saying "I'm not watching that. It's wasting my time."