As the mother-credited saying goes, if you don’t have anything good to say, then say nothing at all. Of course that would eliminate a great deal of film criticism. Taking a favorite form of mine, the short film thematic anthology, and making me scratch my head and grit my teeth, A Decade of Love was an unfortunate choice to start out the mini-festival of up-and-coming Hong Kong directors at the Gene Siskel Film Center this month. Featuring 9 shorts (there were 10 but one was cut for fear of limiting the film’s distribution to mainland China) inspired by love in, about, and for Hong Kong over the last 10 years since it’s return to Chinese sovereignty, the collection has less to say about Hong Kong cinema than it does about the challenges filmmakers face when a story must be cohesively and entertainingly told in ten minutes instead of 100. It always struck me as odd that film students are expected to produce a short film, given how much difficult quality short filmmaking can be compared to a feature length project. The directors here were certainly experimenting with style, which is fine, but the stories were, with hardly an exception, so poorly written and conceived that the chosen styles were muted by the deafening void of substance.
A Decade of Love
May 1st, 2009 · No Comments
Tags: Capsule · Comedy · Drama · Ensemble · Foreign Language · Romance · Short
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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