The Spine (2009)

Just what I expected

A Masterpiece!

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

"The Spine" is an animated short film from 2009 and even if this is already 7 years ago one of the more recent works by Canadian filmmaker Chris Landreth. He was already an Oscar winner at this point for "Ryan". But I am not the greatest fan of him after having watched some of his works. i also find his Oscar winner pretty overrated. But back to this one here. We see people with holes in the head and this is a metaphor for us to hear their thoughts and their true feelings. Gordon Pinsent, a somewhat known Canadian actor, lends his voice to a main character here and the other voice actors are fairly experienced too. And it is certainly not their fault that I did not manage to like this 11-minute film. Slightly over 10 minutes seems a common runtime for Landreth. All in all, it was too bizarre of a film for me and I don't recommend checking it out, or at least not as the first of Landreth's work. Thumbs down.

It takes breathing, it takes reflection, to assume and finally understand that a film as this is a part of you. You see, short films that are as effective and powerful as this one are necessarily hard punches in the stomach. And indeed this is a powerful film. So in this case, it took me 10 days, during which i watched very few movies, to see which parts of me were shaken by the film. And indeed, i had 10 uneasy challenging days.I didn't know the filmmaker, this is my first experience with his work. I'll want to see what he did before. This film does something that i hadn't seen done this way before. Now that i saw it, it seems incomprehensible how it hadn't been tried before. This is a kind of Philip Dick meets Gondry meets Jonze, both of which share the fact of having worked with Kaufman. Animation, in the sensitive way Landreth works, seems an incredibly interesting medium to work with these themes, basically voyages between vessels of inconscience. A constant instability that won't allow us to know where we stand, which level of consciousness are we visiting. The whole film is a no man land, an uncharted territory to obscure parts of self.Every emotion is perfectly controlled, the construction is tight and perfectly balanced, and played around poles of madness, depression, love, frustration. Life.The visual accomplishment is huge. The camera is grounded on our real world, but the images, though springing from this same world, were visualized elsewhere, in the tiny space between being awaken, and deeply sleeping. I'll want to see this film again.My opinion: 4/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com