In Theaters: Shorts (2009)

Directed By: Robert Rodriguez

Starring:
Jimmy Bennett as Toe
Jake Short as Nose
James Spader as Mr. Black

Shorts is technically far worse than the other bad movie released this week, Post Grad…and yet I am awarding them equivalent star ratings. As I mentioned in my review of Inglourious Basterds, I want to see innovation in films, and Robert Rodriguez doesn’t settle with the same old, tired routine for Shorts. He bends the rules of traditional family movies, telling a nonlinear story that is perhaps one of the strangest I have ever seen. Though it is indeed still bad, this film has the benefit of being surprisingly unique and inventive. From scenes where a monstrous booger tries to engulf a horde of children in a germaphobe’s house to scenes where a giant wasp attacks a destructive robot, I never knew exactly where Shorts was headed next. The fact that its destination is almost always repulsively silly and awfully dumb is quite unfortunate.

To describe Shorts is a bit like describing insanity or perhaps stupidity. The film’s basic plot deals with the arrival of a wishing rock in the freakish Texas community of Black Falls, home to the company that makes the “Black Box,” an invention that can turn into almost anything (as long as its batteries aren’t dead). Toe Thompson (Bennett) is the son of two of the company’s developers (Leslie Mann and Jon Cryer), who have recently learned that they will be fired if they can’t somehow make the Black Box perfect. Toe finds the wishing rock and uses it to, amongst other things, wish for friends. These friends come in the form of inch-tall martians flying in tiny spaceships. Their arrival sparks chaos and, right from the beginning, we learn that this wishing rock isn’t all its cracked up to be. Eventually, it gets passed to every member of the community in a series of short stories told, for some inexplicable reason, out of order.

Ultimately, the super-stylized production values, the obnoxiously bright color scheme, and the nonlinear storytelling are all masks trying to cover up the fact that Shorts is really quite hollow. Certainly, the film is whacky and creative, but it doesn’t really tell a truly fascinating story. All of the vicious crocodiles, flesh-eating boogers, and pea-sized aliens in the world cannot save a film, unless they are somehow strung together in a comprehensible and interesting storyline. And that is where Robert Rodriguez takes his fatal misstep. He makes the entire film about breaking the rules and being creative, instead of making the film about a story that features rule-breaking and creativity. The only reason we are ever invested in the images put on screen is because we can’t wait to see what off-the-wall thing Rodriguez is going to throw at us next. By the time a man is turned into a giant Oscar Meyer wiener, I was exhausted and ready to leave.

I would imagine that there will be many children who will thoroughly enjoy this film. To them, boogers are always funny, and so a giant one that eats children will probably be hilarious. But, they deserve better films than this, and parents will find very little to enjoy about this frantic and hyper-kinetic experiment conducted by Robert Rodriguez. Why else would he have made this movie, except for it to act as an experiment, testing just how far he could push boundaries before people finally walked out of the theater, turned off the DVD, or changed the channel? Why else would people like Leslie Mann, Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, and James Spader do a film like this, unless there was some grander scheme behind the scenes that we are not seeing? Much like the cast of Post Grad, I cannot see why anyone who starred in this film would be willing to do so. I imagine it must be because Robert Rodriguez wrote and directed it. Little did they know, this would be one of his career’s biggest mistakes.