Wholphin Volume 3 is the equivalent of throwing wet toilet paper at the wall and seeing what sticks.  

This collection of shorts is truly all over place. The techniques, budgets, and tones of the shorts are all over the place.    Like other issues of this alternately wonderful and frustrating series of collected shorts from around the world, the DVD Menu itself offers up several short films or excerpts from films that are interesting and perplexing.   You will find yourself saying what the heck?  Many times as you watch this collection—but that is a good thing.  The hits out-number the misses so if you don’t demand commercial filmmaking at its slickest and most predictable, these innovative, quirky, often imperfect vignettes, excerpts, short narratives and mini documentaries should keep you very entertained.  

These short films, non-fiction, fiction, animated, experimental, lack something to appeal to a wide commercial audience.  What most lack are a conventional beginning, middle and end.  You may not be fully satisfied in the conventional sense with many of these shorts—some seem too slight and pointless, others don’t have quite enough innovation or controversy.  Indeed how would someone market most of these shorts and get people excited about seeing them?  It is as if you are being dared to like them.

 The people behind McSweeney’s and the Believer, figured out an interesting way to group and package these short films---create a DVD compilation, offer subscriptions to them, sell them individually, as sets, offer free discs; and now they are re-packaging the series in Best of compilations.   I suspect they might actually be making a few bucks on the deal…my guess is that they were hoping to break even and get some exposure for some interesting short films.

Speaking of short films:

I have never seen anything as strange, disturbing and borderline disgusting as Funky Forest 15:42 (excerpt from the2005 150 minute feature film Funky Forest: The First Contact) which is a Japanese comedy (I think it is a comedy).  We get two segments:   A young man in a pod imagines himself part of a strange vaudeville sort of slapstick act called The Mole Brothers. And then in After School Club a young girl in a tennis outfit meets a strange middle aged man who is some sort of experiment and slowly reveals odd things about his body.  How odd?   He is shy about taking off his shirt because ‘they are not even’.  Does he have breasts?  Well he has what look likes male body parts sticking out from his chest.  It gets weirder and more disturbing.  Is he an experiment?   The closest thing I’ve seen to this segment is the oddest moments of David Cronenberg’s Existenz movie.    You want to see something completely different?  This is it folks.  I doubt you’ll know quite what to say after seeing it.  It’s imaginative, funny, outrageous, disgusting and disturbing.  How far are they going to go?  Bizarre special effects and you have to ask… what’s the point?   But it’s one of the oddest things I’ve ever watched.  And just how weird and how far does a whole movie of this sort of thing go? 

The 2005 150 minute film got some festival exposure starting in 2006 and has been out on DVD since 2008.  I fear, like too much exposure to Hunter S. Thompson, once you let something like this inside of you and see it’s good, it will become a part of you.

Sorry… where was I?  Yes, in the intoxicating world of the Wholphin DVD Volume 3 to be exact.    

One of the highlights of the collection is writer, director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways) student film made at UCLA in 1990.   It’s a tale of a creepy obsessive love that begins as a quirky romantic story and slowly builds into something creepier.    The Passion of Martin is basically a short 49   minute mini-feature film.    It’s not as polished as Payne’s later work, and lead actor Charles Hayward lacks the charisma to carry the movie but it’s an engrossing, increasingly unsettling film that doesn’t seem to be 19 (!!!) years old.  Hayward plays a photographer who almost instantly falls in love with a young woman (Lisa Zane) after she likes one of his photographs.  You can see where Payne’s ‘Election’ came from. 

 The Yemen Documentary by Khadija Al-Salami is another highpoint of this collection.  The just less than 30 minute A Stranger in Her Own City shows us a few days in the life of a young 12 year old girl who refuses to cover her hair or face with the traditional veil.  She would be called a tom-boy in the U.S. but in Yemen her actions are radical and as we watch her defiance and enjoy her rebelliousness knowing it probably can not last as the culture and city itself will force her to conform. 

At just 3 minutes and 28 seconds Yeah Yeah WE Speak English . Just Serve an original Wholphin short is one of the simplest short films to make a powerful political statement that you are every likely to see.

On a beach at the border of Mexico and California, two U.S. volleyball players play volleyball over the 12 foot slat fence wall with unseen Mexican players on the other side of the wall.   It’s a border wall that extends out into the sea.   Several facts about the wall are mentioned by the narrator as the Volleyball game continues.

 The 3 minute and 30 second DVD menu film by Dave Rabinovitch Tactical Advantage depicts a God like father sitting on a cloud with a young angel playing a lyre.  Eventually the angel becomes a spotter and the ‘God’ takes out a scope rifle and starts picking out targets (which we don’t see) to fire at.  The crisp, clean colorful look of the film makes the fantasy very real.

A Bee and a Cigarette  directed by Bob Odenkirk is a quirky, somewhat forced short sit-com involving two young men who can’t believe how lucky they are about to be with two young women.  Then one of the men unluckily steps on a Bee and a Cigarette and must be taken to an emergency room for his allergic reaction.  I liked it better than Odenkirk’s Pity Card film on Wholphin Number 2, but it’s a minor diversion not a unique enough work to be included on a collection that bills itself as a DVD magazine of rare and unseen shorts.  Odenkirk created the Mr. Show program and his off-beat quirky humor can be seen and experienced in many places. It's odd rhythms and language may keep it off network television but there's 100s of cable stations that could run it uncut.  Perhaps he's friends with McSweeney editors, perhaps he needed the work and Wholphin producers are fans.  Some will like it and be glad its here.
Next. 

In Alice Wincour’s stylish Kitchen, a pair of Lobsters taunts an Asian woman who can’t bring herself to prepare them for dinner.   The short doesn’t develop its idea, but is interesting to watch for most of its 14 and a half minutes. The lobsters flopping about become increasingly creepy, perhaps possessed. 

The 3 minute and 39 second DVD menu short Ballistic Jaw Propulsion of Trap Jar Ants, makes the little creatures seem almost like alien creature or maybe that’s just dangerous monsters.

 In Never like the First Time several different stories of having sex for the first time are animated in various styles.  A couple of the stories are unique, a couple are fairly ordinary, some are humorous, some sad, one is ‘lovely’….the presentation and animation are interesting enough.  It’s directed by Jonas Odell and last 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

David and Nathan Zellners 5 minute short film Flotsam /Jetsam is another DVD menu film playing with a collection of images to create a brief disturbing scene.

The Seven Minute and 18 second Bobby Bird is an experimental interactive short.  You can passively watch the various short vignettes or you can click on the tattoos of a nude male cartoon figure and have Bobby tell you the story of the various tattoos in ‘Clutch Cargo’ style animation.   Good original concepts, some of the stories are very interesting.

 The 5 and half minute filmed performance art piece The Russian Suicide Chair is filmed poorly and documents Dennis Hopper’s Jackass type stunt of surrounding himself with dynamite and blowing it up.  He is also interviewed about the ‘performance’.    It’s a big so-what and only of interest because it sounds like a crazy thing for Dennis Hopper to actually do.  The footage was recently‘re-discovered’. 

As before the DVD includes a very impressive booklet featuring printed short interviews with the filmmakers that is very interesting

As a bonus, Part 2 of the controversial documentary The Phantom Victory directed by Adam Curtis is included.    I will comment on it after I have seen the final Part 3 of the documentary.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV