Short Cuts: THE KINDA SUTRA and FREE LUNCH

THE KINDA SUTRA 

Everything you always wanted to know about sex and are afraid your parents told you wrong. That’s THE KINDA SUTRA. Jessica Yu‘s delightful short exposes myriad adults’ misguided perceptions about conception and the more clinical explanations of today’s kids, including her own. Endearing direct-camera confessions are interspersed with animated sequences sorta in the style of the Kama… well, you get the picture once you get the title.

FREE LUNCH

I have often declared: “Every short film could be ten minutes shorter; even those that are less than ten minutes to begin with.” Writer-director Rick Curnutt might just be the first filmmaker to change my mantra. Even though it is already a form-defying 35 minutes long, FREE LUNCH needn’t be ten minutes shorter, it ought to be and hour longer. It feels like a generous swath ripped from the fabric of a feature. The story of a young man attempting to subvert his bourgeois upbringing by piloting a contempo chuck wagon to serve the working classes draws you in, then abandons you mid-climb, rather than dangling you from a cliff’s edge. You’ll want to know to what happens next AND what happened before. As is, FREE LUNCH is oddly disappointing despite its strengths — appealing lead actor, able supporting cast, sensible cinematography — because of the promise it suggests. It’s an engaging,yet incomplete character study akin to tuning in to a particularly compelling episode of a talk show teasing the reunion of long-lost twins and then neglecting to return after the commercial break. Rick Curnutt may be a terrific storyteller, but I’ll reserve judgment till I actually see The End.

Warren w/Rick Curnutt @ AIFF '09