Eat My Shorts: The Follow (2001)

Today I thought I would start what will hopefully be a new weekly occurrence. I have noticed a lot of movie fans who don't like short films, I for one, think that some short films are better than full feature length films! The amount of talent it takes to tell a story (usually in under 10 minutes) is staggering. In fact short film making is a breeding ground for talent, especially for directors! You need look no further than the resumes for some of Hollywood's biggest names to see that they got their start in either short films or music videos (some of which are essentially short films on their own...eg. Michael Jackson's Thriller)

Each week I will review a short film from my collection, or from the internet, or wherever....

I am going to start with one of my favorites:

The BMW short film series The Hire got critical acclaim when it was released. It drew a lot of large names and talent to its challenge of creating 8 short films based around a driver for hire played by Clive Owen.

My personal favorite of the 8 films made is The Follow directed by Wong Kar-wai, written by Andrew Kevin Walker and starring Mickey Rourke, Forest Whitaker and Adriana Lima.

It sees our driver paid to follow a paranoid actor's wife and report on her whereabouts...it is told almost poetically with a melodic pace, beautiful score and some great cinematography. It stands out from the other films in that there is very little action involved, the tale is more of a drama and once all of the pieces are in place you learn quite a bit about our driver's character.

You can watch this short in its entirety below, I welcome your thoughts!



The BMW series had some really good entries and I am sure I will be covering most of them over the course of this feature, but we shall see what happens next week...