Weekends

This Oscar-nominated short offers a surrealistic point-of-view movie as a small boy spends the weekdays with his mother, who is studying to be an accountant, and the weekends with his father, who has cool samurai swords and plays video games with his son. These sequences are interspersed with dream sequences of flying. Each parent tries to move on with life, which causes the protagonist some alarm, but in the end, nothing much happens and life goes on.

Has animation entered its anecdotage? That period of long, rambling discourses that seem to start out well and pertinently, continue with some interesting-seeming details and then after a white, end with nothing at all being different? Because that's what happens here. This is quite unlike being in a phone conversation with my great-aunt Esther, who would keep you on the phone for hours. Every forty-five minutes like clockwork, she would say "You know what I mean?" When you replied "Yes, Esther" to prove you hadn't hung up on her, she would switch from that interminable story to a different endless one.

Perhaps this short might have some value to kids whose parents are going through a divorce, wondering if the world will ever move on. However, the program at the IFC where I saw this notes "Not suitable for children under 8". So much for that thought.