Short Notice

The Academy Award-nominated movies hardest to get to see are the nominees for best live-action and animated short films. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, will give the public a chance to see them Friday at 8 p.m. in its Samuel Goldwyn Theater when it presents all the nominated films in both of these categories. They add up to an enjoyable evening’s entertainment, although the work in animation is far more venturesome and imaginative than in the live-action category.

In the live-action category is Bertha Navarro’s “De tripas, corazon” (Guts, Heart), a sweet-natured 18-minute vignette told with gentle, bemused humor. In it, a handsome, sensitive teenage Mexican boy (Gael Garcia Bernal) who delivers milk to a bordello attracts its most beautiful prostitute (Elpidia Carrillo), who decides to help him lose his virginity. It was filmed gorgeously in the ancient, picturesque El Pueblo de Concepcion de Buenos Aires.

By far the most original and rigorous of the five nominated live-action films--although it was not the winner--is Kim Magnusson’s “Ernst & Lyset” (Ernst and the Light), a tart, succinct 12-minute parable from Denmark in which a tired, hard-driving cleaning supplies salesman, Ernst, gives a lift to a man who convinces him that he, the hitchhiker, is indeed Jesus Christ--only to discover that Ernst regards him as obsolete.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 23-minute “Esposados” (Linked) is a giddy, funny, dark comedy, a Spanish-Canary Islands co-production in which a husband (Pedro Maria Sanchez, very Marcello Mastroianni-ish) struggles mightily to do in his vulgar, bossy wife (Anabel Alonso). Fresnadillo clearly has what it takes to make full-length features.

Even more sentimental than “Guts, Heart,” Antonello De Leo’s nine-minute “Senza Parole” (Wordless) finds a young man from Southern Italy who’s come to the big city with such a thick accent almost nobody can understand him except the pretty mute young woman who attracts him.

David Frankel’s 22-minute “Dear Diary,” which won the live-action short Oscar, is a strong calling card for the motion picture industry, as expert as it is familiar in its lightly humorous telling of an attractive Manhattan advertising agency art director (Bebe Neuwirth, very sharp and lively) coping with turning 40. Neuwirth is well-teamed with Brian Kerwin as her overly preoccupied attorney husband.

Timothy Hittle’s vibrant 7 1/2-minute stop-motion adventure “Canhead” finds Jay Clay, a Claymation figure, wandering through a surreal landscape where he encounters Canhead, who looks to be a cross between Godzilla and the Terminator. “Canhead” has a notably jaunty, exotic score. And in Canada’s Richard Condie’s amusing seven-minute comic opera “La Salla,” a creature becomes preoccupied with a cannon, which is among the many toys in his playroom.

Peter Lord’s “Wat’s Pig” is an 11-minute gem, placing the familiar tale of twin brothers, separated at birth, in the most beautifully realized world of medieval grandeur. And Germany-based director-photographer Tyron Montgomery and producer-writer-animator Thomas Stellmach took the Oscar for their 30-minute “Quest,” a ruefully ironic fable so inspired and brilliantly realized that it could become a classic. In it, a thirsty Sandman, following the sound of dripping water, wanders through surreal worlds of paper--imagine the Sahara covered with big, overlapping sheets of paper--the first of his adventures. This time the academy honored a masterpiece. Information: (310) 247-3600.

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Among the films screening Friday and Saturday in the American Cinematheque’s continuing Agnes Varda retrospective at Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, is the local premiere of the poignant “The ‘Young Girls’ Turn 25” (1993). Varda’s late husband, director Jacques Demy, and composer Michel Legrand followed up their international hit “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” with another charming romantic musical fantasy, “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967). Although it was not the huge hit abroad that “Umbrellas” was, it had an amazing cast, including Catherine Deneuve and her sister Francoise Dorleac as twins, Danielle Darrieux as their mother, plus no less than Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, top Broadway dancer Grover Dale and French stars Michel Piccoli and Jacques Perrin. It also revived Rochefort, which had suffered the closure of its shipyard.

Consequently, Rochefort decided to hold a gala celebration in 1992 to mark the 25th anniversary of the film’s release, which included the dedication of streets renamed in honor of Demy, who died in 1990, and Dorleac, killed in a 1967 car accident. Varda’s irresistible documentary on the celebration includes behind-the-scenes footage on the making of “Young Girls” shot by Varda and Belgian filmmaker Andre Delvaux plus pertinent clips. She interviews key anniversary participants Deneuve (who declares, “I won’t let sadness overcome me”) and Legrand; Demy’s great art director Bernard Evein, a master of bold color; others involved with the complicated, four-month shoot--a musical shot entirely on location and in two languages, plus many townspeople who appeared in the film, and in some instances, whose lives were transformed by the experience. Above all, “The ‘Young Girls’ Turn 25” is an homage by Varda to Demy, a loving and luminous companion film to Varda’s “Jacquot de Nantes,” which closes the retrospective June 20. Varda will be on hand for discussions throughout the weekend. Information: (213) 466-FILM.

The American Cinematheque also is screening tonight at 7:30 Arthur Borman’s grating comedy “Shooting Lily,” about a wedding videographer of overweening obnoxiousness who can’t resist constantly turning the camera on his wife, forever trying to make her do things that--with very good reason--she absolutely does not want to do. When shortly into the film he gets his richly deserved comeuppance, Borman daringly asks us to care what happens to him, a feat you may well find easy to resist.

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Also skippable: “Sudden Manhattan,” which opens Friday at the Monica 4-Plex and the University 6 in Irvine. Adrienne Shelley, a most beguiling actress, has made her writing and directing debut in which she apparently works out a lot of angst over her love life and career in terrifically tedious fashion. Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741; University 6: (714) 854-8811.

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The New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd., is screening tonight at 7:30 “Pather Panchali” (1955), the first installment in Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy, tracing a Bengali village boy’s maturity and his leaving home to make his way in Calcutta. Also screening is Ray’s superb “The Music Room” (1958), a remarkable study of the decline of an impoverished nobleman whose abiding passion is to hold costly, lengthy recitals of classical Indian music in his decaying mansion, a stately structure resembling the White House. Ray views his obsolete mandarin (Chabi Biswas) as a tragic figure, a victim of his own overweening pride and the inevitable crumbling of his princely way of life in a time of change. So sensitive an actor was Biswas that he was able to make this arrogant, selfish nobleman’s obsession for music seem a grand folly and not mere frivolity, thus gaining compassion rather than contempt for him.

The New Beverly Cinema will be screening “Aparajito” (1956), the second part of the Apu trilogy, and “Charulata” (The Lonely Wife) (1964) Wednesday and June 19, and on June 25 and 26, “The World of Apu” (1959) and “Devi” (The Goddess) (1960). Information: (213) 938-4038.

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Robert Snyder’s 1988 “Michelagniolo: Self-Portrait,” which screens at LACMA’s Bing Theater tonight at 7 and Saturday at 2 p.m., is as rapturous as it is stately, a splendid survey of the key works of Michelangelo accompanied by his own words, spoken with restraint and feeling by Snyder himself. (The film’s title comes from the Tuscan variant of Michelangelo’s name, which he used as his signature.)

Snyder, a master documentarian, likes to refer to his film as the only possible traveling show of Michelangelo’s work, but his film is much, much more than that. It allows us to view the mighty statue of David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Pieta and other of Michelangelo’s great monuments from a variety of perspectives otherwise unavailable to us.

As the camera caresses both marble and canvas alike, and as we hear Michelangelo’s thoughts about his life and work, Snyder is able to evoke the very spirit of the man who described his work as a sculptor as “freeing the figure encased within the marble.” We are able to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling not only revealed as an unfolding narrative but as a glorious resolution of Michelangelo’s conflict between the spirit and the flesh.

“Michelagniolo: Self-Portrait” is itself a work of art, and a companion piece to Snyder’s earlier Academy Award-winning documentary, “Michelangelo: The Titan.” Information: (213) 857-6010.