Short: Plastic Bag

2009 short film

Rating: none

Plot: A thrown-away plastic bag desperately tries to find his way back to his maker.

I'm going to start throwing more short films--maybe one a week--on the old blog. This first one is by the director of Man Push Cart, a movie I meant to watch during my famous "man" streak from a few years ago and then again during my New York Movie Festival. It's in my house now, so maybe I'll actually watch it soon.

This first short is a great way to spend 18 minutes. We're guided along on this quiet little journey by the plastic protagonists's inner thoughts, and those inner thoughts are read by one of my favorite voices--Werner Herzog's. Imagine Herzog narrating an existential journey of an inanimate object as it tries to navigate and find meaning in a world that it doesn't understand. The central metaphor here is a fragile one, and a lot of the imagery--a bag twisting in the air and later in the water among jellyfish--is spectacular. Nothing here is really anything new, but Herzog fans and folks who like movies that star inanimate objects will be interested.