Logorama
The movie that provided me the most chuckles per minute at Sundance was one of the shorts that played in the Shorts Program I, perhaps the best shorts program I've ever seen at Sundance (which may have been why they chose it as one of the opening night screenings). It contained four shorts, one of them being the latest Spike Jonze film I'm Here.
But the short I'm referring to is the one called Logorama, and the best way to see it is to not read anything about it beforehand. Normally that's all I'd say, keeping this post spoiler free.
But there's a decent chance this short never gets picked up and released, and so I'm inclined to explain why, and those of you who don't want to know more can stop reading.
The difficulty of securing a release is not just that it's a short movie (and who watches shorts except at film festivals and on compilation DVDs) but that the filmmakers, French directing collective H5, madeit almost entirely out of corporate logos and brand characters, over 2,000 in total, without asking permission. Not only that, many of the brand mascots are depicted in ways their companies would likely choke on. Ronald McDonald as a machine gun toting, f-bomb dropping bank robber? Mr. Kleen as a gay tour guide at a local zoo? It's not just a satire of our branding-saturated society, it's a funny spoof of Hollywood movie tropes.
There is a full, albeit fuzzy version of "Logorama" online on this blog. I can't imagine this embedded copy is a legal one, but even with an army of lawyers this short might not see the light of legal distribution again, so a low-res stream may be better than nothing at all.
Ironically, the filmmakers did seem to have cleared the music which seems like putting a dab of sunscreen on your nose while jogging in the nude on a sunny day.