DVDS: Let's Keep This Short

The author Dave Eggers and his pal Brent Hoff, an editor for Eggers's humor journal McSweeney's, are big fans of short films. Alas, says Hoff, "they're too short to show on TV, and they don't play in theaters because they'd rather show some great trivia about Adam Sandler." The two men had an idea: what if they launched a DVD "magazine," in which each new "issue" was a disc of short films? The concept became a new quarterly called Wholphin. That's "whale" crossed with "dolphin." Don't ask why. Focus instead on the first issue, which features a potent Iraq-war documentary by David O. Russell ("Three Kings") and a hilarious short starring John C. Reilly, plus goofy stuff like "a dude singing 'Stairway to Heaven' backwards. It's awesome," says Hoff. He's right. It is. But the jewel is a 1999 documentary about Al Gore by director Spike Jonze. Screened publicly only once--on a lazy afternoon at the 2000 Democratic convention--the film shows a hidden side of Gore: funny, warm and relaxed. "I don't know if the film would've changed anything, but he was clearly misunderstood," Jonze says. "I wish more people saw it." They can now.

© 2006