Worst. Movie. Ever.

Last night with some excitement we went to see the Oscar-nominated live short films, which are only showing in a few cities. Last year we went to a combination of the live and animated short films, and it was great. Very diverse - you never knew what you were going to get from one to the next, like a plate of delightful little mixed hors d'oeuvres.

By contrast, this year's collection of live short films could have been subtitled "Five Short Films About Death." Three of them were about men whose wives die. One of them has an extra guy whose wife dies, along with his baby, just for good measure. That one, an Irish film called Six Shooter, was, bar none, the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. Every moment of it was unpleasant. To make things worse, the theater ran it fifth in the lineup, so it would be the last thing you remember from the evening. And then they forgot about us and left us sitting in total darkness. It was so unpleasant that I had to take a sleeping pill to overcome the memory of it and find the blissful peace of sleep. Seriously, I'm not kidding, it was that awful.

I can't really say more because I'm employing the technique from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to completely erase that time from my brain.

The one film that was not actually about death was about working the night shift at a grocery store, which is probably akin to death. But it featured the sweet-looking young man who played Percy Wood in the Harry Potter movies, and good music, and naked women, and practical jokes played on the sexist boss. That one, and the one about the psychiatrist with six weeks to live, were practically knee-slappers, in relative terms. Why couldn't they have put one of those last? I probably could've managed a chemistry-free night of sleep.

That being said, I still like short film as a genre. But if you're thinking about going to the Oscar-nominated shorts, let me recommend you try the animated films this year.