S Is for Bird

Bird is an employee at a family fun centre with ball pit, mini-bowling lanes and trampolines, providing kids with fun, parents with a distracting respite and employees with a depressing source of income. When a 6-year old turns up in the back of the lanes, Bird returns her to her mother but the girl comes back and, as he reads her a book about the letter S, he finds inspiration that perhaps today is the day that he should make a move on the hot snack bar girl.

This short film nicely manages to sit between two stools because on one hand it is an unlikely romantic comedy with a cute kid, an unlikely series of events and a nice romantic conclusion, but then on the other hand it is also set in a grimly familiar world and seems to have a base of depressive realism to it. Neither one of these aspects works perfectly and indeed they bump up against each other in a way that those looking for either one to dominate will find a bit distracting, but together the mix just about works to produce a short that draws on the strengths of both even if it also has the problems too. So the grim reality of the workplace is there and is mostly nicely done in its dreariness while the child character is a bit too sweet but still works. Watts leads the film well but is a bit too obvious with his appearance and slouch – he feels short of being a character which did hurt how much I felt for him.

It is amusing even if it is not hilarious, and it is sweet even if it falls short of real charm – but the mix of material is good and works better than I would have expected, even if it makes sacrifices with that.

Probably my least favourite of genre is the romantic comedy probably down to the fact that there's two types of people I can't stand . One is people who think they're romantic when they're not and people who think they're funny when they're not , so devoting almost two hours of my life to unfunny unromantic tosh which will invariably have a happy ending seems like my idea of cinematic hell . This Canadian short film written and directed by Mark Sadowski does fall firmly in to the romantic comedy genre but it's a much superior entry probably down to the short running time and the feeling you're not actually watching a rom-com until everything is played out . Matt Watts puts a lot of good work in as Bird the eponymous anti-hero of the title and makes a good anti-hero in much the same way as Ben Stiller ( Himself very good at these roles ) would have brought to the part . Maybe not a classic short film S IS FOR BIRD is twelve minutes of efficient light hearted fun