TVSquad

On December 26 at 10pm in select markets, the PBS series Independent Lens will showcase three short films and the half hour comedy drama, My Life Disoriented.

The first short, Someday Flowers Bloom, looks at the life of a white country singer and his wife, a woman from Japan. When the two met, neither spoke the other's language. The other live-action short, which shared the grand prize for Independent Len's first online film festival, is Paris, 1951, the true story of a girl who finds out the man who raised her was not her real father, and that no photographs or physical reminders remain of him.

Between these two short films, Someday Flowers Bloom seems to take the most simplified approach. Paris, 1951 felt burdened by too many attempts at poetic visuals and forced symbolism. The last short is The Zit, and animated short directed by Mike Blum, who also directed the Baxter and MacGuire shorts on Comedy Central's Motherload site, and has worked on the technical side of the films Toy Story 3, Chicken Little, Dinosaur and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In the cartoon, a young boy's first zit seems to take on a life of its own, and he's forced to come up with different ways of destroying it once and for all, including dressing it as a bird so his cat will attack it.

Finally, there's the half hour comedy/drama My Life Disoriented, which Julia wrote about here. The special focuses on an Asian family, specifically the youngest daughter Kimberlee who must face life in a new school. Typical high school bullshit abounds, but being one of only a few Asian kids doesn't help matters, either. Admittedly, I have an aversion to any show having to do with high school because I found teenagers annoying even when I was a teenager, but I think the show deserves a chance if for no other reason than it presents realistic look at being a teenager without all the gloss and glamor that is the stuff of most TV high schools.