++Wes Andersonâs new Netflix shorts are the latest case for the form. +
++The short film is a neglected form of American entertainment, prevalent â you can find them most anywhere, and pretty much every filmmaker has made a few â and yet barely watched or talked about. Thatâs strange, when you think about it. We talk about movies (by which we mean features), and we talk about TV. Paramount recently uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok, in 23 separate clips, and the platformâs subscriptions spiked. +
++Short films, however, dwell in a liminal space between movies and TV, and they simply donât get the same respect and interest. Even anthology shows like Black Mirror, which might be described as a collection of short films, are designed to generate meaning through their juxtaposition. I know the stand-alone short film is still a rarity on my entertainment menu, and I suspect I am not alone. +
++In a sense that may be because nobody really knows what a short film ⊠is. According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences â the group that gives out the Oscars, including three for short films (animated, live action, and documentary) â a short film runs a maximum of 40 minutes, including credits. Thatâs about the length of a network TV drama episode, once you strip out the commercials, but a short film nominee could be, in theory, the length of an Instagram Reel. +
++A feature-length film, according to the Academy, is anything over 40 minutes. But that has little to do with the length attributed to most movies. (When was the last time you went to the theater for a movie that was, say, 61 minutes long?) Itâs vanishingly rare for any feature film to be less than around 82 minutes. +
++I tend to think of a short film as being an hourish and under, with its own defined arc, and a feature as anything longer. But when you think of it, the distinction is almost meaningless and randomly invented, the product of years of business and technological decisions and not having to do with any natural timeframe. Why not sit down and watch something for 25 minutes? +
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Netflix
++Thereâs something uniquely pleasurable about watching a tight, elegant short thatâs exactly the length it needs to be, not inflated to an arbitrary length. Topics that would be brutal at full length (palliative care, for instance, as in the 2019 Oscar-nominated End Game) are not just bearable but moving at 40 minutes. Jokes and punchlines land perfectly in shorts, without requiring a lot of exposition or character development. (Those of us raised on Pixar shorts know this well.) Short films give filmmakers permission to take risks and play, in part because the audience might tolerate experimentation or frustration better if they know it wonât take up their whole afternoon. +
++Shorts generally get the most airtime at film festivals, and some garner significant fanfare. Just this year, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. Pedro Almodovarâs 31-minute gay cowboy film, Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, premiered at Cannes this year and has been making the festival rounds ever since. (Itâs bankrolled in part by Saint Laurent Productions, part of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion empire.) Once Within a Time, an experimental creation fable from the iconic documentarian Godfrey Reggio, clocks in at 52 minutes, which is just right for the material, and its release was accompanied by a retrospective series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. +
++And consider the recent shorts from Wes Anderson, whose work is easy for me to admire but difficult for me to love. His stylistic tics, not in any sense bad, are difficult for me to track at length. I find myself rewinding and rewinding because I keep getting snagged on details or zone out while narrators talk. By about the 40-minute mark, my brain has entered stasis. (Yes, I always take a couple cracks at watching before I write a review.) +
++Luckily, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar â one of a whopping four Anderson films that dropped on Netflix last week â clocks in at a cool 39 minutes, and itâs the longest of them. Anderson has adapted author Roald Dahl before (in 2009âs The Fantastic Mr. Fox), and as is his custom, he works with a bevy of familiar actors, like Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert Friend, and Ben Kingsley. (New to Andersonâs stable are Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade.) +
++Henry Sugar and the three other films (The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison, each of which run 17 minutes) are also recognizably Andersonian in their aesthetic, design, and thematic obsessions. I sat down to watch the longest, Henry Sugar, with a little trepidation, knowing my spotty history with Anderson. But though I did have to rewind a couple times, I found myself buzzing with enjoyment. Henry Sugar is the story of a very wealthy cad who goes through some very unexpected personal growth, and as I watched I could also feel myself growing: Did I finally feel Wes Andersonâs work, in my very soul? +
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++Maybe. But watching the other three, much shorter films â all of which are pretty intense â proved that theyâre enjoyable and digestible because they simply begin and end pretty quickly. I didnât have to lock in for an hour and a half. I could throw it on and have a whole, lovely, freestanding cinematic experience with my morning coffee. +
++If anything good can come out of the streaming revolution, it could be (or, at least, could have been) the cultivation of an audience and a market for short films. That would go a long way toward expanding the voices, perspectives, stories, styles, and creative visions we encounter. Film students, budding artists raising funds, filmmakers who want to test out a concept or technique, and directors from marginalized regions and communities who canât get major studio or investor backing often start out making shorts. With an audience and enough interest, that could be funneled into further work â not just directing a big-budget movie, but telling more stories that work best at shorter lengths. +
++Of course, that would require us to go find them, and the companies that distribute them to put more heart into directing audiences toward them. You probably have easy access to some world-class shorts right now. Netflix, like other streamers, has an entire âShortsâ genre category under âMoviesâ on its site, which includes many documentaries, but scripted fiction and animated shorts, too. The internet, quite literally, is awash with short films, whether on YouTube or some specialty site. +
++The Anderson shorts werenât particularly easy to find on Netflix in the first few days after release, and itâs not totally clear to the casual viewer that theyâre linked without digging into the interface. Streaming platforms have a long way to go before they figure out how to coax viewers into watching the shorts. +
++But in a world where so much attention is drawn toward very short-form content â recall TikTok Mean Girls â this canât be rocket science. Maybe The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a feint in the right direction. Who says how long a movie has to be, anyway? +
++The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison are all streaming on Netflix. +
++The IDF has launched retaliatory strikes after hundreds of Israeli citizens are dead and thousands wounded. +
++Israel has officially declared war against Hamas following an unprecedented assault on Israeli territory by the Gaza-based militant group. The declaration comes after the Biden administrationâs promise of additional support for Israel and the announced movement of several US Navy warships and aircraft squadrons into the Eastern Mediterranean. Several countries, including Egypt and Jordan, have volunteered to try to defuse the situation diplomatically. +
++Meanwhile, fighting in southern Israel and Gaza continued on Sunday after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a large, complex, and well-coordinated attack on Israel early Saturday from the territory it controls in Gaza. This comes after months of simmering conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. +
++A group of fighters from Hamasâs military arm, the Al-Qassam brigades, entered Israel Saturday â an unprecedented breach of the security apparatus that controls Palestinian movement in and out of Israel â killing at least 700 Israelis, and at least 2,243 were injured, according to the New York Times. At least 413 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,300 injured, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reports, both in retaliatory strikes and in gunfights. There have also been reports of Hamas fighters taking hostages back into Gaza, holding Israelis hostage in their homes, and of gunfights in southern Israeli towns. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on Sunday that his office is working to confirm that Americans are among the missing and dead. +
++Hamas has launched thousands of rockets and mortars into Israeli territory after the initial barrage of at least 2,200 on Saturday morning with additional volleys happening throughout Saturday and Sunday. That number is indicative of the massive scale of this operation; in the whole of a 50-day war between Hamas and Israel in 2014, the group, alongside others, launched a total of 4,564 rockets and mortars into Israel. +
++âOur enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known,â Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said about the attacks. âWe are in a war and we will win it.â Under Netanyahuâs leadership, Israel has become increasingly hostile to Palestinians and encouraged Israeli settlements in parts of the West Bank, another Palestinian enclave. +
++Meanwhile, discussions about forming an emergency unity government between Netanyahu, Israelâs opposition leader Yair Lapid, and National Unity party leader Benny Gantz happened, but no clear resolution had been made as of Sunday. +
++The Israeli Defense Forces have already retaliated with airstrikes against Gaza, which has suffered from blockades by Israel and Egypt for years and has been described as an âopen-air prison.â Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militant group based in southern Lebanon, have praised the attacks. Saudi Arabia, which is in negotiations to normalize relations with Israel, issued a statement calling for de-escalation, specifically calling out Israel for its âcontinued occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities.â +
++In Gaza, fears of a ground assault are growing as residents have been warned in a speech by Netanyahu to âleave nowâ after he threatened to turn Hamas strongholds âinto rubble.â Many Palestinian civilians have sought shelter at schools set up by the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, as Israel hits Gaza with repeated air strikes. +
++Hamas leadership is calling the operation âAl-Aqsa Floodâ or âAl-Aqsa Stormâ after the mosque in Jerusalem, which is Islamâs third-holiest site. Palestinian worshippers have been repeatedly harassed and attacked by Israeli police and settlers at the site. +
++The attacks came on the final day of Sukkot, a Jewish celebration of the harvest, as well as on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, threatening the existence of the young nation. That, too, was a surprise offensive, and though Israel eventually won the war, victory in that conflict was far from assured. +
++Israelâs security lapse is shocking +
++Hamas managed to pull off a stunning assault on several fronts, not only shooting mortars and rockets into Israeli territory but also staging an invasion via air and sea. That infiltration, as many experts have noted, is particularly shocking given Israelâs Mossad intelligence service and the tight control under which Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank live. +
++âThe Israelis pride themselves on having world-class intelligence, with the Mossad, with Shin Bet, with Israeli military intelligence,â Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy, told Vox. âThey do â from the most exquisite human sources to the most capable technical intelligence gathering capabilities [including] cyber and signals intelligence.â +
++Thatâs coupled with the basic surveillance that Gazans and other Palestinians live under all the time, like checkpoints to enter and exit Palestinian territory. +
++That culture of extreme surveillance made Saturdayâs unprecedented infiltration all the more shocking; the fact that Hamas was able to pull off an operation of this size and complexity, not to mention infiltrate Israel and, as has been reported, take hostages, would have been almost unthinkable before Saturday. Yet fighters infiltrated as many as 22 Israeli sites as far as 15 miles away from Gazaâs border with Israel. +
++Though there is speculation about Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in the operation, there are no concrete details about what that entails as of yet. âIran has played a major role in helping Hamas with its rocket and missile programs, and mortar programs,â Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. âThereâs no question about that, which was a big part of the attack,â he added. +
++Iran and Hezbollah also provide funding, training, and intelligence to Hamas fighters, all of which could have contributed to Saturdayâs attack, both Byman and Clarke said. +
++However, given the tensions within Israeli society and the simmering conflict between Israel and Palestine over settlements in the West Bank and traditionally Palestinian sites in East Jerusalem, a conflict of some sort was likely. +
++Israelâs internal politics under Netanyahu have created a maximally polarized society under minority rule by Netanyahuâs Likud party and its right-wing coalition partners, who favor Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory as well as other conservative religious values. A recent decision to change the balance of power between Israelâs Supreme Court and its parliament, the Knesset, sent shockwaves through secular Israeli society, sparking mass protests across several sectors of the country, including Israeli Defense Force reservists. +
++The important question: Why did Hamas attack Israel? +
++Hamas is likely seeking the return of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, according to experts. In the past, the group has successfully traded a small number of Israeli hostages for Palestinians held in Israel, notably keeping Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for five years before exchanging him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, the New York Times reported. +
++The number of hostages is as yet unknown, but they are reportedly being held both within Gaza itself and in Israeli villages where Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters have been able to infiltrate. The hostages include a âsubstantialâ number of both civilians and IDF soldiers, the Israeli military confirmed Saturday. +
++Saturdayâs attack, though itâs unprecedented in scale, complexity, and surprise factor is all happening in the context of increased settlements in the West Bank, a brutal, 16-year blockade on Gaza by Israel and Egypt, the political vacuum in the Palestinian territories, the displacement of generations of Palestinians since the founding of the Israeli state, and the apartheid under which Palestinians live. +
+ ++Most Gazans are either refugees from the 1948 Nakba, when mass numbers of Palestinians were displaced during the Arab-Israeli War, or descendants of those refugees, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Theyâve lived under a strict blockade by Israel and Egypt, relying on foreign aid to access basic necessities, and about one-third of Gazans live in extreme poverty according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. There is also little mobile connectivity, Hassan said, making communication with the outside world difficult. +
++Diana Buttu, a Haifa-based analyst and former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian negotiators, told Vox in an interview that many Palestinians were jubilant at the start of the attacks. âWhen you punch your abuser in the face, it feels good,â she said. âThe first reaction was elation â we saw that both in Gaza and in the West Bank. In Ramallah [in the West Bank] people were over-the-top happy because it was not just a punch in the face,â but also because Hamas was able to breach the security state that defines and diminishes so many Palestiniansâ lives. +
++Palestinians have also lived without real political representation or power for decades, both within Israel and within the Palestinian territories. Though Hamas nominally controls Gaza and the Palestinian Authority the West Bank, these parties have been unable to negotiate a solution to the crisis or to uphold democracy within the Palestinian territory. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, has been in office since 2005, and neither Gaza nor the West Bank has held elections since 2006 when Hamas and Fatah, Abbasâs party, failed to make a coalition government for the West Bank and Gaza. +
++With Israel normalizing relationships with Arab nations â including, potentially, Saudi Arabia â and the US unlikely to take an active role in negotiations between Israel and Palestinian leadership, some Palestinians feel they have no other choice, Hassan said. +
++âThe message has been clear to Palestinians,â Hassan said. âThey canât wait on some Arab savior and they canât wait on the US government to act as peace broker â that theyâre going to have to take matters into their own hands, whatever that looks like.â +
++Israelâs response is already ramping up +
++If the past is any indication, Israelâs response will be intended to be deterrent, not proportional â and Palestinian casualties will be heavy. +
++âAll means are relevant, all means are legitimate against this barbaric and horrific attack toward innocent civilians â women, children. This is a barbaric organization and it is going to pay an extremely heavy price for its crimes,â Amichai Chikli, Israeli minister of diaspora affairs, said on the BBCâs Newshour program on Saturday. +
++Israeli airstrikes have already completely flattened several residential buildings in Gaza as well as a building that held Hamas offices. Previous conflicts between Hamas and Israel have caused disproportionate devastation for Palestinians, including decimation of their infrastructure and civilian deaths from airstrikes. +
++Because Israel was caught so off guard, it is likely to hit back hard. âDeterrence is about disproportionality,â Byman said. âHamas has to take a lot more to be deterred.â +
++âNetanyahu in the past has tried to avoid significant ground operations in Gaza, because he knows it will be messy â really messy,â Byman said. The presence of Israeli citizens in Gaza complicates any retaliation effort, though, due to the sensitivity of that issue in Israeli consciousness. âThe question is, will the political dynamic push him to that, even if it might be self-defeating for Israel in the long term?â +
++Correction, October 7, 3:15 pm ET: A previous version of this story misstated that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the second-holiest site in Islam. It is the third. +
++Hereâs how a war between Israel and Hamas could play out. +
++Israel suffered its most devastating attack in decades Saturday when Hamas militants launched thousands of rockets from Gaza and infiltrated several Israeli towns, killing hundreds of people and taking an as-yet-unknown number of hostages, both military and civilian. +
++Given the scale and brutality of the attack, Israel may launch a ground invasion in Gaza, in addition to the airstrikes the military is already conducting in the region. That could mean a long, bloody battle with significant deaths on both sides, but with Palestinians bearing the brunt of the casualties and destruction. +
++The death toll on both sides is already in the hundreds, with injuries from airstrikes in Gaza and rocket attacks and gunfights in southern Israel numbering in the thousands. The Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, began launching retaliatory strikes shortly after the initial shock invasion Saturday; on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially declared war against Hamas. Although the next phase of Israelâs operation in Gaza hasnât yet unfolded, itâs likely to be catastrophic given previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza, as well as Netanyahuâs heightened rhetoric. +
++âIn a way, this is our 9/11,â IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said in a video statement posted to the social network X on Sunday. Videos have circulated showing dead Israelis, as well as Israeli civilians being captured by Hamas militants, presumably to be held in Gaza. Though some hostages in Israeli towns near the Gaza border have been freed and their captors killed, many remain in captivity and some are presumed dead. +
+ ++Netanyahu, meanwhile, has told Gazans to leave the territory and threatened to turn it into âa deserted island,â Al Jazeera reported Sunday; many civilians are sheltering at schools built by the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, some of which have been damaged by Israeli airstrikes, the Associated Press reports. +
++Israel has fought multiple wars against Palestinians and Arab nations including Syria and Egypt; it has also launched ground operations in Gaza, most recently in 2014. Though Israeli military policy is to use disproportionate force in Gaza as a deterrent strategy, that has so far failed to enact durable security, limit Hamasâs ability to strike Israel, or allow space in Israeli politics for any sort of political negotiation which could lead to a more peaceful future. +
++Civilians have reportedly left Gaza City and areas near the border in anticipation of a ground invasion, according to the New York Times, and Netanyahu has called up IDF reservists and ordered 24 villages and towns near the border to be evacuated. The government has also shut off electricity to the region and halted the flow of fuel and goods to Gaza, which has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt for 16 years. +
++What are the odds of a ground invasion of Gaza? +
++âI donât know the likelihood of a ground invasion â I would say, if I were calculating odds, the chances of a ground invasion are greater than they were in previous rounds of violence in Gaza,â Khaled Elgindy, director of the Middle East Instituteâs Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, told Vox. âIn the past, weâve seen reports of ground invasions being imminent and theyâve turned out to be inaccurate or even deliberate misinformation put out there by the Israeli military.â +
++The Netanyahu government has typically preferred airstrikes to retaliate against Hamasâs rocket attacks, as they minimize Israeli casualties and inflict serious damage in Gaza. During the last major attack on Gaza, in May 2021, Israeli airstrikes ostensibly targeting Hamas leadership and targets also hit civilian sites including media offices, residential buildings, and health care facilities. More than 250 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the 11-day conflict. +
++âNetanyahu ⊠heâs always been very cautious around widespread use of military force,â Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. âHe hasnât done the kind of big wars like we saw in Lebanon in 2006, so he tends to be cautious. But it may be hard to be cautious in these circumstances. +
++Israel has put boots on the ground in Gaza before, and occupied the territory from 1967 to 2005, when it unilaterally withdrew from the region. +
++When they are ordered, ground incursions tend to be horrific, causing devastating infrastructure damage and heavy civilian casualties on the Palestinian side. In 2014, simmering conflict in Gaza exploded into a major Hamas rocket offensive into Israel, which responded with a 19-day ground invasion. Though there was an Egypt-mediated ceasefire in August of that year, 2,251âŻPalestinians â including 1,462 civilians â and 73 Israelis were killed in the fighting, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. +
++Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told Vox that, given the nature of the attack and current public and political sentiment in Israel, a ground invasion was âvery likely.â +
++âThe mood in Israel is such that another round of airstrikes or something like that is seen to pale in comparison to the task,â he said, ânot only for the general mood of vengeance in the country â which is certainly there â but also the question of how can Hamas capabilities actually be degraded and a repeat of some sort be prevented.â +
++Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009 wreaked havoc on the Gaza Strip; the first day of airstrikes alone killed 230 Palestinians. After a week of intensive aerial bombardment, Israeli forces launched a two-week invasion from the north and the east while Israelâs navy shelled the area from the sea. Overall, though sources vary in specifics, around 1,400 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed during that operation. +
+ ++Israelâs asymmetric response is supposed to serve a deterrent purpose, Byman told Vox, but the country has also, at least in the past, had a vested interest in keeping Hamas in power. According to a 2017 research brief by the RAND corporation, Israel has the military capability to wipe out Hamas, but doing so could perhaps be even riskier than not, given that an even more extreme organization could come into power â or that Israel could be put into the position of governing the territory itself. âAs such, Israelâs grand strategy became âmowing the grassâ â accepting its inability to permanently solve the problem and instead repeatedly targeting leadership of Palestinian militant organizations to keep violence manageable.â +
++âWe want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital,â one Israeli defense analyst told the research briefâs authors. +
++Hereâs what a ground war might look like, given what we know +
++Just two days into the war, what comes next is impossible to predict. But given whatâs known about previous conflicts and the capabilities of both sides, the coming weeks are likely to be bloody. UN agencies have urged both sides to avoid civilian casualties, though reports of civilian deaths on both sides are already high. +
++âThe immediate phase will be Israel sweeping up its own villages and towns, making sure that there are no Hamas fighters left there,â Sachs said. The IDF confirmed that assessment in an email statement to Vox. +
++Israel will then need to gather intelligence on where Hamas leadership is and determine the number of hostages missing and their locations, which will be a challenging task, Sachs said. +
++International leaders have affirmed unwavering support for Israel, and the US has pledged to send additional military materiel, âincluding munitions,â according to a press release from the Department of Defense, with the first tranche of security assistance headed to Israel today. +
++In addition to the materiel support, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in Sunday afternoonâs statement that the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes an aircraft carrier and multiple guided missile destroyers, has been deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean. +
++âWe have also taken steps to augment U.S. Air Force F-35, F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons in the region,â the statement reads. The Department of Defense did not respond to Voxâs additional questions about this change in force posture by publication time Sunday, but such a show of force is likely meant to serve as a deterrent to other actors like Hezbollah or Iran. +
++Despite the overwhelming Israeli and US military might it faces, Hamas has not yet shown signs of backing down. +
++âHamas has lost the element of surprise but it has likely prepared to stick in for the long haul, probably has a lot of supplies,â Colin Clarke, research director at the Soufan Group, told Vox in an email. âI think Hamas still has a robust arsenal of rockets and could be planning more ambushes. I wouldnât be surprised to see suicide bombings, if Hamas is able to infiltrate more operatives onto Israeli soil. But once Israel gears up and mobilizes, its military is likely to make quick work of Hamas, killing and capturing its leaders and decimating its infrastructure.â +
++And despite the possibility â even likelihood â of serious casualties in the coming days and weeks, Sachs said, âIsrael is not about to de-escalate now.â +