The Long and Short of It

This is a sweet, compact little film about the way total strangers can impact on each other's lives. Coming in at about four minutes and choreographed to the aria "Che Gelida Manina", it involves a simple but heartfelt story, a touch of humor, and puts forth the notion that everyone can have a role to play in the world -- all they have to do is look for the opportunity. I look forward to more work from Sean behind as well as in front of the camera. LOTR fans will recognize many of the faces here, and for those who have the Two Towers DVD, watch the 'making of' featurette on the short -- it is a riot!

I hope this little film met the criteria for inclusion in the Oscar race -- I would be delighted to cheer this to a win in the spring.

After I watched this, I had a big smile on my face. It's only about five minutes long, but it brings across an important message that should be around more where I am. It's about when a 'grizzled painters' trying to paste a poster up on the wall, but his ladders broken and he's struggling to get it up properly. Then a 3 1/2 foot tall woman and an 8 foot man help him. Just imagine a place where everybody stretched out there empty hands to help other people. It's inspiring. I love Sean Astin's acting and I hope he goes further with directing. It's exactly like what happened to make this, cast and crew working on the Lord of the Rings giving up their spare time to help. It's great! 10/10

Nice little film with the message of helping each other out in a hard situation. You can almost touch the friendly and sympathetic atmosphere. Visually, it wasn't that special but still you can see that there's much more professional film crew behind it than with your average short films. And I think the music suits this one well. Of course we wouldn't know of this if it wasn't on the LOTR DVD but it made me smile, maybe even chuckle a bit and that's enough. Worth watching it again some another time, especially as this doesn't really take that much time out of your life.

It was a typical weekend in Wellington, New Zealand when Sean Astin borrowed a camera or two from the "Lord of the Rings" set to shoot a short film he had written.

This is hardly on the scale of "The Lord of the Rings" - especially when one considers that it was made with some materials borrowed from the epic for one afternoon. Nevertheless, it is a very nice short film that is well worth five minutes of anyone's time.

I found the making of documentary to be quite humorous, with Andy Serkis describing his plot - even more insidiously evil than Gollum's plan to steal the One Ring - to rise through the ranks of the production crew :).

I would give this film four out of five, with the fifth star always being reserved for the films that are unspeakably wondrous, so there's no shame in not getting it, especially as small a picture as this.

This is a wonderful short by immerging filmmaker Sean Astin. Made on their days off while shooting Lord of the Rings in New Zealand it makes use of the lesser seen crew members in a gentle and simple story about a man in a spot of bother who is helped by some passersby. I absolutely love the idea that Elijah Wood is First Assistant Director and Andy Serkis is Assistant Location Manager.

To me this is really about the spirit of Peter Jackson's trilogy and the bonds that were formed. It's just a really sweet and endearing little film with some astonishly big names attached to it.