Your Mother And I

Johnna (Julia Sarah Stone) is helping her dad (Don McKellar) to prepare dinner - or at least has been co-opted in, dragged away from her music and illicit cigarettes to grate cheese. As she works, her dad, in between offering instructions on the importance of Muenster and pecorino, reminisces about her mother. These aren't the usual short of recollections, but tales of blue-sky thinking, about how the pair of them did remarkable things with wind power, roads and, unaccountably, llamas in between bouts of remarkable - and for Johnna toe-curling - bouts of sex.

Actor-turned director Anne Maguire has adapted her tale from a Dave Eggers short story - a first-person monlogue to a daughter whose voice is never heard. Here, Johnna gets to say her part but this is an incredibly dense monologue, ill-advisedly shorn of some of Egger's asides concerning the preparation of the dinner.

Part of the point is that the dad's one-sided discussion is boring for Johnna, although it does eventually come to have some emotional resonance. Unfortunately, it becomes pretty dull for the viewer, too. McKellar delivers the huge chunks adeptly but there is simply monologue overload with little in the way of visual invention to lift it.

When you read the Eggers story, there's a sense of playfulness and humour, swapping it for melancholic nostalgia in the short feels like a bad trade.