User Reviews

This was the "weakest" of the five nominees for the Live-Action Short category bestowed by AMPAS, which means it was only very good in a field of excellent shorts. Because I want to discuss the short in a little detail, there will be spoilers:

The basic premise is that people who work on the clock at a supermarket during the late shift all have different ways to make the time seem to go by more quickly, ranging from just not looking at the clock through simply goofing off to the most extreme, which is pretending that you've cause time and all movement but your own to come to a full stop. Along the way, we meet a female checkout clerk, the overbearing and absolutely tedious supervisor who keeps trying to impress her (in vain), two arrested development cases, who are 22 going on 12 and the narrator, who is the one who makes time pass by acting like he's stopped it cold. Oh yeah-he also likes to sketch the female shoppers (at least the prettier ones) in the nude.

His narration is generally entertaining and often funny. It's an entertaining short which may actually make a better feature, as it feels a tad constrained by its brevity. All in all, a good short and well worth watching.

This short is available on a compilation DVD containing eight of ten nominees for the two Academy Awards Shorts categories (two of the Animated Short nominees aren't included) and it's a very good DVD indeed. Recommended.

Ben is an art student who works in his local Sainsbury's to pay his bills. As with all his colleagues the mind-numbing work makes time go even slower than it normally would and each of them deals with it different ways. Some cut off all contact with clocks, some mess around and try and have fun but for Ben it is different. His knack is to freeze time dead in its tracks and embrace the freedom this gives him – a freedom that his creative side and appreciation of the female form takes full advantage of.

Someone recommended the film Cashback to me and, when I discovered it was originally a short film I decided to watch it first. The film is a game of two halves and I'm not entirely sure how it all fits together. The first half is a perfectly amusing bit about the realities of a menial job, one where you do the same thing over and over again and cannot escape the reality that it doesn't matter what they do. This reminded me a little of Employee of the Month in the way that those in the supermarket find to pass the time, playing games or other little knacks. In this regard the film is amusing but not hilarious and I was assuming that the film would mine this vein harder for its punch line.

That it didn't do this is not a problem but what it did do didn't fit with the tone of the first half. What the film becomes is Ben freezing time to mostly undress women and appreciate their bodies. It is presented as an artistic pursuit but it felt a bit odd to me to see the character of Ben undressing women without their consent and it made me wonder what the point was. The problem with it is that it doesn't have a strong point to this to back up the suggestion that it is artistic and not just weird and smacking slightly of misogyny. Instead it falls back into a punch line related to the first half of the film but not one that ties to this sudden venture into female nudity.

The end result is still amusing but I'm not seeing what about this got it Oscar nominated. It has some good ideas but it doesn't do enough with them to deliver on the potential. The comedy stuff isn't done with enough humour and imagination, while the artistic stuff isn't fully realised, leaving it feeling a bit weird with what it is saying/doing with the bodies of unaware young women. Distracting stuff though and I will be looking at the full film to see what Ellis does with more time and resources to expand upon this.

I literally just got back from my trip to NYC to see this film at the Tribeca Film Festival.

I went in knowing it would be interesting, but I had no idea how amazed I would be. The story is so detailed and character oriented that you are drawn into the world and become attached to these characters. All in 19 minutes. And it is a beautiful artistic world.

Sean Ellis and Sean Biggerstaff were both on hand for the Q&A session following the showing. Sean Ellis revealed the plans for the full length feature, saying that the short itself will be placed in the film intact and the rest of the movie will happen before and after it. He joked that he was lucky that he already has a 20-minute trailer for the film.

The film was amazing and I can't wait to see it as a full length feature.

"Cashback" is an 18-minute short film from over 10 years ago. It was nominated for an Academy Award in the live action short category, but lost to the brilliant "Six Shooter". At least this time, the Academy got it right. Still, writer and director Sean Ellis managed to build a fairly successful filmmaking career on the basis of that achievement. However, I really see nothing memorable at all about "Cashback". The first half is basically about a young man's professional life at a supermarket, his grubby boss, his likable female colleague and two other colleagues who like joking around and playing pranks and also get in trouble with their boss occasionally. The second half then is about the young man's childhood when he saw a Swedish foreign exchange student fully naked at his house and how this inspired him also to see the customers at the supermarket naked now. Or does he really have the ability to stop time and see right through all their clothes. I have to say, this part was really not well-done at all. It always had a touch of softcore to me and I saw almost no artistry in there despite Ellis' try-hard attempts in making this look like something significant. You can include full-frontal nudity, but you have to spin a convincing story around it and succeed in depicting and explaining why you do so. This movie came short in that regard. But I am not surprised the Academy nominated it. They are far more liberal these days, so they had no problem with the nudity and they love to prove people wrong who say they are too uptight for films like this one. Literally, this is the only reason I can think of why this got an Academy Award nomination. It sure can't be because of the mediocre quality of this short movie. The only thing I kinda liked here was the music, but that was also only because Ellis took famous pieces by other artists and included them here. Not recommended.

A well executed film. A trip to Sainsbury's will never be the same again! The film provides a few minutes of amusement and is very well crafted. It's impossible to comment on such a short film without giving away spoilers but give the film a go. It will probably put a smile on your face.

Aside from the compact nature of the piece, the acting and camera work are first class. The mise en scene is constructed well and the musical score finishes the whole thing off in an upbeat fashion.

I consider that the film has an impact that could last long beyond the viewing. A few moments in time but moments that create a smile. No bad thing in these tense days.

I saw Cashback at the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival, in a showing with four other shorts. It was easily the worst of the bunch. The treatment of women in this film is deplorable. There is a long sequence in which the main character "stops time" in a grocery store, then undresses all of the women and sketches them. Or, I should say, sketches their breasts, asses, and hairless groins: their faces, and anything about them other than their bodies between their knees and their shoulders is apparently irrelevant. To make this worse, the sketcher blathers about his love of the "beauty of the female form", when it would be more honest for him to say that he's obsessed with tits and shaved pussies. I can't think of a more repulsive objectification of women on film (though, to be fair, I tend to avoid films that might offer competition in this area).

To begin with this short movie looked promising. The first shot is of the Sainsburys ceiling and the next of a rather gormless worker on a scooter. The best shot is of a bag of frozen peas spilled on the floor which is actually the most artistic bit in the film. He then talks about his love of the female form while looking up several young females skirts. So far okay. The next shot is of his childhood and of his life changing after seeing a naked Swedish exchange student walking up the stairs. We get a close up view of her hairless genitals. Attractive. The rest of the film is made up of 'artistic' shots of attractive slim under 30s women. Actually no, of attractive thin under 30s breasts, behind and shaven crotch. Agreed there is artistic beauty in a attractive slim womans body, but what about her face, hair, eyes? What about larger women, what about older women what about the diversity of women? What about men? He mentions the uniqueness of their beauty, but all I was seeing was the same body type over and over. Thankfully there were no fake breasts as far as i could tell. What a poor excuse for art. If you are a straight guy or a lesbian this is your wet dream but for me being a straight women i found it degrading and pathetic except for the few moments of actual thoughtful art. They could have done so much more with the story they had. Instead they made it into a adolescent fantasy. Well done. How original. I hope the movie they made of it will have more substance.

This 18-minute film short won a number of awards, and in 2004 was nominated for the Oscar for best short. It is included in the DVD extras section of the 2006 movie of the same name.

Anyone offended by frank and explicit female nudity, from several different angles, should avoid this movie, even though it is a romantic comedy.

Set in England with British actors, the title has two references in the movie, which takes place largely in a supermarket and among its employees. When customers pay with some type of debit card, they are asked if they want any "cash back." Also, character Ben Willis, in art college, can't sleep after his girlfriend dumps him, so he gets a night shift job at the supermarket, making use of that otherwise useless 8 hours, and for his efforts gets "cash back." Sean Biggerstaff is Ben Willis, art student who gets dumped. The cashier at the supermarket is Emilia Fox as Sharon Pintey, and they take a liking to each other.

The movie has a very unique premise, Ben can seemingly stop time, where everything around him freezes until he puts his hands together and "cracks" his fingers. For a few minutes, or days. Having been curious since a small boy about the female figure, he stops time in the supermarket and partially undresses the pretty ladies and draws them, and of course putting all their garments back in order before he resumes time.

It is not totally clear whether he is really stopping time, which would be a fantasy element, but it appears that he is, otherwise he wouldn't have had time to draw all the nice, complex drawings he made.

Very interesting and entertaining movie, if seeing female nudity doesn't bother you.