COVID finally got me (a relatively mild case, thankfully), but on a positive note, my wife and I published a new episode of our podcast, which you can listen to here.
Movies
Captures extremely well that particularly brand of loneliness represented by grainy bedroom online video uploads, a kind of cry for help that seems to have transcended the ebb and flow of tech platform whims—I remember seeing this kind of stuff on YouTube and Google Video and other early forums, and you can apparently still find it on TikTok and Discord servers. In addition to that, the movie really does a great job of evoking the way that the "real" world gets all smeary and overlit after a long session of peering into the internet. What I'm most taken by, though, is the premise, where the protagonist (played by Anna Cobb, who is truly great here) gets involved in some kind of role-playing/ARG-type viral video thing that requires her to post videos of herself pretending(?) to lose herself to some mind-and-body-altering power, which is a spooky enough idea for this to justify its (slightly misleading) designation as a horror film but also is a smart way of dramatizing the ways in which the internet forces us to launder our humanity through the mediation of a persona that may or may not accurately reflect aspects of our psychological wellbeing, not necessarily because we want to keep the truth secret but because true, radical openness is hard enough in in-person interactions and even harder online where we are personally responsible for curating facts about ourselves. Knowing yourself enough to craft a virtual representation of your true self is one of these impossible tasks foisted upon us by our contemporary way of being, and that's not even keeping into account the reasons (usually out of self-preservation) why someone might not even *want* to present their true self to the internet. There's a particularly harrowing moment later in the film when one character tries to cut through the pretext of the game to simply ask the girl directly if she is okay, and the act of doing so is such a violation of the social contract of the majority of online spaces that the girl responds with rage and fear—and maybe it's right for her to do so, since after all, the internet is full of weirdos and creeps in addition to well-meaning folks, and the movie has given us no way of knowing which this person is at this point. But at the same time, that vulnerability, that directness sans the irony and refraction inherent to digital life, is the only way for genuine human interaction, whether online or in person, and if we can't find the ability to reach through the screen, as it were, and find each other's personhood and worth on the other side, we're doomed. Whatever the case, I found this utterly captivating, more sad than scary as we watch this teenage girl try to navigate all these conundrums while also dealing with the deep loneliness endemic to teenagerdom. My internet access as a teen was fairly limited, so my sympathies go out to all the kids now for whom having to survive this stuff is basically a given. Grade: B+
The meta-commentary is fun, and the cast is pitch-perfect (I'm begging you, movies: bring back regular Parker Posey appearances). But mostly what I was struck by is how much of a blast the soundtrack is. The Adam Schlesinger-penned "Pretend to Be Nice" is my favorite, but "3 Small Words" (co-written by the movie's directors!) would make a great double-A-side single with it, and really, all the music is just a great time. I wish "power pop" were the early-aughts flavor of mall-punk that was coming back, instead of whatever MGK and the like are peddling. Also, the Netflix DVD of this was scratched, so midway through I had to bail and finish watching it on the Internet Archive, where the movie is listed under the topic of "MK Ultra," which gave me a chuckle. Grade: B
Somehow kitschier and also cooler than its predecessor. The tech is a little better in the found-object renders, but it still has that early-CGI abstraction that is very, very entrancing. It's hard to say a lot about these movies because they are pretty much the platonic ideal of "pure cinema" in the sense that there's no satisfying way to communicate what is meaningful about them without having experienced first-hand their visual and aural textures. It's very silly, but also, its status as an artifact of an indelibly precise slice of a cultural moment really strikes a chord in me. Transporting. Grade: B+
Unbelievably good. My sweet spot for jazz is about ten years later than this, but this film captures a special energy that probably wouldn't have been present at whatever fusion/free-jazz freakout would have resulted from a circa 1970 concert of jazz luminaries. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a movie so effectively observe the liberatory joy of jazz while also so convincingly evoking the banality of a music festival. It is legit hilarious how this doc will show some musician in the throes of the profoundly spiritual ecstasy of their performance and then cut to someone chomping unglamorously on an ice cream bar, but it's also kind of beautiful, too, that these two expressions of humanity coexist in the same space. Grade: A
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