Chauvinistic actioners stateside and abroad; multiversal odysseys large and small; quiet, brain-rewiring sci-fi; youthful escapes into unreality; glitchy detours into virtual spaces and digital manipulations. These are impressions, capsules, and musings on film, tv, and other worthwhile media from 2022 so far.
a housekeeping note: see the end of each write-up for where you can watch everything right now!
a note about what’s on this list, why, and how: if there’s a YouTuber you love, or a tiktok that melted your brain, or a soccer game that brought you back from the grave, shout it out like it’s art! it is better for our brains and for the people who make things to think and talk about them like they matter, rather than just dopamine drips of content! In this same spirit, this list is not ranked and nothing is given any kind of rating because this ain’t sports and analytics are for human resources departments
a note of solidarity: say gay, support your local black-owned businesses and donate money or time to your regional abortion funds, we are all just here to help each other out
RRR (director: S.S. Rajamouli)
RRR is an easy film to describe: an epic historical action bonanza that contains all of the expected characteristics of an Indian blockbuster for those privy to the region’s formulas, from its maximalist action and emotionality to its dizzying genre fluidity — there is perhaps no greater phrase in the vernacular of international cinema than “Masala Film,” a reference to a mixture of spices that doubles as a description of the intermingling of action, melodrama, musical, and comedy in mainstream Indian filmmaking. RRR fits the bill.
But RRR is also a difficult film to describe: its historical backdrop is a canvas upon which director S.S. Rajamouli and his creative team craft an allegorical fantasy. Hypermasculine superheroics are performed by exaggerations of real-life figures resolutely fixed on their mission to overcome a colonial body that, while rooted in historical fact, has its malevolence and power maximized in kind. RRR’s imagery is loaded with socio-political weight but constantly elevated into the softer apolitical ethers of genre and spectacle. This has made it remarkably accessible to Western audiences, who can’t deny the potency of its open-hearted emotionalism and breathtaking choreography, nor its most brute political conviction: colonialism is evil, its perpetrators are decadent and racist, and it must be defeated, preferably in the coolest and most magnificent manner possible. The complicated but rapturous friendship at its center, between two historical figures who never really met, is emotionally and thematically palpable yet always primed to transcend into greater allegorical dichotomies: a nation and its colonial overseers, for one, but also (deep breath) fire and water, human and animal, human and god, civilization and nature, motorcycle and horse, gun and fist…even, as Rajamouli has described, the twinned regions of his bifurcated home state, which his two protagonists, in their successive collision, split, and reconciliation, he optimistically claims they represent.
The simplistic renderings of its political and apolitical dualities has made it more complicated for Indian and other audiences aware of some of the divisive cultural mores and political symbolism it evokes, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not; for better and worse, this nationalistic fervor is as frighteningly compelling as anything else in the film. Even in the brute satisfaction of its vengeful reveries against historical oppression (a bloodlust it shares with Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist actioners) there remains an unnerving tendency toward brutal and nationalistic imagery that can, at times, sit uncomfortably next to its tenderer tendencies. This prickliness is welcome to a certain extent, as so many American action films obfuscate their thematic and economic roots in American chauvinism, as critic Richard Brody noted in his review.
Rajamouli has cited Mel Gibson’s directorial ouevre, along with Gibson’s star vehicle The Patriot, as key Western inspirations; the blatant disregard for reality in favor of revolutionary heroics evident in Gibson’s work is everpresent in RRR, such as a free-flowing historical anachronism it pulls from The Patriot, which shares RRR’s fervor in depicting a nationalist rebellion against a pointedly vile British colonialism. RRR also reflects Gibson’s more torturous work with Passion of the Christlike acts of physical and emotional torment; one centerpiece in particular has a hero put on a musical display of violent resolve that in its pure power ignites a fire of political upheaval.
The historical phantasmagorias of Gibson and Tarantino tend to explode uncomfortably onto an American blockbuster landscape that has been mostly reduced to empty corporate progressivism or formless nihilism, and they inevitably have to make their way through the cultural discourse machinery (which is not at all to make light of any genuine alarm towards streaks of reactionary conservatism in American film), but RRR has the benefit of landing in American theaters with a cleaner slate and can be taken fairly easily at face value.
This face value is the key — Rajamouli joins Gibson’s ranks (and arguably exceeds them) in his heightening, and bludgeoning, of historical facticity for the sake of mythopoetic spectacle, but he just as effectively invokes ever greater subsections of contemporary action and fantasy cinema: his dedication to extreme emotion, brute, explosive action, and complicated homosocial affection brings to mind Bruckheimer’s pantheonic 90s productions (with Face/Off especially bridging a gap between Rajamouli, Hollywood and the Hong Kong impressionism of John Woo), and his synthesis of these elements with Wagnerian operatics and VFX-enhanced environments and action places his setpieces firmly in the realm of Peter Jackson, the Wachowskis, and most crucially, Zack Snyder, whose statuesque masculine forms, speed-ramping, and earnest investment in mythological imagery (and fanboyish love for the contemporary mythologies of comic books) makes him the clearest Western forbear to Rajamouli’s project.
His sweeping and ecstatic setpieces are remarkably coherent despite their maximal tendencies, making them as emotionally and metaphysically engaging as they are exciting, and the structural and tonal consistency maintained between each sequence is astonishing. One need look no further than the opening forty minutes’ extended action-oriented prologues introducing the two protagonists: Ram (Ram Charan) is introduced fighting a crowd of hundreds of men single-handed, and entirely through a balance of enormous, sweeping crowd shots and grounded, chaotic close-ups we can track the combat across the sea of people, with Ram’s location, and his goal, always entirely clear; Bheem (Jr NTR) is introduced fighting a tiger in the middle of a jungle, and his strength, poise, and spiritual tenor are made evident in the midst of his intense struggle, the more bombastic scenario also acting as an introduction to the film’s use of CGI animal action. The two heroes’ paths soon intersect in an explosive rescue sequence that combines the breadth and tonality of each character’s energy and punctuates this extended prologue with a well-earned title card that lands almost a third of the way through the film’s runtime. This push and pull between scale and tenor of action is maintained with remarkable consistency throughout the epic length, assisted by its tone- and theme-setting musical interludes (most importantly a rousing dance battle that acts as a microcosm for the film’s internal and external struggles) and an immaculately placed intermission bridging two of the film’s most emotionally harrowing scenes.
RRR is available to stream on Netflix — it’s the Hindi dub, rather than its original Telugu language release, which is available on the somewhat niche but fairly affordable Indian streaming service Zee5. A subscription to Zee5 for a month will run you $7.99, which isn’t all too bad a deal for a single movie rental anyway, and even more thrifty at its $49.99 annual plan.
Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Is Memoria a 2021 or 2022 film? It’s a film about transience, and existence outside of considerations like time and space, so because Neon finally rolled out its unconventional release of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film this year, I’ll gladly put it here.
Its set up is deceptively simple: a Scottish expat in Columbia (Tilda Swinton) is awoken in the middle of the night by a strange and sudden sound. She becomes obsessed with determining the source of the sound, and with recreating it, and this fixation takes her on a journey.
Memoria is the best kind of film, the kind that rewires your brain. Weerasethakul’s image-making is meticulous but patient — scenes play out in slow, single takes that shift and reorient their compositions in ways that redefine previous contexts, then sequences follow suit, then the entire film, which one is forced to reconsider in its entirety once its central mystery is given a concrete explanation, the accumulation of detail and meaning sending one’s mind reeling with possibility. It plays with an ebb and flow between concrete and ephemeral, and the focus on a sonic mystery gives it a perfect subject with which to explore that which is both physical and not.
In one of its greatest scenes, Swinton’s protagonist sits in a sound booth with an audio engineer and they try to recreate the noise that has been haunting her. In long, static shots of the two of them at the booth, we see the many ways a single sound can be made physical: as shifting dials on a soundboard, as a waveform on a computer screen — but then, is it just one sound? Because then we see this single entity, this particular sound, is constituted of shifting levels and colors, of a dozen dials on the sound board, of bass and treble and its varying combinations. Then, the engineer explains, the sound is one thing through these speakers, but it will manifest differently through headphones, through a car stereo, or through a cinema’s sound system. Even as a concrete entity on a computer screen it cannot be reduced to one single thing.
Projected on 35mm film in this particular release strategy gives everything you see an increased ephemerality — one film, composed of many images, these images captured on a degrading object, degraded further by its projection day by day, city by city, and everything that unfolds is itself subject to the degradation of memory and subjectivity. As heady as this all sounds, and as elitist and art-centric as its distribution model makes it appear, it’s an experience steeped in an understanding of film as an accessible vehicle for suspense and wonder — Memoria seeks to demonstrate an orientation toward the world that prioritizes the intersection between mundane human experience and the remarkable, mysterious elements that form its foundation. Whether these elements are knowable, and whether they are spiritual, scientific, straightforward, or oblique, or all of these at once, is the question it leaves you with. And it delights in knowing your understanding, and your experience, is singular — as with the nature of the medium itself, the experience is transient by nature because every individual viewer is experiencing the film through their own subjectivity. This is obviously true of every movie — most of which don’t have a million explanations for every million people that watch them — but the delight here is that this subjective experience interacts playfully with the entire modus operandi of the film, which acknowledges its own formal conversation with the viewer and encourages the viewer to participate in that conversation. If, as the film eventually posits in another of its greatest sequences, individuals are like satellites sending information to and from one another in ways visible and not, part of the excitement of experience is knowing that we are all only getting a small piece of the whole picture, and our experiences and our stories and our memories are in part composed of what experiences, stories and memories we receive from other people.
Memoria, at its own pace, becomes another of the best kinds of film: science fiction, in particular science fiction which recenters the phenomenal to the scale of the personal.
Memoria isn’t streaming in the U.S., and, according to its distributor Neon, never will…it’s intended to be released only in its limited, unique theatrical engagements. This may eventually change, but for the time being, you can see where it’ll play at the official website, and because there has been some streaming availability internationally, the pirates among you can probably find it in your usual places.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. Daniels)
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
“The only thing I do know is…we have to be kind. Please, be kind…especially when we don’t know what’s goin’ on.”
These words are, respectively, from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Everything Everywhere is the closest anyone has yet come to cinematic Vonnegut. Its irrepressible silliness and easy evocation of memetic aesthetics balance well against an undercurrent of harrowing existentialism, never betraying the emotional throughline of its characters’ journeys but understanding entirely that it is operating in an intrinsically ridiculous and flattened mode of art-making.
This has been the specialty of Daniels Kwan and Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels. Over the course of a prolific career as music video journeymen they’ve imbued pop sensibilities with a physical, and physiological, urgency. Their video work, and their culminating feature film debut Swiss Army Man, consistently depicts human bodies as flailing, clashing ragdolls. Their formal interests, which have combined a grindset tendency for thrifty but inventive VFX work with a hyperactive appropriation of imagery and rhythms pulled from anime, video games and other sundry exemplars of internet culture, make them a perfect totem for a certain strand of millennial and gen-z artistry; their closest analogues are not within the realm of cinema, a medium they have noted is just one component of their avaricious content consumption engines, but are perhaps instead those music and video producers and editors who have made it their mission to flatten the distance between high and low, and between mediums altogether: mash-up artists, YouTube film parodists, meme page administrators.
The artist who instantly came to mind the first time I saw the film dips a toe in many of these postmodern avenues: musician Neil Cicierega, whose mash-up albums (starting with 2014’s Mouth Sounds) irreverently combine gauzy 90s earworms (especially Smash Mouth’s “All Star”) with pantheonic works like John Lennon’s “Imagine” in order to craft demented soundscapes of anti-nostalgia. An example: Cicierega’s “T.I.M.E.” from Mouth Moods, where the innocuous camp of the Village People’s “YMCA” is set against the propulsive and cathartic conclusion of Hans Zimmer’s Inception score and, despite the inherent humor to the mash-up’s dissonances, reveals a lost emotional potency to “YMCA”’s queer foundations. Compare this to a climactic stretch of Everything Everywhere, where the dread-infused self-destructive ideation of Stephanie Hsu’s Joy gets precariously cross-cut with a deranged Ratatouille parody and a densely referential Wong Kar Wai riff; the harrowing nihilism sits strangely, even uncomfortably, alongside the humor, but the cumulative power, dramatic and comedic, of the montage reveals unexpected pathos while it dares the viewer to dismiss its silliness (as plenty have — it’s been a divisive movie in spite of its unlikely critical and commercial successes).
Like Cicierega’s work, Everything Everywhere seeks to bridge generational gaps by exploding their respective bubbles; when we truly, pointedly observe the foundations of our hardened orientations toward the world, we see that they are all crumbling, or already crumbled. Also like Cicierega, whose work by necessity could only exist now, after the advent of the information age when such disparate works of art can sit side by side, the revelations of Everything Everywhere are able to emerge because of our expanding vision of the world. Its frenetic style and the narrative gambits it reflects are an allegory for the internet, certainly, where a virtual space constantly toeing the line between utopian and dystopian reveals with every article, video and meme just how pointless the human condition is, and illustrates every life we could have but never will; but just as effectively it’s an allegory for the accumulation of generational disappointment: more and more, we observe that our parents, or our grandparents, or any of our forbears, have just as little idea of what is going on as we do. The hope, if we want to hope, is that this knowledge will connect us. We unite in our cluelessness–which is, paradoxically, a cluelessness in the face of almost universal knowledge. Pure Vonnegut.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is, remarkably, still available widely in theaters, months after its release; it is also rentable on general VOD platforms like Apple and YouTube and comes out on home media in the U.S. on July 5th.
Russian Doll Season Two (dir. Natasha Lyonne et al)
My takes on television ought to be taken with a grain of salt — most of the TV I watch these days is either wholesome reality competition stuff (mostly The Great Pottery Throwdown) or the same episodes of King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers, or Joe Pera Talks With You over and over again — even shows I’ve watched a season or more of and liked, like Handmaid’s Tale or Atlanta, I just never feel the urge to continue.
Russian Doll has been a rare exception, perhaps justifying its second outing because of how unlikely it seemed that it needed one; the first season was so holistically perfect, operating as such a complete and closed object that the notion of a second season felt unnecessary. What would a sequel to Groundhog Day look like, if not just a weird retread? It follows that a similar redundancy would occur here.
With season two there was demonstrably no reason to doubt Natasha Lyonne and co., who have no interest in treading the same ground or even retaining the conceit that made the first season such compelling viewing. Instead, they pivot away from the first season’s quasi eternal recurrences to a new metaphysical/existential conceit altogether, indebted again to an iconic pop culture exemplar — this time Quantum Leap — and use it as a means to explore the complex intersections of familial and historical trauma. If season one acted in part as an allegory for video games’ death cycles, and the medium’s ability to teach the player with every ensuing demise, season two expands the the video game allegory considerably by exploring the medium’s ability to put the player literally in the head of another person.
The heady thesis makes for a tougher buy-in, with the first episode really throwing the viewer in the deep end, but once it’s clear what Lyonne is going for, it’s as dizzyingly powerful and darkly comic as ever — and it truly is Lyonne’s show here, as she inherits the role of showrunner from Leslye Headland and confidently directs many of its key episodes in addition to providing her omnipresent, and phenomenal, central performance. It’s all a big risk, and it pays off hugely. The result is a beautiful and devastating depiction of what it might actually entail to inhabit and understand the lives and headspaces of those who preceded us — to actually see them as paradoxical and psychologically rich individuals, rather than characters in our own stories.
Russian Doll is streaming on Netflix.
ephemeral videos about video game ephemera by Any Austin (dir. any_austin)
One of the great sleeper YouTube channels, any_austin has been crafting smart, funny, and, unexpectedly moving bits of material about video games for a decade, starting off with a long-running show about marginal video game glitches called Eggbusters, and gradually accumulating a steady cult following, a devoted Patreon base, and increasingly elaborate and well-made series and one-offs that explore various dimensions of video game ephemera, from comic forays into the kinds of glitches that made his name to frank reviews of bargain bin indie games whose names may only on the lips of Austin and his avid viewers. After a significant stretch where he was off YouTube, he returned in August 2021; in the ensuing months, and quite prolifically over the course of the front half of this year, he’s jumpstarted a number of series and specials that more smartly and amusingly than ever dig into those ephemeral aspects of games that fade into the background while you’re playing them but lend them their dimensionality and mood–their backgrounds (“skyboxes”) and architectural milieus, their NPCs, their small atmospheric details…the varying amounts of time their characters can hold their breath underwater…even the feet and faces of playable characters that one’s attention isn’t inclined or encouraged to linger on. Every small detail makes up the whole world–“what is the ocean but a multitude of drops.” And the process of discovery–the process being itself the goal, “the journey was the friends we made along the way” austin frequently malaprops–encourages a holistic examination of video games, and by extension all media, as fragile things, composed by actual human beings, as subject to decay and disarray as any of our systems.
The unspoken pathos of any_austin’s primary aesthetic interests is in its implied connection to his own obscurity; in his invocation of “the algorithm” and being “like PBS,” he acknowledges the niche quality of his work as a commentator and critic and as an independent musician, and in turn acknowledges the need for those in small communities to support one another and encourage the richness and diversity of the work we do for one another. It’s a well-worn descriptor at this point, and can mean everything and nothing, but it’s just wholesome stuff, and some of the most addictive video content I’ve encountered in a long time.
any_austin’s work can be found on YouTube, with a seemingly endless supply of additional content made available regularly to his Patreon supporters. You can find his music on Spotify (as frostyn and The Excellent Man from Minneapolis) and your other usual streaming platforms.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (dir. Sam Raimi)
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the Marvel Cinematic Universe shifted from a compelling bit of blockbuster-scaled televisual junk food to a claustrophobic cacophony of crunched VFX work for quip-poisoned actors to supplement from their green-screened apartments, but it underwent that very transformation, in fact played out almost in its entirety to this point, in the lamentable amount of years it’s been since Sam Raimi last directed a movie. Raimi’s contributions to the world of superhero cinema concluded just as the tide started to turn and the state of mainstream American film grew increasingly dependent on the subgenre-turned-phenomenon, and you can sense Raimi’s gentle but ever-professional derision at the seriousness with which these products have been treated in his decade away in the wicked irreverence of his Doctor Strange sequel.
As with most MCU films since around Age of Ultron, Multiverse of Madness is really sequelizing a number of adjacent products: the original Strange of course, but also by necessity the other films Benedict Cumberbatch’s cash cow has appeared in, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far from Home; and, more programmatically dizzying, the most recent appearance of Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision.
So, to put it lightly, Raimi is in the difficult position of yet again juggling the demands of many masters; fortunately, given the relative lack of genuine emotional dimensionality in MCU’s character-building, he isn’t saddled with the same challenges as with the schizophrenic Spider-Man 3, which required Raimi to engage with numerous executive demands while also making room for his own emotional and aesthetic interests. Here, with what amounts to a B-tier entry in a franchise approaching adolescence, Raimi lets his freak flag fly in the margins. As the obligatory soap operatics and franchise-expanding play out, the camera whips and writhes in traditional Raimi fashion, with more emphasis than usual placed on visceral and kinetic imagery, particularly in surprising spurts of horror rife with skeletons and zombies and autonomous phalanges. Moments that might play as audience applause breaks in other MCU entries are here undermined to comic effect by Raimi’s playfulness: an entire pantheon of would-be MCU headliners dispatched with morbid glee; a climactic tet-a-tet giving Danny Elfman’s bombastic orchestration center stage instead of its human combatants; villainous reveals staged with bargain bin spook house theatricality.
It doesn’t make for great “Cinema,” as if we ought to expect such a thing from what even Raimi seems to treat as a protracted sideshow to a Disney World dark ride; it does, however, play with amusing consistency as “baby’s first horror movie,” like the Doc Ock surgery sequence in Spider-Man 2 stretched gossamer thin across an entire film — and with Raimi having been gone as long as he has, this is reason enough for (tempered) celebration. One hopes Disney throwing a bone to one of his generation’s great genre visionaries will be a baby step to an earnest career revival.
Multiverse of Madness is available to stream on Disney+.
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (dir. Richard Linklater)
Richard Linklater’s latest foray into rotoscope animation again produces some of his best work–and, again, some of his most aggravatingly unsung. As with Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, where the animation technique gave the off-kilter material the shaggy impressionism of an alt comic, Apollo 10½ uses its stylization to blur the line between reality and fantasy, beautifully encapsulating the tendency for childhood memories to stick in one’s mind like a fading dream — a dream that feels more real than reality. Like Boyhood, Linklater recounts his childhood through a fictional prism, something more granular and universalizable; the details, though specific, are evocative of larger emotional truths that transcend their position in a particular time and place, and the result is a portrait of a historical moment that demonstrates all socio-historical moments as mere backdrops to subjective experience. It’s Linklater’s worthy addition to a growing canon of history-as-autobiography navel-gazing that some of his indie peers have produced in recent years–Roma, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Belfast, the imminent Armageddon Time–yet, in true Linklater fashion, far more deceptively relaxed and mundane. Though Jack Black’s narration gives the whole thing a pleasantly sweet and comical tenor, it is, nonetheless, as substantial and melancholy as any of Linklater’s other masterworks.
Apollo 10½ is available to stream on Netflix.
After Yang (dir. Kogonada)
After Yang is a spare and simple sci-fi film that is happy to pose questions and let us sit with them, rather than answer them outright. What is family? What do we do with memory, both our own and the ones people leave behind in the art we observe? What do we do to really connect and understand one another? Is Colin Farrell our finest living actor? How do we connect with where we’ve come from if that line is severed? Moreover, is there beauty enough in the recognition that our connections and our foundations span more time and memory than we’ll ever know?
It takes a quiet approach to engaging with these questions and others, letting them gently ebb and flow alongside its gentle storytelling, and it teaches you how to watch it as it goes along in the exciting ways it fills and condenses the frame, in its meditative pacing, and in its expert deployment of sweet and sly humor. It is small, but nonetheless one of the most remarkable films of the year.
After Yang is streaming on Showtime Anytime, and any streaming platform where Showtime can be added as a premium subscription (Hulu, Amazon, etc.). It can also be rented on YouTube and Vudu, among other platforms.
Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb (dir. Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein)
The sound of a baseball game is often enough to set my teeth on edge, let alone actually bearing witness to its tedium; nonetheless, it is cinema’s greatest sport, often entirely because of its metaphysics: the romanticism of baseball espoused in Moneyball, after all, is almost always invoked in the background realms of the theoreticians and proletarians that maintain its machinery.
Jon Bois has perfected this depiction of baseball. His is a vast, hyperreal space composed entirely of statistical information waiting to be unraveled and contextualized — “they should have sent a poet,” Jodie Foster’s scientist proclaims when bearing witness to something transcending the concrete in Contact, and where science had its Carl Sagan to mold a melody out of the mundane, sports has Jon. And like the works of Sagan and his acolytes, which deploy cold information in order to expound warmly upon the incoherences of the human condition, Bois begins with numbers as a foundation and builds monuments to pure human frailty. With Captain Ahab, Bois finds Dave Stieb as his perfect subject, a beautifully flawed man whose personal growth develops in a rapturous dance with the complex systems of his team, his city, and the tendrils of capital and culture with which they must intertwine. Though reducing his previously huge and byzantine methodology to one man’s life occasionally proves slightly too linear and small for the vastness of Bois’s treatments, it is nonetheless home to some of Bois’s most gorgeous and ecstatic storytelling. Stieb’s Sisyphean struggle to pitch a no-hitter encapsulates Bois’s prowess in teaching the viewer how to watch his films, introducing visual conceits that gain cumulative power as his sweeping digital grids grow dense with information. But the entire final hour of the project, long after its most jaw-dropping bouts of existential despair and staggering emotional payoffs, shows Bois and his writing partner Alex Rubenstein engaging just as expertly in pure documentary advocacy as they gradually reveal fatal flaws in the institutions that are tasked with and trusted to canonize the finest in their communities, resulting in an incredibly specific piece of criticism that, despite that specificity, sheds light on the ways American culture and its institutions have ideologically hardened themselves against honoring the actual best in human achievement.
Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb and all of Jon Bois’ stellar work is available on the Secret Base channel on YouTube.
Section 1 (dir. Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein)
It is a rare gift to get two Bois/Rubenstein films in a single calendar year, but mere months after releasing Captain Ahab, the duo’s third opus in as many years to push well past the three hour mark, they dropped Section 1.
Considerably shorter, running less than an hour and covering one single sporting event rather than the lifespan of a team or player (or…first name), the film shows Bois and Rubenstein trying their hand at crafting a true blue historical thriller, setting the stage in the first moments for the life-and-death stakes of a single game between the 1976 Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Colts, football teams at the cruxes of their respective histories whose battle on one sunny afternoon will unbeknownst to anyone become a veritable metaphysical battleground against the cruel tendrils of chance itself. Never before or since, Bois posits, has a football game’s outcome been tied to the actual lives of some of those watching it.
With this simple thesis, what follows is an expertly sustained suspense setpiece, employing Bois’ trademark push and pull between tragedy and farce and exemplifying his ability to use maps, pullquotes, still images, and pixels to accumulate genuine emotional meaning. Here, as with so much of his best work, he considers the dizzying ways heroism manifests only in retrospect: no single moment in sequence seems to be substantial, or purposeful, or important, but in their entirety, as a vast, concrete grid composed of these atomized moments, every single moment matters. A stunning, succinct piece of filmmaking.
Section 1 and all of Jon Bois’ stellar work is available on the Secret Base channel on YouTube.
The Inside Outtakes (dir. Bo Burnham)
Inside was an inspired and timely mish-mash of comedy special and fictionalized mental breakdown, an elevated one-man-show not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s filmic treatment of Spalding Gray with Gray’s Anatomy or Errol Morris with his first person interrogations of eccentric subjects. Burnham saw the potential to synthesize the deceptively simple aesthetic of his YouTube upbringing — one face and a camera, speaking directly to the viewer — with the more elaborate theatricality of a live performance, in doing so revealing the isolation of both. Conflating the loneliness of the long distance vlogger with the conditions of the early pandemic came off somewhat less potently, often providing the film with its most tedious and tired social commentary — woe is me rich guy stuff, ultimately — but Burnham self-corrects with his year-later release of The Inside Outtakes, a making-of and deleted scene showcase that candidly reveals the artifice of his po-faced isolated protagonist. Perhaps its greatest moment — certainly better than any of the deleted songs, which are almost all best left outside the confines of the nearly immaculate original lineup — is a simple and short one: a close-up shot of Burnham, watching footage of himself as a kid on YouTube singing a song that he surely wrote on a lark that would send him on a path to virality; he smiles, warmly, seeing himself up there, giving himself just a moment to remember that he was just a kid, making music, letting himself be happy. So far, an image we saw in the original film. But it goes on longer. A moment later, the grin disappears, Burnham’s face settles into a neutral state, he looks over to the camera, turns it off. The happiness is a performance, the emotions all a narrative — he got the take he needed.
The Inside Outtakes is available on YouTube. Burnham’s original film, Inside, is streaming on Netflix.
Rothaniel (dir. Bo Burnham)
It’s worth acknowledging the facade Bo Burnham employs in his own work when approaching Jerrod Carmichael’s latest stand-up special Rothaniel, for which Burnham’s direction sets a clear tone. Like Spike Jonze’s intimate and unconventional camera work for Aziz Ansari’s special Right Now, Burnham primarily shoots Carmichael in mediums and close-ups, obscuring the audience as he performs his comedy set turned confessional (an increasingly popular subgenre of stand-up that feels inextricably linked to the age of direct-to-camera vlogging and monologuing). The special begins as an exposé about the cross-generational secrecy and lies that defined Carmichael’s childhood and gradually becomes his coming-out story, and the tonal balance he seeks is a tricky and prickly one; he almost instantly follows up coming out to his audience with a defensive, and deflating, proclamation upon their warm reception that he is “gay, not [r-slur].” Later, when he smiles and laughs after an awkward moment, he quickly drops the smile and proclaims, frustrated, that the laugh was fake, another in a long line of happy faces he admits to putting on as a performance in public and in private. This throws the entire vibe of the special into relief: Burnham’s camera feigns intimacy, matching the vulnerability of Carmichael’s declarations, but it is, always, still a camera, and this is a performance. Almost more radical than Jerrod Carmichael’s deeply personal revelations is the implicit recognition of this remove. It’s been another year of reckoning with stand-up comedy as a medium that, by nature of its inherent intimacy, muddies its artifice. This is a performance. Whether it’s from the moment the camera is rolling or the moment the comedian steps into the venue and walks on stage, this is a performance. These people are not your friends–they’re probably not even the people you think you’re seeing on the stage or screen.
Rothaniel is available to stream on HBO Max.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Jane Schoenbrun’s feature directorial debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, also traffics in the dissonance between reality and fiction caused by screens and “screen life.” It presents itself ostensibly as a found-footage horror film, though it features sequences outside the confines of its screens, about an isolated girl who begins participating in an online creepypasta-adjacent role-playing game to escape her isolated home life. In sequences similar to those in Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, we see her awkward and off-kilter vlogs, announcing her interests in horror and digital spaces, and eventually her Skype chats with an anonymous older man also taking part in the game, and the creeping ambiguity to this man’s nature lends the film much of its menace. It’s largely, though, about loneliness, and performance, and the levels of performance in what we’re seeing on and off screens in the protagonist’s life demonstrate a more malevolent sense that the internet is creating generations of dissociation and artifice, placing everyone in states of digital solipsism. It’s a strong film about right now, though in general its slow, formal aesthetic and crisp digital images of midwestern vistas often unexplored in mainstream film (e.g. an AutoZone is used to great effect) were even greater appeals, and Alex G’s haunted ambient score lends it a great deal of its atmosphere. An exciting first feature.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is making its rounds in a small, limited theatrical run — you can see if it’s playing near you anytime soon here — and is rentable on most VOD platforms like Apple, YouTube, Google, etc.
Dog (dir. Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin)
Another excellent debut, though from a decidedly different source. Tatum and his writing/producing partner Reid Carolin take notes from their work with Steven Soderbergh and craft an effortlessly charming and moving road movie that, like those earlier collaborations, is a lowkey comedy-drama about “the Real America,” following a damaged war vet whose travails across the west coast, bringing a service dog to her handler’s funeral, provide a number of lowkey and subtly rendered episodes about grace and care in the face of trauma. It never goes for the lowest common denominator angle on any of its ideas, and even on the rare occasion when it slightly overplays a comic tone, it smartly redirects and reveals the human foundations to its farce. In many ways it operates on a looser, funnier end of the spectrum defined in recent years by warm bits of contemporary Americana like The Rider, Leave No Trace, or Clint Eastwood’s hyper lowkey “real American hero” films. Just good, sturdy entertainment.
Dog is available to rent on your standard VOD platforms.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie (dir. Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman)
Bob’s Burgers isn’t a show that demands the large-scale treatment, but it’s clear from the first musical number in the much-delayed Bob’s Burgers Movie why the prospect of a larger budget appealed to Loren Bouchard and co. They dump loads of Disney’s blood money into some of the most fluid character animation and choreography that the animation behemoth has permitted onto the big screen since their last traditionally animated effort, Winnie the Pooh, was released more than a decade ago. Elevating these musical numbers, which occur often in the show’s typical 22-minute format but never with this scale and detail, is where the Movie is. The plot is just good, sturdy Bob’s Burgers, warm and watchable, if occasionally stretching itself thin to suit the feature length runtime.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie is currently in theaters and will stream in the U.S. on Hulu and HBO Max starting July 12th.
Top Gun: Maverick (dir. Joseph Kosinski)
Maverick is a demented American foil to RRR, obsessed as it is with pure masculine star power and a heightened, ahistorical nationalist chauvinism; it is also, for much of its runtime, a cinematic death dream, declaring in its opening sequence and in almost every piece of loaded dialogue from there on out that American blockbuster filmmaking as it once existed, in Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer’s primes, has at last shuffled off its mortal coil, with Cruise a defiant, aged Orpheus attempting to wrest it back from Hell’s doorstep (judging from the box office take thus far, he’s delayed the corporate hellhounds for a little while longer). One wishes, perhaps, that the savior of Cinema weren’t so indebted to such a limited kind of filmmaking; though Cruises’ dedication to masochistic stuntwork and sturdy visual coherence makes for arresting setpieces, it consistently leaves his plots dramatically wanting, and the visual language more utilitarian than genuinely beautiful or metaphysically compelling. Nonetheless, there’s a potency to this requiem, maybe in part because, in the theater, it’s preceded by a markedly aging Cruise thanking us for our service, going to see The Movies Big, and declaring his desire to keep the streaming and Disney monoliths at bay a little longer. Hollywood gets the Christ it deserves, if not the one it needs.
Top Gun: Maverick is, as the cinematic lord and saviour Thomas Cruise Mapother IV intended, currently only available in theaters. It will eventually stream on Paramount+.
I Ate a Shoe Because of Top Gun 2 (dir. Matt Patches)
Matt Patches, cohost of the underrated film podcast Fighting in the War Room and entertainment editor at Polygon, tweeted more than a decade ago that if Top Gun 2 actually came out, he would eat a shoe, a lark of a tweet calling back to Werner Herzog’s iconic declaration that he’d do the same if his friend Errol Morris successfully made and released his debut film Gates of Heaven. Herzog did, indeed, eat a shoe — in a documentary directed by another icon of the medium, Les Blank, no less — so Patches, friend of comedy bits and perennial gadfly to contemporary film discourse, followed suit, also documenting the occasion.
He uses the concept to engage with questions about the seriousness and severity with which people approach media on the internet, critiquing the incessant discourse cycles that arrive with and surround every new corporate product and that have poisoned platforms that were once home to genuine human connection and thoughtful conversation.
He does, also, make an edible shoe, and eat it.
Matt Patches’ heroic shoe-eating can be observed on YouTube, and his work can be found all over the internet. His podcast, cohosted with Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich, Indiewire’s David Ehrlich, and The Ringer’s Da7e Gonzales, releases new episodes weekly.
The Batman (dir. Matt Reeves)
There is a moment early in The Batman that more vividly encapsulates the power of its title character than any filmic rendering thus far: a montage of criminality across Gotham’s streets and alleys and subway stations, and then, of course, the harsh light of the Batsignal breaking through the dark of the sky, and suddenly, the purveyors of illicit action have cause to halt, turn their heads toward the shadows that surround them, and consider in terror that the Batman could be there, waiting to emerge and meet their violence in kind. This is something most Batman films attempt, and it tends to work as an increasingly cliched and iconographic introduction to each new Batman. But here, it feels new. The patience of Reeves’ camera, the depth and contrast of darkness he creates, actually make it feel like Gotham is a massive, urban panopticon with the Batman’s eyes watching from every speck of darkness.
The film can’t possibly hope to maintain the power of these early images. It must, ultimately, be a Batman movie, and in this it joins its predecessors as another solid entry. The franchise has been dependable as a proving ground for the aesthetic interests of its respective directors: Burton and Schumacher with their respective bits of impressionistic camp; Nolan with his exploitation of sociopolitical imagery and brutalist montage; Snyder with his Frank Miller-infused macho posturing and Wagnerian iconography; even Todd Phillips with his punk-chic Scorsese collage.
Reeves, who isn’t rooted in quite so specific a tradition as any of his predecessors, nonetheless has a specific vision, combining the severity and morality of David Fincher’s crime epics with effects-driven image-making whose radical technicality is only made fully evident in behind-the-scenes snippets that show just how much of the film is shot with the increasingly popular stagecraft systems with which Jon Favreau and company have been producing the Star Wars television shows. Reeves’ rendering of visceral, percussive action with such a static production model is simply extraordinary, and it’s matched by an inventiveness in the staging of certain suspense sequences: a chilling journey into Gotham’s underworld via a first-person camera reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs’ basement climax in particular demonstrates the adventurousness of Reeves’ camerawork.
But none of this can quite make up for the stagnancy of the material, which is old hat Batman stuff: Gotham’s inherent corruption, Bruce Wayne’s inability to balance the duality of his personas nor the dualities between his caped crusader and his theatrical enemies, Batman’s cold, boring moralism clashing against the desperate action of genuinely imperiled “anti-heroes” like Catwoman. The film’s last-act devolution into urban apocalypticism–and Nolan-esque reactionary political imagery–is particularly aggravating, even with some unexpectedly moving emotional pivots occurring among its incessant busyness, and it never makes a solid case for its bloated runtime or humorless tone.
The Batman is available to stream on HBO Max.
Exploring the VFX of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Vanity Fair and Corridor Crew)
Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man: No Way Home serves as a pointed contrast to the innovations of Matt Reeves’ synthesis of stagecraft and practical elements in The Batman. Some truly illuminating State of the Industry material was produced this year with two videos detailing the visual effects of the monumentally successful film, one by Vanity Fair, and one by VFX crew turned YouTube personalities the Corridor Crew.
Both feature the film’s VFX supervisor, Digital Domain’s Kelly Port, whose deadpan approach to explaining the unthinkable breadth of effects in the film evokes a dystopian dread the likes of which haven’t been depicted since the behind-the-scenes features for George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy. He explains partway through his Vanity Fair breakdown that a single insert shot of a woman clicking in her seatbelt is perhaps the only shot in the film without visual effects, before correcting himself: well, actually, this shot was retimed, so it’s also technically an effects shot. A sly grin comes to his face when he explains this — “Yes,” it seems to say, “I know what I’m saying, that a ‘live action feature film’ is composed almost entirely of VFX imagery, is completely insane.”
It’s a matter of course that mainstream blockbuster entertainment is supplemented by, or even driven by, VFX, with artists employed for obvious instances of effects-heavy action or bits of unreality, but also to craft entire sets, pre-visualize action sequences, correct lighting and color, and alter the faces, bodies and clothing of actors (or, in many cases, completely replace an actor and their performance). But the degree to which the film seems to self-perpetuate its VFX, creating problems with VFX only to solve them with more VFX, reaches a point of hysteria — this highway is where this fight should take place, but it’s too expensive to shut down this highway, so we’ll recreate the highway, but this highway has a tower that’s under construction, so we have to recreate the tower but not with its construction scaffolding in order to maintain a level of believability in the setting (forget that none of the sequence makes coherent geographical sense independent of all these concerns).
The result is not only a plasticity of the environment, which is its own problem in terms of maintaining the atmosphere and tension of an action sequence, but a resultant plasticity in every discrete element — it becomes a more efficient and cohesive process to continue choosing the digital element over the practical one, so even with Tom Holland providing acrobatic reference and motion capture footage, or Alfred Molina giving his performance as Doc Ock attached to an enormous mechanized rig, the majority of visual information gathered by the camera is replaced by a VFX counterpart, because the more a composition is made up of VFX elements, the more those practical elements will stick out and shatter the illusion. A vicious cycle: more VFX is required and implemented, more practical elements stick out, more VFX is deployed to correct the discrepancy, etc.
The weightlessness of Spider-Man: No Way Home was avoidable insofar as, e.g., Doc Ock didn’t have to have digital arms rather than real ones, Green Goblin didn’t have to be strong enough to throw Spider-Man through walls and floors. This is problematic for its action setpieces, almost none of which have any dramatic or emotional tension, but it’s even worse for those instances that ought to build out the narrative, characterization and overall dramatic stakes of the film. Fundamental creative choices were made that required the extensive use of digital artifice and vacuum-sealed performance, and so the film was cursed from its inception. The result is a film that feels trapped, every performance seemingly performed independent from any other, moment to moment continuity and narrative propulsion eschewed to keep the bloated plot moving, every sequence cut within an inch of its life, and all the while completely enveloped by digital artifacts that simultaneously give the film its only signs of life (props as always to the overworked and underpaid VFX artists who have to turn out borderline usable work under outrageous time constraints) and sap from it all personality and detail.
Port amicably and engagingly describes these processes, most likably in the Corridor Crew video, but it never feels like any less than a hatchet man describing how efficiently he is going to kill your son.
Kelly Port’s informative but dystopian explanations of Spider-Man: No Way Home’s VFX can be found at Vanity Fair and Corridor Crew. Vanity Fair’s film breakdowns, often hosted by the filmmakers themselves, are generally excellent and insightful. Corridor Crew has been producing entertaining and informative videos about good, bad and ugly VFX for years, and they’ve curated a good playlist of their standalone videos experimenting with and educating on visual effects.
Jackass Forever (dir. Jeff Tremaine)
The great tides of history turn, and that which was once juvenile and vulgar and uncinematic becomes high art. So it was when the aging cast of Star Trek feasted their eyes on a new Enterprise in Stark Trek: The Motion Picture, a decade after the conclusion of their show; such it is now, with the masochistic punks of Jackass well over the hill and bearing witness to ever more inventive ways to terrorize each other and push the limits of the human body.
The high-minded reappraisals of Jackass that have occurred over the past decade, citing in particular its revolutionary digital cinematography and mainstreaming of homoeroticism, don’t have the crew resting on their laurels for this belated revival, which revels in the same brand of destructive silliness while accumulating built-in pathos from the aging of its cast. This, as with the films and show that preceded it, is simply a film about camaraderie as an endurance trial, connection through recognition of mortality. Its power is the paradox inherent to its action: the human body is fragile, the human body is powerful.
It’s purely celebratory, unpretentious, and ecstatic filmmaking.
Jackass Forever is streaming on Paramount+ — Jackass 4.5, the crew’s customary collection of supplementary materials from the theatrical film, is streaming on Netflix.
“PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife,” Cool Blue Car and other sinister short comedy works (dir. Alan Resnick)
Few film artists, let alone comedians, capture the dead-eyed decadence and disappointment of contemporaneity like Conner O’Malley. With his producing partner Joe Pera he has crafted one of television’s best comedies, Joe Pera Talks With You, which counters the incessant busyness and self-absorption of modern life with a slow and steady eye for banal human detail, finding joy and grace in simplicity, all the while using the patent ridiculousness of Pera’s grandpa-chic mannerisms to wring unexpected comedy out of Michigander mundanity. He recently joined the writing and producing staff of another of TV’s recent masterworks, How to With John Wilson, which, even in its considerably more satirical and urban milieu, emerges with a similar vein of gentle humanism.
Meanwhile, on his own time, O’Malley revels with evil glee in all the possible contrasts to those works, blending the vernaculars and aesthetics of a homegrown content glut of perverts, pundits and would-be influencers and vomiting out videos and short films steeped in a special kind of sinister postmodern parody. His characters are loud, sloppy, angry, and grotesque — even on the rare occasion he aspires to replicating actual human behavior, it is recognizable only in how it reveals an all-too-human masculine id rotted — or perhaps cultivated — by the broken culture that allows it to self-perpetuate.
One of O’Malley’s best short films, last year’s Top 10 Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses For Free Pulled Pork, was a platonic ideal, encapsulating all of his skills as a behavioral performer and improviser of hilarious dipshit non-sequiturs while imbuing his short form narrative with an alarming, impressionistic digital terror. Selfie-stick cinematography melts into AI-enhanced nightmare imagery and back, the seemingly harmless middle-American YouTuber shtick growing more and more menacing until it devolves into a depiction of a demon ruling a kingdom in the purgatory of liminal American spaces.
This tone is all too familiar to Alan Resnick, who’s been directing and starring in short films throughout the past decade that share Wisconsin Dells’ off-putting digital surreality, inherited in part from his forbears at Adult Swim, where much of his work is distributed. Also like a lot of O’Malley’s work, Resnick’s characters have a tendency to make demented self-help proclamations in slightly askew Middle American milieus.
Their shared sensibilities at last coalesced this year with two collaborations, one of which, PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife, is a direct follow-up to Wisconsin Dells, and with Resnick at the helm, O’Malley dives full-bore into erratic digital psychedelia. His character, stranded in the desert after a misbegotten DIY demonstration, is caked in animated artifacts (among other viscera) and stretched and squeezed across the frame as he is taken on a demented vision quest when Resnick’s character makes him eat sand. It’s a beautiful and strange collision of two visions, all the more amusing for it occurring both behind and in front of the camera, like Resnick’s weathered guru and veteran of 4am Adult Swim timeslots is imparting his twisted kitsch comedy secrets onto his Vine-bred companion. True to O’Malley’s “Richard Jule Cinematic Universe” m.o., it concludes in a Staples parking lot.
Their other collaboration, “I Didn’t Know I Was Dead,” applies their experimental digital approach to a more sparse and literary end, with O’Malley embodying the tortured protagonist of a bleakly comic Kafkaesque monologue recorded by Negativland founding member Richard Lyons during his struggle with nodular melanoma; the video, set to the ambient experimental stylings of the group, was produced and released in recognition of the anniversary of Lyons’ death in 2016, on his birthday. Resnick’s associations with DIY experimental multimedia, particularly with the Baltimore group Wham City, makes itself evident here, and with some of his other small scale 2022 releases, like two short experimental pieces implementing imagery generated via the recently viral Dall-E AI program.
Resnick continued his working relationship with Adult Swim in 2022 with a short film contribution to their series smalls that acts as a kind of tempered companion to his work with O’Malley, Cool Blue Car. Also set in a desert and focused primarily on two individuals talking to, at, and past one another, it’s the most formally conservative and direct of Resnick’s films for Adult Swim, adjacent to its the horror-tinged predecessors in tone but with minimalistic imagery, a primarily locked off camera, and increased focus on faces and performance. It’s largely a protracted surreal exchange between a man (played with deadpan excellence by Jared Larson) washing his titular cool blue car and a deranged woman who emerges from the vast empty landscape and demands he rent it to her (played by go-to deranged woman, increasingly prolific alt comedy star Patti Harrison). It’s odd, amusing work that, with its off-screen exchanges and vast outdoor setting plays like it was probably a broadly improvised COVID production. Even while retaining Resnick’s signature tonality, an uneasy mix of absurd comedy and discomfiting quasi-horror, it displays a sophistication of style that angles toward his increasingly professional artistic aspirations. Give the man a movie.
Conner O’Malley’s too-hot-for-YouTube PVC Feces Rig Tour (Home Made) #vanlife is available on Vimeo. Alan Resnick’s work is all available on either his YouTube channel or on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel, website and streaming app.
Ambulance (dir. Michael Bay)
The best American action film of the year is also Michael Bay’s career best. The macho maestro keeps it simple, following the lead of the century’s best action film Mad Max: Fury Road: one car chase stretched across a single movie. This is also reminiscent of Speed, and in truth, it’s a collision of many disparate cinematic threads that, the longer the list goes on, seem less and less likely bedfellows: Speed, Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, Michael Mann–so far so good, a liquidated Blockbuster’s worth of 90s action influences–but then also Stan Brakhage, whose rare forays into urban imagery, especially in the frustratingly hard to see film Eyes, makes sense of Bay’s frenetic montage of concrete and glass and flashing lights, and Michael Snow, whose La Region Centrale is evoked by Bay’s glorious use of drone imagery, robotic eyes barrelling across the edges of skyscrapers and under leaping vehicular explosions. The panic and hyperactivity of Ambulance sets one’s mind aflame with such galaxy brain comparisons, and these inspirations, intentional and otherwise, make it an endlessly magnetic watch. Its hyperactive imagery works symphonically with its performances’ maximalist pitch, especially with regard to Jake Gyllenhaal, who gives a tour de force performance that acts as a kind of stand-in and autocritique of Bay’s juvenile kineticism (Jake G as demented conductor of the film’s high octane action) while also providing a platonic ideal for the operatic acting style he’s been parading around in almost all of his movies post-Zodiac. That it is able to increasingly escalate its action while retaining a solid emotional throughline, culminating in a walloping, if manipulative, tear-inducing crescendo, is a new height for Bay. He’s never done better, and one hopes the commercial ambivalence with which it was met doesn’t send him hat in hand back to the abyss of Transformers and Netflix Original Movies.
Ambulance is available for streaming on Peacock (baby).
