POST-CINEMA 2023 // the best films that maybe aren’t films of 2023
Forget the rapidly collapsing superheroism industry. Forget Barbenheimer. Forget Tom Cruise’s franchised death drive. Let these and all the other bellwethers of mainstream American filmmaking dissipate into the ether, fading dreams of cinema’s cultural dominance. Another year passes and once again, no matter how many chokes and sputters might burst from The Movies while they persist on life support, the theatrical medium as a primary source of cinematic innovation diminishes, and some of the strangest, most captivating, most mindboggling…“filmic material?”…lives in the margins. As I did some years back, I’ve decided to highlight some choice bits of film/video ephemera from 2023. Honorifics are subjective, and the order, aside from some thematic/stylistic links, is arbitrary.
you can find a playlist of most of these selections here
The Best…Is it a Film? What is it? It doesn’t Matter, it’s The Best…of 2023
The Mask (Conner O’Malley)
The whole notion of Post-Cinema emerged for me alongside my discovery of Conner O’Malley. To try to capture his work in a few words is an exercise in verbal acrobatics…on one occasion I’ve described him as “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,” elsewhere I’ve recounted his “particularly id-driven variation on a dipshit Middle American comic persona.”
These and plenty of other words aptly describe his latest film, the 25-minute absurdist, quasi-screenlife opus The Mask, an ambitious expansion of his previous work that seeks to capture the interconnection of media and social media that cultivates the paranoiac, conspiracy-addled mindsets of contemporary life. O’Malley’s film joins Observe & Report and First Reformed in a tradition of 21st century films informed by Taxi Driver that transplant its narrative of pathetic white male radicalization to the Here and Now, a rapidfire montage of tweets, reels, news clips, vlogs, and other media marginalia brewed into a manic stew that, as with O’Malley’s previous work, is breathtakingly funny, but in a new turn for the comedian, also heartbreaking. O’Malley’s effortless dance across the social media landscape is a perfect exemplification of cinema in 2023 (and 2024): atomized, marginalized, manic, and enigmatic.
Best Exploitation of an Exploitative Television Show to Craft Twinkly Midwestern Emo
“Dr. Phil but its a midwest emo intro” (Gummie Worm Productions)
There is no shortage of “x but its midwest emo” content — and it had a considerable uptick in 2023. Surely everyone has their personal favorite, and I begrudge no one a different one from mine, but one that truly stood tall among its peers was this one. “You are right to protect yourself, and your children,” Dr. Phil declares over silence, and then he continues his quiet, disturbing tirade on matriarchal trauma atop Gummie Worm Productions’ twinkly, cascading emo riff; it captures better than any other “but its midwest emo” meme I’ve seen the true unnerving, unplaceable despair at the heart of so much post-hardcore music, while also perfectly toeing the line between that despair and pure, infectious absurdism.
Most Resolutely Cursed Deployment of AI-Generated Imagery:
The Man Who Couldn’t Miss Screenings (Damon Packard)
It would take more space than I’m allotting here to explain and explore the work of truly underground filmmaker Damon Packard — and having not yet seen opuses of his like Reflections of Evil or Foxfur, I’m not the appropriate authority to do so anyway. But Packard’s acidity as a satirist and complete lack of self-consciousness as an aesthete are made instantly evident by The Man Who Couldn’t Miss Screenings, a nightmarish AI-augmented screed targeting pathetic purveyors of Los Angeles repertory theaters. Its sickly AI imagery, and a truly bizarre Pink Floyd needle drop, make its brief runtime feel like an eternity, like a dream you beg to wake up from. And, as Michael Sicinski writes in his rundown of some of the best experimental work of 2023, it also reveals, amid its nightmare of contemporary film culture, the nightmare of AI itself — “Packard is in part showing just how impersonal, data-scraping AI systems see us, as indistinguishable from our image-culture.”
Most Potentially Cursed but then Secretly Beautiful and Heartbreaking Deployment of AI-Generated Imagery
“Now and Then” (Peter Jackson / The Beatles)
This year marks a full decade since Peter Jackson has released a non-documentary feature film; since the release of his Hobbit trilogy, the New Zealand auteur has been toying with new technologies, bringing archival footage from WWI to life with the documentary We Shall Not Grow Old and then crafting a massive tribute to The Beatles and their album Let it Be from scrapped and repurposed footage from their production of that album with the docuseries Get Back. In both of these projects he uses machine learning technology to breathe new life into old images — sometimes controversially, sometimes to great success. He continued his collaboration with the remaining members of The Beatles in 2023 with that same modus operandi, first assisting them with the production of “the final Beatles song,” “Now and Then,” which uses restored audio from a lost John Lennon track and abandoned work from a reunion of the remaining trio in the 1990s to craft a freshly produced work that uses every member of the legendary band — then he directed the music video for the song, which is what I’d like to highlight here.
There is no reason this music video should be good, and on first blush, it rubbed me the wrong way; using some of the same techniques he used to restore the Get Back footage — and surely using some new toys as well — he bridges the chasm between past and present, life and death, letting the living members of the Beatles play side-by-side again with their departed compatriots. It’s goofy, it’s uncanny…but as it goes on, and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr look on with joy and amazement at their resurrected friends, it becomes unbelievably moving. The pathos builds as Paul and Ringo then play alongside younger versions of themselves, and all of space and time collapses, Paul laughing at the antics of his and his bandmates’ younger selfs; against my better judgment, even describing this bizarre spectacle is getting me choked up. I can’t blame anyone for finding this morbid or strange, but I would draw a line at in bad taste, or exploitative — in its best moments, it’s not altogether different from Martin Scorsese’s use of new technologies in The Irishman, invoking what is simultaneously beautiful and mournful about technologies ability to — for just a moment — defy the passage of time.
An Ethically Ambiguous But Not Altogether Useless Exploration of the Deployment of AI-generated Imagery
Is This AI Art, or Is This Something New? and other videos about AI and machine learning by Corridor Crew
VFX-house-turned-YouTube-personalities Corridor Crew struck a nerve in February 2023 with “Anime Rock Paper Scissors,” a sketchy little experiment that used machine-learning combined with other VFX and animation techniques to create an homage/parody of particularly maximalist and melodramatic strains of Japanese animation. The video — instantly controversial for using imagery trained on copyrighted material — dropped alongside the Crew’s declaration that they had potentially “changed animation forever,” though, as is often the case with YouTube, this was clickbait, and not the whole story; the crew’s head and intellectual spokesman Niko Pueringer always has a more nuanced aesthetic and philosophical approach to their work than the bro-y surface of their work lets on, and the group’s engagement with AI in their videos is considerably more pragmatic than those who hope to make it as “content creators” while skipping any semblance of creative development. The Crew instead used this controversial starting point to explore through the rest of 2023 what the current world of AI-assisted art realistically looks like, and at the same time illustrated the ways that digital art-making gave itself up to mechanical shorthands long before AI became such a hot topic.
Most Uncanny Image Not Remotely Produced With Artificial Intelligence
Cop Slide
The most indelible images in cinema are often unexplainable, true magic tricks; such is the case with Cop Slide, a viral video that observes a Boston police officer flying at unnatural speed from a metallic slide outside Boston’s city hall. Why does he emerge at such a speed? Regardless of how much one scrutinizes the phenomenon, it is an enigma. Key to the mystery of Cop Slide itself is the abundance of copycat videos that emerged in its wake showing countless individuals, young and old, emerging from the enigmatic bowels of the slide at a completely normal speed.
The Second Best Film from 2023 By Comedian and Filmmaker Conner O’Malley About the Slow Then Rapid Devolution of An Individual Caused by Contemporary Media Poisoning
Rebranded Mickey Mouse (Conner O’Malley)
The Mask felt like a culmination, a natural peak for O’Malley’s recent shortform filmmaking, but he started the year strong as well with this, another hilariously paranoid, demented odyssey, though with a significantly more enigmatic central figure: a man determined to recalibrate the Disney brand with an “adult” Mickey Mouse and a fresh, mature milieu, Disney imbued with the shameless decadence of Euphoria. O’Malley has angled on occasion into horror, of a sort — his masterpiece Top Ten Wisconsin Dells Haunted Houses for Free Pulled Pork in particular contains a fairly alarming and tension-filled series of exchanges — and Rebranded Mickey Mouse continues this trajectory, filled with unsettling surveillance footage, sudden, violent turns, and a full-on dystopian climax. But most incredible is how it demonstrates O’Malley’s socio-political sharpness; it dropped in March, coinciding serendipitously with the ongoing conflict between Ron DeSantis and the Disney corporation that can be partially blamed for the popular fascist’s recent political defeats; O’Malley’s absurdist elevation of the Disney company to a militarized state power is rooted in decades of political maneuvering on the corporation’s part, but that his film on the subject emerged so perfectly timed with Disney’s public interventions in contemporary political theatre was pretty incredible, and lends the film some extra potency.
Most Ecstatic Musical Number Arranged and Choreographed in Order to Discourage the Use of Vaporizor Technology
“Stop Vaping” (Jason Rodelo)
Four dancers, three water bottles, two words, one Goo Goo Dolls instrumental; with these elements alone, Jason Rodelo produced one of the most infectiously strange, hilarious pieces of propaganda this side of This is Your Brain on Drugs.
Most Ecstatic Musical Number Arranged and Choreographed in Order to Provide All the Power and Pathos of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in One Small Two and a Half Minute Package
Trailer Park Alien (bscott2hot)
Who is “bscott2hot”? What does he know about the American government’s obfuscation of our relationship to alien life? How does he insert himself so seamlessly into his lo-fi digital creations, bring such vitality to hyper-artificial characters, mostly rendered with public domain artifacts and models? No one has the answers to these questions — but we can all be thankful for his skill and grace, his willingness to share his gifts with the world.
All jokes aside, “Trailer Park Alien” is as endearing for its grubby, proletarian aesthetic as it is captivating as an earworm; despite its incredibly short length, it packs a considerable emotional and comedic punch, and bscott2hot’s animated choreography is so crisp and precise and the melodies so simple that each image is indelible in spite of their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality.
bscott2hot’s 2023 held more than one infectious hip-hop opus — “Mr. I Scream Man” dopy criminal’s internal monologue hilariously invokes R. Kelly’s soliloquizing Trapped in the Closet as children, a cop, a nosy dog, and the Ally McBeal baby traipse across its bizarre suburban landscape, and “Jiggly” — well, “Jiggly” may best be gone into completely blind, but it suffices to say that bscott2hot easily bests Illumination as the best creator of a Nintendo-based piece of visual media in 2023.
Another Immaculate Video in Which Elements From Disparate Pieces of Archival Footage Intermingle and Mix to Create a New Ecstatic Experience
“Bizarro Elaine Dance” (Bell Bros)
A short and sweet bit of remix media that is best viewed with no further comment; at its best, invokes cinematically the musical genius of mash-up maestro Neil Cicierega (if you know me, the highest of praise).
Best Stealth Adaptation of a Sports Biography Disguised as a Longform History of a Football Team
The History of the Minnesota Vikings (Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein et al)
Jon Bois is a staple of this ephemeral, marginal, “not-quite-film, not-quite-not” post-cinema project. Since 2018, he has produced several epic-length histories of various sporting franchises, feature-length explorations of Michael Jordan’s psyche and the rapid decline of athletes named Bob, and a short political thriller about a single high stakes football game, and his work has gradually elevated him beyond the diminished status of “video producer” and into the realm of genuine cinematic discourse. He reached another peak in this regard in 2023 with his latest totemic history project, which got him interviewed by Indiewire and included in critics’ lists of the best films of the year; this time covering the history of the Minnesota Vikings, Bois and his constant collaborator Alex Rubenstein use as the skeleton of their narrative the life and work of one of the teams’ coaches, Bud Grant, using his biography as the film’s thematic backbone. Grant is one of the great characters Bois has engaged with; while the film is the longest of these histories thus far, and doesn’t always feel as though it merits the same cosmic treatment as his previous subjects, Grant’s life and philosophy is always a sturdy foundation, and the result is a characteristically beautiful, frustrating, and altogether engaging exploration of sports as an allegory for so much more.
Best Ripoff of Jon Bois That Demonstrates Just How Atomized and Diversified We All Are in the Information Age (And The Best Mario Movie of 2023)
The Quest to Beat abney317 (SummoningSalt)
YouTube filmmaker SummoningSalt takes all his stylistic and rhythmic cues from Jon Bois; but where Bois uses the histories of mainstream sports to tell larger stories about life in the 20th and 21st centuries, SummoningSalt details the histories of a microcosmic subculture: video game world records. As a result, his narratives feel like a circle within a circle within a circle, resembling, and relevant to, nothing in the real world; what may be his magnum opus thus far, The Quest to Beat abney317, details the nature of world records in the video game Mario Kart 64, and the efforts from various players, and abney317 himself, to match and beat the records set by the latter over the past several years. This is as strange and insular as it sounds, and SummoningSalt’s dramatic account of these deeply bizarre efforts makes it all the more absurd — and all the more addictive to watch unfold. The result is something that feels deeply reflective of how far apart we all are in an age where we’re all ostensibly brought together by the internet; the internet atomizes as much as it connects, and we all fall into rabbit holes from which some of us never escape. What is accomplishment, what is achievement, in such a world?
Best Long-Running Attempt at Playing and Discussing Every Single Sega Dreamcast Game Released in the United States
The Dreamcast Files (Brian Schmid)
Speaking of atomization…starting in August 2022, and every week since, Brian has been covering each and every game released in the United States for the Sega Dreamcast (in release order). 2023 was his first full calendar year releasing these videos, and this Sisyphusean task has, alongside Blank Check with Griffin & David and virtually nothing else, been one of the only media artifacts released weekly that is a true appointment viewing for me.
Annual John Fetterman v Doctor Oz Award for Most Despairing Cinema About the Fragility of Our Public Servants
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell freezes during remarks to reporters
The American Public has surely learned by now not to expect any better from our leaders than perennial incoherence and decay. Contrary to popular belief, bizarre gaffes and non sequiturs are not exclusive to the highest heights of public office (this could just as easily be called the Fool Me Twice Award or the Corn Pop Award), as demonstrated in August 2023 when Mitch McConnell provided one of the most captivating images of the year when he froze and went stone silent right in the middle of some public remarks. The quick zoom in as he falls silent and his eyes drift into the abyss of the middle distance is as abjectly disturbing and psychologically evocative an image as any committed to theater screens in the same calendar year.
Best Video Essayist By Far, Several Years Running
“The False Evolution of Execution Methods” and “How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away” (Jacob Geller)
I highlight these two specific videos among the dozen Jacob Geller produced in 2023 not to declare them especially better than his others — though, maybe they are — but to emphasize just how eclectic and all-encompassing his project continues to become with each passing year. In one he recounts the history of the death penalty, aiming to demonstrate not just that the notion of capital punishment hasn’t actually improved over the past century, but that the entire notion of liberal progress itself is a narrative that obscures continued societal ill; obfuscating fictions are also the key to the second video, in which Geller explores physical and virtual archival resources and laments at the false promises of the information age. All of Geller’s videos are worthwhile; these two would be great starting points for a first timer, especially for those less inclined to wax poetic about the art and philosophy of video games, Geller’s pet subject.
Video Essayist Who Gives Jacob Geller a Run for His Money
“Who is Killing Cinema” and other explorations of contemporary film culture (Patrick H Willems)
The video essays of Patrick H Willems can be somewhat of a hard sell for the uninitiated; for the past several years, his essays have shared space with comical, metaphysical narratives crafted with a crew of writers, producers and actors that make his material 80% analysis, 20% sitcom. But 2022 drew a long running narrative within Willems’ videos to a close, and though the sketchiness and silliness continued into 2023, the ratio pivoted drastically toward the critical material of his videos, and he spent the better part of the year exploring from various angles how we arrived at the contemporary state of mainstream American cinema — slavish to intellectual properties and corporate conglomerates, lacking star power and auteurist heft, and succumbing to the competition of lesser forms of media. “Who is Killing Cinema” is the perfect crux point to this year of essays, but just as integral to Willems’ larger argument are videos like “Everything Is Content Now,” “When Movie Stars Became Brands” (about Fascist Psy-Op™ Himself Dwayne The Rock Johnson), and “AI Filmmaking is Not the Future”
Best Use of an Enormous Public Platform To Expound upon Global Health Care Inequities (Last Category Featuring YouTube Personalities I Promise)
A Tale of Two Cancers and other videos by John and Hank Green
Hank Green and his brother John, who have been making YouTube videos for their channel Vlogbrothers for so long that their ubiquity almost registers as invisibility at this point, faced a task this year that ought to be unusual, but in the public-facing world of contemporary life, is altogether mundane — Hank was diagnosed with cancer, and so he and John, who produce multiple videos a week that often touch on their personal experiences, had to (well, chose to) “vlog through it.” The result, which in different hands could have been a morbid or exploitative enterprise, manifested instead, in usual Green brothers fashion, as a dialogue about their privilege and how that privilege can be used to highlight inequality in the larger, mostly unseen populations of the wider world. Hank reported on his treatment — what it felt like, how it was intrinsically easier for him to get expedient and expensive treatments, how illness is covered by the media, what support cancer patients could receive from their loved ones — and John, in return, both explored the mental world of one of said loved ones, but also used the opportunity to engage with his current intellectual and political passion: the similar inequity in the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease virtually “cured” for the developed world that remains catastrophic in developing nations. I can certainly understand, for the John Green / Fault in Our Stars allergic out there, how engaging with a year of Vlogbrothers videos about cancer and tuberculosis can be a hard sell — but in a YouTube era defined primarily by the virality of empty entrepreneurs and creators like Mr. Beast, the substantive work the Green brothers continue to produce on YouTube and elsewhere is like an oasis in the vastest of deserts.
Best Nightmarish Parody of YouTubers and other contemporary social media personalities not Produced by Conner O’Malley (Alan Resnick is not a YouTube personality so I’ve kept my promise)
My Very First Vlog and Vlog #2 (Alan Resnick)
One of Alan Resnick’s many talents is that he pretty much always “says the quiet part loud.” Like Conner O’Malley, I have written about Resnick a number of times — occasionally, when gifted with such a collaboration, about Resnick together with O’Malley — and something that always strikes me about Resnick — an altogether addicting quality to his work — is that his characters communicate in ways that immaculately reflect how my socially anxious brain thinks about general social interaction; that it is largely composed of strange, prefabricated totems that “everyone” understands, that “everyone” can produce on autopilot.
With his two vlog parody videos, Resnick captures the not-so-subtly obscured misanthropy and self-obsession at the heart of the format. In the second of the two videos, he gives a tour de force monologue, explicitly declaring, “I think I choose vlogging because, like, it gives me power over you, you focus on my face, and are thinking about me, and it gives me power.” As he goes on, what he says, and what he describes, becomes ever more surreal, and as satire turns to psychodrama, the video effortlessly joins Resnick’s previous work as a perfect mix of absurdist comedy and surrealist horror.
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An abundance of thanks due to my partner Christina for sharing many of these with me; there exists no better curator of funny.
