And they said a comic book film could never win an Oscar.

It's appropriate and applaudable for a modern film to confront the millennial crisis of the declining sense of meaning in our culture.  The problem with EEAAO is that it also happens to be exactly the kind of emotionally contrived empty-calorie entertainment product that is exactly the problem with this malnourishment of meaning.  The philosophy is as paper-thin as its consumerist pop culture tropes and its juvenile surrealism (hot dog fingers!) is precious enough to stick on a refrigerator.  Like their Swiss Army Man, the Daniels serve an audience that can't discern between wit and non-sequiturs, overly sweet without substance.  It panders rather than inspires.

A film like Memoria is a lot less "fun" but far more effective.  It forces the audience's patience to appreciate the meaning of the moment, in truly Buddhistic fashion, unlike the relative strip-mall spa offered by EEAAO.

6/10
 

crumbsroom wrote:

I didn't know this was from the same guy.

*guys*  The 'Daniels' are partners Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert.  These are their only two films as of now.

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

I didn't know this was from the same guy.

*guys*  The 'Daniels' are partners Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert.  These are their only two films as of now.

While I liked their movies enough, I found them getting increasingly annoying over the course of their Oscar acceptance speech.

Yeah, both of those are fair points.

I do think this is a movie that’s probably somewhere from a 5/10 to 7/10, that the most annoying people on the internet have chosen to declare as the best or worst movie they’ve ever seen. Which happens with most successful movies but seems to have been especially prominent with this one.

I’ve avoided watching that for one totally unfair reason (Rachel Sennott’s face annoys me) and one pretty valid one (Pete Davidson sucks).

Rock wrote:

I’ve avoided watching that for one totally unfair reason (Rachel Sennott’s face annoys me) and one pretty valid one (Pete Davidson sucks).

Maybe it helps that their characters are annoying awful people?

Rock wrote:

I don’t think I like Road House very much.

Seemed like a fool's errand.  You just can't intentionally make good schlock like that.  If you're going to remake a hilariously bad movie, you have to lean into pure spoof.  Nobody saw Plan 9 and thought, "Maybe we could salvage the story..."

Good performances though.

Some Netflix content....




The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem

Using 4Chan as a synecdoche for the larger social trends of the 21st century internet, this documentary about the wild, fringe message board which became a forum for anonymous meme-creation in the mid-late '00s manages to accurately map the direct rise and fall of internet culture from the promise of the information age to the cesspool of the disinformation plague.  Serving as an appropriate complement to the earlier Social Dilemma, we can easily see the same psychological traps and temptations here, primarily the addiction to accelerant outrage and the pathway from alienation to radicalization.  The only real difference is that these toxic pathologies occur more naturally here, as opposed to advertising-driven algorithms, but it's still premised on the same fundamental compulsions which fuel an over-indulgence for online interaction and the resulting epistemic dissolution of context and critical judgment.  The chronology of this doc offers an excellent outline of our society's 20 year onset nervous breakdown.  The only glaring omission that it fails to touch on is the recent pandemic.

For background:  4Chan was a message board for mostly fans of anime and Japanese culture, as well as outrageous and occasionally sick humor.  It should be sufficient to say that a message board that was capable of producing both the Guy Fawkes Anonymous phenomena as well as the Qanon conspiracy cult (the definitive bookends of '10s online madness) illustrates the twisted but mighty power of bored lonely people with way too much time on their hands.

8.5/10






Look.  I love crazy shit.  This lazy-ass bullshit here is an insult to my more credulous fancies.  This is some K-Mart level bargin-bin blue light discount culting.  Oooh.  Sex and Aliens?  With vaguely Vedic highlights?  Who do you think you're talking to?  You think this is my first cunt-yogi rodeo?  This Gallagher motherfucker who looks like he just stepped off the LP cover of the worst moog-fusion record ever?  This trash is too stale to even mock properly.  If Sasha Baron Cohen tried to put this out as a parody, it would even be something that feels like a refried '80s comedy.  All I can do is to regard anyone dumb or unimaginative enough to get caught up in whatever persuasive allure of this Bee Gee bastard with the utmost pity and contempt.

3/10




This latest Netflix doc from the Duplass brothers (Wild Wild Country) follows a similar dramatic formula.  Each episode inevitably sets up the next as an escalation, starting off with a single string, pulled to unravel a purportedly vaster tapestry of revelation.  The formula is indeed captivating.  But unfortunately, here, despite all of the intriguing touchstones of 1980s conspiracies (Iran-Contra, drug cartels, computer surveillance), it all adds up to ultimately very little than inspiring interested parties into doing a little extra research on their own.

The story of Danny Casolaro is irresistibly fraught with malign implications.  A freelance journalist who winds up dead in their motel bathtub shortly after meeting a source is always going to raise some eyebrows.  What he had been researching was the so-called "Octopus", a group of eight members of the national security apparatus (including ex-CIA heads George HW Bush and William Casey), who were involved and possibly orchestrating all of the above '80s conspiracies while a string of unsolved murders (which would eventually include Casolaro's) tied these nefarious plots together.  Along the way, we get to know a Michael Riconosciuto, a prodigy polymath with shady government connections who would later turn to manufacturing LSD and methamphetimine (MK-Ultra!), and who is always promising, but never quite delivering, various deep state revelations about what's really going on behind the curtain.

I wouldn't say that all of these plots and theories were hoaxes and delusions, in fact most of them are well-known and can stand on their own.  The problem with this doc is that for all that it tries to chew it never manages to swallow any of it.  It's as if the point of the series is less about revealing truth and more about simulating the stimulating rush of chasing down a rabbit hole for its own sake.  The problem is that this chase always comes with a familiar crash, and the crashing result of this documentary is that, after about 2 and a half hours, it has uncovered about absolutely nothing, and we're all just kind of along for the ride.  (And Casolero was also broke, desperate and depressed, which is another frequent and plausible hazard that freelance journalists tend to suffer from.)

6/10
 

Wonder how I would feel with a marathon watch of Land, Diary and Survival?  Would my opinion improve?  I remember finding Land decent enough, hated Diary, pretty sure I never actually watched Survival.  And the bigger problem was that these were all from that era when the glut of the zombie renaissance, culminating in Walking Dead, left me openly contemptuous of the genre. 

lol looks like they’re on US Tubi

Eh, I’ll save them for later in the week. Expecting work to be kinda busy for the next few days.