Month: October 2018

Review #10 – Shane Dawson’s “Inside the Mind of Jake Paul”

by Alec Kubas-Meyer

Shane Dawson is not Errol Morris. Jake Paul Isn’t Robert McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld or even Steve Bannon. But I kept thinking about those movies, in concept if not in actual implementation. Part of the reason I is the simple that that Inside the Mind of Jake Paul runs for an hour and forty five minutes, putting it squarely in the feature length category against the world of Morris and others. The 40 to 50 minute pieces that preceded it feel fundamentally different, despite the fact that the final episode doesn’t have any more things in it than the others – it just has them for longer.

And Jake Paul is, you know, reviled by the public and the media. In a different way by much different people for less significant reasons, but the initial reaction to a docuseries about Jake Paul was DARN IT SHANE DAWSON DON’T YOU DARE MAKE ME FEEL FOR JAKE PAUL. The idea of giving that guy a platform was anathema to a wide swath of the people on the internet who care about the things that happen on the internet. And yet, he did. And so, you do.

The question that bogs down the first half of the series – is Jake Paul a sociopath – is so far from view and irrelevant by the finale that you honestly wonder why Shane Dawson bothered in the first place. He’s not, so the devotion of an entire episode, easily and justifiably the most controversial of the bunch for its problematic use of music and extra footage, to it seems like the flailing of a filmmaker who has extensive remnants of an earlier video concept left in place because no one was there to tell him it undermined the point he would ultimately be trying to make.

But it’s also a likely result of the way the series was released. It was fascinating to watch in effectively real time as this thing was formed. He continued to edit each episode until the day it released. It is everything that a YouTube series can be that nothing else can.

But maybe the decision to form the coherent structure and argument beforehand isn’t just a result of archaic distribution systems. Maybe it just results in more cohesive storytelling.

Hmmm…

The series, then, is largely a distraction. The very-serious conversation between Jake Paul and Shane Dawson that is this final episode focuses on some topics that we’ve heard from any number of perspectives, and others that have not come up at all. A fair amount of it contradicts things we heard earlier, and there’s no attempt to reconcile that.

None of it was necessary. Much of it was counterproductive.

Inside the Mind of Jake Paul is a fully self-contained document of a 21-year-old millionaire. One who doesn’t matter at all. Except that he does.

I did not care about the younger, slightly less controversial Paul brother until I saw Nerd City’s video on him entitled Parents Worst a Nightmare, which exposes some genuinely dangerous aspects to the videos of someone who claims his audience is kids 8 – 16. I continued not to care on a personal level, but the video shattered any impression that Paul’s success was benign.

That video also serves as the basis for the most revealing moment of this entire series. That is not, as Shane seems to believe, in the segment where things get real and the background music comes down (more on that, I can assure you), but in the exchange that precedes it. Shane brings up Nerd City and the accusations he makes. He gives Jake Paul a chance to be redeemed. And Jake Paul rejects it outright.

Not only will Jake Paul not apologize for manipulating children into buying dat merch, he rejects the premise. The closest thing he gives to an actual defense – that Spongebob has commercials too, so whatever – falls on deaf ears in the only moment where Shane genuinely pushes back (sort of). I believe that Jake doesn’t understand the problem with what he’s doing, but that doesn’t make him anything but wrong for doing it. I’m glad someone told him that to his face. Maybe when he’s 30, he’ll understand.

Can you imagine Jake Paul at 30? He probably can’t either.

The intent of these Shane Dawson docuserieses has been to give a platform to controversial figures and let them speak their truth in a setting moderated by an ostensibly (but clearly not) neutral arbiter. It’s an interesting, perhaps even admirable, goal, but it is also one that grinds against the reality of a Shane Dawson video.

This is because Shane Dawson is not a particularly good interviewer. His YouTuber sensibilities overtake his conversations as he interjects himself into basically every question he asks. Everything begins with a monologue explaining what he thinks and why before he invites the other party to respond. And back-and-forths continue in this pattern. He often offers his subjects the opportunity to just stop talking or turn off the camera. He, of course, would have much to say about this fact. But it makes sense, because as much as any of these series – this, Jeffree Star, Tanacon – are about the people whose names clickbait his titles, they are all really about Shane. And that’s fine.

But let’s not pretend that this is anything else.

Fifty-three minutes in to Inside the Mind of Jake Paul, a title card says that heavy stuff is coming (it’s not wrong) and so Shane will remove the background music that has been playing under everything thus far. And that moment, and the subsequent conversation that happens in silence, is so clarifying. Because you can feel the manipulation on Shane’s part in the musical choices he makes even more than in the video clips he overlays. The music is heavy-handed. It’s loud – I listened with headphones. It doesn’t benefit the video. And I can say that with the utmost confidence because even if the conversation that begins there is not the most enlightening, it’s the most compelling. This is where you just get Jake Paul in all of his glorious dullness. 

Because he is not an interesting person to listen to. His language is simplistic and repetitive, particularly when he’s trying to express emotion, which much of this video is him struggling to do. He dropped out of high school, and you can tell.

But what he is trying to emote about is, I think, genuinely interesting. The story of what brought a kid from Ohio into this bizarre internet fame and the craziness that followed his fame all make for compelling, if often unrelatable, drama.

YouTube drama takes a variety of forms, but it runs the gamut from utter nonsense to kind of horrifying. Jake has been caught up in both, but Shane focuses largely on the latter. There appears to be an honest attempt to get him to go deep on it – though one constantly interrupted by Shane’s need to explain how it all makes him feel.

The Mind of Jake Paul, which has over 130 million views and counting across its episodes, is nothing short of a sensation; it also has taken on this broader importance, as the entire internet that cares about the internet stopped to have an opinion – myself obviously included. And the series, and this episode in particular, will shape the way people perceive Jake Paul going forward. This platform, these 105 minutes, the chance to say things with some pretense of radical honesty is disarming.

But it’s a puff piece, and we can’t let ourselves think otherwise. Shane Dawson likes Jake Paul, and that fact hangs over every minute. Jake’s feet aren’t held to any kind of fire; that sole pushback comes in the form of a stern talking to and not a genuine attempt at engaging Jake in his manipulation of children. Despite all of that, it wants you to be on Jake’s side, and of course it succeeds.

If you don’t, you wasted eight hours of your life.

Six-Point-Nine out of Ten

Review #9: First Man: The IMAX Experience

by Alec Kubas-Meyer

Not every IMAX Experience is the same. There are the actual IMAX theaters, with their screens the size of buildings with a unique, atypically tall aspect ratio. Then, there are the so-called LIEMAX theaters, which have nice, big screens, but they’re basically just better regular theater screens; they cannot show a full IMAX 70mm print in all its vertically intended glory. There are further between IMAX Digital and IMAX Laser projections, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. Point is: I saw First Man on a proper IMAX screen, the way it was ostensibly intended to be seen.

And now, a slight digression:

I have met First Man’s director, Damien Chazelle, at an after-party following the New York Film Festival premiere of his first film, Whiplash. I was talking about how much I liked the movie to someone else, and he said, “Oh, that guy over there? Hold on.” And then he brought me over. Damien was sitting on a couch talking to two other people and I then interrupted to tell him that his movie was fucking amazing. I asked if I could have a hug and he obliged. He asked my name, and I said it was Alec and he said his was Damien and I said I know, your movie was fucking amazing. Then I walked away.

(Nailed it!)

I found him on Facebook later; I wanted to send him my glowing review of the film, since I’ve found that first-time directors are excited by that kind of thing. We Facebook Messengered briefly. He was very, very nice. He told me to hit him up if I was ever in LA. He has since become an Academy-Award Winning Director. I did not do that on my recent trip. (SNAP)

But this is all to say that I really, really like Damien Chazelle. And he has shown talent enough already that I’ll follow him anywhere. Even the moon.

First Man is a very good film. It’s well-written, well-paced, and well-acted. I know nothing about Niel Armstrong, and this movie will serve as all I’ll ever learn about him; it did not instill in me a fascination with the man, but it invested me in his story for just under two and a half hours. Whether the depiction is “accurate” or not, it felt real. He felt human, like someone who existed outside of the confines of the theater screen. And the world is beautifully rendered, totally nailing the 60s aesthetic – or so believes someone who did not live through that era – and using some of the most effective CGI I’ve ever seen; with a couple of as brief exceptions, I couldn’t see the seams even when I looked for them. I have some quibbles with the camerawork, but we’ll get into those later.

The hard right, genre-wise, that Chazelle took after the widely beloved La La Land is exactly what he needed to do to prove his versatility at this point in his career. Go from the 3ish million dollar indie drama in Whiplash to the 30ish million movie musical in La La Land to now the 60ish million space biopic First Man does so in spades.

One of the perks of the step up in budget was that Chazelle and co could afford to use IMAX 70mm film cameras for the climactic scene on the moon. There’s something mildly frustrating about its prevalence in the marketing, since the sequence doesn’t come until the last half hour or so, but it’s also not like a biopic about Niel Armstrong wasn’t going to have these scenes, so this wasn’t some big twist to be hidden.

Prior to IMAX screenings of Mission Impossible Fallout (4.5 stars), they showed a clip from First Man as well a brief montage of on-moon imagery utilizing the full glory of the screen. So, I knew what to expect on two fronts: the gorgeousness of those epic moon shots and also the shakiness of what would precede it.

Six and a half years ago (oh my gosh…) I wrote about how the first Hunger Games film, which I greatly enjoyed, revealed flaws in the IMAX Experience. The camera moves constantly and intensely. Afterwards, my head hurt. And from that point on, I decided not to take it for granted that the IMAX version of a film would be superior.

First Man complicates this, because the exception has been, of course, films that actually used IMAX cameras. Checking the Wikipedia list of studio films partially shot using in IMAX 70mm – the largest movie film format by a significant margin, I’ve only missed two: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Trek Into Darkness.

Of the other nine, I think it’s worth noting that hardcore shakycam is a rarity. Seen in the large format, there is only the benefit of the added screen real estate with none of the exhausting downside. First Man isn’t that. The first fifteen to twenty minutes of First Man would be exhausting on a decently sized television. In IMAX, it’s pain-inducing. Any time a ship is doing anything, the camera goes all over the place, particularly in closeups. It definitely succeeds in making you feel like a part of the moment, as the rumbling of the rocket would, one assume, feel like that. But the sheer scale of it will probably make some folks queasy. And it’s not just during the actiony sequences; two characters talking can still look like something from a Bourne film, and though you do get acclimated to it, you never stop being aware of it.

But what about the IMAX itself? Having seen some of it, I knew what to expect but that didn’t make me any less excited to see it again. I have long believed that there is nothing more well suited to such an expansive image than the grandeur of space. Of the Christopher Nolan films with IMAX footage, I believe that Interstellar uses it best because The IMAX Experience is so tied to understanding the enormity of what the characters are doing. Space exploration is a crazy thing. It’s one of the craziest things humanity has ever done, and certainly one of the most impressive. Most of us will never get to experience that; we must do so vicariously: 2001: A Space Oddysey, Gravity, Interstellar. These are films where big is not just better but is vital.

First Man lacks some of this vitality because so little of it takes place in space, and even less is shot in IMAX. Only the moon walk is. *But* the rapid transition from one format to the other is a truly spectacular moment in cinema; someone in the audience literally shouted “WHOA” as it happened, and understandably so. Going back to this concept of enormity, the moment that changes everything is the one where Armstrong leaves the pod. As you’re reminded throughout, the Russians have beat the Americans to every other major milestone; only the moon remains out of reach. So the simple act of going into space, as much as I would have loved to see in full, doesn’t carry nearly the weight that the grand walk does.

And oh so grand. Released footage showing that first step cropped to match the rest of the film shows only a part of that crucial, incredible moment. In the full glory of a four story IMAX theater, you see it all. And it’s like nothing else. Truly, it feels out of this world.

Eight Point Six out of Ten