Hello anyone, everyone, my name is Really Kinda Sad Right Now, because today I want to talk about a game I have long considered among my favorites of all time: Playdead’s seminal puzzle platformer Limbo.

Limbo was released in 2010, alongside other visually striking, mechanically interesting indie platformers Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV. This had a profound impact on me as a player; ever since, those have been my favorite types of games, and I have pretentiously proclaimed such at every opportunity.

As a result, I was hype af for the release of Playdead’s follow up, Inside, six years later. I bought it, got stuck about four minutes in, and then gave up for literally years.

It was pretty pathetic.

And I have thought about this pretty pathetic thing every four to six months since, but never really felt the impetus to do something about it until the release of the official Kotaku review of New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe a few weeks back, which came from the mind of Tim Rogers.

Rogers has been my favorite games critic since 2013, when Brendan Koegh, the author of the Spec Ops: The Line – five stars – critical analysis Killing Is Harmless – 4.5 stars pointed me to Rogers’ 18,000-word, not-very-positive review of Bioshock Infinite – 4 Stars.

He and I don’t always agree, for example Bioshock Infinite. Also, The Last of Us – two stars. Yeah. That’s right. The Last of Us, a really interesting movie with a stellar opening but otherwise underwhelming interactive experience tacked on.

Oddly enough, my specific gripes are not entirely unlike the ones Rogers has with Infinite, though in a way that is much, much more specific and irritating to other people.

I have incredible respect for Tim Rogers’ opinions. When it comes to a discussion about gamefeel and the fundamentals of functional mechanics, I genuinely don’t think there is anyone who games criticisms better. So, I was heartbroken when, about three quarters of the way through that review, he called out Limbo. In the text version, it’s an off-hand remark. In the video itself, he briefly pauses to say he literally hates it and also spoils the ending, kind of.

My initial response was shock and revulsion followed by depression, anger, rejection, and then a little bit of curiosity. It had been so long since I played Limbo that… maybe I was wrong. But before I could really think about that, it was time to finally freaking finish Inside.

So, I picked up another copy that I could more easily play from my couch (i.e. not on PC) and sat down with it. I did not move until the credits rolled. It was a work night. Oops.

But I was a changed man.

I immediately figured out that thing I was stuck on all those years ago, got mad at myself retroactively – as I am wont to do, and then never stopped again. I was genuinely blown away. Despite having even less text than Limbo (there’s no button prompt to start the game), it tells a cohesive and coherent narrative that digs into themes of humanity and control: a kid who freed himself from zombification escapes at first towards freedom but ultimately back to the people who believed they owned him.

It goes to some seriously unexpected places, with the last thirty minutes in particular being some of the most genuinely bonkers I’ve ever played in a game that didn’t appear at first glance to be completely bonkers.

Really, it’s amazing.

A few days later, I booted up Limbo. Fully expecting to love it every bit as much as I did back in 2010.

I… didn’t.

I still liked it, of course, or so I keep telling myself. But playing it after Inside – and with Tim Rogers’ entire En Es Em Be You Dee review in mind – is kinda rough.

At times, Limbo is reminiscent of the rage-classic I Wanna Be the Guy without the meta-hilarity.

I subscribe to the theory of game design that a preternaturally good player should be able to reach the credits of a game on their first try without dying once. If the logic and rules are consistently applied, someone with a flawless grasp of the mechanics will be able to make it through. I Wanna Be the Guy quote-unquote subverts your expectations right from the start by changing the way that apples “fall” – both based on the rules of the game as you think they have been set out in the opening moments and the world in general, since apples don’t typically fall up. But that’s the point. That’s the whole game. And I respect its commitment to making you angry at every moment – the sweeter the feeling of accomplishment when you finally pass an obstacle, or so some might have you believe.

That isn’t Limbo’s shtick, though. The completion of a puzzle tends to come not with a sense of pride but relief.

I can pinpoint the moment where my devotion to Limbo started to waver: you are running underneath some heavy machinery – two identical contraptions. There are triggers on the floor. Step on the wrong spot, and you will be crushed. There is no indication that this is the case until it comes down upon you, though you can reasonably guess it from the presentation.

As someone who has played a video game before, you would expect that you have to jump over the low-ground onto the center high-ground. And for the first, you would be right. Jump, land on the higher platform, and you’re set.

The second one, though, landing on the center triggers the machine.

If you think about intent, this makes sense. A general platformer putting two of the same jump in a row, particularly one with such serious consequences, would be par for the course, but not this particular puzzle platformer.

But that thought requires you to be constantly outside of the game experience, trying to read the developer’s minds instead of the actual experience they built.

Your player sense tingles, you jump to the center a second time, and you die. And then you groan or shout at the screen and do it again, correctly. But you know from then on, if you hadn’t known already, that this game hates you.

If you want to be kind in return, maybe chalk this up to narrative: it is, after all, limbo – literally; it’s confusing and disorienting. You can’t get out of limbo by following “rules.” You do so by getting into philosophical discussions with very smart mostly Greeks as part of your epic quest to woo a girl you’ve been obsessed with since you were a child even though you only met her twice and she married someone else, so, like, get over it, dude.

Do you remember that God of War-like Dante’s Inferno game? I don’t know if it’s possible to miss the point harder than that thing did. Although maybe I just came close.

Anyways.

You spend a lot of time waiting in Limbo. About a third of that is waiting for something so you can proceed – most of that on this one fucking puzzle, but generally this is about elevators and elevator-likes; another third is waiting for the game to kill you because you didn’t realize you needed to do one thing before triggering another and welp, it’s too late now.

The third… third is a hybrid, where you are redoing one of those initial waiting periods because you didn’t realize there was something in the puzzle ready to kill you until you finally saw the exit and a big heavy ball from a minute ago lands on your head, at which point you realize the puzzle was actually just about avoiding the ball the whole time. And how could you have known? Even if it didn’t hit you, that was almost certainly not because you knew it was coming but that you just happened to follow the necessary pattern.

And all this results in the crushing realization that the design philosophy behind Limbo is… bad.

And Playdead must have realized it, because nothing that I just said applies to Inside. Inside is damn near perfect, taking everything that worked in Limbo and wildly improving everything else.

Still, I find it impossible to take the final, logical step and just say that Limbo is not, in the year CE Two Thousand Nineteen, a good game. That the love for it is not only misplaced now but may have been misplaced from the start.

I can’t do that because it was so significant to me for so long, that it helped to change the way I think about games and what I look for in games. How do you accept that you don’t like a thing that mattered that much? It still has its moments! All these years later, individual moments are as intense and powerful as they ever were… but so what? When I actually had trouble keeping going in between those, because there were other things I could have been doing and would rather have been doing?

Ugh.

Ya know, I thought a lot about the title for this video. Back when I conceived of it as a review of Inside after my wildly positive reaction to that, or maybe a look at the evolution of Playdead’s style. I knew they would be different but believed them equivalent. That this video might be about how they’re both perfect. Then it became about how they were perfect in, ya know, their own way.

And then one wasn’t perfect anymore.

Six Point Zero out of Ten

So, last week, two streaming juggernauts released last week about 2017’s most public event planning fiasco: Netflix’s Fyre and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud.

Over the weekend, I watched both – one after the other, and spoiler, but I recommend doing the same.

Their combined 192-minute runtime features surprisingly little overlap and each actually fills in some of the other’s gaps. Shockingly, only a couple interviewees overlap, which is a result of separate agendas and interests. I think that there is a really excellent, if stylistically inconsistent, two-and-a-half hour documentary that could be made by taking about an hour of Fyre and grafting it onto Fyre Fraud.

But without question, I would want the latter to serve as the base. Because watching Fyre Fraud sometimes makes Fyre feel like one.

Not in, like, the legal sense. In fact, not even in a “it’s a bad documentary” sense – it’s not – but seeing Fyre Fraud first, you become painfully aware of some of the information that Fyre is missing.

Its fundamental problem, which Fraud actually points out in its final title cards, is that Jerry Media is one of the financiers of Netflix’s project. Jerry was the head of the festival’s marketing campaign and played no small part in its success. And you can draw a bright red line from that conflict of interest to the doc’s ultimate conclusion, because they come out with egg on their face but their hands entirely clean.

Fyre Fraud paints a dirtier picture.

Pretty much everything you need to know about the intent of each documentary can be found in its respective name. Fyre is a targeted film, one that is interested almost exclusively in Fyre the talent-booking app that the music festival was theoretically supposed to be a launching point for and then the music festival itself. It delves into the logistics of the festival – beginning just a few months before it was set to launch and then going along the process with the people who were trying to make it work. If you want a deep dive of what happened on the ground in the Bahamas in the couple of months leading up to the festival, Fyre should satisfy you. Many of the stories are mind-boggling – particularly one later on involving customs and water acquisition. It’s clear that this thing could have never worked, though many of the interview subjects seemed to somehow believe it could have.

Fyre Fraud has another story about customs. It’s less awful but more straight-up criminal.

Fyre Fraud isn’t a deep dive into the festival or Fyre Media or the Fyre App: It is a look at the broader context of all of these things. And it is about the fraudster who created them. The only Fyre employee to be interviewed in Hulu’s documentary is Fyre’s creator and the man of the hour: Billy McFarland – who doesn’t make an appearance in Netflix’s, which caused an interesting stir last week in itself. Rather, its subjects are journalists and influencers; a venture capitalist who created the “Fyre Fraud” Twitter handle and makes a small appearance in Fyre plays a fittingly large role in Fyre Fraud. There’s a lawyer who filed a $100 million dollar class action lawsuit against the company. And a former member of Jerry Media who played a particularly key role in that marketing campaign and certainly makes his old employer seem complicit.

If you didn’t know going into Fyre how Billy McFarland’s story ended, it might feel like a twist to learn that he’s a compulsive liar. I knew that and it still felt like they were uncovering some kind of mystery. So much of the film is spent building this guy up as a genius that when the house of cards falls, it’s almost bewildering. All of the failures that lead to that point felt like some sort of innocent incompetence. This young guy was in over his head, sure, but he wasn’t out-and-out malicious, right? You don’t learn until late in the game that, no, he was malicious. It’s information withheld from the audience for, I guess, narrative purposes. And key information that might have revealed it too early is generally ignored.

Again, just look at the names: Fyre Fraud shows McFarland as a con man from minute one who has been a con man from day one. And not just of Fyre, but his previous ventures as well. Where I really understood the difference between the two films was in their respective discussions of McFarland’s previous venture, Magnisis. The NYC-based fancy credit card company that I’m pretty sure I aspirationally looked at for like fifteen minutes a few year years back is considered a pure success by Fyre. It takes as fact that the brand had over 10,000 members when an employee of both of McFarland’s failed ventures claims such and just generally looks back on that time as one of a young entrepreneur doing something incredible and setting him up for more incredible things.

Fyre Fraud shows otherwise, that, for example, Magnisis never passed five thousand members – it also shows footage of McFarland once claiming that it had over 100,000. The insidiousness is exposed from the outset. McFarland was not the genius head of a wildly successful company; he was the con artist head of yet another company built on lies.

In Fyre Fraud, you know there was never going to be a Fyre Festival. And the people knew it too.

So, instead of diving into the logistics of an always-failed project, it looks out at the world and sees how the actions of marketers and influencers and the media at large served to prop this failure up. There is a lot of discussion in Fyre Fraud about “millennials,” a term whose actual meaninglessness I’m only really now coming to terms with. Millennials are folks born between 1981 and 1996. I had forgotten that, that I am in the last third of that group. And that I have a whole lot more in common with the older folks in Gen Z than I do with the oldest members of my own group.

For one thing, I watch way more YouTube.

But in 2017, millennials were the target audience, then ranging from 21 to 36. For a festival with no tickets less than $999 – not counting at least a few thousand in additional expenses – who else would even consider it? Folks older than that don’t go to multi-day music parties in the Bahamas. Folks younger than that don’t typically have the money to go to multi-day music parties in the Bahamas.

If you’re curious what a Gen Z version of Fyre Festival would look like, by the way, it happened last year: Tana Con. Literally the same thing.

Fyre Fraud’s discussion of millennialism is pretty surface and doesn’t lead to any new revelations, but it opens a broader conversation about influence that I think is worth having. There are two sides to this: there are the supermodels who blew it up in the first place – flown out to Pablo Escobar’s island in The Bahamas and filmed partying and having a great time, setting the expectations sky high. Then, there are the ones who came to the Fyre Festival on Fyre Media’s dime in order to show the world just how incredible the whole experience was going to be. The former, people like Bella Hadid who should have marked their posts #ad and never did, are probably more responsible for its success than anybody. The latter are victims too, though ones whose bottom lines weren’t as drastically affected. But even that is an oversimplification.

I don’t like the term “influencer.” You can see from my subscriber count that it doesn’t really matter how I feel about it, since it doesn’t apply to me anyway, but the commoditization of trust I think is genuinely damaging to our culture. I have a review show on YouTube. I would like to believe that if you are subscribed or have made it this far that you trust me – at least a little bit. But what happens if I sell that trust? My girlfriend worked for three years in influencer marketing, connecting YouTubers and Instagrammers with brands to sponsor their posts. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; folks gotta eat, and if something is clearly an ad for what the “influencer” genuinely thinks is a good or useful product as opposed to just a thing that will pay them money, then it’s ultimately a win-win.

But the fact that Hadid et al posted about Fyre Festival the way that they did is genuinely terrible. And not just for the obvious reason, that not #ad-ing it was a violation of federal disclosure laws, but that she and all of them were so easily taken in by a serial con artist who has cheated people out of tens of millions of dollars. Those supermodels got to have the actual experience that Fyre Festival promised. They weren’t lying. But they trusted a con artist to do what he did for them on a massive scale and didn’t do the due diligence to learn that that was never in the cards. Everyone looks bad here.

And that’s the most troubling thing about Fyre Fraud, that it shows you just how easily trust can be built up and how long the con can go before it crumbles down. And yes, that house of cards fell, and McFarland is in jail where he belongs – though not entirely for Fyre-related reasons. But people were hurt by this. Physically, mentally, financially. It exposed just how easily our culture can be exploited.

And that this will happen again.

Fyre Fraud: Seven Point Nine out of Ten

Fyre: Seven Point One out of Ten

Choice is an illusion, right? That’s what you keep hearing in cynical media – Charlie Booker, writer of the entire Black Mirror-verse, clearly believes it. And at face value, it seems to be what the latest entrant to the series, Bandersnatch, is trying to convey.

Bandersnatch is a Semi-Interactive Cinematic Experience, or “David Cage video game,” where you watch a movie about a would-be game developer who is building a Choose Your Own Adventure title called Bandersnatch, and you are periodically given the ability to choose his adventure. But, because this is Black Mirror, he figures out that he is being controlled and yada yada yada.

It’s a fine enough premise, and if Netflix was going to be game-ified, then a Black Mirror spin-off is an appropriate way to introduce that. But… did it have to be this one?

You will know how you are going to feel about Bandersnatch about ten minutes in. At that point, you are given your first Important Decision: Should protagonist boy Stefan do a thing that seems like it is the basic premise for the rest of the movie?

If you thought, “Yes,” joke’s on you, because the bad cop from Detroit literally puts his hand on Stefan’s shoulder, says it was the wrong choice, and leaves. Flash forward: bad ending. Flash back to the beginning.

“Cute,” I thought.

But it’s not just that you’re sent back; it’s that when things happen again – just the key moments – there are some changes. Specifically with programming wiz Colin Ritman, aka the bad cop from Detroit (who is also in other things but that’s what I remember him from don’t @ me). He recognizes Stefan and doesn’t know why. Stefan knows things about the conversation they’re about to have that he didn’t know the first time around.

And then you get back to the same conversation and the same question and you choose correctly this time. Because the choice was an illusion. But you were still supposed to say Yes, because that’s how you see the rules of the game. That’s how you learn that the obvious answer is not always (or perhaps even ever) the “right” one, and that what seems to be the right one could immediately end things. Not only is Stefan’s choice an illusion because he is being controlled by you, your choice is an illusion because it is being controlled by the creative team behind the project.

I too played Bioshock in 2007.

But where Black Mirror in general wants to expose something about the world we live in, Bandersnatch never gets beyond the fourth wall, even as that wall lays shattered before it. Bandersnatch is, instead, commenting on itself. If it is trying to implicate the audience in its crimes, it doesn’t even do that as well as Funny Games, let alone something like Spec Ops: The Line.

And this renders Bandersnatch toothless. When the best episodes of the show end and the picture cuts away and you see yourself in whatever Black Mirror you’re staring into, you are literally confronted with the thing it is usually condemning and ever-so-rarely celebrating. And then you think about it. Or try to, before Netflix forces you into the next one before you’ve fully processed it.

The auto playing binges that Netflix pioneered (or at least popularized) make it so easy to just watch everything forever but aren’t particularly conducive to grappling with the themes of multiple disconnected narratives – or even a single connected narrative. There should be time to think. But you don’t even get the credits to do so anymore.

Netflix is kinda bad, y’all.

Anyway, when you are revealed in the reflection of your screen at the end of Bandersnatch, your first thought is never “Wow, how interesting. I wonder what it means.” It’s, “Huh. I wonder how else that could have ended.” and then you keep playing.

Years ago, I wrote an article about the David Cage-directed semi-interactive pseudo-cinematic experience Beyond: Two Souls. Specifically, it was about my fervent belief that you should not play it or games like it more than once. When you get to the credits, you should break the disc or delete it from your hard drive and be satisfied with it, even if the ending wasn’t satisfying.

That’s because a second time around is like looking behind the green curtain. The seams pull apart and the thing is laid bare. In the context of a gameplay-less dramatic narrative, it tends to result in a less effective experience.

I think I would have liked Bandersnatch more if I had taken my own advice.

I did not stop when I reached the credits. But this is partially because of the way that the endgame, as it were, is presented. After the credits, you are not set to autoplay whatever other nonsense Netflix is trying to force down your throat instead of ROMA, which is what they should be doing that with; instead, you get a chance to go back to specific decisions and try again.

Except, that’s a terrible idea, because once you’re doing that, you’re completely out of context of the narrative. How did I get to this decision that I’m changing? Heck if I know. But I guess I’ll try the other way a couple of times and see what happens.

Wow. That was boring.

A criticism I often hear of parodic narratives is that it isn’t enough to merely recreate a bad thing in a jokey way. Calling attention to something in a slightly different context does not deconstruct the thing; rather, it perpetuates it.

And though Bandersnatch isn’t parody, it gets caught in the same trap. It’s not a deconstruction of the choose your own adventure genre, despite being a part of a franchise ostensibly about societal deconstruction. Nor is it a celebration, despite being about a guy who is, like, super in love with choose-your-own adventure narratives. So what is it? A slightly interesting, mostly dumb attempt at a new type of Netflix experience. A little thing to be poked and prodded, and a better version of which to be expected in the next few years.

But instead, it’s a massive deal that people are still talking about. And that’s in large part because it’s Black Mirror. Netflix’s acquisition of the series is not a bad thing, but it is unequivocally a change. And Netflix seems to largely treat it as one of the more prestige properties that it’s gotten its grubby hands on. Whereas Bird Box is a new garbage thing, Black Mirror was established and beloved. Getting more people to see it is cool, and even giving it the option to expand in new and odd ways is something that I think is worthy of consideration if not necessarily praise.

But also, just because something is part of an established, respected series does not mean it is inherently worthwhile. Bandersnatch is an experiment, and not a particularly good one. So, for it to receive the attention that it has is, inevitably, a Netflix thing more than a Black Mirror one.

It’s literally impossible to keep up with Netflix’s release schedule, so you have to trust their big marketing pushes to point you in the direction of The Good Stuff. They hide at least as many Netflix Originals as they promote, so it’s not like they’re just pushing their own stuff at the expense of everyone else – though that is true. Unfortunately, you just can’t do that. Because Netflix’s decisions about what’s good feel as arbitrary as Bandersnatch’s choices.

Four Point Five out of Ten

Fuck Bird Box.

But, like, actually though.

Bird Box is a genuinely offensive movie on multiple levels. The most significant, one that’s been hit on by other, smarter people, is the fact that this movie about evil wind that makes people commit suicide demonizes the mentally ill. It’s not a joke; in Bird Box, mentally ill people are dangerous monsters who must be avoided if not killed.

In Bird Box, only people who are already quoteunquote crazy (as in, have been or should be committed) can look into the wind and see something beautiful instead of death-inducing. Everyone else needs to cover up the windows and wear blindfolds and whatever. But because the wind, being wind, can’t actually do anything, it needs the “crazy” people to do its dirty work.

And that’s awful.

I am of the general opinion that if something is going to be awful, then it must at least be good. I sort of touched on that in my last video on Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, but it is part of this broader conversation about cultural acceptability that we are all having right now.

One that, I think, often misses what really matters – not what is said, but how and why it’s said. This is Central to the comedy debate in particular, but that’s a whole other thing.

In the case of Bird Box, there is some potential for leniency because I think it’s fair to assume that the creative team behind Bird Box wasn’t actively working to demonize the mentally ill in their spooky wind movie. But why give leeway if they’ve got nothing else to say?

At its core, Bird Box is a story about motherhood. It flashes between the apocalypse itself, during which Sandra Bullock is unhappily pregnant, and years later, when she’s unhappily warding two children: Boy and Girl. After hearing of a safe place on the radio, she and the children get in a canoe, blindfolded, and head down river.

But if The Babadook is a serial killer’s diary, Bird Box is a phone book.

On the river, it’s just them. In the apocalypse, a rag tag group of immediately recognizable strangers – John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, BD Wong, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. – adds a whole bunch of nothing. The fact that they aren’t on the river, which you know before you even know they exist, means that things aren’t gonna work out.

In a better movie, that could mean something. Annihilation tells you minutes in what happens to Leena’s squad, but that fits in with its broader themes of self-destruction. It’s not a film about survival – in fact, it’s the opposite. But Bird Box is about survival, so knowing who makes it to the boat is just a spoiler.

An irritating one, because every time you’re with the ensemble, you’re just anticipating their demises. Eagerly, because every single actor is given material far below them – including the rap devil himself. The interpersonal drama is, to put it lightly, worthless.

And it just pads that runtime.

I initially missed the first 20 minutes because my family doesn’t like watching movies with me – can’t imagine why – and still thought it was 20 minutes too long. Going back just made it feel 40 minutes too long.

But somehow none of that is the most frustrating thing about Bird Box. No, where it truly goes off the rails is in its flailing attempts at horror. This is because Bird Box never commits to the thing that makes it scary: claustrophobia.

These characters are locked in a house, windows boarded; they are trapped. They know that something is out there but they don’t really know what. But the house is too big to feel the confinement. If someone is mad at someone else in the big house, they can just go elsewhere. Big important things can happen without anyone else knowing about it. Except you. You know everything.

Every time the camera (and therefore the audience) is stuck with the characters, it feels right. But inevitably it pulls back to reveal, what exactly? The car scene early on is a perfect example. A handful of characters are in a car; they have newspapered up the windows and are navigating using a clever combination of GPS and the car’s collision detection systems. This is cool.

Outside, bad things are happening. So when you’re in there with them, and everything is shaking and the collision detection warnings are going crazy, you’re on the edge of your seat… but then it cuts to outside, where there is nothing but wind. Ugh.

Last week, I saw Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men for the first time in a decade. I had written most of the above already, but the thing that I’m talking about was so perfectly crystalized there. It’s not fair for an infinite number of reasons to compare these two movies, but Children of Men uses a limited perspective so gosh darn brilliantly that I can’t help doing so. Because Children of Men succeeds by keeping you in one place at all times. You are never more aware of what is going on than Theo. In a car, the camera sits there with him. You’re always tense.

The closest Bird Box gets to that is a moment on the river when in the fog she hears the voice of someone telling her that it’s okay and she can take off the blindfold. This time, she’s actually in danger, and neither she nor you know where that danger is. She pulls out a gun and fires into the nothingness, and there is real tension – before the poorly staged payoff. For a few brief moments is the promise of a much better, if still fundamentally bad, movie.

But so what, right? People make bad movies all the time – much more often than they make good ones. Bird Box should just be a blip, like so many other things. But it wasn’t. It was the biggest goshdamn thing in the entire world. It’s still a big enough deal that I don’t feel that weird coming in and complaining about it a full three weeks after release. And it is infuriating. Because the reason that it blew up is not because it’s good but because Netflix decided it was the Next Big Thing. It’s Bright but burning so much brighter. Netflix has incredible market penetration and marketing and the things it decides are worthy of being a phenomena are an insult to the genuinely amazing films that they have on the service. For gosh’s sake, ROMA is a Netflix exclusive but you didn’t see any viral memes about house cleaning or familial abandonment.

• 

• 

So #relatable

Netflix’s ability to drive the cultural conversation is slightly alarming, because they have never been a real content curator, and as they pump out original series week after week, burying everything under the weight of a handful of typically star-studded productions that they feel represents… something.

And it’s nice that Bird Box, like Bright, is not part of an established franchise. It may be a literary adaptation, but so was the best movie of last year; but that isn’t enough. There are so many original stories on Netflix, and if it wasn’t for Netflix trying to convince me I should, this particularly one would have never even hit my queue, let alone my actual TV. Bird Box does things that a dozen movies have already done better, including several from the same freaking year. But if A Quiet Place is an uncommonly good busking violinist, Bird Box is a man fistfighting a Christmas tree.

And you know what? I’m not even going to explain that one.

Three Point Zero out of Ten

1. You don’t forget Salò
2. You can’t forget Salò
3. You shouldn’t forget Salò

These truths are self-evident from the content of Pasolini’s final film as well as the context in which it was made, and now the context in which it is being played.

I have seen Salò three times. I think. The first is burned indelibly in my memory as much for its horrors as for the Pad Thai I was eating at the time.

I believe there was a second in that same living room, this one without Pad Thai – or any other kind of food. I remember being prepared for what was to come.

This time, there was popcorn. And I was ready – as ready as you can be, anyhow.

I hemmed and hawed over the decision to buy a ticket to the 35mm screening at the Metrograph in New York City – the death of Moviepass previously marked the end of my visits to that theater, asking people I knew and even a Facebook group I take part in if it was worth doing. Part of it was a matter of timing: I wanted to finally see Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA, which was playing in 70mm further uptown during overlapping times, and I definitely didn’t want to see ROMA first. But a late-night ROMA screening was added, and based on the absolutely nothing I knew about it, I thought maybe it would be a nice pallet cleanser.

And while I wouldn’t go that far, I will say that it makes for a more appropriate double feature than I had expected. It’s also amazing and will likely be remembered as one of the best films of the decade.

Right. Salò.

The word “Awful” historically has two meanings, and Salò fits both. It is awful in the modern sense of the term in that it is absolutely horrific. When the credits rolled, a man sitting next to me said, “That was disgusting.”

It is awful in the archaic sense that it inspires awe. That same man then said, “I don’t think this is even parody” (more on that in a bit. “I think that just, like, happened. Or happens.” There is nothing quite like Salò, a statement that shall remain true, I think, in perpetuity. The absolute horrors depicted here are the typical purview of films far less interested in, say, exploring the impact of fascistic power upon an unsuspecting and undeserving population, than they are in just making you regret your life decisions. They shock for the sake of shock, whether their creators would cop to that or not.

But in the work of the Marquis De Sade, whose 120 Days of Sodom Salò loosely adapts, Pasolini saw what he called “The choreography of fascism.” And that perfectly encapsulates the film that he made. Every single movement in Salo drives towards the central thesis, simply enough: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It would not be unfair to consider Salò a bit pompous, being that in its opening credits it lists an “Essential Bibliography” of writers and philosophers whose work could serve to illuminate its intentions further. And I can understand how someone might see that and think that Pasolini was just obfuscating his desire to direct some disgusting imagery under the guise of philosophy and intellectualism. But there is a reason that Salò is in the hallowed Criterion Collection and, say, Cannibal Holocaust and A Serbian Film are not.

Cannibal Holocaust is a fairly significant film, being really the progenitor of the found footage genre and using some of the same marketing tactics that The Blair Witch Project would exploit nearly two decades later; it also has a very clear “meaning,” one that is made explicit in the final moments of the film – ya know, for those who were too distracted by the actual animal murder to notice. But that rings hollow because of the content itself – see: actual animal murder.  

Likewise for A Serbian Film, the writer for which I am, bizarrely enough, Facebook friends with. It doesn’t have a particular historical significance like the others, but it has seen a similarly extreme reaction. And… justifiably so. While it can be seen as a direct descendent of Salò’s psycho-sexual politics, A Serbian Film works very hard to make sure that it is the most brutal version of its theme that it can be. And, like Cannibal Holocaust, revels in that brutality. It is a horror film first and a message movie… eventually… maybe.

Salò isn’t that. Salò’s horror feels almost incidental. These scenes are often brief, and the camera is dispassionate – matter of fact. It doesn’t bask in the carnage or linger just a little bit too long. Much more time is given to segments where atrocities are described by “The Storytellers,” women all dolled up and so joyfully detailing traumatic experiences from their youths as a way to sexually charge the atmosphere. It’s disturbing, to be sure, but the worst of it is described for the audience rather than depicted. And it’s honestly not as dour as one might expect. Seeing it this time, there was one actual moment of laughter in the theater and a few more that came close – including two puns that I imagine worked better said aloud than as subtitles.

It is not a light film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is also so much less dark than it could be considering what it is. When the man next to me said to his companion “It’s not parody, etc.” I assume he was attempting to sound Very Smart. Unfortunately, he was clearly confusing parody for satire, but he is right to see it as some type of comedy of horrors.

The set, as recounted in the genuinely fascinating short documentary that accompanies the Criterion release, was an unexpectedly fun place to be. People were laughing and enjoying themselves, particular during the most horrible scenes. But in retrospect, it actually feels right that they would be. Sometimes the only response to atrocity is levity. And when you are depicting the greatest atrocities, laughter is the only way to cope.

And so we return to the context for that depiction. The decision to transplant the Marquis De Sade’s France-set story to the final days of the Mussolini Fascist government was Pasolini’s. He directed the film at a time where he saw a society rushing back towards fascism. His brutal murder, committed before the film even released, seems to indicate that he wasn’t wrong. His work, then, is a reality that he understood but also one that he believed was about more than just his own time – a reality that spans decades: The 1940s. The 1970s. The 2010s.

Watching Salò in 2019 adds a new layer of unnerving. It feels like the kind of thing that could never happen while also being the kind of thing that has definitely actually happened and that may well be happening right now. Whatever the conspiracy theorists involved in Pizzagate imagined was going on in the nonexistent basement of that DC restaurant, it may well have borne some resemblance to this film.

The experience of watching Salò in a theater on an aging 35mm print is radically different from seeing Criterion’s Blu Ray restoration in the comfort of one’s living room. The damage to that print adds a layer of artifice, and the size of the screen makes the fact that the dialogue is ADR’d poorly far, far more apparent. The seams in the film itself become clearer on the big screen. This, combined with the horrendous seats in the Metrograph (I switched positions at least 15 times over the two hours) results in a viewing experience that is almost entirely outside of the film itself. You never really get “immersed.” And I think that may be the best way to see it.

For one: It’s easier to watch. Being outside of it, the most disgusting scenes are slightly more tolerable. But really, it’s because in that context, Salò becomes a series of questions that you as the viewer are constantly forced to ask about how and why and who and what – none with clear or necessarily “good” answers. It becomes a two-hour mind game. And after the credits roll? Well, you’re still playing it, because it stays in your head. Forever.

I first saw Salò during a period in my life when I was trying to see everything on those lists of Most Shocking Films of all time. Your Cannibal Holocausts and August Undergrounds and the like. Amidst them, Salò stuck out as something entirely unique and not for people who just want to see the most depraved imagery every committed to celluloid. It contains some of that, sure, but if that’s what you’re after, you’ll leave disappointed if not outright frustrated. You must have more than a strong constitution. You must want to engage with the ideas that Salo puts forth, to think about its metaphors and philosophies.

Maybe even read that bibliography.

Seven Point Five out of Ten

Aggretsuko is basically designed for me – a sentiment I have seen repeated by many others but still feels true on a personal level. The name portmanteau’s Aggressive Retsuko.

The titular Retsuko is a red panda salarywoman who has the deep dark secret: when she gets mad about the irritations and injustices of her existence, she goes Hard at a karaoke bar, death metaling it up – the coolest kind of venting I can think of. Sometimes, you just want to scream. Well, she does it to blast beats and sick licks.

You do not have to like death metal to like Aggretsuko, and indeed the type of death metal that Retsuko karaokes is not my preferred sort of death metal – melodic death metal, but it’s fine in the short bursts, and the lyrics are all tied into those frustrations. Ultimately, it’s fun.

Plus, these death vocals are performed by Raracho, Aggretsuko’s pseudonymed creator, who writes and directs each episode. Which is great.

So, this show has a lot of things going for it for a person who likes the same things that I like and thus should be subscribed to this channel. It’s got metal; it’s got anime – which I have fallen off from since my younger days but still enjoy; and it’s got red pandas.

I love red pandas. They are favorite animal, which results in periods of me attaching photos of them to actual work emails that I send to people with whom I actually work in a real office setting.

My daily grind in an office is likely part of where Aggretsuko’s relatability comes in, because this is a show about a woman in her 20s who is trying to figure it all out. Each short episode focuses on one or several widely-felt frustrations: the struggle of keeping a major part of yourself secret, the difficulty of finding adult friends, the aforementioned daily grind, etc.

And it really gets at the heart of each of them. Despite the silly exterior, Aggretsuko genuinely understands why life is frustrating. They’re hardly new observations, but I’ve never seen them presented like this. With the visual language of a Japanese children’s cartoon, the underlying message has a way of sneaking up on you. You are laughing along and then suddenly you see yourself in a cute but unhappy red panda or one of her animal co-workers and you begin to second-guess every decision you’ve ever made and oh gosh what are you doing with your life, Alec, to quote metallica sometimes the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way and how far down this tunnel are you going to go before you realize that you…

Um. Anyway.

While season 2 of Aggretsuko is set to release sometime in the next year, Netflix saw fit to grace us with another holiday special – a thing they seem to do a whole heckuva lot, but I’m not complaining. We Wish You a Metal Christmas is, indeed, Christmas themed, both released and taking place in the couple of days leading up to Christmas and then culminating on Christmas Eve, which is the day that this video is going up; so in sync. In this episode, Retsuko is being taught by her young doe colleague how to be an Instagram girl. How to frame that food and contort that face to make the best Content, the stuff that will get random people on the internet to SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON.

Her obsession with it, trying to understand the tricks with lighting and positioning, is something all of us think about when taking photos or videos. If you were to look through my Instagram feed, you wouldn’t see any people or foodstuffs, but every photo that is up there is one of at least a half dozen attempts – one of them the 40somethingth version of the same shot. Because if I am going to put something up – there, here, anywhere, I may as well do it properly, right? How else could I convince people to SMASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

But where it hits a bit close to home is in a conversation between two of Retsuko’s colleagues about the inevitable result of this pursuit of likes. It gets pretty dark, but what is deemed the start of the spiral is something that I think a lot of younger people would cop to: traveling to another place – in this case, a new prefecture – for the sole purpose of hitting up a trendy spot with some instagrammable eats. This is something I struggle with on a fundamental level, and I imagine I’m not alone there.

I talked a bit about it in my first video, but for a few years, I used an app called 1 Second Everyday, where at some point each day I would grab a second of video of a thing I was doing; at the end of the year, you have six minutes that are your life. And I felt compelled to do something every single day so that at the end of the year, people wouldn’t think my life was boring. And that meant doing new things or going to new places or meeting new people. My particular use of Tinder in 2016 was at least partially driven by this driving need for neweness

And I am glad I did it for the time that I did, because it helped me get out of my apartment and into the world. And because I made a concerted effort to do more than just get The One Second. I tried to enjoy the things that I was doing, despite the depressing motivation for having done them.

Because there is nothing wrong with going to a trendy café in a different city, even if you really just want to take a picture. The problem becomes when you do that without enjoying it. When you end up with your friends and refuse to eat noodle soup because it’s not photo-worthy enough for your holiday pic.

You can’t do that. You can’t let that impulse control your life and your happiness and your self-worth – even though it’s so easy to do. But you need to be okay with being in that moment, with getting the soup even if it isn’t photo worthy, because it’s delicious and you’re with your friends.

Aggretsuko gets it. It knows how complicated all of this stuff is to navigate. And it uses adorable animals and anime styling to give you another way to think about your own frustrations. In a way that you can laugh with and headbang with.

Eight Point Seven out of Ten

GRIS is an indie puzzle-ish platformer. I love indie puzzle-ish platformers. It’s on the Nintendo Switch. I love my Switch, and with the recent release of Super Smash Bros, I am putting in a whole lot more hours on this thing than I have in a while. It really is an amazing system, but it’s one that I have rarely used in docked mode. I’ve played a few hours of Zelda, Mario, etc. on my TV, but most of the time, even at home, I do it handheld.

But GRIS changed this. Excepting a couple minutes I spent to prove the point, I played the entire four-or-so-hour experience on my TV. Because this game, though it is on the Switch, isn’t made for the Switch. It would be just as at home – probably moreso – on a PS4 or Xbox One where it could run at higher framerates and resolutions and maybe a little bit of HDR in there for good measure. It’s not a game to play on the go. It’s one to sit with and contemplate.

Let me back up: you should buy GRIS. It is both fascinating and very good. I am not going to be showing much footage from it because any given image is a spoiler. This is especially true as the nature of the game’s milestones becomes clear: you are returning color to a world of gray. Anyways, with each color you add, the world becomes even more beautiful. I paused so many times in awe of GRIS’s imagery. I would spend at least $55 for a coffee table book of moments from the game. I may spend more than that getting fine art prints of screen caps to hang on my wall.

So I’ll show a bit, when it is absolutely necessary to illustrate the point, but the less you see before you play, the more I think you will get from each new moment. And, like, just buy it.

The presentation of the GRIS’s imagery is fascinating, because the camera itself is fascinating – performing this high-wire balancing act of practicality and cinema.

Though locked firmly at a 90-degree angle from your face, its placement in space is constantly changing along all three axes. At times, you are the center of at tention; it swoops in to be there right beside you. This is when it would be most appropriate to play in the Switch’s portable mode, though you still wouldn’t want to.

More typically, you remain at the center but the attention is elsewhere, as the camera has pulled back to reveal more of the world itself – those sparse, beautifully rendered lines and, eventually, their subtle but distinct colorations. You take it all in. This is the cinematic.

Or you are not at the center at all. The level design stands at the forefront as you are tasked with a puzzle that takes up a space many, many, many times your size. And you must see the entirety of the thing in order to understand it. This is the practical. It is also when portable mode becomes effectively useless. Even on a TV of relatively substantial size, you are tiny. On at least two occasions, I found myself lost on the screen and needed to move the analog stick a bit to find the black blob of motion. The camera moves smoothly in and out, never actually “cutting,” which can feel in turn epic and exhausting, depending on how dynamic it feels like being at a given moment.

But the important fact imparted by the constant expand&contract is that you will always see everything that you need to see in a given moment – sometimes more but never less. This is pleasantly reassuring.

Play is simple. Stick or pad moves. B jumps. A… breathes. Eventually, Y does something too. X remains unused. They do what you ask of them when you ask it. Here and there something might not respond exactly as you might like – mostly in water – but those moments are fleeting. On the lovely Switch Pro controller, which is basically a requirement since, again, TV, everything feels quite nice.  

At first glance, GRIS probably appears a little bit like a 2D Journey with a drained color pallete, but let’s return to my alternate title, because I think it’s akin to something a bit more recent. Celeste, which was released earlier this year on a bunch of platforms including the Switch, is a wonderful, brutal little 2D platformer. It tells the story of Madeline, who climbs a mountain to face her own inner demons – those demons also being herself. Madeline’s anxiety and fears manifest themselves in increasing torturous ways. It is not subtle, but it is both effective and wonderful. It’s a unique subject matter for a game in general and particularly a game of its sort. It’s a game in which you will die hundreds or thousands of times climbing up the mountain.

Now, remove the spikes. And beneath that, you find GRIS.

It’s not just that GRIS lacks overt danger or an actual fail state; it’s that GRIS is told in images rather than words. You know that the unnamed girl you are controlling is dealing with the fallout of something, and you help her to come to terms with that and put the pieces back together, but the question of what, exactly, has broken is open.

And it’s one on which you can project your own damage. Celeste tells you what Madeline is feeling, and perhaps you feel it vicariously through her. GRIS tells you nothing beyond the fact that you press A and she takes a breath. But the breath is short, clearly intended to be something more. And so you think about that. You don’t intentionally press A very often, but when you do, it gives you pause. And you think about it some more. And you wonder what she is trying to do and then you try to figure it out. Is it really just taking a breath? Does she want to talk? I called it the Press A to Emote button for a while, because it seemed almost like she was trying to cry. In fact, the first time I pressed the A button, she collapsed. This before she’d even picked up the ability to jump.

And you fill in the gaps with the pains that you know. The times that you were unable to do anything but take a short breath. This girl doesn’t have a name or a voice but she is struggling to cope with something. And even if you are never able to explicitly understand what it is, you feel that pain that she is feeling and you have to help her. You want to help her.

Because you have felt it too.

Eight Point Nine out of Ten

Back in August, the New York Times ran a story film called “After a Director Dies, Friends Finish His Life’s Work: A Zombie Musical.” That musical was/is Anna and the Apocalypse. The circumstances surrounding it are quite sad, but the fact that the late Ryan McHenry was able to have his work finished – and finished this well – is something kind of like inspiring. I recommend the read.

So, yes, Anna and the Apocalypse is a musical. In the Broadway (or… I guess, West End) sense of the term. Imagine Shaun of the Dead but starring high school theater kids, and you’re 80% of the way there. This is a British movie about a zombie outbreak wherein a bunch of teenagers burst into song when the narrative feels it’s appropriate.

See this clip, which lacks zombies but will give you a pretty good sense of what’s going on. It’s pulled straight from the movie but has had lyrics overlaid on it because I guess they didn’t feel like there was enough going on onscreen. They’re distracting, but you get it.

Having been a theater kid myself in high school – you can find videos of me acting back then here on YouTube, which I don’t recommend – I have a particular affinity for this type of thing. And in general I love me a good musical. And on that level alone, Anna and the Apocalypse is a success. The songs are catchy as hell, so much so that I went home and immediately queued them up on Spotify and was already singing along with No Such Thing As a Hollywood Ending.

But the music isn’t just catchy; it’s narratively necessary, pushing along the story and allowing the characters to really express themselves in a way that your average archetype typically cannot. There is only one song of 12 that doesn’t work. It’s called “Human Voice,” and it’s a pretty good song taken on its own… Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with the scene in which it’s placed or even, to be honest, the movie itself.

Being a screed against the digitization of modern communication, it doesn’t really work to have a bunch of people singing about wanting to hear an actual human voice when they’re literally locked in a room with other people all while having phones without service. And technology in general plays basically no role in the film. There is no scene where someone is on their phone and then gets eaten and it’s all technology’s fault and etc. So… to what end? Human Voice comes off like a rant on the part of a lyricist who wanted to get something off of his chest by putting it into the actors’. It’s irrelevant and its irrelevance is distracting … but it’s also only four minutes long and is, again, performed well. Obviously, I am still thinking about it, but it doesn’t detract too greatly from the film in general.

Fifteen minutes in, a couple sitting a few seats over from me got up and left. At two different points in the movie, a Chatty Cathy to my back left got up as well; her companion certainly seemed to enjoy it, though, laughing almost as often/hard as I did. I can only assume that this was a failing on their part to understand what they were in for and also a general inability to enjoy things that are good on their own merits. Musicals are great, y’all. Full stop. And this is the best movie musical since I don’t know when.

I’m curious how it would work on a stage. I think it could definitely be adapted, the kind of thing that would play Off… or maybe Off-Off-Broadway. It’s already inspired a book – the first chapter of which is available online, and I’m seriously considering checking out the rest.

If this were 2012, I think Anna and the Apocalypse would be my favorite movie of all time. The fact that it isn’t now makes me actually feel old.

Happy birthday, grandpa.

I say 2012 specifically because that’s the year that Joseph Khan’s Detention hit theaters for precisely one week, presumably to capitalize on the lead performance by Josh Hutcherson coinciding with his ascent to the cultural consciousness with The Hunger Games. I saw it at a press screening on a whim because I had to be in the area for an unrelated thing, and I was blown the heck away. A time-travelling sci-fi/slasher/romantic comedy/coming-of-age drama from the guy who made basically every good music video ever (and would go on to make Taylor Swift’s video worthy of sensation). I saw it only a couple of years out of high school, and it felt so true to the emotions of my experience, even if I couldn’t relate to… well, any of the specifics.

It has been my favorite movie ever since, and each of my ten or so watches has just solidified that fact. Since then, movies like Girl, Asleep and The Edge of Seventeen have threatened its place, but not really any movies that aren’t coming-of-age tales about teenagers. I relate to them in a way I try not to dwell on.

Or, at least, I did.

I felt the seeds of change a little earlier this year, actually, while watching Eighth Grade. I loved that movie – four stars for sure – but I found myself on Kayla’s father’s side rather than his daughter’s. There are only a handful of quote-unquote adults in Anna and the Apocalypse, all of whom exist largely to crush the dreams of the younger generation. As such, I didn’t particularly relate to them… but I also didn’t connect with the, uh, youths in the way I expected I would, or the way I know I would have a few years back.

I guess I’m just little too far removed from these archetypes. McHenry originally pitched it as High School Musical but Troy Gets Eaten by Zombies, and everyone is about as surface level as you would might expect hearing that. I didn’t really think about that much in years past. I guess I do now.

That isn’t to say I was entirely outside Anna and the Apocalypse or didn’t feel anything during it. Quite the opposite. I felt a lot of things. I was thrilled, excited, tense, and delighted. I literally cried at least one actual tear during a particularly emotional moment, and my girlfriend cried three separate times.

That’s because this film fundamentally works. It’s a modern day Christmas Carol but with more red and less message. It is a film that aspires to be exactly the thing that it is, and it is a triumph in that. Seeing it, this truly unique little thing, in a theater is an unexpected joy, because it’s exactly the kind of movie you never see in a theater. It’s the kind of thing that you only hear about in retrospect, like on a blog or in a Youtube video. Or that shows up as a recommendation in whatever streaming service feed it ultimately winds up in. And you check it out on a whim, and you’re like, “Whoa. That was amazing.”

I knew Anna and the Apocalypse was coming. I have five Facebook friends in common with director John McPhail, at least one of whom has been raving about the film all year. So I’ve been looking forward to it for quite some time. But even so, I successfully avoided knowing anything concrete beyond the premise. I avoided trailers and spoilers, and I’m glad to have done so, because it still felt like I was making a discovery. That I got to do so on the big screen made it feel even more special.

But I look forward to seeing it on a small screen to. As soon as it hits Blu-ray, I’ll be adding Anna and the Apocalypse to my collection. And an annual viewing to my Christmas tradition.

Eight Point Three out of Ten

For many years, my go-to travel method when visiting family for the holidays was the Peter Pan bus. I was never really a fan, but it was affordable. Since getting a day job, I have largely made the switch over to Amtrak. Which has been a general quality of life improvement on those trips.

But don’t let that fool you, because while that statement is definitive, it’s also relative as heck.

One of the worst mornings of my life for reasons not relevant to this review took place in Tokyo early last year. The bad part of it ended with me on the Nozomi Shinkansen, the fastest bullet train in Japan and thus anywhere. Looking out the window, even in my horrendously bad state, was a thrilling experience. Watching Japan zoom by like that was amazing, and the ride was as smooth as Alien Ant Farm’s criminals. Truly a travel experience unlike any I had had before. To then come back to America and jump on an Amtrak train was more than a little disheartening.

Here, I think of trains as The Least Bad Option rather than the actual Best. Cars don’t give you any freedom of movement but give you unlimited freedom to just pull over and stop being in them at any point. Buses typically have a little more space and you don’t have to drive them, but you’re limited by schedules. The smoothness of both rides is outside of their control, entirely at the whims of American infrastructure and other drivers. Are the roads alright? Is there hella traffic? Probably not and almost certainly yes, respectively; during holiday weekends, even moreso. Traveling in or out of New York City, inevitably. The seemingly endless stop and start of those wheeled vehicles is exhausting. And I hate it. Throw in their cramped nature, and it’s something I avoid whenever possible. Though, sometimes I really just can’t afford the nicer option.

This past weekend being Thanksgiving, I traveled. One way, I took Amtrak from the hellhole that is New York Penn Station, seen here at something resembling capacity. It was a pretty easy trip, all things considered, and I got to sit in my favorite spot – more on that in a bit.

The other way, I took a bus, having waited a little bit too long to buy the tickets.  That… wasn’t great. A supposedly three and a half hour trip was a full hour longer; and I hated it.

My real problem with wheeled vehicles is the bouncing. It’s something that you rarely do on a train, because if somehow you started bouncing, it would likely mean the train had left the track and you would die and the last thing you would be talking about was the fact that you felt a little up and down. Even when they’re a little rougher, as Amtrak trains are vs. those in European or Asian countries, the result is mostly swaying. Side to side is fine – certainly, Ariana Grande seems to have no problem with it. Up and down is less so.

Plus, train cars are a bit more open, especially in my preferred spot: the café car. I’m always a little surprised that more people don’t go for that – only three of the few dozen times I’ve taken Amtrak have I not been able to get a seat. There’s more room, since you can typically sit just one person per side of the booth, and the shorter seat backs and typical lack of overhead storage leave a lot more empty space. I can get up and walk without bumping into people. Without adjustable seats, I can write this review without worrying about some guy in front of me jacking the seat back and warping my laptop screen. I have written many reviews in the café car of Amtrak’s Northeast Regional. (I tried rewriting on the bus… but that didn’t work out super.)

The regional slower and therefore cheaper than the fancier Acela. But really, the Acela seems to be faster mostly as a consequence of taking fewer stops and not because the train itself is better. The regional is a little rougher, but neither that nor the better seats and slightly shorter trips really justify the added expense for someone who isn’t particularly wealthy and only takes the train every few months – i.e. me. If it was a frequent occurrence that I could expense to a business, I get it. But for a middle-class schmuck like myself, the regional is generally fine.

Timeliness in general is something of a concern. I have found that Amtrak trains are typically ten-to-fifteen minutes late over the course of a three-hour-thirty-ish trip. Sometimes, they’re entirely on time. Others… not so much. Once, we sat motionless for a full hour because some rando was on the tracks and refused to leave. I was in the café car watching Gravity Falls; so it was fine, except it meant I got home at 1 AM, which wasn’t my favorite. That one also wasn’t their fault. The other ones, well, they definitely were.

But I get less frustrated by long train rides than I do long bus rides or car rides. The fact that I could get up and walk a bit helps. Certainly there’s a lot more length to a train; even just a trip to the bathroom at the other end of a car is more than you could ever really do on a bus. And have you ever been in a bus bathroom? Or tried to use one in New York City traffic? Good golly.

But it can’t be divorced from the reality of Amtrak. It’s the best of bad options, but that doesn’t even make it “good,” let alone great. The prices are high, especially when compared to other countries that do it better, and the trains are… fine. But no one writes home about their experience on Amtrak, because it’s never anything special. I’m fortunate to live in an area that is serviced and reasonably well by it; in most parts of the country, that isn’t the case. The US just doesn’t put the money behind the rail system that it would need to to make it a truly competitive and compelling experience.

Which is sad, because trains are awesome.

Just not these trains.

Six-Point-Six out of Ten

So… this is, arguably, a conflict of interest, because I am credited with many, many things in Reel, from co-writer/director to editor and actor, but many years ago (literally, primary production took place in 2014), I decided that if it ever played in a film festival, I would review it. Somewhere, somehow.

And then it was accepted into the Urban Action Showcase International Action Film Festival. So, here we are.

Because it’s ridiculous that I should not be able to review my own movie. In fact, I don’t think there is anyone on Earth more qualified to do so than the guy who has seen it dozens and dozens times across its various iterations, as I edited it over the course of three and a half years.

It’s a much better movie now than it was in 2015. I had seen it on screens ranging from 5” to 8’, each making for a radically different experience. And now I’ve seen it proper big as part of a AUSIAFF shorts block. Which was exciting.  About three minutes into said block, I turned to JD, who plays and also was the main fight choreographer, and said, “Life Lesson: 90% of short films are terrible.” On this, that whiny baby commenter boy and I agree. In that block, one was infuriatingly bad, two were incomprehensible and also not good, one felt like a rough cut for something that could have been fine, and then there was Reel.

Gerard Chamberlain, with whom I share several credits, was somewhat frustrated by the lack of quality around Reel. “It made me feel less special.”

Me too.

So, it was nice when a couple of days ago, I received an email letting me know that Reel was selected as a Finalist in whatever category it was nominated in. We may not have won, but we’re a step up from the bottom.

Having seen it all those ways, I was disappointed by my reaction to seeing it big. I had gone into the festival expecting to love a short that I had always liked, but I came out feeling a little cool on the whole thing. I liked it… but not as much as I usually had.

Much of that, I think, comes down to the budget in context with the competition. Even if our film was the “best,” it was also clearly the cheapest. The others had larger casts, more locations, CGI, etc. Taken on its own, watched on a laptop or a 50something-inch television or even an 8-foot projection screen, you aren’t as aware of the limitations. I think Reel is a genuinely good looking movie, one that is shot well and certainly looks more expensive than it was, but it wasn’t expensive. And that shows too.

And it probably shows to me more than to most. I have a particular level of insight into the film and its somewhat unsteady production. I can see what was and what is right from the opening moment. Reel has an opening credits sequence. For forty-five seconds, you hear the voice of star/co-writer/co-director Gerard Chamberlain as he gets increasingly frustrated with having to set up both the premise and the stakes of the following fifteen minutes. This happens over black punctuated by White Text. This bothers me. Anything under 16 minutes shouldn’t have opening credits. And certainly not this credits sequence.

But at least you know what’s going on.

The first several cuts of Reel were intentionally opaque. There was this Grand Overarching Meta Narrative, and in fact this opening sequence replaces an entire scene shot at the Rocket to Venus bar in Baltimore. There were other characters and more story, including a couple of things that get called back later that are no longer call backs. None of that story actually ultimately mattered in the sense that the first time any character outright said what we were all fighting about was more than five minutes into a then twenty-minute movie; that part is still in there, but it’s no longer a weird dumb reveal that was a result of our refusal to have that exposited into unrelated dialogue. Now, it’s a reminder of the stakes, which is a good thing to have in narratives.

But even more than that, the fight in the scene was bad. For a movie that lives and dies by the quality of its action, that was unacceptable. No one would keep watching. They’d be right not to.

So it went.

And the movie is better for it. Even if I don’t like those opening credits.

Reel is effectively a series of fight scenes. There are three, the final of which takes up a full quarter of the run time. We had the goal of making the best Baltimore-based martial arts short film – with no clear sense of our competition – and may well win by default. For specific stylistic inspiration, we looked largely to The Raid, a film that is infinitely better than this one. The only action cinema I watched in the week leading up to our main production was the meth lab fight, which is just straight up perfect.

Like many non-Hollywood action movies, Reel lets the fights speak for themselves. Each fighter uses a different style of martial art, each based on one that the actor had experience with, and the camera steps back to let them do the thing they were trained to do. The camera is rarely closer than a medium, and few shots are under a few seconds in length – with the longer ones closer to a minute than not. At no point is there ever a cut on the strike. We shot with a constantly moving camera and exactly zero coverage. We moved from fight segment to fight segment, doing each at least a half dozen times until we had gotten it right. We had no choice. If the choreography and performances weren’t up to snuff, the whole thing would have fallen apart, and we would have had nowhere to hide.

So it’s good that the fights worked. Ya know, after that cut one.

I have found that most people share my opinion that the final fight is the best of the film; it is the longest, the most technically impressive, and just a really cool sequence to watch. It is about a third of the way into it that Reel still grabs me and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

But there are certain people who don’t feel that way, who prefer the first fight, and it’s worth unpacking why.

Every fight has to tell a self-contained story. Each is about overcoming the odds, something that must be presented in actions before words. For the latter two fights, this is purely the case; the broader narrative, such that it is, essentially stops while people trade blows.

That first fight, with the producer (full disclosure, me), deemphasizes the action story. It more concerned with the characters than the moves they’re making.

Neither of these approaches is inherently better than the other, but Reel benefits from having both. Being the actual introduction to our protagonist, it is critical that this first fight establishes his character. Afterwards? Again, it’s under 16 minutes. At some point, you just need to worry about the punching in this movie whose logo is a fist going through a film reel.

The constant push forward, game-like in a sense, results in a short film that feels even shorter. There are a couple of minutes here and there to catch your breath, but it’s Go Go Go enough that you can just get swept up in it, helped greatly by an original soundtrack by Chase Hawley and Riley Smith that works brilliantly within the movie but is also just really good and something I enjoy listening to. (One of the songs is my ringtone.) It’s never boring, never giving you a reason to turn away or pull out your phone. By the time you really stop to think about it, it’s over. And you think, “Yeah, that was fun.”

And ultimately that is what matters in the end. That is what we learned in the final cut. We had all these ideas for what everything meant and would mean; we tried for literal years to make them work. But the movie that we actually shot was something different than we understood. Eventually, we accepted it. And we made something that I can be and am proud of.

Seven-Point-One out of Ten.