Look, Anthony Jeselnik is controversial. I mentioned to a friend what show I was going to, and he said, “Is he the one who tweeted, ‘Other than that, how was the movie?’ after Aurora?” And I said “Yep” and he said “I love that guy.” But he is a very different kind of controversial than the comedians who, say, whine about the PC police or whatever. Those people tend to toe the line, see what they can get away with. And look, I don’t think that there are topics that should be fundamentally out of bounds for comedians, but saying awful things and then calling them “comedy” doesn’t somehow inoculate you from criticism. Clearly felt racism under the veneer of a joke is still just racism.
Anthony Jeselnik’s comedy doesn’t work like that. He spends his entire hour so far past the line that the questions you ask are different. The over-the-topness of ALL of it is The Point, where casual-ish misogyny (more on that in a bit) is mixed with an extended riff promoting murder suicides. Putting them together, having the line always in the rearview mirror, means that the idea that you might hit your wife is seen as just as sick as intentionally dropping a baby. And they are just as sick as each other! All. Of. It. Is. Bad.
The clearest evidence of The Joke is in the moments where Jeselnik the character begins to brag about his brilliance and how good he is at writing and structuring jokes. In past specials, he has taken to explaining what makes so good. He didn’t do that here, but he definitely spoke down on people who didn’t put two and two together. But all of this braggadocio is played for laughs. Regardless of whether he believes the things he says about himself – he does and should, because he is very good at writing jokes – he welcomes you laughing at him for it. He’s laughing at himself too. Because that’s what it’s all about.
But some people don’t get the joke. Three years ago, I was staying in a Hostel in Prague. I had just found out about Anthony Jeselnik and was listening to his stuff on whatever music service I used back then. Another guy in the four-person room was from Canada. He was rich as heck and really kind of gross in the way he talked about women. But I needed some company being alone in a new country and… whatever, I hung out with a douchebag for a day. Sue me.
Anyways, I played him some Anthony Jeselnik, and that was when I realized that this kind of comedy really is a mirror. Because he was laughing at something he found relatable. I was laughing at something that was objectively terrible. His identifying with what is overtly lampooning humanity’s terrible impulses is unnerving at best. That reaction I found more disconcerting than his offer to show me nudes he had been requesting from women on Snapchat.
So, the experience of seeing (or even enjoying) him requires a little bit of introspection. First, you need to know why you’re laughing. Are you laughing because it’s ridiculous or because you’re awful? And then, you have to ask: When every single joke is too far, what does it say about You if you only laugh sometimes? Every joke is just as expertly written and performed as every other one, so to laugh at some and say “Oh gosh! How dare you!” at others speaks to an unfortunate cognitive dissonance. All. Of. It. Is. Bad.
And yet.
Fire in the Maternity Ward is probably the tamest special yet. One of the reasons I wanted to see this enough to buy a front-row-mezzanine ticket was because I wanted to know what 2018 had done to his comedy. Would he double down on the most problematic stuff, as some – again, wah wah wah PC police – or would he change his targets? And it is distinctly the latter. He doesn’t complain about political correctness. Only once does he talk about the fact that he’s now in a position where maybe he shouldn’t make racist jokes; lesser comedians might have used that to set up a series of racial jokes as a Screw You to The Man or whatever. Someone only vaguely familiar with Jeselnik’s work might expect the same of him. But that isn’t what he does. Because, quite honestly, he’s better than that.
And indeed, much (key word) of the overt and ridiculous misogyny, racism, etc. that was so prevalent in his earlier work is missing from this special. But it doesn’t feel neutered. The jokes remain transgressive as heck – and, as ever, much of the comedy is targeted at children – but some topics just aren’t as funny in 2018. At one point, he tells a story about a white supremacist sending him fan mail. The punch line is fake, but the setup is probably true. And even if it’s not, he’s certainly had the thought, and that thought has had an impact.
What makes seeing Jeselnik different from just hearing his words is watching him soak it all in. He is very deliberate in everything. The steps he takes on stage are as purposeful as the pauses before his punchlines. Seeing him revel in the discomfort of the audience and also enjoy the material that he has crafted – he actually broke into laughter twice before starting a joke, which I hadn’t seen before – gives you a very different impression of who he is than an audio album.
So I’m glad this will be coming to Netflix, that people will get to see his face even more clearly than I could in my excellent seats. His comedy isn’t for everyone. It may not even be for most people. Indeed, a handful of folks walked out during the show, I guess somehow unaware of what they were in for. But if it is your thing, and for the right reasons, then you can’t go wrong with a Fire in the Maternity Ward.
In college, I had multiple wrist surgeries that didn’t quite heal the way they should have. This means that holding bulky things for extended periods is genuinely painful. The shift towards increasingly large and heavy phones might be great for some, but it’s not for me. (I maintain that there has never been a phone more perfect in the hand than the original Moto X.) The Pixel 2 had a fairly small screen with ridiculous bezels. Put up against the engineering marvel that was the Samsung Galaxy S8, my previous daily driver, it looked downright ancient. The XL version, by contrast, was… fine. But it was too freaking big.
The Pixel 3 looks like a smaller Pixel 2 XL. It’s fine. It doesn’t have any kind of notch, and it particularly doesn’t have the ludicrous notch that plagues the XL version this generation. I like the clean look of the screen, with rounded corners that fit Google’s new bubbly OS aesthetic.
I remember being excited that my Droid X all the way back in 2010 would be getting Android 2.2 Froyo. I have used every single version of the operating system since; it’s amazing how far it’s come.
The Pixel 3 launched with Android Pie, version 9, which I like well enough but am not going to delve into it because it doesn’t really matter and other people have already done it better. What matters is that the Pixel 3 runs it beautifully. I’ve never had such a smooth Android experience. I replaced the stock launcher with Action Launcher, which makes much better use of gestures than Android itself, those required on Google’s latest hardware. That is dumb. Action Launcher is great. Five stars.
It’s a cliche that the best camera is the one you have with you, something that must be true because of how words work, but there are two radically different lessons you could take from it:
1) Don’t worry too much about what you’re shooting with
2) Make sure you’ve always got a good camera on you
Since we here on The Week I Review believe that authorial intent is irrelevant, I’m going to focus on the latter as it pertains to the Pixel 3. But first, a brief digression: My XT-2 replaced a Fujifilm X100T rangefinder. I loved that camera, which came with me to three continents, for the photos it took and the colors it had in those sweet sweet jpegs. Its small body meant I could just throw it into my bag and not think too hard about it.
But the video was terrible. So I traded up. And while I’m very happy with most of the XT-2, I miss the smallness and the inconspicuousness of the X100T.
But even that has nothing on a phone, which is even more inconspicuous and also infinitely accessible.
And while the Pixel 3 certainly isn’t versatile or straight up fun to shoot with as those Fuji cameras, I finally feel like my phone can act as a more-than-capable backup for when the bulk of a bigger body just isn’t practical. For stills, anyway.
Unlike many of its contemporaries, the Pixel 3 flips the sensor count to two front and one rear. In lieu of a rear “telephoto” that’s so common, there’s an additional wider-angle selfie cam, undoubtedly great for all those group shots I would take if I, ya know, had groups of friends to take them with. But software is the new hardware. The Pixel does not have a top-tier camera because it has the best sensor or optics; it has the best software. The processing capabilities on display with all of Google’s phones take images that any flagship phone could take and bring them to the next level. All of these really involve taking a number of photos and merging them together with algorithms that ??? until Profit. HDR+ is the typical tech that is on everything, and it gives very good dynamic range to image – though it can be a little too aggressive at times for my taste.
That missing second rear lens? Ostensibly obsolete in the face of Google’s SUPER RES ZOOM, which uses the motions in your hand to simulate an existing sensor technology called pixel shifting, merging multiple photos taken slightly apart from each other to increase overall image resolution before performing the zoom. It’s unequivocally better than a regular digital implementation, but whether it is a genuine replacement for a second camera is another matter and not one I feel compelled to litigate.
The most notable is Night Sight, a genuinely mind boggling technology that let you take photos in the dark that just… stop being dark. As I record this, it’s not officially released, but a downloadable version of it is accessible nonetheless, and I felt compelled to try it before doing this. It lives up to the hype. I assume it’s the opposite of SmartHDR+, taking a ton of slightly overexposed photos and cleaning them up, but I don’t know. It’s probably just magic.
Concerns that the images would become too much like the daytime and negatively impact desired composition can be put to rest; you have the same ability to alter the exposure that you always do, so Night Sight can result in better image quality in the darkness with the same apparent exposure. Full stop: It’s amazing.
Also of note, because there I have seen some confusion about this point: none of the cameras on the Pixel 3 have optical image stabilization. Instead, they have very good digital stabilization that, again, relates to the higher quality of their software relative to the competition. I’m shocked that I believe even think it, but the Pixel 3 just doesn’t need OIS. Even when using Night Shift, which requires at least a full second while the phone collects light, any little jitters your hands might do in that time don’t result in any apparent blurriness in the image.
Unfortunately, the video capabilities don’t support all of these wonderful features. Which makes sense. All of that processing of multiple shots just to get one good image? It takes time. Heck, a Night Sight photo can take another 30 seconds or so to finish processing after you’ve gone off to other things before it actually becomes that amazing incredible thing.
So… that won’t work at 24-plus frames per second. Instead, you’re left with the capabilities of the sensor, and the flaws in it are glaring.
What’s odd about it, and where I fell into a trap with the first go, is that on the screen of the Pixel 3, it honestly looks fine – pretty good, even. It’s only when I brought it into Premiere that my eyes basically started to bleed. The problem is partially one of dynamic range and also of the limitations of camera apps on Android. If you want to take photos, you can do all kinds of specific controls; but if you want more control over your video, you’re pretty much out of luck. You can bring down the exposure, and that’s basically it. But it’s also harder to realize when the exposure is totally out of whack. If I press record and then turn the phone around to record me with the rear lens, I’ve got no indication until it’s too late that it didn’t work out properly.
An unfortunate side effect of the Pixel 3’s smaller size is that it has a smaller battery to match. This is a problem plaguing the industry – if you want a battery, get a big screen. I would gladly take a thicker phone with a smaller screen, but that’s just not a thing that exists outside of, like, Sony’s Compact line. The battery life isn’t terrible – it’s better than my S8 was – but if I follow my typical, probably above average media consumption habits, then I don’t make it until the time I would otherwise plug it in for the night. This is a shame.
Speaking of the S8, one of the big draws for me last time I was in phone acquisition mode was that it had retained it’s headphone jack in the face of overwhelming, uh, courage, on the part of its competition. At the time, I used exclusively wired headphones, and the prospect of dongle life, particularly given my many consecutive hours of media that probably ultimately requires mid-day charging, was enough to keep me away. Now, I primarily use a pair of Bluetooth headphones, so the calculus is different. To Google’s credit, both USB Type-C headphones and a short 3.5mm dongle are included. I largely stopped wearing earbuds a couple years ago because a doctor told me to, but The Verge speaks highly of these, so their inclusion isn’t nothing.
Not of particular consequence but something I care about is the implementation of the digital well-being functionality intended to make us look at our phones less. Though it’s still in beta, it still offers some built in app timers and limiters as well as, most significantly for me, a grayscale button built right into the quick settings panel.
It’s been shown – evidence in the description – that the vibrant colors of a smartphone play a large factor in their “addictiveness,” so a way to make people stare at them less is to drain that color away. Then, when I’m not watching a video or taking a photo, I keep them off, and it really does make a difference. Turning them back on is kind of startling, actually; and sometimes I keep it off even when videos play. It’s not like this kind of thing wasn’t possible before, but the added convenience of it being built into the system right alongside the toggles for Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, etc. is something I really appreciate.
And it really does make me want to stare at my phone less. And also go back to shooting photos in Black and White.
It’s this kind of thing that makes Google’s offering stand out in ways small and large. Some of this stuff will come to other phones, but they’ll always be on Google’s first. And some things Google is just going to keep to themselves, at least for the foreseeable future. Those sorts of little life conveniences go a long way towards justifying the thing’s cost.
To kind of little life convenience goes a long way towards justifying the thing’s cost.
The Pixel 3 starts at $800, a full $150 more than its predecessor, and the lack of expandable storage means that the 64GB version just isn’t going to cut it for most people. We’re now, sadly, in the era of the $1000 flagship, and while the Pixel 3 isn’t quite there, its more sizable sibling is; these phones are being put up against the new iPhones and Galaxy Ss and Notes and etc. And sure, they’re not as immediately impressive as any of those, but I don’t have any buyer’s remorse. I like the Pixel 3. It’s smooth as heck, has a pretty swell imaging system, and is the only Android phone released in 2018 guaranteed to be getting timely updates in 2020. And that counts for a lot.
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.
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.
Searching is the latest movie in the up-and-coming genre of
computer-screen cinema. It tells the story of David Kim, played by John Cho, whose
daughter, Margot, disappears out of the blue, after sending three consecutive
phone calls in the middle of the night and having left her laptop at home.
Ultimately, he turns to computers to aid in the search.
Everything you see in Searching takes place on a screen. And
though you can see John Cho for most of its runtime, there is never a
disembodied camera – it’s a FaceTime video feed or something on YouTube.
Before I talk about that, though, I want to talk about another movie: Unfriended, the 2014/15 horror movie that brought this thing into the relative mainstream. A pseudo-sequel that I didn’t watch, Dark Web, was released earlier this year, but the original Unfriended is a thing I have spent a lot of time thinking about, evidenced by the 2700-word review – one of the better ones I’ve written.
Unfriended takes place in real time. It is a screen
recording in the literal sense: you can see the entirety of protagonist Blair’s
laptop screen from start to finish. This is fascinating.
I described it as a film “about a girl who doesn’t know how
to use Cmd+C” (or Ctrl+C, if you’re a Windows user). Anytime Blair needs to
copy text (which is often), she goes through the laborious process of right
clicking, copying, going to the destination, right clicking, and pasting. For a
teenage girl, that’s completely ridiculous, and undoubtedly everyone involved
knew that… but it exemplified the complexity of what the filmmakers were trying
to achieve, as invisible keyboard shortcuts don’t communicate actions to the
audience. It was a question of realism vs clarity, and the creative team went
with the latter.
Searching generally avoids this problem by being something
else entirely. Rather than “just” recording a screen, Searching uses the tools
of cinematic language that have been developed over a century and applies them
to this new type of production. There are pans and zooms and cuts. It has an
original, non-diegetic score. There are changes in “location” as David shifts
between computers, and the switch from macOS to Windows in key moments is a
silent but powerful change.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Unfriended’s approach,
which might be thought of as theatrical in an Off-Off… Off-Broadway sense
versus Searching’s cinematic style. Each has a place. But what Unfriended did
is much more difficult to make interesting for the duration of a feature film.
And with that, let’s talk about Searching!… ‘s marketing.
I hate it when movies advertise their big, twisty narratives whether directly
or by quoting some critic who wants his (probably; let’s be honest about the
gender makeup of that industry) audience to know. The last ad I saw before
going to see the movie was on Facebook. It says only “See the twist. Keep the
secret.”
I don’t like this. If you don’t know that a movie has some
big twist at the end and then it comes, then you will have a natural reaction
and be surprised and hopefully thrilled. But when you go in looking for the
twist, it consumes the movie. Everything becomes in service of this twist that
you know is there and are now looking for. People have a natural tendency to
want to outsmart movies. They want to figure out the twist because it means
they’re better than the movie… or something.
So from the time I saw that ad until the moment I saw it, I
was thinking about the twist. I was thinking about my assumptions about the
twist. Because when I see that there’s something big, I always assume one of
two things:
Someone
doesn’t exist
The
protagonist did it
These are bad twists. They can work (I saw an example of the
former earlier this year that was handled beautifully), but that’s a rarity.
Fortunately, the creative team also knew this, and neither
is the case here – in fact, neither is even flirted with.
But the nature of the film’s climax matters less than
whether or not it is justified, and… there is no narrative payoff in Searching that
does not have some kind of setup, as ham-fisted as it may sometimes be. It’s
not trying to trick you or pull the wool over your eyes. In fact, by its very
nature, you forcibly have the exact same amount of information at all times as
David.
Which is the most interesting thing about the movie. Because every interaction David has, between his iPhone and his MacBook, is easily accessible in one place that an audience can use to follow along with the story. It doesn’t matter that the actual desktop was put together over many many many months in post-production – so cool, by the way, because that is what a desktop would look like were such a thing to actually be occurring.
And if someone had remote access to that computer, they would have access everything. The implications of these movies, then, is somewhat terrifying. They only work because it’s completely plausible to get the entirety of a story from text messages, facetime calls, etc. and not feel like you had information hidden from you. You can only feel like you’re as in-the-know as the protagonist if the protagonist puts his every thought onto a screen.
Bojack Horseman is by far my favorite show on Netflix and by extension probably my favorite show on television. The animated story of a washed-up celebrity voiced by Will Arnett in horseface started off dark and has only gotten moreso as the seasons have gone on. I loved the show all the way back in Season One, more than most. Season two really changed things, though, particularly with its episode “Hank After Dark,” centered on a Cosby-like character in an alternate reality where a woman tries to bring him down instead of a man. And, well, she fails where Hannibal Burress in the real world succeeded. That marked a turning point for the show’s cultural relevance – the moment where the show went from a darn great show to a vital one.
I watched the entirety of Bojack Horseman Season 5 in less
than seven hours. Skipping the opening and closing credits – which Netflix
makes very easy to do – puts the runtime at about five. In those extra hours, I
was, well, this, mostly; recording Monday’s episode about Islands of Adventure.
Also, eating dinner. I did watch while I was cooking, though.
An oft-documented problem with the
dropping-every-episode-at-once paradigm is that in the full year or so that
comes between seasons (or more, as in the case of Stranger Things), it’s easy
to forget what’s going on. When shows air over months, the first episode of a
new season is comparatively pretty soon after the finale of its previous one.
Unless it’s, like, Game of Thrones. Because it’s been a year since I last watched
Bojack Horseman, something that will now probably become an actual reference
point for the passage of time in my life, I had honestly forgotten the
narrative threads left off at the end of Season 4. Instead, I remember its most
effective and powerful moments, or even entire episodes that are dedicated more
to character than to plot. Episodes like Stupid Piece of Sh*t and Time’s Arrow are
genuinely incredible and have left indelible marks. But I couldn’t tell you
what happened in the last few minutes of the season, so it took me half an episode
to actually get my bearings.
The show continues to focus on four-plus-one characters. There’s
Bojack, washed up sad horse trying to make a comeback; Princess Carolyn, Bojack’s
ex-girlfriend and still agent and now producer of this season’s show within a
show; Todd, asexual comic relief formerly crashing long term on Bojack’s couch
and now doing so on Princess Carolyn’s; and Diane, Bojack’s closest friend and biographer
turned blogger.
Diane’s now ex-husband and all-around good dog Mr.
Peanutbutter weaves his way in and out of everyone else’s storylines and gets
some of his own screentime this season, but even that is ultimately in service
of developments relating to those other characters, mostly his ex-wife.
In that way, Bojack Horseman season 5 isn’t necessarily
welcoming to newcomers. As before, the timelines are fluid, with flashbacks
fleshing out backstories that only returning viewers will see and be like,
“Ohhh! So that’s how that happened.”
But most of those moments are over as soon as they begin. No
one would accuse Bojack Horseman of meandering along the way so many Netflix
shows do. It’s thing after thing after thing. The exception may be the
incredible sixth episode, which I think is formally one of the most daring the
show has done yet for its commitment to minimalism as little more (and yet so
much more) than a 20 minute monologue, but even that covers a whole lot of
character ground and features probably the best performance Will Arnett has
ever done. If ever a man deserved a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding
Character Voice-Over Performance, it would be for this.
But even in that, the show retains its constant stream of jokes
and/or other emotions. There is so much going on in Bojack Horseman at any
given moment, with half a dozen visual gags in the background of every
establishing shot, and dialogue that you barely register before it’s onto the
next thing. It lends itself well to the things that Netflix is good for:
binging and rewatching.
By binging the show, you commit yourself to its descent into
madness. Each episode goes deeper into the psyches of its broken characters
while simultaneously serving as a scathing indictment of society in general and
the entertainment industry in particular. It’s often uncomfortable, frequently
hard to watch, and always impossible to look away from.
This time around, Bojack Horseman takes on, among so many
other terrible things, sexual harassment and the widespread forgiveness of
abusers. And… it’s rough. The main harassment plot line is fairly light at face
value but has depressing implications.
Henry Fondle, a sex robot built by Todd as a would-be gift that
says, well, wildly inappropriate sex… things, says those things to people until
it makes him literally the head of the company producing Philbert, the
aforementioned show-within-a-show that everyone else is tangled up in. In a
way, it’s reminiscent of the bizarre Vincent Adultman arc from the first
season, where what was very children on top of each other’s shoulders
nonetheless had a relationship(?) with Princess Carolyn, because no one could
see the obvious except for Bojack.
But while the idea of a robot sex-talking its way to the top
of the food chain is ridiculous, remove the robot from the equation, then take
the overtly sexual language and mask it just a little bit, and suddenly you’re
faced with something that feels very real. That people accept it as part of the
company culture because they think that that’s just how business is done. It’s
by sheer force of talent that, even once you realize that deep down none of
this is funny, you can’t stop laughing.
The prevalence of forgiveness is much more straight faced, resulting
in a much more complicated series of emotions. The existence of an award
ceremony called the Forgivies that a Mel Gibson-a-like wins is something that people
can laugh at and feel superior about because it’s so obviously terrible, at
least as long as they didn’t see Hacksaw Ridge. Which I did not.
(You’re so brave!)
But the whole show is built around a character who does not
deserve forgiveness – oh and does he not deserve forgiveness – but it’s so easy
to put that out of your mind when he isn’t actively being a monster. You feel
for him. You maybe even want to forgive him.
I mean, he’s trying to change! Slowly. Inconsistently. Maybe
circumstances won’t let him, but how much does that matter? Maybe it’s
circumstances that won’t let him, though… does that even matter? “I would like
to be judged solely by my intentions this time,” he says early in the season.
But the road to hell, right?
Bojack Horseman never lets its title character off the hook,
per se, but the show is now grappling with its potential to normalize the
behavior that it has made so much effort to not glamorize. And in dialogue,
largely given to Diane and co-star of Philbert, Gina, Bojack Horseman talks to itself
just as much as its protagonist about that very fact. The conflict there is
obvious. The audience, too, is implicated in all of this. But what can you even
do?
Whether you see that implication as an accusation or a good
faith attempt to open a dialogue says little about the show and a whole lot
about you.
I spent last weekend and the start of the week visiting my friend Christine in Oviedo Florida, a town that is named after Oviedo but lost the Spanish inflection somewhere along the way to become “Oveedo.” Oviedo is not all that interesting, but it provides proximity to Orlando, home of Walt Disney. Orlando as a city is also not super interesting for anything but its glut of theme parks, but that one aspect of it is very interesting indeed.
The five big ones: Disney World, Animal Kingdom, Epcot, Islands of Adventure, and Universal Studios, all cater to slightly different groups, but my favorite has always been Islands of Adventure. I’m a fan of rides over non-specific “attractions,” and I’ve considered that one the best of the bunch as far as that goes.
It has been about thirteen years since I was last in Orlando, and the park has changed in some parts and remained identical in others. There are fewer roller coasters now, largely a result of the removal of the Dueling Dragons, which I missed this time around. In their place was a whole lot of construction, and the giant crane visible over Olivander’s Wand Shop definitely diminished some of the Magic of Diagon Alley.
Other than those, the rides I remembered were there, plus a
few more, thanks to the addition of Harry Potter World and a ride themed after
Kong: Skull Island.
The deemphasis of roller coasters (Harry Potter has only an
entry-level coaster) has been met by a bigger push towards more high tech rides
with greater property integration. I find myself somewhat conflicted about
this.
On the one hand, the experiences offered by trusty old
Spider-Man (asterisk for reasons we will talk about in a bit) and the newer
ones like Harry Potter’s Forbidden Journey and Skull Island: Reign of Kong create
some genuinely thrilling and unique experiences unlike any you can experience
at other parks.
On the other hand, I really like roller coasters.
And sure, I could go anywhere to get on roller coasters;
there are a bunch of cheaper coaster-heavy options in Orlando even, though why
anyone would travel to the home of Disney and go to a non-Disney themed park is
beyond me. But also, The Incredible Hulk is my favorite ride at the park and
easily one of my favorite coasters period. I greatly enjoyed Dueling Dragons as
well back in the day. I want some loops, you know? And there’s only one place
in the whole park to get them. That’s a bit of a shame.
Christine had never been to an amusement park before. That
made the visit particularly special. And our first ride, her first ever
amusement park ride, was Spider-Man.
In Spider-Man, you put on a pair of 3D glasses and get sent
out into Manhattan (not where I was looking to be on my vacation away from… Manhattan)
in a car with a bunch of other folks. You see Spider-Man. You see villains. You
see actual flames and water and you get lifted into the air and dropped and
it’s all very exciting. But… it broke. In the climax, the projection gave out.
First, the audio lost sync, then the video looped, and then it went black. And
in that moment, the illusion was lost. A moment I remembered, one of the most
intense of the entire ride, as you feel like you’re falling, is nothing.
It was actually kind of fascinating in the sense that it
makes you realize just how much work your brain is doing to make the whole
thing work. The vehicle barely needs to move for you to feel intense movement. But…
you want to feel it from start to finish. It made me wonder if we were a
one-off or if something was generally wrong with the ride and no one bothered
to inform the operators. I considered it but didn’t; maybe no one else did
either.
This wasn’t an isolated incident either. Two rides,
Spider-Man and Jurassic Park, and one queue, the one for The Incredible Hulk, had
moments when the theme park broke through the façade.
Despite the glitch, I enjoyed the ride. Christine did too.
One down. It’s a start!
The last time I went to a Disney theme park, my family
picked up the tab. This time, the $115 ticket – more, I imagine, than it was in
2005 – ripped a hole right in my wallet. But, ya know what, vacation, am I
right? If I can’t make not-always-financially-sound decisions while I’m
traveling, why even bother having money in the first place?
Before going on another ride, we experienced the Eighth
Voyage of Sinbad, a live show with some not-necessarily-great fighting but
pretty great other stunts. That was fun. As with Spider-Man, there was actual
fire, and it was something that I could feel. But unlike Spider-Man, where it
was probably fifteen to twenty feet away, here it was probably sixty or more;
and I still felt it. I can’t even imagine how hot it is for the people onstage
within spitting distance of the flames.
Christine bought butterbeer in the Wizarding World, which
seemed like something that just had to happen. It tastes like cream soda with
butterscotch topping. I had about five sips of it. I liked it well enough but
could tell it would send me into a sugar coma if I had any more.
The Hippogryph coaster was fine. Christine screamed a lot.
It seemed like a good introduction.
Harry Potter’s Forbidden Journey was perhaps the most
interesting ride of the whole visit, owing largely to Christine’s intensely
adverse reaction.
Forbidden Journey felt like the modern version of what
Spider Man was trying to do. It didn’t use 3D glasses, and it didn’t need 3D glasses. The ride is long and
the projections immersive as heck. It relies even more on those than
Spider-Man. It has actual props and sets that you flip and turn your way
through, but there’s no, for example, real fire. The effects themselves are are
digital.
About those flips, though: Because it is a hanging ride with
the track above rather than below, and there is only one row of seats to manipulate,
a lot more can be done to these seats, including two instances of near upside-downness.
I did fine with all this. Christine did not.
I left the ride thinking that it felt like the logical
evolution of Spider-Man. The lack of glasses, the more intricate projections –
it all felt very modern where Spider-Man felt retro. This even extends to the
set. One of the most fun things about these attractions is the work that goes
into the pre-ride. Long corridors with lovingly crafted sets to get you in the
mood. Videos and props crafted just for the ride. If your ride wait is less
than 40 minutes, you’re going to spend that whole time in this environment, and
it adds greatly to the experience.
We went on a Monday after school was already in session.
Much like my trip to Nuevo Vallarta, this off-season visit resulted in waits
that were manageable *at worst*. These lines are built to accommodate such
large groups that, so when the expected wait is 20 minutes, you can spend
literally five just getting to an actual person to stand behind. This was
truest with Harry Potter, but there were long walks to at least three separate
rides. Still, we never waited more than half an hour. And while we watched the people
with their express passes skip ahead, I never felt the urge to drop the extra
$65.
So, not completely financially unsound.
Going on Kong’s ride made me realize that I was wrong in my
original assumption about Harry Potter, however. The newest ride is even more
projection-heavy yet requires 3D glasses. It has to do with your experience of
it. As with Spider-Man, Kong puts you in a car with a number of others. You all
experience it together vs the feeling of isolation you have with Harry Potter.
And you’re able to look around at projections that come at you from both sides.
In this environment, the glasses are a necessity.
Kong’s line has the most impressive animatronic I’ve ever
seen, of an elder woman making what are probably religious proclamations about
Kong. After the fun but silly ones on the Jurassic Park ride, where you can
literally hear the movements, the jump in tech was again on display.
Jurassic Park didn’t glitch, but the in-ride intense voice-overs were mitigated somewhat by the actual voice coming over the intercom on four separate occasions “Row Three Take Off Your Hat,” chastising someone who wasn’t even on my ride. He was in the one behind, and clearly he didn’t care at all, because we kept hearing the messages.
The Incredible Hulk went down while I was in line, which resulted in some weird dissonance while an in-park voice-over while one voice over the intercom said “We are experiencing a brief delay and will update you when anything changes” and “Status Update: Gamma Radiation at full,” which sound like they could be related but aren’t. But I kept thinking that maybe they would be and waited for far too long… which was frustrating, particularly since they made me put away my cell phone, camera, etc. in a locker, resulting in me being alone and bored.
Eventually, though, I got on, and gosh darn was it good. Such a fun coaster. Gave me a bit of a headache as it knocked me around, but totally worth it.
We went on one other ride and walked through one other
attraction: the Ripsaw Falls log flume and Fury of Poseidon, uh, walking tour.
Ripsaw Falls is a classic, and it’s a ride that people will literally stop to watch others experience. Jurassic Park has that too, though seen from a different angle.
More importantly, Ripsaw Falls makes you the rider, much wetter.
It costs $4 to rent a locker by the ride. It was the only
money I spent once we got into the park itself. It was also a great purchase.
Some rides – Harry Potter, Incredible Hulk – will give you free locker access
because it would be dangerous to have loose stuff hanging around during them. The
water rides don’t have that, but, like, if you’re walking around with a camera
because you’re vlogging in a theme park, rent a locker. Your stuff is going to
get soaked and probably not work anymore and then not be under warranty because
of severe water damage, and then people will laugh at you.
And deservedly so.
Lastly, Poseiden’s Fury. This was the one older attraction
that I hadn’t done before, and I’m both sad and glad about that. Sad because it
was super cool and I wish I hadn’t missed it the last times around and glad
because it was super cool and I got to experience it for the first time. In its
climax, the whole space opens up in a way that is genuinely awe-inspiring, and
though the projectors appear to be in dire need of bulb replacement, resulting
in some muddled visuals, it was nonetheless a pretty incredible show.
And that was the experience in a nutshell. Sure, it would
have been nice for things to have worked properly and that guy in the Jurassic
boat behind me to not have been wearing a hat while a disembodied voice berated
him, but though they impacted the immersion in those moments, they did little
to diminish the overall experience.
In fact, there was something kind of amusing about seeing
behind Disney’s curtain. They work so hard to keep you from seeing the seams, and
to see them fail feels like a special thing.
You may be wondering why I want to compare Moon Pies and Choco Pies. It’s a fair question, but it’s got a simple answer: Moon Pie’s official twitter account. Twitter is generally a nonsense cesspool, but one beacon of light is the full commitment to post-irony that you’ll find in such gems as:
Describe how a brand uses questions as bait to get quote tweets and attention in 5 words
And those are all since the beginning of August. If you dig back further, it’s all amazing.
A lot of brands do this kind of thing (Old Spice comes to mind as one that has been in the game longer than anyone), but I don’t think even they compare to Moon Pie for sheer commitment. I mean, look at this one:
“A lot of people ask me “Hey, are Moon Pies any good” and I would say I’d probably eat them even if I didn’t work here that’s a pretty big endorsement”
Can you imagine another official brand account saying “probably” like that? Of course not. That’s ridiculous.
And it worked. Ever since I learned about the account late last year thanks to an AV Club article, I’ve been craving a Moon Pie. And only in the past few days have I finally gotten to have one.
That’s not for lack of trying – though I’ll admit I didn’t try very hard – but there just aren’t Moon Pies in New York City. I checked out at least a half dozen stores that the Moon Pie website says would typically stock them in a different place where I don’t live, including one that says it should stock them in the place where I do live but to no avail.
But the desire went at least somewhat deeper than just wanting a Moon Pie because their socials were tops; I actually just wanted the snack. I like smores. I wanted to try what are effectively bagged smores. Is that an enticing way to phrase it? Doesn’t matter.
One day, though, I was in an M2M, which is a Korean-plus grocery store that has sadly lost most of its locations over the past couple of years. I was buying pocky or something and noticed they had an individually wrapped thing called a Choco Pie. It looked kind of like what I thought a Moon Pie was supposed to look like. It was 50 cents.
I went to the internet and looked up the difference been a Moon Pie and a Choco Pie. Unfortunately, no one had made a clear, straight-to-the-point YouTube video that I could quickly watch and get the necessary facts from while I awkwardly stood in the aisle – an issue that I have just fixed by releasing this video (you’re welcome, internet).
I bought it. It was delicious. This was at least six months ago. It satiated the specific snack sensation I was so inspired to find, but Choco Pie doesn’t have hilarious marketing, so I still wanted the actual thing.
Well, having spent the weekend in a small city upstate. I finally got myself an actual Moon Pie.
Moon Pies are pretty big, though. I was actually a little surprised at their size, since I have been used to the smaller Choco variant. Let’s unwrap these bad boys and see this a little bit better.
I should have suspected, since Moon Pies have a full hundred calories on Choco Pies (220 vs 120), but this is a lot smore snack. Almost too much, I think. And the Choco Pie? Bite-sized by comparison. I don’t feel compelled to eat another Moon Pie, but I’d be digging the concept of another Choco Pie if I hadn’t just eaten both.
When I was researching the difference all that time ago, I learned that the real measure of this sorta snack is to briefly microwave it and have it warm. Only then will I really know what’s what.
For science.
…
Law of diminishing returns, am I right?
The Moon Pie is an institution, having been around for literally more than 100 years. The Choco Pie and every other thing like it – there are many – inevitably is naught but an imitation of the thing that the Moon Pie website says was conceived of in a coal mine back in the terrible teens. This Choco Pie comes from Lotte, a Korean mega corporation that has also an film production/distribution subsidiary that released great films like Eungyo, Very Ordinary Couple, and The Terror, Live. They have their hands in a lot of, uh, insert pun here, but for real though.
A box of 12 Choco Pies costs $4. A dozen Moon Pies costs $6. But, that comparison isn’t really fair. A Moon Pie, as we have established, is a little bit too big, but you’re getting more unhealthy snack food for the money. A more direct comparison would be the Moon Pie Mini, which I do not have but is closer in size to the Choco Pie (which lacks a “Maxi” equivalent), and that cost $4 a dozen as well. At that point, it’s not a matter of cost but of taste and convenience.
The latter we addressed – it’s difficult to get my hands on a Moon Pie by any means other than an online shipment, and these types of snacks are exclusively impulse buys for me. Placing an order with the knowledge that I’ll be having a dozen of these things hanging around in my kitchen is a surefire path to intense regret similar to the one I’m feeling right now. So I can’t get the things in the first place, but even if I could, would I? Is the original actually better than its imitation?
Yes, it is. I don’t know if all those extra toxic-sounding chemicals that make up the Choco Pie are resulting in a taste that isn’t quite-but-almost-the-same but still just isn’t quite as good. I mean, it’s less good for you probably, but neither of these things could by any measure be considered healthy, so do the degrees even matter? You shouldn’t eat either, really, so if you’re going to go against what I assume is a doctor’s advice, go with the tastier option.
Four years ago now, my friend Gerard and I ran a small but ultimately successful Kickstarter for a martial arts short film called Reel. Though we filmed the bulk of it in late 2014, it wasn’t finished until… a month ago. There are a lot of reasons for this that don’t matter here, but the point is that it weighed on my mind for literally the entirety of the intervening time and if I hadn’t finally finished it, I probably never could have gotten this whole YouTube thing off the ground.
But I digress. The movie is actually pretty good, something that I think shocked just about everyone involved. If it gets into a festival, I’m going to review it here. It would be a largely positive review.
Because of that, we decided that it may actually be worth sending out to film festivals. In my years as a film critic, I went to a lot of festivals and saw some of my favorite movies ever and also my most hated. There are certain projects that just, like, why? So bad. Sometimes the New York Times loves a film that you absolutely hate and you just can’t even.
And when you see those movies, you can be fairly sure that your movie is good enough to show somewhere, but obviously it’s more complicated than that.
It’s complicated because the job of a festival programmer is complicated. The selection of a film isn’t based just on its merits – it must function as part of a cohesive whole that is the festival’s ideal. And this is even more true when it comes to shorts, since they have to work as part of programs or a lead-in to a feature.
Which leads to a lot of tough decisions.
Your film might be the perfect length for its story but too long for the shorts block. You might execute your thematic intent perfectly but no one else submitted anything to complement it.
I know that Reel is at least as good as some of the films that will play at the New York Film Festival, but I also know that the festival doesn’t show movies like it and therefore couldn’t accept it if they wanted to. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s important to know what you’re submitting to and why you’re submitting there specifically. If you don’t, well, that submission fee ain’t coming back.
On the other hand, there’s something kind of nice about the shorts-specific complexities, because you can tell yourself that a rejection was not an indictment of your work but of everyone else’s – and there’s a non-zero chance you’ll be right.
In 2018, it’s easy (if not exactly cheap) to submit your movie to dozens or hundreds of festivals with a few button presses. Sure, some festivals, like Cannes or Telluride, have dedicated platforms, but the bulk of festivals of all shapes and sizes are accessible via one or both of two platforms: Withoutabox and/or FilmFreeway.
Each service does the exact same thing – connects your film with festivals, but the experience of using each is different in key ways. FilmFreeway offers much more robust tools for filtering through the enormous list of participating festivals – all right from the home page. Aside from sliders and radio buttons on the left sidebar allowing you to select for customizable entry fee ranges or event types or film categories and there’s a wider variety of sorting tools, including popularity and user ratings.
For those numbed by the sheer volume of options, there are a handful of curated lists, including 33 of the “50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee” from Moviemaker’s list – one that I’ve used in the past as a way to narrow down my submission decisions.
Withoutabox, too, has filtering tools – if you dig into the “Festival Search” page – though they’re not as wide-ranging as FilmFreeway’s. It also has some easily accessible lists, including “Hot List” – for highly popular options – and “Deal Time” – for those with lower-priced entry, but it lacks the ability to sort by that popularity and has no user reviews; both have quick links to their Oscar-qualifying festivals.
But what Withoutabox has that FilmFreeway does not is a parent company with a household name: Amazon. Withoutabox, then, shares an owner with IMDb, meaning there are some integrations between those services that doesn’t exist elsewhere. The project page you create for your film can automatically become an IMDb page. Considering how user-unfriendly the IMDb interface is, it’s a major step up. Additionally, there is a button right up there in the corner of Withoutabox telling you that you can have your film put on Amazon’s Prime Video Direct if you want to self-distribute your work.
These are nice.
Since the last time I used it, FilmFreeway has introduced a profile system that they bill as “Like IMDbPro, except it’s free,” but let’s be real: No. FilmFreeway’s profile system is an IMDb competitor in the same way that YikYak was a Twitter Competitor.
RIP YikYak.
Withoutabox is the OG here, and with that status has come complacency. And fair enough: you don’t need the most efficient browsing system when you offer exclusive access to Sundance, Slamdance, Tribeca, Fantasia, etc.
To take on Withoutabox, then, FilmFreeway would need the sleeker interface and more modern feel. And it has that. Every aspect of the service feels more thoughtfully designed. Certainly, they’ve got a complex going on, considering their dedicated page of tweets from people favorably FilmFreeway against its competition.
Maybe if I tweet out this review, I will get added to their page. Probably not. It’s a bit much.
You can decide which subject is the “it” in that scenario, and you’ll probably be right.
But the flip side of Withoutabox’s hold on the big names is that its selection of smaller festivals is less impressive.
For example, my last short played at the Women Texas Film Festival in 2016 – shot after Reel, but finished much earlier. Maybe I’m a little biased, but it’s a great festival, and it’s only on FilmFreeway.
I asked Justina Walford, the festival’s creative director and most impressive person I have ever met, why that is, and she told me it was a combination of complexity, cost, and ultimately just need: enough people use FilmFreeway to fill their slate with quality productions, so why even bother with its competitor?
But this means that a filmmaker will inevitably have to use both: Withoutabox for the big names… and FilmFreeway for everything else. Because for the festivals that use both – Austin, Fantastic Fest (also in Austin), Female Eye, etc. – there is no reason whatsoever to go with the dinosaur.
But regardless of the platform, it’s unequivocally the case that getting your work in front of programmers is more-or-less infinitely easier than it once was. With a single video file (maybe even a Vimeo link), you can get your work seen by programmers all over the world. And though both FilmFreeway and Withoutabox seem to take issue with the fact that Reel has two directors, they take a lot of the frustration out of information gathering. You know you have the stuff that you need, because there are boxes that you’ve gotta fill or else you can’t submit. It’s easy. It’s nice.
And then, of course, you can obsessively check the status of all of your various submissions from the comfort of a single dashboard (or… two).
These platforms take the stress out of submission itself, FilmFreeway more than its competitor, which frees up time that you can use to… stress out about where those submissions are at.
Dashboard Confessional, or Dashy Confesh, as I assume the cool kids call them, is currently touring their first album in nine years with All Time Low on the so-called “Summer Ever After” tour, which stopped by New York last Sunday night at the Rooftop on Pier 17, an outdoor venue at the top of a former mall wrecked by Hurricane Sandy that has genuinely the nicest bathroom of any concert venue I’ve been to in my entire life.
Unlike several hundred other people, I read the list of restricted items, so I knew not to bring an umbrella. There was an enormous pile of umbrellas next to the security desk by the time I got there, at which point I was ushered through before I could stop to take a picture.
I made a Spotify playlist 15 months ago called Developing Intensity (2004-2009). It charts the course of my musical taste over that time. I was always more into modern rock than the classic stuff, and it got heavier and heavier as the years went by. By the early 2010s, the words in much of the music I listened to were growled rather than sung.
But that meant that, by the time All Time Low was picking up steam, I was already outside of their sphere of influence. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of them until their song Backseat Serenade showed up on a Spotify radio station one day. After “Missing You” followed, I was hooked. When I met my girlfriend, Danielle, not long after, her love of the band cemented my own affection for… both, I guess?
DashCon, on the other hand, I had always been vaguely aware of – they were formed in the first decade of my life – but I had also literally never listened to them until last weekend. And I’m all emo about it now that it took so long, because they’re really good. Frontman Chris Carrabba has an excellent voice, and the musicianship is solid throughout. They have great stuff on every album, up to and including their latest release, Crooked Shadows.
But the act of first discovering, and then seeing them perform, in 2018 is kind of fascinating.
They’ve been around for a very long time, so it makes sense that Carrabba would be in his early 40s – 43, to be precise – but that knowledge makes the concert a little strange. Without any nostalgia to draw on, I was focused differently than most of the people there were. I thought at least as much about the context of what I was watching as I did the content.
Even though the man writing the words for Crooked Shadows is older and presumably wiser, he seems just as focused on youth as he ever did. But that fact feels different now. These are the opening lyrics of the album: “We were the kids that left home, probably too young.” At his age, he could easily have had kids who left home right on time.
That type of digging back to the past is a little… sad. And not sad in the way emo music inevitably must be. I mean sad in a varsity-football-star-still-wearing-his-class-ring kinda way. Here is a forty-three-year-old man who stood on the stage and talked about having recently graduated from high school and then correcting himself by getting younger – he’s going back in just a few weeks, he told the crowd. Sure, he’s joking, but the dude hasn’t been in high school since before at least half – and probably much more – of the people in the crowd were born.
It’s weird.
I get it. He’s pandering to his audience of almost entirely girls and young women who are listening to his band in high school or listened to them when they were, in the same way Kane Brown is pandering to whatever demo he’s playing for – I mean, have you heard him on the alternate version of Camila Cabello’s Never Be The Same? I am still not convinced that that’s the same guy who sang What Ifs. I like those songs (actually though), but dude’s faking it for at least one of those audiences. Maybe both.
But while pandering is an almost-inevitable part of a being a band that peaked in an earlier decade, it eventually becomes discomfiting. Though I can’t tell you exactly where the line is, 43 is definitely past it. (I’m lying, the line is the day you graduate from college.)
DaCo seems determined to stay forever relevant to that demographic too, as evidenced by the featured artists on Crooked Shadows: Chrissy Costanza, singer of Under the Current and person I hadn’t thought of since I got really into watching Alex Goot YouTube covers five years ago, appears on the final track – my favorite of the bunch. A quick check-up on where her band’s at shows that her voice has changed a lot in the intervening years. Kind of interesting, that.
Dancing violinist YouTube sensation Lindsay Stirling is also there, which makes me think I shouldn’t even call them features; I should call them collabs. Because, you know, YouTube. But are those collabs genuine, or are they ploys to ensnare a new decade of their target demographic?
Maybe it’s both. Does it even matter?
It’s not like they’re the only ones pining for the olden days. Heck, they weren’t even the only ones at that concert doing so, where All Time Low came out with nostalgic bangers like “Good Times” that feature lyrics like “Chasing girls who didn’t know love yet,” a lyric one can only hope is in reference to the time around their formation back when they were also young enough to not know love yet, because at some point that went from sweetly naïve to actually a crime. Lead singer/songwriter Alex Gaskarth is 30, which is comparatively young… but it ain’t that young.
On a personal note, there’s a benefit to having similar music tastes to this particular demographic, because 99.6% of women in it are shorter than me, resulting in excellent sight lines for the whole concert – so long as they don’t bring their often distressingly tall boyfriends . (I tweeted something about this just over four years ago.)
Halsey came out for a song – All Time Low’s, not DC’s. That was cool. I didn’t know it was Halsey, because the last time I wanted to know what Halsey looked like her hair was a different color, but I knew I recognized her voice. It’s kind of like how Lady Gaga is in that new movie with Bradley Cooper, and you’re like “Huh, she looks kinda familiar” and then you hear her singing voice and you’re like I know that, and then they also show her name on screen, and you’re like Oohhhhh, duh.
It was the kind of cool, unexpected appearance that makes seeing live concerts such a pleasure. Chris Carrabba himself came out again briefly to show off his ridiculous lung capacity during another ATL song. I liked that.
Look, as odd and slightly uncomfortable as it is to hear a very grown adult pretend to be a high schooler, I am totally on board for their music. Even not having a history with it, I can’t help but get caught up in the feelings that it very honestly does portray.
Plus, they put was a great show.
Eight-Point-One out of Ten
Thank you so much for watching. This is the second week of this channel and the first week where I am doing the thing in the way it’s meant to be done. A colleague asked me how many reviews I have stashed away, and he called me an idiot when I told him none. But it’s true, which is both exciting and frightening. I am unsurprised that my Death of Moviepass review has thus far been the most popular, and I expect that the wildly disparate topics I’ll be covering will result in ridiculous fluctuations of viewership in the long term. But if you’d like the take the journey with me regardless, there’s a button that lets you do so below, right next to some buttons that let me know you care enough to press more buttons.
Also, if you want to talk about this subject or any other, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter. As you may have noticed, I’m a fan of talking.