07/22/22
This week: A long list of things we loved about NOPE, the improbable magic of MARCEL THE SHELL, and two TV shows that prove comedy is very much alive and thriving.
TRENDS THIS WEEK:
Youtube HALLOWEEN ENDS
Letterboxd THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER
Spotify ME PORTO BONITO - Bad Bunny
Netflix VIRGIN RIVER
Twitter DON’T WORRY DARLING
Trailer HOUSE OF THE DRAGON
Shopify It’s Been A Week
Life & Culture
Bad Bunny is having a pretty great summer. As of Monday, he broke his own all-time record for biggest streaming year for any artist in Spotify history, with over 10.3 billion streams. He’s also doing three concerts next week in his home of Puerto Rico, for which he only sold tickets in-person, causing fans to stand in line for upwards of 27 hours, like this TikToker shared. Plus, he’s getting into the world of acting, starring in BULLET TRAIN alongside Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock next month, and is soon to be a Marvel star as well.
If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’ve probably come across the Mr. Men/Little Miss trend. Meme creators are making images featuring characters from the ‘70s book series, overlaying specific roasts on the original character names. The trend seems to have started back in May with @juulpuppy, and it’s really snowballed over the past few days, with tons of internet users sharing the “Little Miss” or “Mr.” identities that they felt seen in, proudly owning their own red flags. But like most memes, this one is probably nearing its end, having already become a bit too omnipresent at this point.
Ever look at the life of a cat and think to yourself, man, I’d love to spend a day in their shoes? Well, STRAY, a new video game released on Tuesday, allows you to do just that. Released by BlueTwelve Studio and Annapurna Interactive for PC and PlayStations 4 and 5, the game allows users to play as an orange tabby cat navigating through a mysterious city. The game is reportedly the studio’s biggest PC hit ever, seeing 62,963 concurrent players at its peak on Tuesday. But humans aren’t the only ones enjoying it; a ton of pet-owners are finding that their cats and dogs are also clearly very into it.
My favorite videos from this week included this weird one where a flock of Canadian geese team up to freak out an entire beach, this one where a woman expertly outlines the best ways to respond when someone says thank you, and this one that brings us underwater in the Everglades.
—Darlene Kenney, Digital Strategist
Film
Roland Barthes famously associated photography with death, every photo a signifier of “that has been.” And as Susan Sontag notes that even the language around film implies violence; you shoot with a camera, as you would a gun. In fact, photographic images have always been tied to mortality, memory, exploitation, fear, mystery, excitement, and dread. And as a film that's largely about memory, and hinges on the quest for a specific image (a "magic shot"), Jordan Peele's NOPE (trailer here) plays with all of this—while unabashedly being, at its core, a spectacle.
The movie follows Otis "OJ" Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald "Em" Haywood (Keke Palmer), descendents of the jockey in Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion," struggling to keep their family's Hollywood horse business afloat in the California desert, begrudgingly selling horses one by one to a kitschy theme park down the road owned by a former child star (Steven Yeun). But soon, to put it in the least spoilery way possible, weird shit starts happening. Instead of sharing spoilers, I’ll tell you my favorite things about the film (and the list is long): a truly jarring opening sequence; Peele's slow and masterful build; a score by frequent Peele collaborator Michael Abels that combines the sounds of classic westerns and horror pictures with Spielbergian wonder; Hoyte van Hoytema's jaw-dropping cinematography; some of the most interesting creature designs our stunted, STRANGER THINGS-saturated culture has seen in a long time; a buddy-comedy dynamic brought to life by some great supporting characters; and the layered sibling relationship between Kaluuya (his incredible subtlety and eye-acting at their best) and Palmer (a for-real movie star who can make anyone with a soul smile). The movie’s faults mainly lie in the human story underlying the science fiction one; I felt like there was so much cerebral stuff to chew on about analog vs. digital media technology, voyeurism, surveillance, and our obsession with seeing and being seen, but wanted the emotional throughline with OJ, Em, and their father Otis Sr. (Keith David) to resonate a bit more. But Peele has said this is a popcorn movie that also caters to Easter Egg viewers, those ravenous types who watch something dozens of times to make sure they get every last crumb; let's hope those revisits substantiate the characters just as much as the plot. Whether you're going one time or a hundred, go see this one in IMAX, because metaphors aside, NOPE is just a blast to watch.
—Alicia Devereaux, Development Assistant
I went into MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (trailer here) dubious. While I was a big fan of the short, I didn’t see how it could sustain the length of a feature film. Well, I am here to say that MARCEL is amazing and beautiful and everyone who has ever felt lonely in their life should watch it. It is a movie about abandonment and loneliness and how small a person can feel in the world. Jenny Slate is heartbreaking. Her deadpan humor is used for both comedy and melancholy to equal effect. But to be clear, the film is also laugh-out-loud funny, full of the bizarre non sequiturs that made the original short such a hit. I laughed, I cried, I felt so many things! Isabella Rossellini is in it! Go see it!
—Julia Hammer, Director of Production
TV
It's been almost five years since NATHAN FOR YOU ended its four-season run. The show was first and foremost a cringe comedy that offered the squirming amusement of watching Nathan Fielder, playing a heightened version of his already awkward self, assist ordinary people in their business ventures—although those ordinary people would occasionally reveal themselves to be more authentically strange than Fielder's manufactured persona, and that was part of the magic. It was, in many ways, like watching a TLC show after one too many hits of a joint. But for the series finale “Finding Frances” in 2017, Fielder tweaked the format a bit, stretching the episode to an 84-minute runtime, and embarking on a road trip to reunite series regular Bill with an old flame. The episode struck an emotional nerve that the series until then had merely prodded at, bringing to the forefront questions of reality, artifice, identity, human connection, and isolation, and culminating in a stunningly poignant conclusion to the program.
Now Nathan Fielder is back with THE REHEARSAL (trailer here), which floats in the same niche comedy space but ironically frames itself as more of a serious, quasi-experimental docuseries than something you'd watch after WHAT NOT TO WEAR over morning cereal. The premise is as high as you can go: Fielder helps people practice upcoming key moments in their lives by replicating and predicting every element of the given scenario and environment, eliminating the possibility of surprise and allowing for absolute preparation.
The most exciting thing about THE REHEARSAL is that it strikes a balance between Fielder's typical brand of humor and something more like “Finding Frances.” In readying teacher Kor to come clean to his good friend about a white lie that’s been snowballing for over a decade, Nathan goes full SYNECDOCHE; NEW YORK and builds a life-sized replica of Kor's local trivia bar. As he does with all his subjects, but with Bill in particular, Fielder walks an uncanny line of compassion—a genuine interest in Kor's humanity—and satire (or what some have even called "mocking" or "mean" in the past). This tension has always given Fielder's content its trademark discomfort as well as its allure. This man, Kor, has some legitimate emotional wounds. Is Fielder probing those for the sake of a laugh, or actually healing Kor through some backwardly ingenious form of therapy? Can it be both?
For anyone who’s worried, Kor's story ends on an emotionally satisfactory and all-in-all sweet note—but not without PURE IMAGINATION playing us out over the credits as a reminder of the unsettling nature of Fielder's ultra-meta creation: It is somehow whimsical, inane, egotistical, generous, delightful, and deeply sad all at once.
—Alicia Devereaux, Development Assistant
It took me a few tries to get into WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (trailer here); I didn’t immediately love it. But after I watched OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH, I went on a massive Taika Waititi binge and ended up getting sucked into the world of four Staten Island vampires and their familiar/bodyguard. I love the way this show combines the mundane with the supernatural, with heartfelt moments that sneak up on you. It's consistent in a way that many genre comedies aren’t, in that it not only commits to the bit comedically but also commits to the constraints of its world-building. Showrunner Paul Simms has fine-tuned an exceptional formula for comedy: Take a strange yet clearly-defined world full of bizarre characters who struggle to get along even under the best of circumstances, and force them to deal with anything but. I love this show for its tight writing and clever storytelling, but I love it even more for its relentless humanity (it just… never relents). And somehow in showcasing the mundanity of what it means to be a vampire, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS has also captured the absurdity of what it means to be human.
—Carrie Smith, Executive Assistant
Music
Steve Lacy’s long-awaited sophomore full-length album GEMINI RIGHTS dropped last week…and it did not disappoint. Steve first gained recognition as the guitarist and one of the producers for The Internet, but soon attracted his own fanbase as a solo act after his successful debut album, APOLLO XXI (which earned him his first Grammy nom as a solo artist!). Compared to his earlier work—a lot of which included his DIY songwriting and production recorded directly on his iPhone—this album is a product of wonderful collabs, giving it a robust and progressive sound. Inspired by Steve’s breakup with a boyfriend, the album muses on a mix of complicated and turbulent emotions—relief, longing, regret, love, resentment and more. For me, this is an album that gets better with each listen, so carve out the time to make it through a few times this weekend!
—Mimi Li, Development Assistant
Have a great weekend! And as always, be kind, stay healthy, and stay creative. ツ
