The best film festival in Australia is back onsite and online. As usual, it’s a fantastic mix of local and foreign talent spread across every conceivable genre and format. This year I’ve chosen a mix of features, documentaries and some incredible shorts.
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk)
Soda Jerk’s third feature-length project, Hello Dankness, takes a look at the weird period between 2016 and 2020 when America couldn’t seem to unf*ck itself until finally in 2020 it reestablished the status quo by electing a scion of corporate liberalism.
What makes Soda Jerk’s satirical stoner musical so unique is that, like Terror Nullius and Hollywood Burn, the entire movie is pieced together from clips of other movies seamlessly edited into a strange montage of vignettes depicting different moments of the 2016 disaster onwards.
Tom Hanks in The Burbs plants his Vote Bernie sign while Annette Bening from American Beauty looks on in disgust behind her Vote Hilary sign. Wayne and Garth are Alt-Right and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wonder how people could fall for Pizzagate. It is a wild mix of characters and genres that fits together perfectly as a satire of so many different targets that it begs many rewatches.
Perhaps the best moment of cutting, samurai sword sharp satire is the opening scene which is Kendall Jenner’s awful, BLM piggybacking, tone-deaf, racially insensitive, bullshit Pepsi commercial shown in its entirety before the movie begins proper. It is almost a statement from the filmmakers saying that whatever mad images they create, nothing illustrates how absurd the modern age is more than the fact a corporation believed that they could jump onto the protesting “trend” to hawk their soft drink. The defining image of that ad is Jenner handing a cop a Pepsi which saves the day but watching the whole thing shows a reckless lack of understanding of the modern world and how angry people are.
Hello Dankness is fantastic. It is the best kind of satire in that it eviscerates its targets while being intelligent, hilarious, and featuring a character screaming that he has his dick out for Harambe.
Biosphere (Mel Eslyn)
Writing this review will be like walking a tightrope above an abyss as I don’t want to spoil a single thing about this wonderfully strange movie as I write a few hundred words about it. I’ll give you this: It is the story of two men – possibly the last on Earth – living in a biosphere while the rest of the world has been destroyed by something, possibly, probably nuclear war though it’s never said outright.
The two men have been friends since childhood. One is the scientist who built the biosphere in case of disaster and the other may or may not be responsible for that disaster. One is intelligent and prone to looking on the bright side, and the other is quick to panic and mood swings.
Played by Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass, these characters are the only people we see in the movie (if you don’t count a scene where they watch Lethal Weapon 3) and while a 100-minute two-hander is a hard prospect, they both kept me riveted.
The plot twist that occurs near the opening of the movie is why I would beg you to go see this blind. It is a wonderfully interesting concept that creates all kinds of mess for the characters and opens up all manner of worm cans.
Tonally the movie jumps from hilarious to sad to sweet, often within the same scene, and the chemistry between the two actors and the sure-handed, occasionally claustrophobic direction from Mel Ersyn keeps things interesting while staying within a single setting.
All I can say is watch this movie. Watch it before it is spoiled for you and enjoy the hell out of it because that’s what I did.
Art Talent Show (Tomás Bojar and Adéla Komrzy)
A lot of documentaries cover similar ground to Art Talent Show. A prestigious organization or institution is letting in new starters and they must train and present themselves over the course of a grueling entry process. Somm does it with wine, GaoKao 2020 for the infamous Chinese college entrance exam, and Art Talent Show does it for artists trying to get into Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts.
What is different about Art Talent Show is that rather than focusing on those who are taking the exam to get in, it focuses instead on the teachers issuing the exam and their experiences in between sessions with the potential students.
It creates a fascinating movie as we see the way exam themes are chosen not as some divine writ but by eight people sitting around a table shooting the shit until they agree on four. We see how the teachers are quite stern with the students while interviewing them, picking apart their every word, but then afterward while debriefing they feel terrible about being so harsh.
Removing the student aspect does take away the stakes of the movie as we have no heroes or villains to root for since we get to know the students only as much as the teachers do by seeing their work, the interviews, and watching how they take a theme and create a brand new piece. Removing that aspect could have hurt the movie but the subject matter being discussed and dissected is so fascinating I didn’t miss it.
After all, how do you quantify art and how do you prove that your art needs to be made and be seen by others? It seems as though everyone, teachers and potential students are struggling with those questions and it is enlightening to see all parties discuss it and try to work it out.
Art Talent Show never gives narration or talking heads. We just watch the process unfold as silent, invisible witnesses, and it is an incredible process to watch.
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