Today I watched the first half of that HBO VRChat documentary, “We Met in Virtual Reality”. So far, it’s competently (though not exceptionally) made, but it is so basic, hetero, and normie. Every location depicted could exist in reality, and almost every activity or meeting shown is something mundane you could do in real life. A belly dancing lesson, a new years celebration, a county fair, and shooting pool at a bar… It’s all just respectable after-work social activities for people in their 30’s, and it’s quite dull.
The first even mention of anything queer is saved for a brief scene halfway through where a nonbinary person gives a 30 second intro to the concept of “I can present however I want when I’m online” before it cuts to something new.
Who knows, maybe when I watch the rest it’ll surprise me, but so far there’s very little weirdness, no subculture or counterculture, and nothing that really considers any of the interesting potentialities of VR or even of virtual worlds in general. I mean, you have to go out of your way to find stuff this bland in VRchat.
The only two scenes that I thought were at all interesting were the first two – a classroom for ASL learners and a meetup for VRchat environment artists. Those two at least showed some of the new and positive things VR technology can enable, but both were quite surface-level treatments.
Perhaps I’m being unfair in judging this thing before I’ve finished it, but so far I’m unimpressed. I’ll report back in a day or two when I’ve watched the rest. I’m half expecting the rest of it to be, like, pottery lessons and wine-and-painting sessions.
You’re not being harsh or off base. The rest of the doc is seemingly just about the belly dancer talking about depression, with the majority being focused on the marriage between that woman and the guy with the intensely Second Life looking avatar.
Very normie and safe. The actual production aspects of it are the most interesting parts to consider, I think.
Oh yeah, I just remembered the bit at the new years party where a hovering white woman in an old fashioned sequined gown talks at length to a gathered crowd about how the pandemic caused her to realize that the service workers she interacts with are fellow humans. Pure suffering!
Rewatching Hypernormalization with my roommate and I am thinking the follow up to Immortality could be sifting through the BBC video archive 200 years from now and watching the birth of Skynet announce itself as early as the 1933.
With everyone (rightfully) in a panic about random limited release stuff vanishing off HBO Max, I watched one movie that’s supposed to be taken off at the end of the month, “The Empty Man.”
It’s…OK. The first 25 minutes or so before the late title drop are pretty dang good. The two hours that follow, eh. Some creepy visuals, some creepy moments, but ultimately it feels like someone got paid to make a rambling Reddit scary story into a movie, and roped Stephen Root in there to do a scene for a few minutes.
Helvetica was one hell of a ride. It was neat to see Hermann Zapf talking typography, though the amount of adoration for Helvetica seemed kind of dated watching this in 2022, after it had been used so hard as the American Apparel font for too long
Life During Wartime is really great! I didn’t know it was an outright sequel to Happiness before I started. I was really thrown for a loop when the opening goes down basically exactly as the opening to Happiness does. But I think overall it’s a strange film in Solondz’ catalog in that it’s just really sad, and it doesn’t seem to be in a rush to spike the viewer’s depression with the same intensely dark humor you’ve come to expect. There are just a bunch of really sad moments in the film, lots of really subtle depictions about the interiority and traumas of its characters. It’s still really funny, of course. It is also strangely beautiful looking, the cinematography is great and really expressive. It makes Florida seem super fucking ugly! Sorry OSB.
But I just can’t get past thinking about the scenes with Joy talking to her dead ex (played by Paul Reubens doing an uncanny Jon Lovitz impersonation). One of the final lines gets delivered by Michael K Williams is so brutal and played completely straight… “You kill yourself, and I will know that you loved me.” There is also an insanely good moment, a rare depiction of an experience so common to university life that it’s bananas to me that you basically never seen anybody talk about it:
It’s late in the dorm common area at the university where Billy, the kid from the first movie but grown up, is attending and getting high with a bunch of other kids. They are going in a circle one-upping each other about who has the most fucked up family. Everyone has already gone and the time comes for him to share what’s so fucked up about his family and past, but he says his childhood was just normal, only that his dad died and that he can’t remember how it happened. Then we watch him sit there with detachment as other people offscreen start joking about his specific kind of trauma without their knowing.
God, that felt so real to me.
The reception to this movie, at least on letterboxd, is surprisingly hostile. Lots of people saying it wasn’t funny and that it didn’t seem to be about anything, or, worse, that it was about something discussed by a few of its characters in one particularly direct scene, and didactic for it. But I was just really impressed by it! It’s so weird to see the same characters played by different people, and it seemed fitting to notice a I’m Not There poster in Billy’s dorm room.
Rewatched Legend with @Tegiminis and boy is that movie a FEAST FOR THE SENSES!! Everything is glowing and covered in body glitter. The air is thick with giant hunks of whirling pollen/snow/flower petals/random shmutz. These characters must have immense lung disease because their forest atmosphere is just a solid soup of schmaltzy reflective matter.
Other observations: most moments in the story are not logically connected to one another. The sound the unicorns make is basically whalesong. Tom Cruise moves like Tarzan because I guess he is such a Forest Boy that he can’t stand up straight. I love all of this and most of all I love giant creepo satan Tim Curry. Every minute he is onscreen is wild as hell. Top moment: when he sends an evil dress to dance with the princess and seduce her to a life of Goth Horniness. Delightful. That dancing dress costume is so fucking good.
Wild fact: the guy playing Gump was NINETEEN!! when he made this movie. Imagine being nineteen and trying to live your life and you get cast as a shirtless and nearly pantsless elf character whose entire gag is that he looks like he’s nine years old and talks like he’s a 200 year old smoker. Intense!! Glad that actor looks like he’s having a good time, lmao. Cannot say I would have appreciated being known as a raspy elf child when I was nineteen and trying to figure my shit out.
We watched the longer cut with the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack. Regretting i didn’t hear the Tangerine Dream soundtrack, but the cuts of the movie that have that soundtrack are apparently brutally short, like 30+ minutes shaved off, and I can’t imagine that helps the story at all.
I love how incoherent and dreamlike the first 15 or so minutes of the movie are. Two horny youths wandering around the forest bumping into shit and getting lost, like a fantasy version of those advertisements where a housewife dumps pasta sauce all over herself because she can’t figure out how to open a bottle. “Oh no!! I’m wandering into a snowdrift!! I’ve fallen asleep!!! I’m under some ice! These unicorns are unhappy!!”
It’s not a good movie but I would unhesitatingly recommend it to every human alive on the strength of Tim Curry, the dancing dress, and those first 15 minutes alone.
I just wish they showed us what happened to that baby that froze into a solid block of ice that the goblins wanted to eat!!
3,000 Years of Longing is the kind of movie they haven’t made since the early 90’s, but it could only happen in 2022. I loved it! Grandiose yet personal and interior romantic fantasy, with visual design straight out of a multimedia CD-ROM. It rocks, pure fun all the way through.
Train I ri-ide 