There has been a rash of such mind-bending fare in the past few years, especially as Netflix dubs outstanding new titles from around the world – shows like Dark or If I Hadn’t Met You. In this list, we will look at some of the mind-bending shows that will live with you long after you shut the numinous Pandora’s box, wondering if you had been better off never looking inside.

Archive 81

A horror series created by Dan Schoenbrun and Eli Horowitz that premiered on Hulu in 2020. It follows a filmmaker embroiled in the mystery surrounding a lost documentary film shot in the 90s. As the filmmaker continues his search for the missing footage, he discovers a sinister plot involving the film’s subjects and their connection to a cult. The show combines elements of found footage, documentary filmmaking, and psychological horror to tell its story. There is something really unusual and fresh about the tone of this show. It plays the modern obsession with liminal spaces and hidden doors to the backrooms in a fantastic way while flickering back and forth in time and reality.

Raised by Wolves

Created by Aaron Guzikowski and executive producer Ridley Scott, this pulp science fiction/horror series premiered on HBO Max in 2020. Massive space cruisers filled with refugees ruled by a religious puritanical cult, body horror, and androids that fly through the air in the shape of a cross obliterating their enemies like water balloons, and strange connections to the Alien universe make for an unsettling and unforgettable experience. The show was highly polarizing, but those who got it were obsessive.

Twin Peaks

The seminal neo-noir drama series created by Mark Frost and his television debuting partner auteur David Lynch aired on ABC in the early 90s, transformed the culture, and made stars out of a dozen new faces and artists. Though on the surface, it appears to be about an FBI Special Agent investigating a series of mysterious murders – not the least of which is the homecoming queen of the local high school – the duality of the social veneer and unbearably dark undercurrents that lace the society and something far more nefarious, manifesting through and among them, is an unrepeatable journey of self-reflection, genuine dread, and nightmarish terror, and sublimation.

The battle between light and dark is not so cut and dry here, as seemingly everyone has a cross to bear and a form of madness to contend with, even while on the surface, everything is as still as the surface of a lake in the woods.

The OA

Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling’s science fiction drama series premiered on Netflix in 2016. Marling plays the titular “The OA” – or that’s what Prairie Johnson calls herself after escaping from a season of being held captive in a glass cage by a dark sociopath. The first season’s endless sequence of false imprisonment and psychological torture eventually veers in a completely different direction, making you rub your eyes and wonder if it happened.

The first season addresses the epidemic of school violence in the most unexpected way. Then season two goes in directions that you’d have to have a certain kind of sensibility to parse on first blush. Essential viewing for fans of the unorthodox.

Black Mirror

The now-legendary near-future science fiction anthology by Charlie Brooker premiered on Channel 4 in 2011 and later on Netflix. It explores the dark and sometimes satirical consequences of society’s reliance on technology. The black mirror is, of course, the surface of your smart device when the screen is off. Each episode is a standalone story that tackles different themes, including social media, artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and gamification. The series is so incredibly prescient, forward-thinking, and uncompromisingly bleak that the creator stopped running it when the pandemic struck because it hit too close to home; truth had become stranger than fiction.

It is brilliantly inventive; many episodes became cornerstone watercooler conversation pieces, including Nosedive starring Bryce Dallas Howard, which eventually became a tabletop game. Or 15 Million Merits starring Daniel Kaluuya in a hamster wheel society where escape is impossible but not in the way you might expect.

Lost

The mystery at the center of JJ Abram’s groundbreaking series was made to keep viewers guessing and in suspense. Abrams did a Ted Talk when the show was still trending that described a box he was once given – the idea being that the trick was to keep you guessing what was inside the box for as long as possible without ever (or if ever opening it). Smoke monsters, polar bears in tropical biomes, mysterious caves, and many more oddities and incredible character arcs kept this show on fire week after week. The character Locke is one of the most fascinating ever created for television.

Despite the controversial final episodes, the first three seasons of this groundbreaking epic changed television. They had millions of folks talking, conjecturing, and riveted.

Utopia

We are talking about the original UK version here, not the terrible US remake that came several years later. This conspiracy thriller series created by Gillian Flynn that premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2013 follows a group of strangers who come together after discovering a graphic novel called “The Utopia Experiments,” which they believe holds the key to unlocking a global conspiracy. As they try to unravel the mystery, they are pursued by a secret organization that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets. The ideas in this show resemble events that came to pass after 2019. One might become paranoid that our world is just a simulation.

This show’s edginess and constant escalating intensity make it a shock to the system, a mind-bending wild ride. Particularly chilling is Neil Maskell as Arby, the bounty hunter. It may be one of the best British TV series ever made.

The Twilight Zone

The essential episodic series created by Rod Serling that aired on CBS from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s presents standalone stories that explore the human condition and society, often with a twist ending. The show’s intellectual and ethical problems laid the groundwork for mindfuck television for decades. Some episodes can haunt you for a lifetime. We speak from experience. Among our favorites are Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?, Living Doll (which some say was the actual inspiration for the myth of the haunted doll Annabelle), and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet which will have you shutting the blinds on every flight you take after watching it.

The Eric Andre Show

A comedy series created by and starring Eric Andre that aired on Adult Swim from 2012 to 2015 spoofed public access talk shows and features sketches, interviews, and pranks. Andre is joined by co-host Hannibal Buress and special guests as they explore various themes and concepts in a humorous and absurdist fashion in what can only be described as an aggressive fever dream related to Natural Born Killers, more than The Tonight Show.

In the same vein as the Tom Green Show or even Gary Shandling Show, it belies ennui with the innocuous and vapid drip of nightly chat shows shilling the last Hollywood press release.

Severance

A TV series that combines dystopia, mystery, psychological thriller, and science fiction elements. In an age where we’re already becoming aware of how our data is being used and how it can be manipulated by our employers, this show is more relevant than ever. Follows a group of office workers whose memories have been surgically split between their work and personal lives. Any cursory study of horror as a genre will tell you that it reflects the zeitgeist, perhaps more than any other genre. Coming out of 2 years of hard lockdown, the shift to remote work justified concern and paranoia about how our data is used, privacy usurped, and emotions manipulated by phantom algorithms.

The post 10 Essential Mind-Bending TV Series That Will Leave a Mark: From Utopia UK to The Eric Andre Show. appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Having grown up in the 1990’s I am all too familiar with the do-it-yourself, indie ethic: Without the internet that could support rich media, we were always at the mercy of the established Gatekeepers and had to devise our methods of self-promotion – whether this meant publishing zines with photocopies at the local Kinko’s or touring dive bars in our 3rd-hand van.

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But in 2020’s DIY and independent artists increasingly proliferated, then sort of plateaued. The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provided a new way for artists to sell and monetize their work, including the alleged ability to track provenance and track revenue in primary and secondary sales (which to an extent, and for a time it did, until wallets, coins, and marketplaces started failing.) The sustainability and long-term viability of the NFT market crashed and burned as copycat hordes oversaturated the market to the point of meaninglessness.

The explosion of creativity was witnessed when Hic et Nunc, the ecoNFT and Women of Crypto Art scenes converged, exposing a network of artists that encircled the globe ready to self-pilot into their autonomous future. It was a powerful and ultimately effective movement as major marketplaces scrambled to shift to a Proof of Stake framework. Alas, it eventually imploded when HEN’s single dev became disgusted with the dynamics of the incumbent aggregators looking for quick dividends and left the communities scrambling. The pitfalls of everything resting on a single developer. This was seen again when Twitter emigrated en masse to Mastodon, and 3rd party apps developed by single devs weren’t able to keep up. So it isn’t just about being free as in speech, but also distributing the load.

Separately the quiet expansion of ubiquitous online self-publishing platforms and tools, many of which grew out of the gig economy, and then were reinforced through the pandemic, have allowed virtually anyone with a smartphone, computer, or tablet to create and share their work with a global audience and maintain constant contact with their supporters. VR (and Zoom) had a hail mary renaissance as folks had to work remotely so were introduced to embodied virtual workspaces and conferences, and yet soon enough The Metaverse became a quantifiable, ownable, productization of an idea whose true developers wanted primarily to elude ensnarement. It was the indies moving the needle. In WebXR and game development.

But the tools are there for a new generation of artists, musicians, writers, game developers, and makers to bypass traditional gatekeepers and reach a wider audience than ever before. Platforms like bandcamp, etsy, IndieGoGo, itch.io, and Patreon are but some of the powerful tools and frameworks in the hands of the indies. Nonetheless, they are still prone to central control schemes. (bandcamp was recently acquired by EPIC games).

Opportunities and Challenges

In an era where we are mercilessly summoned by dopamine pumps, many people are seeking out authentic and unique voices that reflect their own experiences and values. DIY and independent culture offers an alternative to the homogenized and commercialized content that is often prevalent in mainstream media. That is when DIY isn’t attempting to resemble the mainstream, to please the almighty Algorithm.

But the rise of DIY and independent culture has been accompanied by some challenges and concerns: least of which is that when everyone is talking, no one is listening. Add to this that the Content Creator economy is an appropriation of the movement, dulling the edge of the art, the way Walmart took out a line of Grunge clothing, effectively inoculating the powerful social counterculture by packaging it up and selling it back to them.

But even as a shift towards “the democratization” of the tools becomes more widespread, the public isn’t really primed for this redistribution of responsibility; many are still of the mindset that stuff should just work, free, because. However, with a little awareness and communication, we could turn the tide towards a more holistic, truly decentralized new paradigm where the participants help to maintain, support, and expand the framework for self-expression and enterprise.

The rise of AI-generated art, text, video, materials and 3D meshes and even code is also challenging indie artists and developers, as the ability of AI algorithms to create increasingly sophisticated and realistic content makes it difficult to stand out. One of the main challenges for AI-generated art is the lack of accountability and tools for tracking provenance and paying out royalties, though others argue that media is in a common trust and when resynthesized represents the creative manipulation of the prompt engineer in the way Warhol demonstrated. But that discussion is beyond the scope of this article.

Another issue is the impending collapse of centralized large-scale social media platforms, which have become sometimes essential lifelines for independent creators, and also wholesale appropriators of that content in exchange for free, advertiser-driven access.

Reasons for the potential collapse of these platforms are mismanagement – their handling of user data, privacy concerns, and lack of transparency, failure to connect with the zeitgeist – failure to adapt and keep pace with changing user preferences and expectations, and the right to ownership and control of their content.

Furthermore, the switch to subscription-based business models for most creative commercial software (I’m looking at you Adobe and Digidesign – and Pantone), and the tax for seemingly endless streaming platforms can make it difficult for independent creators to afford the tools they need to thrive and create freely.

From Kinko’s to the Fediverse

The fediverse is a network of interconnected servers that support a range of decentralized online services, that include social networking, blogging, and file sharing. Mastodon is an open-source social networking platform that is part of the fediverse. Unlike algorithm-driven platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Mastodon allows users to choose and follow other users to control the content that appears in their feeds.

Users can also add other users to their “boosts” list, which allows their posts to appear in their timelines. This allows users to curate the content they see and connect with others who share their interests.

Additionally, Mastodon is decentralized and community-run, which means that it is not controlled by a single company or entity. This allows for greater control and autonomy for users and provides an alternative to the centralized and commercialized nature of many mainstream platforms.

Some of the fediverse’s other online services include:

Mastodon: a decentralized and open-source social networking platform that is part of the fediverse
Diaspora: a decentralized social networking platform that allows users to own and control their data:
Pixelfed: an open-source platform for sharing and discovering photography
Peertube: a decentralized video platform that allows users to host their content.

While far from perfect, both technologically and culturally, the rise of these open-sourced public-operated alternatives, lights a path towards a different kind of future, one that is not weaponized to exploit your dopamine daze.

Open-source software solutions, like GIMP for graphics and illustration, Ardour for audio, and Blender for 3D modeling, provide accessible and affordable, extensible, customizable options for DIY and indie artists and meanwhile, their participation in these solutions help to make them a more diverse, robust, public trust.

So with all that said, let’s explore some of today’s open-source resources for DIY and independent creators:

Accessibility

NVDA – An open source screenreader

Graphics, Illustration, and Design:

GIMP: Image editing tool for manipulating color, cropping and resizing, and optimizing file size for the web
Inkscape: Vector graphics editor for creating SVG and PDF files
Krita: Drawing and painting tool for use with a tablet
Bulma: CSS framework for designing interfaces
LazPaint: Lightweight raster and vector graphics editor

Video Editors:

Shotcut: Non-linear video editor with support for hundreds of audio and video formats and codecs thanks to FFmpeg, 360° Video Filters, and 4k/ProRes.
Olive: Upcoming video editor that features flexible node-based compositing

Tooll3: An incredible node-based motion graphics editor

Panorama, 360 and Image Stitching

Hugin –panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program that enables the creation of wide-angle to 360-degree panoramic photographs.

Audio Tools:

Ardour: Music creation software with support for AudioUnit, LV2, LinuxVST and LADSPA formats
Audacity: Audio software for editing, mixing, and recording audio

3D Modeling and Design:

Blender3D: a comprehensive 3D modeling and animation, video production, 2D animation, archviz software suite
FreeCAD: parametric 3D modeling software for 3D print designers
Meshlab: a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering, texturing and converting meshes
Poly Haven: Public asset library for 3D assets.

Web Development:

WordPress: Content management system and website builder
Bootstrap: Front-end component library for building responsive websites and applications
React: JavaScript library for building user interfaces
Threejs: a JavaScript library that enables developers to create and display animated 3D graphics using WebGL in a web browser.

Software Development:

Eclipse: Integrated development environment (IDE) for Java and other languages
Visual Studio Code: Source code editor and IDE
Git: Version control system for tracking and managing changes to code.

Makers and 3D Printing:

OpenSCAD: Program for creating solid 3D CAD objects
FreeCAD: General-purpose 3D CAD modeling software
Slic3r: 3D printing slicing software
Repetier-Host: 3D printing host software for managing and controlling 3D printers.

Writing and Publishing:

LibreOffice Writer: Word processor with advanced layout and formatting options
Scribus: Desktop publishing software for creating books, brochures, and other printed materials
Calibre: E-book management and conversion tool
Pressbooks: Web-based platform for creating, publishing, and sharing books.
Sumatra PDF: Thank god. A free, working PDF reader. Better than most paid options
Free PDF: Thank god. A free, working PDF editor that also adds signatures. Better than most paid options

Game Development:

Godot: Game engine and development platform
LÖVE: 2D game engine and development framework
OpenRA: Open-source implementation of the classic Command & Conquer real-time strategy games.
ScummVM: Allows you to run classic adventure games on modern hardware and operating systems.

Other Tools

AutoHotkey: The ultimate automation scripting language for Windows.

The growth of online DIY and independent culture has also been accompanied by some challenges, like the potential collapse of widely used social media platforms and the rise of AI-generated content. To support independent creators, we need to foster the tools and platforms needed to succeed beyond the walled gardens, and exploitative business models that fail to nourish them.

The post How Open Source Tools are Challenging the Status Quo (with a List of Resources) appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

The 6th annual FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories

In a time when attention deficit runs high and news and marketing bombard us from all sides, immersive stories have a singular ability to envelop the viewer and transmit context and culture that is so often missed. I firmly believe in nurturing the evolution of this medium, which has enormous transformative power and untapped potential.

Since we created the FIVARS festival in 2015, we have pushed our small and intrepid team to its limits to maintain the highest standards while pushing the outer limits of what a 21st-century festival can be. We have always been as focused on new approaches to user experience as we have been uncompromising in our search for the finest new content creators from around the globe.

In June of 2020, we rapidly iterated and launched a true spatialized conference in the web browser, studying, learning and building upon the very latest techniques, code, design principles and ideas for what socially distanced conferencing can become. Almost immediately following, we had to bring together six years of experience and input to do the same for our beloved, public-facing immersive stories festival.

As always, FIVARS 2020 is an experiment. Building on extremely powerful, highly customized open-source code, powered by a grant from Amazon Web Services, we have designed a truly independent, spatialized, accessibility-minded platform for the exhibition of instant-on 4K, spherical video with ambisonic or 5.1 audio that runs in your browser with no buffering time, proprietary software or downloads required.

Check out this video that explains how this online virtual theater for immersive content works and some of its features:

Here are a few more selections:

Inside Lieutenant Gustl Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler and being one of the first virtual theatre experiences, “Inside Lieutenant Gustl” immerses the viewer in the mental headspace of a young Austrian officer from 1900 grappling with an existential crisis. Missing Pictures: Birds of Prey Hard times, bad luck, tight spots, mishaps, quarrels, setbacks, hiccups, destiny…some films, it seems, become recipes for misfortune, never to see the light of day.

Swing VR The story unfolds in overlapping acts that depict the internal and external struggles of a frustrated girl who is attempting – and failing – to swing on a playground swing. As she struggles with the swing, she imagines the demise of the children swinging successfully around her. Indirect Actions Join a documentary filmmaker on a mission for justice at Standing Rock, where over 300 indigenous tribes stood together in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Hominidae Creatures have evolved in surprising ways, with humans, birds, spiders and frogs sharing unique anatomies. This experience follows an Arachnid Hominid, an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, as she struggles to raise her young in a hostile environment. Mutatis At night, strange men in white suits enter a botanical garden. A young woman’s inanimate body is found there. The garden hides other bodies, buried, sunk in the deep flora. Then, a strange light appears from the women’s bodies…

Sleeping Eyes A Korean soldier compares his undiagnosed narcolepsy to quantum mechanics in this eerie memoir. Warsaw Rising A Warsaw insurgent received a note with a message from his daughter when he was leaving to fight in the Uprising in August 1944. At the time, he did not know yet that the note would influence his further fate.

With the Wind and the Stars With the Wind and the Stars is a 360/VR docuseries that takes you on an adventure into the lives of women who fly. Episode One features Teara Fraser: a pilot, mother, and proud Métis woman setting out to launch her own airline. A Safe Guide to Dying The quest of a self-deprecating man exploring different suicide methods inside a lifelike video game simulation.

In the shadow of the FAANG companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix controlling what we see, how we see it and for how much, it is more important than ever to build spaces that belong to artists, creators and programmers, beholden to no one.

FIVARS launched October 7th and runs through November 2nd, 2020, showcasing an expertly-curated selection of immersive experiences from around the world.

For more information, visit
https://fivars.net 

Find Tickets

The post How A VR Festival Is Showcasing A New Kind of International Cinema appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

From Dark Star Pictures and Uncork’d Entertainment comes the story of a church that’s been called “the most aggressively preposterous theology the world has ever known!”

“Bobs are part of the joke that, once you get over the butt-hurt, you start laughing at it.” Focused on a self-proclaimed cult started in 1981, director/writer Sandy K. Boone and co-writer Jason Wehling look at the religion that hoped always to not quite go full Scientology but never shied away from tricking people just as much.

The film opens in a field populated by an eclectic gaggle of aging new wave, hippie, skeptic absurdists: tattooed, tie-dyed, role-playing. I can very much relate to this group. In the early ‘90s, we had the same: a tight cluster of punks, runaways, mavericks, art room recluses, theater kids and weed-smoking, acid-dropping musicians who read books, spliced movies together from two VCRs and played Tetris while scarfing down Froot Loops. We made up our own rules, languages, code names and handshakes. We named our own deities.

Whether we were operating in parallel to or the wake of the Church of the SubGenius, the ‘90s were the most fecund territorial for waging war against normies, being aggressively bizarre and oddly relishing in the possibility of the fall of society. Was it because of century fatigue, pre-millennial tension, nuclear and Cold War anxiety, the collision of the ‘80s excess with the dawn of the Internet? All of the above? None of the above? Penn Jillette points out that many simply didn’t realize that they were “building on tropes originated from the Church of the SubGenius.” Most certainly, the 2005 rise and free-speech/anti-Creationist movement of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – the Pastafarians – took cues from Dobbs.

Postmodernism, Reaganism, New Wave, punk, MTV, Saturday morning cartoons, fax machines, 2600-baud modems, latchkey kids, underground comics, west coast and east coast pop art, mixtapes, digital sampling, computer-generated art and straight-to-video pulp films were being thrown in a blender and then sawed in half with a chainsaw.

When founder Ivan Stang came up with the notion that they weren’t quite geniuses but sub-geniuses, the whole world clicked and things took off: a sudden combination of robot toys, zines, clip art, and the invention of a cult leader – Bob Dobbs, leader of said cult, represented by a 1950s man’s smiling face, smoking a pipe.

Finding the Freak Frequency

As a film, we have a great collection of nicely shot interviews, a quirky soundtrack, and lots and lots of montages of vintage ‘90s oddities. Arguably we can see the origins of the internet’s belligerent subcultures – the skeptical armchair critic with otaku tastes and “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

In this film, you will hear from the founders, original members and requisite celebrity cameos from the likes of Nick Offerman, Penn Jillette, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, director Richard Linklater…all the expected suspects, raised on Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. The counterculture that came together to form a countercultural society. “We were trolls before they had that term, but CB radios used that term. We didn’t use (the radio) to help others; we used it to confuse strangers.”

Bob Dobbs

They coined the term “Slack,” a lifestyle choice that could loosely be defined as not giving any fucks. “Arch Doctor Saint Margaret,” “Saint Byron Werner,” “Pope Sternodox” all signed up for a dollar via a pamphlet canvassing new disciples. Other members of the cult included Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Repo Man director Alex Cox, and the more you think about it, most of the people who drove the Generation X revolution: David Byrne, The Residents, Pee-Wee Herman.

25 years later, Generation X is often left out of generational comparison statistics. Truly, a lost generation? Or one that has been inoculated by the white blood cells of Capitalism and the ideology of the nuclear family?

Losing My Religion

The film momentarily turns toward how the group is mainly a boys’ club – “the patriarchy strained through a cheese-cloth’ – but with the qualification that “Heck, I wanted to meet all the boys.” You can hear echoes of outlaw artist Robert Williams everywhere. Their first convention took place in Dallas and was billed as “the fastest-growing cult” on Channel 4 news. It also turned out to be a financial disaster.

Linklater comments on how often the “slacker” is attacked by society for being a drop-out, an outlier, a weirdo – all of which represent threats to the industrial complex. Of course, Linklater’s seminal work Slacker is a virtual manifesto of Bob Dobb’s dogma as well as a film that dismantled edited structures in much the same self-conscious or ironically laissez-faire way as the ‘60s New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and François Truffaut and such Italian works as Fellini’s 8 ½ or Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy on modernity and its discontents: L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse.

By act two, the film begins to address the rising fame of the cult, growing egos and a publishing deal. Bookstores didn’t sell it in the comic book section but rather alongside other religious texts. As Offerman points out, it was “older, wiser miscreants telling us that human-made organizational systems are as flawed as you’d suspect, because…they’re made by us.”

We look back at the horrors and manias of cults like Jonestown, Waco, the “pinks,” the megachurches, the snake oil salesmen that pervaded the era. In so many ways, the precursors to the mania that has infected America in the second decade of the 2000s: a bonfire doused in the gasoline of algorithm-driven social media machines, commandeered by political operatives, corporations and lobbyists to incite partisanship with all the lunacy of religious fervor.

In the film’s third act, we explore the effects of playing with fire. You see, to suspend one’s lifestyle in a suspension of disbelief that walks the tightrope between community, satire and allegiance to the tribe is a slippery path.

“If you can’t take the joke,” Offerman explains of the cult’s catchphrase, “then please go fuck yourself.” Yet, mix this idea of giving community to outcasts who are emotionally driven by resentment, anger and disenfranchisement, and you have the potential for aggressive toxicity. Such cultures invariably fracture between those who take the words literally and those who use it as a guideline.

“The internet did so much to kill the old ways of doing things…people exposed to it can longer distinguish between fantasies and tripe.” As the documentary moves into the Columbine era, it becomes frighteningly clear that things can come back to haunt you. There were promotional missteps. There were prompts. Bomb threats to their conventions. Being added to national security watchlists.

“In the end, it is about confronting the dark things, pulling the fangs out of them, and making them a joke.”

“The internet did so much to kill the old ways of doing things,” – “people exposed to it can longer distinguish between fantasies and tripe.” As the documentary moves into the Columbine era, it becomes frighteningly clear that things can come back to haunt you. There were promotional missteps. There were prompts. Bomb threats to their conventions. Being added to national security watchlists.

“In the end, it is about confronting the dark things, pulling the fangs out of them, and making them a joke.”

This Is the End

Then 9/11 comes and marks the end of times. Indeed, it was the end of innocence. I will leave the rest of the film for you to discover. Needless to say, it offers a fascinating story about a time that seems both irretrievably lost and paradoxically now surrounds us to the degree that, as Douglas Rushkoff states, makes the Alternative the normie and the normies the outsiders.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the ‘90s were just a giant cult of Bob Dobbs. Shit got real weird, and sometimes it was hard to separate from reality. “Bob is great in reasonably sensible doses,” reflects one of the Church’s most staunch long-term members.

I recently listened to the reading of disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen’s book about his life as Donald Trump’s consiglieri. He lays down one damning, scandalous bombshell after another, confirming every suspicion and every accusation that has been leveled at the infamous President. And yet, no one is talking about the book. The revelations, scandals, conspiracy theories and transgressions have all become so commonplace that society’s outrage has been fatigued and these gross indecencies, injustices, and flat-out crimes have been normalized.

“It’s very easy to slice the world up, and pit everyone against each other,” cautions Linklater. As the film turns to the present, one can only wonder at the movement’s prescience, its role as a harbinger, and how that may have sown important roots in forming an intellectual bulwark against contemporary propaganda. In the very way that the group played with its own wobbly margin between reality and satire, it highlights how easy schadenfreude, the desire for inclusion and spectacle, focused through the lens of fear, can transform into a dangerous cocktail of unconditional devotion to demagogues.

The film’s coda addresses the hyper-socialized world we now inhabit. A world in which no moment is lived offline, where every act is captured and posted, every meal, joke, exchange, passing thought, emotional ripple. A world that will not have time to watch this movie or read this article.

But if you somehow do, J.R. Bob Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius can be viewed from the comfort of your pandemic-driven social isolation, while the cult of Donald Trump doubles down across North America. Regardless of his place in office, the new cult of the SubGenius has been birthed.

Check out the trailer below

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius is available in virtual theaters October 16 and available on Demand October 20, 2020.

The post Review: J.R. Bob Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius – A Documentary appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

In this terse and short-lived sequel (the film clocks in just over an hour) you get it all: pissing cock, furry vaginas and bad complexions. Clark is interested in the unreserved experience of adolescence in every way it comes, seen through a cinematic lens. The verité performances are always a welcome respite from the the slick hair-shine aplomb of the MCU plague (with all respects to Mr. Lee).

The deceptively off the-cuff-style still belies is constructed nature, using only essential dialogue and beats. Undoubtedly there is a mountain of footage that ends up on the cutting room floor. These films create the very experience they are pretending to recreate. Nothing in cinema can get you much closer to the true feeling of sweat and vertigo of making it through days, with all the shit that drags along with it than a Clark film and he has only improved on the method.

As Clark states: “I don’t try to be controversial, I just try to be honest and tell the truth about life. Coming from the art world, I never think there are things you can’t do or show. I think that Hollywood films are really underestimating their audience. I’ve been an artist for many, many years. I’m not interested in making films to make money. I’m interested in making work that I’m satisfied with, showing people’s lives that aren’t shown. If I could see this anywhere else, I wouldn’t have to make these films.”

This is visceral work, literally warts and all. You can often feel the actors pushing their way through the improv, seeking, faltering, but the filmmakers find the beats – editors and Affonso Goncalves and Margaret Reville have done a tremendous job with pacing and capturing the moments. They may capture a hand on a thigh, a sunray on a pockmarked face, the wide open eyes of an infant, as the inexorable pace hammers on. So many cues afforded through these nuanced inserts. The angles, the music.

But this never feels like exploitation; it’s looking at childcare, unemployment, mental illness and substance abuse, crime, loyalty and obligation, domestic violence in an uncompromising way.

Marfa Girl 2 cinematographer David Newbert uses a high key lighting approach to look unflinchingly at these 17-years-old coming-of-age and falling face first into adult obligations – from raising children to paying the rent. These are raw vignettes strung together in emotional sequence.

Mary Farley, who has the unusual job of playing the only adult in the entire film, is unfiltered and unafraid, driving of line of reason through a human wasteland. Drake Burnette, who plays the titular Marfa, gives a chilling monologue center-piece that is just so full of abandon and provocation as to burn indelibly into the mind. And yet she is almost secondary to the many stories colliding here. Until the terrifying outcome makes itself known.

In an era of frightening cultural gentrification and thought inoculation, Marfa Girl 2 is essential viewing.

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