Reaction Shots: Brows Beaten High
Plus a review of The Menu and the Kino Around the Corner.
The Kyle Kallgren Award for The Worst Film Take of The Year
Within this newsletter, I once gave a shoutout to Kyle Kallgren, a video essayist whose channel goes by the name of Brows Held High. Kallgren started out as one of the few intellectual faces of the Channel Awesome mould, along with another film YouTuber Lindsay Ellis, who has since retired from public life but got her to start as the Nostalgia Chick and departing to set up her own videos. Whereas everyone reviewed trashy movies, Kallgren focused on the arthouse, whether they are weird or disorienting and sometimes he does a series of videos dedicated to Shakespeare adaptations. His videos are professionally made, and as a person, he has his merits. This is why the shoutout Kallgren got in this newsletter is his tweet about the Snyder Cut being fascist.
This line of thinking continued when, Kallgren has his Twitter account suspended, following a tweet in which he described Fritz Lang’s M as fascist. How much evidence does he have to back up his claim? Very little. He claims that M is fascist because it has the supposed beliefs of one: the children, the enemy and the brutality of law enforcement. Overall, his conclusion is that they support asserting power and that is part of the purported ideology and then ties it to the Club Q massacre and the ‘groomer’ hysteria. But in its execution, M is about a child killer who is eventually caught by a neighbourhood terrorized by these crimes and is angry that the police did little to prevent them even more. It’s also measured by lofty criteria since these tenets are applicable to any kind of politics. So why make this kind of claim?
Kallgren has been on an anti-fascist streak, as most people on the Breadtubers have in recent years. While we can’t boil down the motivation, or the video that started his beliefs, he did make an essay about Triumph of the Will, pointing out its political intentions and calling it overall fascist. After it received a backlash from infuriated commenters, he released a follow-up that is purely political. That video (which has since been deleted) outlines the basics of fascism, mainly relying on Umberto Eco’s interpretation that has been utilized by many creators under the same umbrella.
I want to lament that Kallgren and others would have a poor understanding of film if they continue to approach these films as totally political objects. But then, I watched another video essay of his that’s centred around the auteur theory, but the subject is Tommy Wiseau. The angle is that Wiseau, the director of his only effort The Room, and why he is underappreciated as an auteur, because of the limitations in the discussion, which would involve championing problematic men, while others like Chantal Akerman and Paul WS Anderson are underutilized because his movies do not match that image. This video essay would have been good if the premise wasn’t lofty as it is on the surface. Kallgren makes the same unforced errors as Moviebob when he wrote about the Marvel movies being good enough to discard the theory itself. These claims - that directors are underappreciated compared to the capital F filmmakers like Nolan and Tarantino - are really subjective, and it risks stretching the criteria to somewhere it doesn’t deserve it.
Brows Held High was part of my film education and it took a rather sober approach in contrast with the folks previously at Channel Awesome, because of the choice of films being reviewed and that it was analyzed, rather than mocked with infinite snark. However, that seems to be such a low bar, if the analysis turns out to be as shallow and tasteless as your peers. It’s a bit hilarious that the allegations of fascism made against Fritz Lang are the kind of thing that would result in the removal of your account in the Elon Musk era. But this isn’t a comedy. It’s a tragedy in the realm of niche content creation.
Review: The Menu (2022)
There have been a lot of movies that are about the joys of filmmaking, as well as those about the industry of cinema. And there are some that serve as allegories for filmmaking. Think of Man With The Movie Camera’s favourable depiction of the joys of the Soviet Union, replete with experimentation of every possible visual composition, or Cinema Paradiso and its famous ending, in which a filmmaker bursts into tears watching a movie. Even if the subject is depicted in an earnest manner, there remains a layer of cynicism underneath, when it comes to portraying the challenges surrounding the medium. The Menu is a film that sticks to this layer almost completely, as it targets its patrons - the washed-out TV host, the food critic, the restaurant board, the obsessive foodie, the geriatric couple and the tech bro - with such contempt that you must feel that there is an understated humanity in Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), the cold Michelin chef who feeds them unconventional meals with the workmanship of a bureaucrat. Fiennes is a bit stiff as the creative artist who has bitterly peaked, and this kind of sentiment does have less self-awareness when it turns into the kind of intellectual exercise that director Mark Mylod is criticizing. When it does, it has not much to say, besides the creator being uncomfortable with an audience that is stuck to him like chewing gum on a shoe.
Slowik’s match is Margot (Anya Taylor Joy), the audience surrogate who refrains from participating in this game, and it appears that he needs her more than her boyfriend. Not in the way you think, of course. The film is more hilarious and goofy than it is frightening, and one of those moments comes from the climax, where it’s spliced between Margot and Slowik playing mind games on what suffices for good food. I won’t reveal what it is, besides that The Menu ultimately reveals itself to be an elongated equivalent of the Steamed Hams segment from The Simpsons.
Mylod’s palette is dull, and much of it borrows from the plaintive template from a variety of episodes he directed in Succession. But its elements heavily overlap with Midsommar, which isn’t to say that it is creatively wrong. For one, this is far more conventional and easy to understand. Both target the ‘oppressor’ of rich white people, but The Menu is at least direct. We know a lot more about the victims in Midsommar, but The Menu doesn’t need to build depth nor does it want to.
Calling The Menu cynical doesn’t reveal that the love for creativity is dead, so much that it’s consumed in the obliquest way that doesn’t register to the normal viewer. There’s a terrible review in Little White Lies that describes this stance by targeting its attendees as ‘unintentionally conservative’ as if he’s taking revenge on exactly those people who wronged him were somehow being endorsed. But how they come about speaks to the creator’s dignity being robbed by a noxious audience who choose to ingest the product, whether it will be lifted up as a new piece of the establishment. It isn’t the first to make the statement, nor would it be the last. And the remedy to this is to steam a good ham.
You Must (Watch) This: What the Internet Did To Garfield (2021)
I’m changing this to a recommendation of cultural criticism that is worth your time, whether it’s an article, a video or a podcast. I’ll still recommend movies, but with a different name.
John Walsh runs a YouTube channel called Super Eyepatch Wolf. His video essays are made out of genuine passion and humanity, and while I’m almost a year late, I really enjoyed this feature-length video on the surprising depths of Garfield fanart. As you stare into the rabbit hole of the Garfield video, not only does Eyepatch Wolf look into the icon, but its owner Jon Arbuckle. Part of the fun in watching What The Internet Did To Garfield is the mystery behind creator Jim Davis and the missing comic that precedes Garfield. And as that is revealed, it becomes an insight into the psyche of the reader consuming these characters, even realizing how saturated the orange cat has been in our culture since his creation in 1978. The words “I’m sorry Jon” is haunting me in a way that I did not expect.
The Kino Right Around The Corner: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1992)
Peter Greenaway’s most recognizable film is so carefully constructed with attention to detail, that it’s difficult to believe that it manages to avoid any sense of fragility. But it isn’t simply the high level of formalism that makes it so enticing (no pun intended). The banality of taste, as it’s consumed by the worst possible human beings such as Michael Gambon’s aptly titled Thief, is shown with little compromise, but doesn’t lose any of its subtlety. Its eroticism, however, is quite tasteful and the chemistry between Helen Mirren and a normie book owner is rather strong. A lot of movies addressing the vapidity of the wealthy would aspire to have this kind of scope, but more importantly, not pussyfooting around it, but are prepared to find the humanity within these characters.