By: Henry J. Fromage –
The New Yorker’s YouTube page is lousy with quality documentary and narrative shorts (including several that have been nominated for or even won Oscars in recent years).
425. Undertone
This A24 horror film now playing on Max has all of the sheen of the largely unimpeachable output of the studio, plus an audio-driven hook (it’s centered on a couple of horror podcasters who receive a cursed batch of audio files). The sound design is predictably excellent, as is the production design that isolates us with the few visible characters late at night. Too bad the script and particularly the dialogue isn’t quite up to par- there’s a few laffers of a line here that pull you out of the meticulously constructed atmosphere. Three Beers.
426. Milk & Serial
This hour-plus found footage horror made for pennies and posted on YouTube was the calling card for a 24-year-old Curry Barker to get the still modest but feature-enabling budget he used to make current mega-hit horror Obsession. It’s a layered story jumping back and forth across a few days in which a group of friends with a popular YouTube prank channel fuck with each other while one among them has far more dastardly plans. It’s easy to see Barker’s bona fides, and excitingly he’s a very effective horror actor as well and it looks like he’ll be getting back in front of the camera for his next. Two Beers.
427. God is Shy
First, a short film that is neither documentary nor feature, nor from the New Yorker. Instead, this Annecy multiple prizewinner and I’d imagine shoo-in for next year’s Animated Short Film Oscar shortlist, if not a nom. It’s a French-language short full of bright, off-kilter color choices and an overall animation style that has heavy Japanese anime and Japanese horror influences. A woman tells a macabre story to a young couple on a train, and things just go more existentially terrifying directions from there. To say more would be a shame- it’s on MUBI, jump on it. A Toast.
428. Strong Grandma
Let’s start our run of New Yorker documentary shorts with an uplifting human interest story. Catherine Kuehn is a multi-time weightlifting world champion, which is a bit easier to pull off when you’re 95 years old and one of the few people in your age group on the planet capable of the task. It’s clear she and her dearly departed husband have always had an adventurous streak, and she takes her current pastime seriously- challenging herself up to and perhaps even a bit past her limits. Legend. Two Beers.
429. Denial
Unfortunately we’re going to change pace completely here- this one will piss you off. It follows Maricopa County Republican Chairman Bill Gates as he earnestly tries and for too many fails to beat back election conspiracies and outright lies around the 2020 presidential election coming from his purported fellow party members. Witness in real time the Party of Trump devour one of their own in a desperate attempt to countermand reality. Two Beers.
430. The Ban
This New Yorker documentary short revisits a particularly absurd moment in time of the British media, when Margaret Thatcher’s British government mandated that the voices of Sinn Féin or I.R.A. leaders could not be broadcasted. Since what they had to say was inherently newsworthy at the times of The Troubles, the media had to come up with a bit of a workaround- hiring voice actors to read the transcripts of what these people were saying in video. They couldn’t sound too good, though, with intentionally higher voices chosen in some cases, and discouragement of syncing voice and image too perfectly. Too strange not to be true. Two Beers.
431. The Spectacle
The most recent of the New Yorker shorts (meaning it may be relevant to this year’s Oscar race), this one is beautifully shot- as it should be since it’s set in some of the most stunning locations on the planet. Travel cinematography isn’t the point, though, as director Yasmin van Dorp is more interested in the hordes of tourists that overrun such places, in large part seemingly to snap that perfect vacation photo. The human animal is an absurd one. Two Beers.
