The History of a Meme Feels Good, Man in the Documentary ‘Feels Good Man’

September 3, 2020

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Feels Good Man (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)

Starring: Matt Furie, Pepe the Frog, 4chan

Director: Arthur Jones

Running Time: 92 Minutes

Rating: Unrated (I Would Put it at a PG or PG-13)

Release Date: September 4, 2020 (On Demand)

After he’s all been put through, Pepe the Frog somehow still feels good, man. That’s the nature of a meme that hangs around for a while. It may get stripped of context and remixed to no end, but at its core, it still maintains some piece of its essential self. And Pepe has been on quite a journey, as laid out in Arthur Jones’ documentary Feels Good Man. He began his life as an anthropomorphic amphibian with big eyes and a wide grin in cartoonist Matt Furie’s comic Boys Club. His visage was then adapted into various Internet subcultures, particularly on the image posting forum 4chan. Bizarrely enough, that led to him being co-opted into a symbol of the alt-right, and he broke through into mainstream culture in a big way when he became associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Soon thereafter, he was designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Meanwhile, Furie was left in this maelstrom to struggle to regain control of his creation.

Feels Good Man works best when it functions as a deep-dive investigation into how Pepe got to where he is today. Furie reveals the origins of Boys Club and how Pepe’s signature catchphrase arose from his propensity to drop his pants all the way to the floor while relieving himself. Internet experts and cultural scholars explain how memes spread online and what memes even are in the first place. A 4chan veteran lets us in on NEET (“Not in Education, Employment, or Training”) culture as we discover how 4channers became a significant segment of Trump’s coalition. Oh, and also did you know that celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj have shared images of Pepe on social media?

The segments of Feels Good Man that focus on Furie attempting to transform Pepe into something positive again are more frustrating, not necessarily because of any filmmaking decisions but due to the Sisyphean nature of this pursuit. Simply put, the world has been flooded with so many versions of the alt-right Pepe, and there’s no drainage system that can work fast enough to fully counteract that. That also makes it tough for the documentary to have a full sense of context when the focus is on the present. Really, that’s a struggle faced by any documentary that focuses on the here and now. In a way, Feels Good Man is about that struggle, as the context of Pepe becomes impossible to fully keep track of. But then at least a glimmer of hope emerges as Furie secures some legal victories and Pepe is reborn as a symbol of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. His story isn’t over, and that weirdly makes me feel optimistic about humanity.

Feels Good Man is Recommended If You Like: People who understand the Internet explaining the Internet

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Memes

That’s Auntertainment! Episode 17: Atypical and Fictional Characters on the Autism Spectrum

August 30, 2020

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Atypical

Netflix’s Atypical is a coming-of-age sitcom about a teenage boy on the autism spectrum. Jeff just finished the first three seasons, and it’s one of Aunt Beth’s favorite shows of the past decade, so they decided it was time to have a deep-dive discussion about it and some of their other favorite fictional characters on the spectrum.

Entertainment To-Do List: Week of 8/28/20

August 28, 2020

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A.P BIO — “Disgraced” Episode 302 — Pictured: (l-r) Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, Allisyn Snyder as Heather — (CREDIT: Chris Haston/Peacock)

Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.

Movies
–The New Mutants (Theaters) – I’m still not convinced this long-delayed movie is actually coming out! (Or that it’s safe to go to the theater yet.)
–Bill & Ted Face the Music (Theaters and On Demand)

TV
–A.P. Bio Season 3 (September 3 on Peacock) – One of the funniest sitcoms out there right now!

Music on TV
-2020 MTV Video Music Awards (August 30 on MTV)

Music
-Disclosure, Energy
-Dua Lipa, Club Future Nostalgia: The Remix Album
-Katy Perry, Smile

‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ and They Also Face the Weight of Years’ Worth of Anticipation

August 27, 2020

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Bill & Ted Face the Music (CREDIT: Orion Pictures)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Kristen Schaal, Holland Taylor, Anthony Carrigan, William Sadler, Hal Landon Jr., Beck Bennett, Kid Cudi, Jillian Bell

Director: Dean Parisot

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for “Some Language,” Apparently

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Theaters and On Demand)

Bill & Ted Face the Music is about the crushing expectations of destiny. It’s kind of like the Bhagavad Gita in that way. From a gnarlier perspective, it’s also about how time travel doesn’t make any sense, and won’t ever make sense, but that’s okay, because we can still be excellent to each other.

When we first met the Wyld Stallyns during their first excellent time-hopping adventure thirty years ago, we learned that their music would serve as the inspiration for a utopian society several centuries into the future. And now it’s finally time for them to answer that call. If they don’t, the time-space continuum will totally be ripped apart! But in 2020, the biggest live music gig that Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Alex Winter) can get is the wedding of Ted’s younger brother to Bill’s former stepmom. How then can they possibly live up to what Fate has asked of them? How could anybody, really? The premise worked well enough in Excellent Adventure, as it remained theoretical and fantastical, but now disappointment feels inevitable.

But fortunately Face the Music isn’t really about the promise of that world-saving composition. Rather, it is about the shenanigans that lead up to that point, naturally enough. Facing a profound case of writer’s block and a terrifying time limit of only 78 minutes, Bill and Ted figure they might as well visit their future selves and steal the song they will have already written by that point. But that proves to be fruitless no matter how far in the future they go, which begs the question: are they only able to travel into a possible future in which they’re not successful? But how could that be if they’re able to visit the utopian far future when they will have necessarily been successful? And why is there a time limit anyway? If they fail, can’t they just get in the phone booth and go back far enough in the past to start over? The stern visage of Holland Taylor (who plays the future’s Great Leader) assures us otherwise.

There’s a sanded-down quality to Face the Music that can happen when you try to resurrect old beloved characters. Bill and Ted are still plenty charming, but they’re far from as dopey as they were when they were teenagers, even though they still talk in the same surfer bro SoCal cadence. Meanwhile, there’s a trickier sort of alchemy attempted with their daughters (Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving), who are basically gender-flipped carbon copies of their dads but they’re also actually geniuses, at least when it comes to music theory, history, and composition.

Face the Music struggles to get a handle on how ridiculous the Wyld Stallyns and their loved ones and collaborators are supposed to be. They do live in a ridiculous reality after all, as they must contend with a depression-prone killer robot (Anthony Carrigan) and a Grim Reaper (William Sadler returning from Bogus Journey) who mopes about not being allowed to deliver 40-minute bass solos. That’s often the trouble with returning to a kooky world. The base level of kookiness is already so high that any new bit of kookiness just feels like chaos. There’s a nice degree of heart here that sometimes shines through in the cacophony, but there’s nothing quite as sublime as “Bob Genghis Khan.”

Bill & Ted Face the Music is Recommended If You Like: Midlife crises, Millennia-spanning supergroups, Just-go-with-it time travel

Grade: 3 out of 5 Princess Wives

New Documentary Says, Dear Wrestling: ‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’, Wrestling Fires Back: Chew on This

August 25, 2020

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You Cannot Kill David Arquette (CREDIT: Super LTD)

Starring: David Arquette

Directors: David Darg and Price James

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Rating: R for Wrestling Blood and Man-Butt

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Drive-In Theaters and On Demand)

I don’t want to kill David Arquette! But it sure seems like some hardcore wresting fans do. A bit of essential background: while Arquette was promoting his 2000 wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, he was given the WCW World Championship belt, which apparently was a historically unpopular decision. That’s the instigating factor for the documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette, in which we see the star of Scream and Eight Legged Freaks attempt to actually make a legitimate go of a grappling career. For most of his public life, he’s been dismissed as a total goofball lightweight, and he doesn’t refute those accusations. Instead, he absorbs them as he attempts to transform into something else.

If you only know of Arquette through his most well-known movie roles, you will certainly see a new side of him here. Not an entirely new one, though. He still very much has an eager-to-please puppy-dog vibe through and through. And the hulking physique he adopts feels more like a shiny coat of paint rather than a full-on metamorphosis. But the impression that really lingers is the obsessive motor that drives Arquette to his core. He mentions at one point how he hates growing up, but I think what he really hates is letting go. Once he has decided who he is going to be and where his journey will take him, he literally cannot see any obstacles in his way to that goal

There’s a point in YCKDA when Arquette is finally going full-bore in the ring, with his face relentlessly covered in blood, and I cannot help but wonder: why? Why put yourself through that? Is it truly worth it? I know what Arquette’s answer is, and I know that it is very different from mine. That assumes, though, that he even bothers to stop and ask himself these questions, instead of just plowing forward with blinders on. Stories like You Cannot Kill David Arquette frighten me. That might be on purpose. It’s tough to watch what Mr. Arquette is putting himself through, but I do believe that he’s calling out to all of us to take witness of him.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette is Recommended If You Like: The bloodiest parts of The Wrestler, the gnarliest circuits in pro wrestling, Famous people putting themselves through a gauntlet

Grade: 3 out of 5 Heel Turns

That’s Auntertainment! Mini-Episode: Aunt Beth Tells Jeff to Watch Red Oaks

August 23, 2020

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Red Oaks

Aunt Beth decided that it was time for Jeff to watch the Amazon Prime series Red Oaks, which has actually been on his TV To-Do List for a while. Is Aunt Beth psychic? Bust out the short shorts and tennis balls and find out what Jeff thinks!

Entertainment To-Do List: Week of 8/21/20

August 21, 2020

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Newcomers Podcast

Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.

TV
–RuPaul’s Drag Race Vegas Revue Series Premiere (August 21 on VH1)
–The Vow Series Premiere (August 23 on HBO) – Docuseries about the NXIVM cult.

Music
-The Killers, Imploding the Mirage

Podcasts
–Newcomers Season 2 – Nicole Byer and Lauren Lapkus watched Star Wars for the first time, and now they’re watching Lord of the Rings for the first time.

‘Unhinged’ Doesn’t Let Its Foot Off the Senselessness Pedal

August 20, 2020

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Unhinged (PHOTO CREDIT: Skip Bolden)

Starring: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman, Jimmi Simpson, Austin P. McKenzie

Director: Derrick Borte

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for A Massive Overreaction

Release Date: August 21, 2020

Unhinged is basically the Book of Job but like if Satan’s preferred form of torture were the most outrageous case of road rage ever. Although I must admit that this comparison isn’t perfect, as harried single mom Rachel Hunter (Caren Pistorious) is far from as perfectly righteous as Job was. But the inciting incident that she perpetrates hardly calls for the hell that she endures. While trying to get her son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school on time, she slams on her car horn at the truck stuck in front of her at a green light. The fact that she didn’t instead offer a quick courtesy honk is all the justification that Tom Cooper (Russell Crowe), the driver of that truck, needs to go on a violent spree of making bad things happen to good people.

My biblical reference may sound like a rather high-minded interpretation for such a pulpy film, but I don’t know how else to process this senselessness. Tom says that he’s “been kind of having a hard time lately,” but we never really learn what that is all about. The implication is that he’s finally snapped after being mistreated himself for too long and that he’s now going to take out his anger on whoever’s in his way. But since we learn essentially nothing about his backstory, he registers more as an anonymous agent of evil than an actual person. In that way, Unhinged is like a high-speed, wide-open version of The Strangers, as society is invaded by meaningless destruction disguised as some guy wearing the mask of road rage.

The opening credits feature a montage of traffic accidents, thereby suggesting that Tom’s revenge is the ultimate consequence of a selfish American driving culture. But Tom is too undefined to actually feel like a product of that backstory. He strikes me as more of a piece with the motiveless killers that were in vogue in 70s horror landmarks like Halloween and The Last House on the Left, which The Strangers is a clear descendant of. Nevertheless, I think the viewers who most enjoy Unhinged will be the ones whose blood pumps at one-man-pushed-to-the-brink thrillers like Death Wish or Falling Down. Unlike in those flicks, though, the focus here is on the mom who fights back against that guy and summons the strength to protect her cub. That doesn’t really make the carnage any more palatable, though it does at least make it less likely to linger with a sour aftertaste in your conscience.

Unhinged is Recommended If You Like: Taxi Driver but because you want to fight back and teach the Travis Bickles of the world a lesson

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Cases of the Mondays

‘Chemical Hearts’ Alternates Between Low-Key and a Cascade of Emotions

August 19, 2020

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Chemical Hearts (CREDIT: Cara Howe/Amazon Studios)

Starring: Austin Abrams, Lili Reinhart

Director: Richard Tanne

Running Time: 93 Minutes

Rating: R for A Sex Scene, I Guess, But It’s Restrained Enough That It Really Should Be PG-13

Release Date: August 21, 2020 (Amazon Prime Video)

Oh, adolescence, when our lives really begin AND end. We don’t fully become who we truly are until we reach our teenage years, and adults are still basically teenagers who somehow managed to make it out of high school intact. Or so Chemical Hearts would have us believe. For all its talk of full-to-bursting emotionality, though, this movie is actually fairly low-key relative to other flicks about teens enduring love and trauma. It’s a young person’s film, with a young person’s sense of the world, but it keeps its head on straight and its feet planted securely.

The action starts out at the school newspaper and expands from there. A few minor conflicts are introduced, but they’re soon handled efficiently to everyone’s liking, and I certainly appreciate the maturity on display. But some potential mysteries linger for longer. Will they come to a head? Before we find out, we must first get to know Henry Page (Austin Abrams), who’s all set to be the editor of the paper and eager to learn about his new transfer classmate/colleague Grace Town (Lili Reinhart). She gets around with a cane and says little about her past, but she’s willing to let a friendship blossom as she and Henry walk to her house every day after school so that he can then use her car to drive himself home.

It’s no surprise that Henry and Page’s hearts gradually become bound up in each other. They initially bond over his attempts to sound like a cool literate soul (he mispronounces the last name of her favorite Chilean poet) and ultimately they just realize how much they support each other. But what is surprising, considering the genre and both lead characters’ penchants for overdramatization, is how understated their courtship plays out. There’s a sex scene at one point that is especially tender and sweet, focusing as it does on these two lovebirds doing their best to be present for each other.

If Chemical Hearts had ended right at that happy point without delving too much into Grace’s backstory, I think I would have been generally satisfied. But of course, it is impossible to completely avoid massive drama rearing its insistent head. It’s revealed along the way that Grace was in an accident and that she lost someone very close to her and has a rocky relationship with her mother. She lives with the post-traumatic stress that comes with all that in her own unique way, and as it may appear to Henry and some viewers, it feels real. This strain of practically operatic emotional pain isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but in this case, it at least doesn’t feel like the cosmos is cruelly toying with these young people. I’m not sure I buy Henry Page’s thesis that you’re never more alive than when you’re a teenager, but I can buy that his story is sufficiently worthy of my attention and my affection.

Chemical Hearts is Recommended If You Like: The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, Five Feet Apart

Grade: 3 out of 5 School Papers

Watch And/Or Listen to This: Miley Cyrus’ “Midnight Sky”

August 17, 2020

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CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot

She shows no mercy when she absolutely slays some of those epic notes.

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