EIGHTH GRADE (2018, written & directed by Bo Burnham, starring Elsie Fisher)

Don't miss this... I think it's an astonishing movie, easily one of the best coming of age movies to come out this decade. Perhaps not saying much, but Burnham's script & direction are subtler and more deft than I would have ever expected he was capable of judging by his comedy, and Elsie Fisher's performance is just remarkable. Some familiar tropes and notes hit through the first half, but the second half veers off into its own very quiet and intense thing. There's so much dignity and courage in Fisher's character and Burnham doesn't linger on or milk what you'd expect: the absent parent, the awkward sexual encounter, the first crush, the active shooter drill (!). The closing father-daughter speech by the fire at the end is as powerful as the end of Call Me By Your Name. It just wrecked me.

Thanks for the reminder--want to see this (as a movie, as a teacher).

flappy otm, except for rating the "I'm so proud of you, I hella wanted to suck dicks when I was your age but was kajagoogoo" speech from CMBYN

flappy otm, except for rating the "I'm so proud of you, I hella wanted to suck dicks when I was your age but was kajagoogoo" speech from CMBYN

I liked i].

that’s a pretty harsh reading of the CMBYN speech but I will say the speech in Eighth Grade is probably better because it’s so understated and simple while still being immensely moving - the CMBYN speech was very loaded with “this is serious this is serious this is so serious PAY ATTENTION and cry”

also when Kayla stands up to Kennedy >>>>>>>>>>>>

I like to think that Leave No Trace is the secret sequel to this.

they both have really tight scripts and manage to be really emotional without ever becoming hysterical. they underplay it, like Lady Bird did but with none of the quirkiness. EG and LMT are very realistic and all the better for it.

directed by Bo Burnham is hard to get by but this sounds good

Burnham's script & direction are subtler and more deft than I would have ever expected he was capable of judging by his comedy

glad to hear that this is good; i really want to see it. i thought his interview on Fresh Air was really good, and then, yeah, i looked up his comedy and i began to have second thoughts. i will try to catch this on the big screen while i still can.

directed by Bo Burnham is hard to get by but this sounds good

i didn't know his work, but alamo had a pre-show with clips of his live act as well as him talking to the camera about the movie. it all made me worry i had made a terrible mistake buying a ticket (and also did too much this-is-what-the-movie-is-about framing) but then the movie was great. lotta realness. the dad stuff felt a little more forced or "movie-like" to me but all the stuff with the kids struck me as dead on.

one small thing i really liked - not my favorite thing in the movie but just something you don't see enough - was the rick and morty references/impressions. kids talk about and quote their favorite shows all the time and most movies about kids fail to get this, i assume either for rights reasons or because the script is too focused on the plot or the emotional arc. i totally believe that these two kids would have that exact conversation about rick and morty.

otm!

I really liked how they handled the absence of the mother, there was literally one reference to it in the whole movie, I was hoping it would go by unmentioned but "since your mother left" is so much better & more vague than "since your mother died" or any more time spent on the subject.

tt and I started watching a Burnham stand-up routine on Netflix and were enjoying its gay misanthropy, but then we got suspicious and looked him up only to discover that he wasn't gay, which completely ruined it

I have a crush on Josh Hamilton and his dad body.

directed by Bo Burnham is hard to get by but this sounds good

My exact first thought, but then I read the New Yorker profile and he seemed uncommonly thoughtful. And then I heard him on NPR and he was really smart there, too. There was a great exchange where Terry Gross plays his dumb breakthrough "I'm Gay" song (or whatever it was), and after she asks him if he's worried it might come off homophobic. And his response was an honest "I don't know that it isn't," and then he explained how important it was for him to leave his formative adolescent work online and not try to brush it aside, to show that people can change and get better and try to be better themselves. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he was very earnest and had given a lot of thought to a lot of things.

sorry elmo! one speech isn't most of the film though

This was excellent. And let me just say, as the father of a 13-year old girl that just finished middle school and is about to enter high school, a lot of this shit was downright uncanny. Off the top of my head I honestly can't think of any remotely similar movie that gets so much right (at least from my perspective).

otm

Didn't like this as much as what's above, but it is ambitious--it wants to be the definitive film on the subject, and to get a film like that into theatres, into wide release even, is admirable. Three things I did like: the wording of the forced invitation to the pool party, "Orinoco Flow" (a song I have not heard nor thought about even once, literally, since it was out in the world; thought of it as an interesting curiosity at the time, like "Royals" or something), and Elsie getting her future self as her high-school shadow.

Kayla, not Elsie--got the character and the actress mixed up.

Did you know that Enya, despite selling millions of records, has never toured?

No--I guess that explains in part why she vanished from my radar. I did like how the film used that song (recognized it immediately but took a few seconds--till the vocal--to put a name to it).

One question (which has nothing to do with my overall feelings--just curious): do schools in the States ever run simulations of school shootings that graphic? I can't imagine anything like that up here, but then the problem isn't as prevalent up here (we've had them, obviously). I would think a readiness drill like the one in the film would be traumatic in and of itself.

My instinct is to say no, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is yes. Certainly my kids (one about to start high school, one about to start middle school) know the drill, so to speak.

man the high school kids were SO good, almost more believably written and naturally acted than the eighth-graders.

The shadowing reminded me of Dazed and Confused, although in Linklater's film, the high school students weren't one-on-one shadows, and most of them wanted to make your life miserable. But a couple of them did take the younger kids under their wing, invited them to tag along, etc.

and Elsie getting her future self as her high-school shadow.

man the high school kids were SO good, almost more believably written and naturally acted than the eighth-graders.

― This is a total Jeff Porcaro. (Doctor Casino), Friday, August 3, 2018 5:20 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm, would watch a movie about them finishing senior year. but then again, that movie has been made many times before.

I tried to resist this (critical nature, slight aversion to Bo Burnham) but eventually fell completely under its spell. What a treat. Amazing that this was showing at the megaplez just down the road and not at the art houses exclusively.

I though the first 15 minutes were weak and was tempted to walk out (after the lady in the film said "lit" and then the teacher dabbed upon entering the classroom) but then immediately followed the most extraordinary stretch of film in recent memory with the dinner scene and the enya scene.

I am too far removed from 8th grade to even trust my sense that some things were overwrought but it did feel that way.

No one got up when the credits started rolling, good sign.

My oldest kid is literally starting 8th grade on Wednesday, so I couldn't resist the synchronicity of taking him to this today. He was sort of intrigued -- by the R rating and because he knew Burnham had started as a YouTuber -- and sort of resistant, because of the potential cringe factor. But we both ended up really liking it. Elsie Fisher is great, and it all felt grounded and, even to an actual 13-year-old, totally convincing.

And yes, his school has active shooter drills. Not with a guy actually dressed as a shooter, but it wouldn't surprise me if some places are doing that.

loved it overall. certainly surpassed this to become bo burnham's greatest film.

I’ve long hated Burnham’s musical comedy steeze and I’m not sure I can ever watch this and appreciate it as its own thing.

I'll see it, but not in the theater. He seems to have matured/grown up vs. whatever he was doing a few years back, though. Good for him.

I’ve long hated Burnham’s musical comedy steeze and I’m not sure I can ever watch this and appreciate it as its own thing.

― circa1916, Sunday, August 5, 2018 1:41 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

missing out! this isn't like his comedy at all

Will def check it out when it’s streaming somewhere. Heard an interview with him recently that kinda punctured my image of what he was about. Just hard to shake vivid memories of a real corny roommate of a friend who would put on one of BB’s DVDs repeatedly and how it made me want to throw the TV out of a window.

Haven't seen it yet but really enjoyed this interview with Burnham where he talks about growing up with social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/566579/?__twitter_impression=true

xpost This has nothing to do with this dude's comedy. It's earnest, it's empathetic, it's lovely and loving. And it's almost documentary like in its restraint and approach, so much so that I would not come close to branding it a comedy. It's got some awkward laughs in it (like life), but there's almost nothing in it that does not ring true or seem like it does not come from the honest perspective of an eighth grade girl (which is something, coming from a 28 year old first time director with a background in dumb comedy). While I can see waiting for it to come to TV, I do recommend seeing it in a theatre with other people, likely of other generations, just to see how they react and what gets reactions. The giggles of recognition from the high school girls behind us were different from the solo 60 year old dude in front of us. My older daughter is at summer camp right now, but when she comes back I think my wife is going to take her, to hear her side. I'll report back.

Interesting Bo Burnham stuff: he plays a well meaning but crap comedian in "The Big Sick," and (as I learned from the New Yorker profile), he directed Chris Rock's most recent special, at Rock's request.

I hate being the guy who's less than enthusiastic about something everybody else on the thread loves, but, while I did like some things about this film (see above), some of it didn't ring true to me--from unimportant nit-picky stuff (I can't imagine any middle school giving recognition at a school assembly for something based on physical appearance--informally in a yearbook, yes, not an officially sanctioned award/certificate) to maybe the most central fact of the film, the father-daughter relationship. I'm not a father--if anyone wants to bat away this objection with "If you were a father, you'd understand," feel free. But when the father gives his big speech about how much of a joy his daughter is, I wish the director had actually given us some reason to believe this. I mean, I know these characters have entire lifetimes behind that assertion that we don't see, and of course any father would feel that way, but all we've seen is 90 minutes of his daughter pretty much treating him like dirt, and him smiling and bumbling and making self-deprecating jokes in response. In Six Feet Under, by way of contrast, we see the daughter treat the mom the same way (or in Roseanne, when Darlene goes through her season-in-black phase), but before they have a similarly emotional rapprochement, we get the expected exasperation/anger/silence/confrontation from the mom (and also from dad on Roseanne). So when they finally do come out the other side, the bond there feels very real to me. Here, when the father speaks of the wonder of his daughter, I just thought "Really?" I found the father a real cipher in Eighteen.

As a dad I kind of agree with some of that and mentioned it to my wife on the way home, that he was a little too idealized (because kids are fucking hard). It did capture the vibe of unconditional love, though, the way you can look at your kid and see nothing wrong, even when they are internally tormented by all sorts of drama. But as my wife pointed out, the girl in this is *not* some mere wallflower or shut-in. She, begrudgingly or not, actually follows her dad's advice. She goes to parties she does not want to go to, she follows his phone restrictions (clearly more limited during the week), she stands up for herself and confronts people when she feels she is wronged, she builds up her courage and does karaoke in front of people that don't like her. And she's not afraid to contact dad for help or rides and stuff, and he is very accommodating. This is an instance of something being a little between the lines but totally clear: she listens to him because she loves and trusts him. They have a great relationship, and that is something else I loved about this movie. They did not mine their relationship for conflict. Her problems have nothing to do with her supportive dad, and she knows that, which is a lovely twist on these things (and yet something else that sets it apart from Ladybird, which is specifically about mother/daughter conflict and a reason I thought it felt a little more TV-y to me.)

You're right that conflict is the default setting in these films. There's a third way, too, but you don't see it very often: the Ridgemont High thing where the parents are virtually absent. (The most extreme example I can think of--pretty sure you don't see or hear a single parent in Heckerling's film). The kids work out everything themselves.

I really hate to keep harping on this but everything about this sounds absolutely unappealing to me

• It's the auteur statement from a stand-up
• That stand-up is ironic rap YouTube funnyman Bo Burnham
• It's called 'Eighth Grade'
• It's about social media
• People in this very thread are saying thinks like "It just wrecked me"

This could very well be an excellent, smart, awesome movie, but that is ... a lot of hurdles for me to jump

yeah

though honestly I really was not a fan of Donald Glover's comedy or music and Atlanta is fast becoming one of my favorite shows of all time

xpost people in this very thread are also telling you they were suspicious of burnham, didn't like his comedy etc., and yet found the movie very good. maybe instead of telling us that our being moved by it makes you not want to see it (because, i guess, we are all dummies whose opinions are always wrong), you should just see it, and post to the thread afterwards.

well it's also like, OK, even if this movie is NOTHING LIKE his shitty, quasi-racist chive-y videos, he wouldn't have even had the chance to make this auteur indie-cinema without years of building his brand from -- and these quotes are straight from Wikipedia --

Burnham wrote and released songs about white supremacy, Helen Keller's disabilities, homosexuality, and more.[1]

When speaking with The Detroit News about his rapping, he expressed his intent to honor and respect the perspective and culture of hip-hop music.[3]

Comedy Central Records released Burnham's first EP, the six-song Bo Fo Sho, as an online release-only album on June 17, 2008.[13]

It feels when people are wowed by Vice News doing some interesting reporting when their entire infrastructure was built on ironic racism and rape jokes. Again, if this guy turned over a smart/funny leaf somewhere, it's news to me.

maybe instead of telling us that our being moved by it makes you not want to see it (because, i guess, we are all dummies whose opinions are always wrong), you should just see it, and post to the thread afterwards.

It's meant less to call people dummies and more like "I don't like going to see movies that make me sad"

Again, the movie could be totally fine, we'll see how bored I get. I'd rather go see Blindspotting and Blackkklansman if given the choice tho

ah okay. well that's more understandable, sorry.

I've been avoiding the acclaimed Mr. Rogers doc too because the innocence of kids sometimes depresses me on a deep level

fwiw burnham is 27, and the alamo pre-show reel, whatever its faults, gave me the sense that he is a 27-year-old who can look at the shit that made him internet-semi-famous when he was 18 and cringe. it doesn't seem like he's proud of it or wants it to define his work, and the film is so far from that sensibility that it includes a loudmouth high schooler trying to be funny with "edgy" humor and argument-baiting, and this guy is clearly portrayed as inconsiderate and obnoxious at best.

but i have not actually watched any of his comedy and for all i know he still has noxious stuff in his act! and obv there are longer debates on how much you can wipe out your 18-year-old edgy asshattery with later good intentions. the beastie boys might be an interesting comparison.

This movie is not a comedy, but ...it is not partucularly sad, either!

There are so many sad or tragic ways it could have gone, some even maybe foreshadowed. That it does not go those routes is another astounding achievement, imo.

Without going into spoilers, no one is hurt, no one is even bullied in this, as far as I remember. That's what sort of makes it so special. Middle School is challenging even when nothing happens to you!

the most intense scene of conflict in this is between her and a kid in a car, and honestly listening to the reaction of the high school girls sitting behind me was every bit as intense as watching the scene play out.

did Whiney leave to watch the film?

It is interesting to me how much the reactions I have read about the movie focus on social media. I know one person who said she and her whole family reconsidered their social media use after seeing the movie. That is weird to me, because I don’t feel like social media is presented as a particularly negative thing. It is just the water they all swim in. In another era, you could have the exact same story with different technological trappings. I don’t really think the movie is about social media at all.

I would imagine it's the easiest thing for a old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds reviewer would notice.

burnham has played it up in his statements on the film fwiw - not in a "kids these days" way but recognizing that it is something different. he said something about how the pressure of social media makes even quiet kids feel like they need to be this big presence or whatever. not like IT CHANGES EVERYTHING (he parodies that with the high schoolers claiming that someone who had snapchat in middle school is a "different generation" ) but it makes some things different, some things easier, some things harder.

if you want to see a burnham-free, social media-free version of this movie, leave no trace is still playing, I think.

sweet baby jesus thank you for no fb snapchat or twitter in the 90s

I found the father a real cipher in Eighteen.

we don't see any of his life outside of Kayla, because we're only seeing her life. but we see how the mother's absence has deeply shaped his approach to parenting, his remaining single, his balancing empathy and discipline and fear of overstepping. it's a fantastically drawn (part of a) character and performance.

Ambivalence noted, I would recommend that everyone see this and put aside whatever you already know about the director. On that count, I’m lucky. I knew nothing about the director going in--had never even heard of him (in no rush now to familiarize myself with his earlier work).

Less helpful was re-watching 20th Century Women a few days before seeing Eighth Grade, a strong contender right now as my favourite film of the decade. I took that into the theatre with me--I’m rarely able to see films without comparing them to other films, especially one fresh in my mind. The mother-son relationship in 20th Century Women starts from the same basic place as the father-daughter relationship in Eighth Grade: the son wants to communicate to the mother that she needs to leave him alone, he’s doing just fine. (He’s a couple of years older than Kayla.) For me, their relationship was infinitely more shaded, though, in terms of what we actually see on the screen, as opposed to taking the complexity on faith, as a given. There’s an incredible scene in 20th Century Women where the son, seemingly in an effort to let his mom know that he understands how she’s feeling, reads aloud to her a passage from Zoe Moss’s “It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete” (which I’m really anxious to read, but nothing online, and I’m not quite ready to pay a small fortune for Sisterhood Is Powerful on Amazon). He’s trying to be sympathetic, but the words he reads seem to cut dangerously close: Annette Bening dismisses them with a curt “And that’s how you see me?” There are so many levels to that scene, and it’s difficult for me to watch (difficult in the good sense: too real)--in the immediate shadow of that, the Eighth Grade version felt hollow. I realize that mother-son isn’t father-daughter, 15 isn’t 13, and 1979 isn’t 2018.

And again, isn't that a movie about their relationship? At the least, I think it probably *is* more complex, more novelistic, more ... written. Eighth Grade is not about the relationship between Kayla and her dad. It's pretty much just about Kayla and her coping with her immediate, in the moment surroundings.

Not as central, probably, but it did feel to me like the dad, even when he wasn't there, was kind of guiding Kayla's decisions (as you point out above, he was the impetus for her "putting herself out there," going to the party, etc.). And there's lots else going in 20th Century Women, too (which is at least as much about Bening as the son, so in that sense, no, it's not a fair comparison).

"going on in"

you want to see a burnham-free, social media-free version of this movie, leave no trace is still playing, I think.

Leave No Trace is definitely at least 9x better than this

Whiney it’s not a sad movie. It wrecked me because it was so moving and life affirming, like I said. You can be like me and see Eighth Grade and Blindspotting. It’s almost like my op was a preemptive response to exactly what you said.

Yeah, moving and life-affirming is a great way to encapsulate it. We know in the end it has a happy ending, or at least something approximating it, cuz most of us have been to 8th grade, and most of us made it through the other side. But at the time things can seem pretty uncertain and ugly and scary and confusing.

Btw, yet another way this movie subverted expectations, or at least my expectation, is that the high school kid she meets doesn't blow her off and genuinely seems to enjoy her company. I was waiting for the humiliation or heartbreak that never came.

Leave No Trace is definitely at least 9x better than this

Leave No Trace left no trace in my BRANE. LNT is a more measured, more mature, less auteurish movie, probably with a superior young female lead. But, eh, it just felt like the 116th movie I've now seen about how the war fucked a guy up.

yeah that's pretty much how I felt. LNT is great, probably the best Iraq PTSD movie or one of the best, but damn, dour much?

yeah Josh that the high school girl was very nice was so great - as clemenza said, it was as if she were shadowing her future self.

Had Jason Reitman written or directed this, he would have turned the high school girl into a hypocrite.

David Edelstein's the only film critic I periodically check in with anymore--his very positive review:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/bo-burnham-eighth-grade-movie-review.html

He reminded of a couple of other things I liked...and a couple more I didn't.

I understand the movie not resonating with some people. Lady Bird, e.g., did not particularly resonate with me. But resonant or not, both are smart and sensitive movies that prioritize the POVs of their young, awkward protagonists in a way I respect.

Saw this with my 13-y-o son, I think he liked it but I liked it more than he did? A bit hard for me to watch as Kayla is surely meant to be the viewpoint character but very hard for me NOT to occupy the viewpoint of the dad.

Because I was watching it with my son I sort of wished there were one sort-of-OK boy in it. (I don't really think Gabe was a sort-of-OK boy.)

The way I knew this movie was good was that the parts of it that were objectively kind of on-the-nose (ending with the video to the high school self, the dad's speech) I totally bought.

My son and I both agreed it was very nicely handled that you could see somehow that the Spongebob was important but not why at first.

Gabe rules, he's blithely living all the self-confident talk-to-people true-to-yourself aphorisms from Kayla's youtubes

Gabe is a dork and not super great at listening/communicating but he's nice and wants to be friends and it seems like he'll turn out okay. Of course, he reminded me of me at that age so I might be biased.

xpost When she first took Spongebob out of the box and stared at it I thought it was because she recognized that she looked a little like Spongbob! Big blue eyes, sort of crooked teeth, spots, "yellow" hair/skin ... When they revealed what it was later it was another "aha!" moment for me.

That's an excellent read on Spongebob, Josh.

However I think it's nuts to describe this movie as "not a comedy'!

I didn't realize the shitty comedy songs I'd seen of Bo Burnham were from when he was 18, that makes it make monumentally more sense he could make this movie, I have to admit I too was like "seriously? THAT guy??"

I kinda feel like a party pooper, but I found this pretty mediocre. It was hard for me to watch it without thinking of similar recent movies that I liked a lot better--Lady Bird, obviously, but also the possibly-even-better The Edge of Seventeen--but even on its own it felt kind of thin. One quibble that will probably seem pedantic, but which I kept coming back to (and which is especially surprising considering the filmmaker's social media past): her YouTube videos look *nothing* like the way any of the videos I've seen produced by young people. Granted, my only experiences with this genre(?) are BookTube things, but these tend to be really energetically paced and quickly edited, not at all like the generally lo-fi and staid videos that Kayla produces. It could be argued that her videos reflect her personality, but I suspect that someone who makes these videos would be more tuned into/trying to mimic the (for the lack of a better term) YouTube aesthetic.

I did like her Diane Franklin-ish high school friend, and the final scene with Gabe ("I like all the sauces equally"). The movie could have used more of his character, especially.

That's fascinating because The Edge of Seventeen felt too Hollywood broad.

I guess its broad in that its aiming for certain comic and emotional points, but I thought it hit most of them. It wasn't as popular among critics as Lady Bird or Eighth Grade, both of which are more low-key in a way that I'm assuming strikes a lot of critics and viewers as more "authentic."

I've seen a lot of videos on YT that looked a lot like Kayla's.

But it's the "Gucci!" That got me! She seems way too aware for that. I think there was something that hinted that she was getting a little embarrassed by it as time passes but I'm not sure

The Edge of Seventeen also had a different look, a more MOR mis en scene. "Hollywood broad" is otm, and I think that's why it slipped by so many people who liked the more stylized and auteurist Lady Bird and Eighth Grade.

and its distribution was completely different - EO17 played at multiplexes, 8G and LB played art houses.

I saw Eighth Grade and Lady Bird in multiplexes

(RIP, Moviepass)

I rewatched bits of this movie before returning the disc to the library today, and I'll concede that the things I like in the movie are enough to push my feelings on it up from a mildly negative to a mildly positive. Part of my problem with the film that I am realizing just now is that most of the good stuff in the film is in its second half, so it feels a bit unevenly weighted and, as a result, poorly paced. That said, the father's speech still doesn't jerk my tears the way I think it was supposed to--I have the same reaction to the father's speech in CMBYN; Jennifer Garner's speech to her son in Love, Simon honestly moved me far more than either.

My favourite thing about the movie remains: I would be first in line from a sequel/spin-off about Gabe.

Anna Meredith made this movie.

i saw this and felt neither moved nor life-affirmed but it was enjoyable to see an 8th grader's mental state portrayed effectively in the modern era. i didn't relate to her youtubing or her relationship with her dad or virtually anything that made this movie good/life-affirming, but i did relate to the stifling pettiness of 8th grade, her documentation of her life via the time capsules, and that feeling that things are hopefully going to get better. things don't always get better but the optimism resonated with me. i thought her budding friendship with gabe was cute but also probably doomed. that was definitely realistic! i guess i enjoyed it? oh and that scene in the backseat of the car made me SO nervous. everything about that was very relatable.

Probably brought it up upthread but there are a handful of horrible things that seemed telegraphed to happen, from a school shooting to suicide to that back seat scene gone worse to the high school girl blowing her off and so on. And ... none of it happens. I've got to assume that was intentional, to underscore all these perpetual latent threats just lurking there at every turn.

and sometimes they do happen, either to the same person later when they aren't expecting it or to someone else. they just didn't happen to her that particular time. i'm not sure what this is supposed to signify or mean cinematically or narratively.

When I was in 8th grade I had the impression that every girl had her shit together and was happy

i thought this was a powerful film. as josh says, nothing that terrible happens (except the harassment in the car, although that could have gone far worse, but it's still incredibly painful to watch. it reminded me that life is painful.

i was impressed with elsie fisher's performance. the discomfort and self-consciousness was palpable.

we just saw this! excellent. as treesh was the last poster and my thoughts mirror his, i'll say treesh otm

i loved this

the awkwardness & false bravado felt so real at times i had to look away & just hear what was happening because it was so uncomfortable & familiar & gave me a lot of overwhelming feels

everything under the desk during the shooting drill & then her looking up oral video tutorials online & the banana...exaggerated but oh god, so familiar

and i’ve seen ppl elsewhere with the takeaway of how damaging social media is etc which sure i dont disagree, but it wasn’t that obvious for me? for me i saw the movie as a leveller, to remind us BEING A TEEN SUCKS IN EVERY DECADE because IT SUCKS

yes

i know we all know this but i just need to blarp more:

imo whatever media in your decade you engaged with as a teen, it always found a way to mine your anxiety & insecurity & make you think you had to be someone you could never be

and 100 years ago when there wasn’t media there was still class structure & materialism

being a teenager is like, idk, you are 100% exposed flesh & raw nerves, no protective layer of skin at all.
everything is abrasive. life is abrasive. ithe smallest innocuous things cause inner pain or anxiety & you legitimately doubt WHAT you are, forget about “your changing body” or whatever. but that too.
and ~everyone your age~ is existing in similar raw, exposed, anxious painful self-doubting ways.
existing ~against~ each other.
feeling WAY too much all the time.

it’s crazy when you think about it.

I just saw this today and realized i love Hal Hartley movies but hate every movie that reminds me of a Hal Hartley movie. I am pretty sure I hated this. But the main actress was good.

this was... fine

the dorko kid was great, even moreso his deleted scene doing magic

Yeah, pretty sure this was really terrible, but props that Bo Burnham got people to love it.

I was really expecting to hate this but it was fucking surprisingly good. Little heavy handed at points, sure, but I was legit struck by the aesthetic decisions. “Bo Burnham ~film auteur~” seemed like a comically outlandish concept, but damn, maybe he’s got it.

Lot of shots and music choices in this that felt really sharp.

yeah

this really did seem to get how the new generation live, for all its universal teenage appeal

Got me real choked up tbh.

That pool party scene with the Anna Meredith song was absolutely brilliant.

Oh!! We remembered it as Holly Herndon. Whoops. Great song/scene anyway

I watched this today and noticed that Lori Loughlin's daughter is the makeup youtuber in the opening credits

Her mother submitted a screen test that got her the part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxMDlgFwNXg

excellent horror movie

anna meredith score was a delightful surprise

Watched this last night and otm it's a great horror movie, with some of the toughest scenes I can remember. We (stupidly?) watched it with our kids, 11 &13 and they both had to walk out at various points. For all its power though, I think it shat the bed a bit in the final 10 minutes or so: the various flails towards redemption (the YouTube sign off, the inexplicable far-sightedness of the flash-forward, the squawk at the 'bullies') and maybe even the dad cha, even if it did move me to tears. With the horror thing in mind, I do wonder if the shooter drill was a different kind of flash forward/wish fulfilment, but that might be a step too far.

Short version: I'd taught two year 9 classes that day (UK version of 8th grade) and have one in the house; ultimately, this made me feel closer to them and all the horrors they have to - and have left to - endure (and which they'll survive because, well, what else are you going to do?).

*dad chat, not dad cha, though with his character, him dancing round the fire would have worked just as well.

My kids were just comparing and contrasting their lockdown drills the other day.

We had a lockdown practise on Thursday. We sat under the desks in the dark for 10 minutes, then had to troop outside in the rain. The kids didn't take it remotely seriously.

I keep thinking about the dad character. I get that he was a cipher of sorts (pushed to the side of his own life, to paraphrase Larkin) and there to accentuate the totalising nature of adolescence, but did he need to be so empty? Which is to say, I think he'd have made an interesting character study. I suspect I'm pushing my own 'emptying out of middle age' anxieties onto Josh Hamilton/Bo Burnham but there we are.

Short version: I'd taught two year 9 classes that day (UK version of 8th grade) and have one in the house; ultimately, this made me feel closer to them and all the horrors they have to - and have left to - endure (and which they'll survive because, well, what else are you going to do?).

― Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering...save string (Chinaski), Saturday, September 28, 2019 6:10 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

my cousin was a very depressed and very online eighth grader and although she was already aging out of it by the time i saw this it really hit me

I have friends trying to convince me that this Bo Burnham guy is great and that this Inside thing is good... What am I missing? Are my friends actually terrible and should I disown them?

eighth grade is a very good movie…. have almost negative interest in this special from what i’ve seen tho

I tried watching, gave up after like 10 mins. the hype/reception is absurd

Agreed. I liked Eighth Grade well enough, but the hype around this special is absolutely insane.

and considering it contains a solid minute of undiluted left agitprop it's really something that I was still totally unmoved (or worse)

I've had this film on my "to watch" queue for a year now, I may hate it but it has Anna Meredith's Nautilus in it, so probably won't.

I'm gonna be generous to the friend who recommended it and say that from the first 15 minutes "Inside" he's talented, if a bit limited in terms of scope.

He comes across a bit smug and self-effacing, like "Yes *wink wink* I know this is kind of shit but that's the joke harharhar".

Musical comedy's can be hard to pull off. When it's great, I love it. I love Flight of the Conchords and Lonely Island because they're parodying actual pop and rock music with absurdism and wordplay. Even Bill Bailey - charming, talented and affable as he is - has mined this "I'm going to put a techno beat over the Channel 4 News theme" thing to death.

But this dude feels like a relic, harking back to the days when Victoria Wood would sit and sing wry, suggestive songs on daytime TV in the 90s; if not going further back to the days of Vaudeville and music hall in the 1930s - and there's nothing wrong with that of course.
But for me this tireless trotting-out of drab observations ("Foot fetish porn and bomb recipes on the internet!", "I'm a privileged white entertainer!", "My mum had wet hair on her Zoom call yesterday") elides actual humour and winds-up as a list of banalities played on honky-tonk piano; a John Lanchester novel set to ironic yacht-rock instrumentation.

Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, or maybe it's just not for me. I was just waiting for it to get funny and after about 15 minutes of watching Inside, the gratingness gave way to a realisation it wouldn't do that.

that was exactly the issue with the one song i watched, the internet one

yes, he seems to care more about finding the appropriate level of self-deprecation/irony than being funny, and it lends the whole thing a level of self-satisfaction that's tough to shake. and yeah the songs feel like relics from another era despite the aggressively contemporary lyrics

i tried w this dude on his first(?) Netflix thing like 8 years ago and just wasn’t my thing. a friend of mine keeps telling me I should watch the new one even though “you’ll prob like some of it, some of it not so much”. not really selling it tbh.

never saw 8th Grade

i was so ready to hate 8th Grade but liked it a lot.

i always think this guys comedy stuff would be funny if they were like 'the funny song' in some actual musical, but presented as standalone comedy its pretty boring. the jokes about self-obsession and how hes coming across, while i guess understandable from a grownup 1st gen youtube star, feel many years out of date. "social media makes me feel weird", huh no shit?

that being said i honestly appreciated how a number of the songs got a hard cut after the first chorus (or even 1st verse a couple times, i think?) as soon as the joke landed, like "you get it, you get it, moving on"

Eighth Grade nails it in so many amazing ways. But the reason I've never checked out his other stuff is ... songs, tbh.

xp OTM. I was waiting for an actual story to take place, but when I realised it was just songs, or more-often observational comedy set to a tune, I lost interest.

I've now watched, like, five of the songs now including the Kanye one and the Zoom call one and the Internet one and a couple more I can't remember. But they all pull the same trick of just listing rote everyday stuff without any real conclusion or punchline, just "This is a thing that happens when you eat Pringles".
Like, yes, I too have had trouble getting the last Pringle out the tube - we all have and we all observed this at picnics in the nineties - but why, Bo, are you continuing to labour this humdrum observation for a full minute after you first pointed it out?
And don't think you can Get Out Of Jail Free me by quipping "I've overdone the Pringles thing, sorry!" at the end.

My own Netflix special is going to be SWEET AS btw

Eighth Grade nails it in so many amazing ways. But the reason I've never checked out his other stuff is ... songs, tbh.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 8 June 2021 15:55 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a bit better when he leaves the musical stuff to Anna Meredith eh

none of the songs I caught in this would pass muster on a subpar lonely island record

Everyone otm. Eighth Grade is a great but tough watch, the bits I've seen of his standup are exhausting and went right through me.

a John Lanchester novel set to ironic yacht-rock instrumentation.

cmon it's not amazing but it's not lanchester bad

this dude feels like a relic

based on my instagram search function, it seems like *everything* is musical comedy now

8th Grade is a great movie, and I liked Bo Burnham a lot in Promising Young Woman. This special is only just ok I don't know why people are falling all over themselves either loving or hating it. The white woman's instagram bit is good though. It's impressive he put the whole thing together on his own.

Father John Misty is somewhere microdosing and slapping himself for not coming up with that Insta song first.

the phrase "can i interest you in everything all of the time" is not a bad line at all but that song is, at best, listenable once

I liked the end when he brought all the themes of the songs together; but like I said, it took an awful long time to get there.

Eighth Grade is a great but tough watch

The most brilliant thing about Eighth Grade is the way none of the worst case scenarios it constantly alludes to actually come to pass. I love that just being a regular eighth grader (my younger finished 8th grade today!) and dealing with mundane teen shit is tough going enough.

I hope this movie doesn't end up being the exception that proves the rule that Bo Burnham fucking sucks

I thought this was... quite ok? Not amazing but definitely not a hate-watch. Some of the observational comedy is half-assed, but the half-assedness kind of fits with the weary, cramped vibe. He's barely out of his twenties! It's not bad considering.

Less politely, I guess I mean some of the comedy is fucking lazy, but in pandemic summer number two, so am I and I didn't mind.

Enjoyed it, but if you told me this guy was in Pamplemoose, I'd believe you.

Inside was one of the worst things i’ve ever seen in my life

you need to see more bad things

idk it was pretty bad

I started watching his 2016 special and it was very bad in a way that Inside wasn't

He's also cuter and in his underwear a lot this time

'inside' is p good! it's like darker weird al. dark al. it's too long, though.

major Tonetta vibes on that turning 30 song

Idk about this.

Not eighth grade, which I love; the new thing.

He talks about killing himself a lot, which I can relate to, but I am resistant to the kind of implicit idea that this is a common generational experience. Idk. Something is off with his treatment of this topic. I don’t know his work and am still in the middle of the special so we’ll see.

yeah I think it's common to all generations not something special to his

I agree with the idea that the Internet has turned our lives into a nightmare. More art about that is welcome I guess.

^^^ one for the box art, as we used to say. before the internet

Wow. Inside was... something. Some good stuff, some clever stuff, some too much for sure. I did like at least half the songs. I think there's definitely enough sincerity in there to make it substantial.

Dark "Weird Al" definitely a good ref point for this

Unfair to compare this to Eighth Grade obviously but I guess this is the thread to talk about Bo so...

There’s a Harry Nilsson vibe - not just the songs but more in the presentation.

Not sure the special was for me but I definitely salute the effort. I mean getting ready to execute something big and being kneecapped by Covid and still getting something like that isn’t nothing.

weird al would never subject us to this

no he wouldnt, thats why hes "weird al", bo is "dark al" do you see

inside every one of us is an "al"

Inside was one of the worst things i’ve ever seen in my life

― flopson, Thursday, June 10, 2021 1:42 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

you need to see more bad things

― akm, Thursday, June 10, 2021 12:12 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

no thanks

all eyes on me is a really good closer.

maybe i like this.

i don't think weird al is a good point of comparison. these aren't parodies, this is a singer-songwriter project. the topical comedy stuff gives way really quickly to concerns that are wholly personal. the former is almost always just a premise.

the best part of the special might be the sequence following "unpaid intern," where he does that meta-trick, overlaying his commentary on the song, then his commentary on the commentary etc, each new layer disavowing what he had just said before, apologizing for it. that sense of paralysis -- or shame, really -- at the fact that everything he says is really just a projection of his own insecurities and need for attention.

i feel like there is a central fear at the heart of this project, which is that he is only able to care about the larger world insofar as doing so allows him to receive praise from others. (performative politics):

You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did
You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside

i think the kind of isolation he is exploring in this special is a lot bigger than just, like, covid/quarantine.

there is another part of the special where he talks about the real world only existing because it, like, provides an opportunity to document things for instagram, and that instagram feels "more real" than reality. this is a movie about drifting away from something and not knowing even what that thing is you need to get back to. all that's left is the feeling of being diminished and ashamed.

why do we keep posting st vincent lyrics

some of it seems a little cringe or on the nose

for sure

the funniest part was when he turned 30

forget Weird Al, these lyrics being posted are like a pretentious Mark Russell

i honestly didn't think any of it was especially funny.

the social commentary joke songs, like "how the world works" and "white woman's instagram" are kind of unbearable on their own. but the juxtaposition of this material with the more searching, psychological stuff is interesting. like the "white guilt" he says he feels early on isn't really that at all. he isn't just worried that he has no role to play in furthering the cause of justice -- i think the ending of the movie shows that sentiment is bullshit. it's at best a sublimation, or socially acceptable version, of his real fear, which is that he is a narcissist and everyone else is too.

I can think of at least one way he could have taken a principled stand against narcissism

good posts treesh

...his takes on early 21st century internet ennui are all just cliches tho?

i know this is kinda ‘the online miserablism knower has logged on’ of me to say but i feel like his depiction of why social media in 2020 is a hell of our own making was so generic, it felt like it was cribbed from old tweets rather than anything personal

maybe that experience is just really universal, so regurgitating tired memes *is* his genuine personal experience. if so, that makes me sad

i personally don’t relate to a lot of the cw about how twitter is a “hell site” and how instagram is so awful and commodified our lives. i see why ppl say that, and there are aspects of it that annoy me, but it also seems ahistorical and short-sighted (every era has people freaking out about new forms of media, and it seems quaint in hindsight to read people freaking out about like, how the radio has poisoned our minds) and also ignores a lot of the good parts of online

it feels like tired “trenchant social commentary” at this point, and didn’t bear the stamp of an authentic relationship to the internet imho. eighth grade seemed smarter in getting at that kind of relationship. i guess comparing his A24 movie with his ‘what if Nanette but Tenacious D?’ Netflix special isn’t fair, but i’m surprised the same person made both

https://imgur.com/Fxj8Myj

https://i.imgur.com/Fxj8Myj.png

Bo has begun his ditch trilogy

i don't think weird al is a good point of comparison. these aren't parodies, this is a singer-songwriter project.

― treeship., Saturday, June 12, 2021 10:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

weird al wrote originals too and they fuckin owned
bo uses a nasal voice that sounds like al to go into "funny songman mode"

i'm not trying to say that this is better than weird al, just that it's really different.

i personally don’t relate to a lot of the cw about how twitter is a “hell site” and how instagram is so awful and commodified our lives. i see why ppl say that, and there are aspects of it that annoy me, but it also seems ahistorical and short-sighted (every era has people freaking out about new forms of media, and it seems quaint in hindsight to read people freaking out about like, how the radio has poisoned our minds) and also ignores a lot of the good parts of online

i think this is valid. i am more of a cassandra about social media and i think the immersive parasocial nature of it can warp people's sense of reality and perspective. however, i don't think the value of this special lies in it saying anything new about these phenomena. what it does is describe the mood of online, feeling hyperconnected but increasingly alone, this grand and paranoid solipsism that *does*, to me, feel like the texture of our times. like how chekhov* described the particular loneliness of country doctors and schoolteachers in late imperial russia, burnham is trying to show our particular misery, not because it's new, necessarily, but because it's ours.

*i am in no way saying he is as successful as chekhov. the comparison is more about marking a distinction between what a sociologist or cultural critic does and what an artist does when it comes to describing and evaluating the times.

it's not at all a new theme either, not even in popular music. radiohead didn't think computers were "OK" either.

social media is not merely a "new form of media" despite the shared presence of the word "media"

what it does is describe the mood of online, feeling hyperconnected but increasingly alone, this grand and paranoid solipsism that *does*, to me, feel like the texture of our times

ya i agree w this. a lot of the shots of him just lying in bed half nude staring blankly at his phone were uncomfortably relatable lol

it is hard to get past how cringe some of the social commentary songs are. i tried to explain this special to my wife earlier today and put the soundtrack on when we were driving. by the time we got to the song about facetiming his mom, she just said, very gently, "this is really bad, sorry."

and she's right. that song sucks. and a bunch of others just seem like buzzy talking points. if there is any value in this, it only comes later in the special where the original schtick kind of gives way to something stranger, darker, more personal. i feel like this latter material shows up the former as a facade -- like it's actively working against it -- but some viewers haven't seen it that way.

i feel like the biggest influence on bo's sense of humour is seth mcfarlane

Lol

major Tonetta vibes on that turning 30 song

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Thursday, June 10, 2021 9:24 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

ty this prompted me to check out the special, which is v good

xxp i believe he even admits it the special!

This was one of the most exhausting things I've ever seen

Simon otm about all the material working very hard to strike exactly the right tone. I was preoccupied with why he was presenting himself as a complete shut in. I doubt he spent the year quite so alone, or if he did the whole thing would've been much more interesting as an exploration of that. Odd to shout out unpaid interns and not the people bringing food to you. Or maybe the sock puppet was supposed to cover that off.

I doubt he spent the year quite so alone

learning (as I did via letterboxd) that BB apparently lived with his partner of several years through all this really did add an extra layer of "fuck off buddy" to my reaction

lol fuck this special

Eigth Grade did rule tho

All Eyes on Me, the new version without the skit, stands alone as a great song. Laurie Anderson vibes, and the lyrics, suggestive of digital anomie, are actually better without the surrounding movie, which overdoes the idea.

Burnham should just make an album of real songs, not joke songs.

“We’re going to go where everybody knows everybody” is a great start to the chorus. It feels like ILX to me.

“Hands down, pray for me”

Everyone itt made this sound shit and then the lyric that got posted in the we didn’t start the fire thread was far shitter than everyone made it sound, I was gobsmacked

Like if the Patricia Lockwood novel got bonked in the head by 30 falling coconuts in a row and then wrote a song

if you take this song, on its own, like T.S. Eliot would, just looking at how it hangs together internally, i think you will find that is good.

or perhaps not.

but this is my take, weeks later. much of the special is embarrassing but i like this one.

watched some pieces of this and dunno if I want to go for the whole thing. his sense of humor is very much like a bunch of Twitter accounts I eventually unfollowed, except it's presented as him singing it to you while nothing funny happens in the background. dude is definitely talented and interesting but I feel like this stuff is supposed to make me laugh at some point? like the "Welcome to the Internet" song, that sort of thing has been done a thousand times but it's so much funnier in the hands of someone like say Neil Cicierega.

re. "welcome to the internet," i think the line "a little bit of everything all of the time" is a good and pithy description of the internet. it captures the way it repels absorption -- you just end up skimming the surface.

there are flashes of poetic intelligence like that in each of these songs.

like, in "white woman's instagram" where he is just clowning on #basic ladies until, all of the sudden, he switches to a verse about how the curator of this instagram page misses her dead mom and wishes she could see she is doing Ok. it's good human moment -- like a lot of social media is just people aggressively trying to reassure themselves and their community, maybe their parents too, that they are OK. we just want to be OK.

i am very torn because i see the cringe too.

I'll probably never watch Inside but I kind of like this album! It's like a melancholy Weird Al?

If you like the album you should definitely watch the movie

i heard the special was good so i checked it out. "i made you some content" was funny but then a few minutes later i was like "wait, does he sing throughout this entire thing? i'm out"

treeship, we are having such similar journeys with this special and explaining it to our partners lol

if a special this successful has a sock giving marxist analysis i'm for it and don't care how cringey it is. also the "get your hands up" song is weirdly effective/sad and i agree that it's a good song and he needs to stop with the musical theatre vibe but also that's who he is, so whatever. he's not doing this for me. also more men should talk about their vulnerabilities around mental health in mainstream media

the only moment i actually laughed was when he said "is the guy big or is the room small" when he was being a twitch streamer playing his own life

Only made it partway through when it first came out. Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into the first.

The Phoebe Bridgers cover of "That Funny Feeling" was a good entry point, taking the song without the Burnham persona.

In some specific ways (voice, vulnerability, specificity), parts feel like a mix of Johns Darnielle and Mayer (the Mayer of interviews more than his songs).

Anyway, works well, especially when we're still in that Inside zone for almost two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEUl4DThSwE

*Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into it.

i just realized the guy who did that thing i don't want to see made this. huh.

ignore that. the movie is much better than anything he's directly made as a standup, totally different vibe

Oh I liked it! I just don’t want to see the other thing

yeah... probably better off not seeing Inside. or any of his netflix specials. I don't know why, I watched those trying to convince myself that there was something good there, and... probably not?

Gave my friend's grade 8 daughter a DVD of this for Christmas. She's very much into her Darlene-in-Rosanne incommunicado phase--hope she watches it.

the movie is much better than anything he's directly made as a standup

The movie Eighth Grade is a perfectly fine, very watchable movie about what it feels like to be an eighth grader in a US middle school in the twenty-first century, which rather naturally encompasses the main character feeling not exactly fine throughout the movie, but struggling not to feel much, much worse than fine.

I just watched Inside on Friday and greatly enjoyed it while thinking to myself “I bet most of ILX is falling over themselves to hate this” and then I thought “that’s not particularly charitable, I should look up what the reaction actually was before assuming” and welp

learning (as I did via letterboxd) that BB apparently lived with his partner of several years through all this really did add an extra layer of "fuck off buddy" to my reaction

Just wait 'til you hear about Thoreau and Walden.

so uh this is pretty good especially given the current situation

Wow. Didn’t know Bo Burnham was a real one. Couldn’t be more relevant pic.twitter.com/DOBEcUEVJQ

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 2, 2022

He's right that the market demands growth and companies that sell your attention must increase their reach into your attention in order to grow. We can only hope that social media will poison their own well so completely by cranking that handle so hard it breaks, and people reject it to give their attention elsewhere.

dang that twitter post took down twitter hardcore

"and yet you participate in society"

"Drink a Haitian guy's blood"

https://genius.com/4355796?

That's a good clip--very much in keeping with what I thought was Eighth Grade's greatest sequence, the girl lost on the internet as "Orinoco Flow" played.