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

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.