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

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