Closing out season 3 of Enter The Void, Renan and Bill consider Don Hertzfeldt's Oscar-nominated animated short WORLD OF TOMORROW, which asks more brilliant and terrifying questions in its 17 minutes than many feature length sci-fi movies put together. For Emily, the 4-year-old central protagonist, and the viewer alike, it's a head-spinning tour of the medium-near future where cloning and life extension, virtual reality, autonomous robots, "discount" time travel, and even living on the moon are all part of the same tedious experience as our own smartphones and instant communications. Also discussed: what happens when our memories become art, or commodity?; in this Netflix-YouTube age, why aren't more short films being made?; what themes from this resonate with Hertzfeldt's earlier work?; and how close are we to virtual reality with the Oculus Rift and the 2016 procedurally generated adventure game No Man's Sky?
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Wong Kar-wai's CHUNGKING EXPRESS is a little different from the psychological thrillers and existential horrors this show usually talks about, but it's no less experimental and just as much a ride through crazytown. It's appropriate that the 1994 film could be called Pulp Fiction meets Reality Bites, since the film's Western popularity is largely thanks to Quentin Tarantino, who brought it to U.S. theaters. Today, Bill and Renan also discuss: whether it matters that Faye Wong is a so classic "manic pixie dream girl"; the cinematography and contributions of Chris Doyle; how it relates to Hong Kong's recent history; also: Bill buries the lead and eventually gets around to sharing his personal experiences of Hong Kong, Chungking Mansions, and mid-level escalators.
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Darren Aronofsky's first feature and still one of his weirdest, PI (or "π") is a B&W-shimmering orb providing a view to several convergent trends of the late 1990s: young independent directors scraping together a mainstream career; the use of obscure math and especially chaos theory in popular art; and the low-level burbling ambient electronic music of artists with names like Orbital and, well, The Orb. In this week's episode, Renan and Bill consider all of the above, and with it: pop mysticism and numerology, the whiter whites and blacker blacks of reversal film, the long arm of Gilliam and Serling's influence, and how PI compares to another ETV favorite, PRIMER (S1E2).
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If you think you've ever had an uncomfortable dinner party experience, well, THE INVITATION will remind you just how boring your life really is. The most contemporary film we've discussed on the show to date, Karyn Kusama's 2015 slow-burn seriocomic ensemble drama / psychological thriller is one worth seeing knowing as little as possible, but still an absorbing study of character and group dynamics even if you know where it's going. This week Renan and Bill are joined by Emily Gaudette of Inverse.com to talk about her interview with Kusama, other dinner party films, how we react to grief and trauma, and gendered things which are not obviously so—including, alas, this show.
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