‘Hello Dankness’ Review: Through the Looking Glass
The video artists known as Soda Jerk explore life in the United States from 2016 onward with an oddball assemblage of pop culture clips.In the pop-culture universe deconstructed — and reconstructed — in “Hello Dankness,” the Ninja Turtles parse the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has lost sleep over the end of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and a “Home Alone”-era Macaulay Culkin spends his pandemic watching “Tiger King.”Written and edited (though not, strictly speaking, directed) by Soda Jerk — the name adopted by Dan and Dominique Angeloro, sibling video artists from Australia who live in New York — the whole movie consists of repurposed visual and audio clips, digitally tweaked and deftly edited to interact with one another, and to present a chain of associations about the United States from 2016 through the start of Joe Biden’s presidency.Even before its title card, “Hello Dankness” opens with a full airing of the Kendall Jenner ad that Pepsi pulled because of complaints it trivialized Black Lives Matter. If you think what follows is outlandish — well, just look at that commercial, which could easily have run before the movie in a conventional theater and plays as if that were happening. In the funniest interlude, the Trump administration’s first three years are reduced, in their entirety, to the deliberately slapdash, meme-inspiring YouTube “Garfield” parody “Garfielf,” with Trump’s pompadour pasted on top of the fat feline’s head.Covid-induced stir craziness and the spread of misinformation on social media are shown as contributing factors to what the movie portrays as a national mental breakdown. You don’t have to agree with all of Soda Jerk’s diagnoses to admire their ingenuity. “Hello Dankness” belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.Hello DanknessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More
