Schoenbrun, Jane

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    Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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    Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: How We Used to Escape

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      An outstanding not-quite-horror film about being a fan just before the internet took over.We’ve forgotten how hard being a fan used to be. You had to labor at it in multiple media: scouring listings and keeping tabs on schedules, reading books of lore and compiling episode recaps. Pop culture was built around presence, real physical presence: To see the latest episode of “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” you had to show up at your TV when it aired. If you missed a key episode, you were out of luck, unless someone remembered to tape it for you, at least until it went into reruns or syndication. And if your taste ran to the niche, discovering that someone else loved the same thing you loved felt revelatory, like you’d stumbled upon a person who spoke a language only you could understand.The social internet, algorithms and streaming blew most of this up, shoving our favorites at us and making them available all the time. Some of the magic disappeared as well, the uncanny immersive quality. You can bury yourself in a binge-watch for a day or a week, but then it’s over, no long in-between stretches to hash out each episode. Sustaining a relationship with the world a show built is still possible; connecting with others over your shared love is preposterously easy. Something, however, has been lost.“I Saw the TV Glow” captures this obsessive, anticipatory submersion in a long-form weekly TV show, to the point where it ignites the same feeling. A lot of movies tell you stories, but the films of the writer and director Jane Schoenbrun evoke them; to borrow a term, they’re a vibe. Like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Schoenbrun’s previous film, this one isn’t quite horror, but it gives you the same kind of scalp crawl. In this case I think it’s the mark of recognition, of feeling a tug at your subconscious. It’s oddly hard to put into words.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was the tale of a lonely teenager living in the oddness of our internet era, where intimacy is free and plentiful and confusing and could be dangerous, or could be banal. “I Saw the TV Glow” dials that same tone back a generation, centering on a couple of lonely teenagers who find one another through a show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a mash-up show, instantly recognizable in its own way: It airs on something called the Young Adult Network (clearly a stand-in for The WB, the teen-focused TV network that turned into The CW) at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time reserved for shows barely hanging on by a thread. The opening credits we glimpse suggest the show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-adjacent (it even uses the same typeface), but with elements reminiscent of “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks” — in all these cases, not exactly horror, but not quite anything else. (There’s also a band in the show, one that apparently performs a song in every episode, which plays expertly tuned mid-90s teen-show music; the musicians are Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl.)“I Saw the TV Glow” is set in 1996, right at the moment when entertainment was about to dive over the cliff and become what media theorists sometimes refer to as convergence culture. Back then, TV was still a few years away from being participatory for most youthful viewers. The internet wasn’t mature enough yet for the majority of teens to really haunt it, and those who did were posting on the kinds of message boards and websites that would eventually come to define both the TV and the fan-driven internet of the early aughts. (“The X-Files,” for instance, which premiered in 1993, was one of the first shows with a developed online fandom; they communicated through a Usenet newsgroup.) If you knew how to find message boards and chat rooms, you might have bonded with other fans. But if you were just a kid at home in the suburbs, you were most likely planning your schedule around episodes.The story of “I Saw the TV Glow” mostly belongs to Owen (played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman, and then from high school up by Justice Smith). He is nervous and anxious and sheltered, but he catches an ad for an episode of “The Pink Opaque.” He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s obsessed. One day, waiting for his parents to finish voting in the school cafeteria, he wanders into a room and finds Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a book that recaps episodes of the show. Maddy explains the show to Owen: It’s about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan, the musician Snail Mail) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who meet at camp and discover they share a connection that enables them to fight that most stalwart trope of ’90s TV dramas: the Monster of the Week. There’s a Big Bad in their world, too — the mysterious Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy. Owen is even more consumed.Owen’s father won’t let him stay up to watch the show, but Maddy and Owen concoct a way to make it happen. This is where “I Saw the TV Glow” starts to leave the realm of straightforward plot and slip-slide into some nether region at the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, fear and longing. Escapism has always belonged to children’s literature, fantastical other worlds into which we might leave the ordinary behind and discover ourselves special. Owen and Maddy are trapped in their own worlds, but “The Pink Opaque” gives them the sense that a parallel dimension might be where they really belong.There’s a heartbreak at the center of this film that made me gasp to see it, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s better not to go back to what we once loved because now, in the cold light of adulthood, it all looks very different. There are other layers, too: implications that awakenings around gender dysphoria and sexuality are tied up in the teens’ obsession with the show, though they barely understand. Even more broadly, the immense pain of pushing down your true self, and the brittle breaking of that shell, is woven throughout.But what’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable. Teenage malaise, untreated, can sour into an adult psychic prison; the TV is just one way that we escape.I Saw the TV GlowRated PG-13 for some really trippy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ Review: Is It Horror, or Just Ennui?

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      In Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a teenager finds terror and distraction in a multiplayer online game.Way back in the 1965, Susan Sontag observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” Still true, but with the added wrinkle that nowadays it can be hard to distinguish banality from terror.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” the debut narrative feature from Jane Schoenbrun, exploits the overlap between tedium and fright, and locates both in the everyday dystopian realm of the internet. Part of a sturdy genre of web-based horror, the movie turns the familiar rituals and hacks of online life into a source of dread.A bored teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb) seeks diversion in a scary multiplayer game — a “creepypasta” — called the World’s Fair Challenge. After an initiation ritual that involves daubing blood on the screen of her laptop, she contributes videos to a growing body of lore purporting to document the game’s sinister consequences. People claim to lose feeling in their bodies, to find themselves turning into inanimate objects, to gradually and irreversibly lose their grip on reality.How terrifying is that? It’s hard to say, since for many of us the slackness, anxiety and dissociation of the World’s Fair Challenge is just another name for Tuesday.Rather than jolt you with gimmicky scares in the manner of the“Paranormal Activity” movies (an explicit point of reference for Casey and her fellow fairgoers), Schoenbrun goes for quiet, spooky effects, accompanied by a glum score by Alex G (for Giannascoli). The film also resists ostentatious found-footage gimmickry. While a lot of what’s onscreen is video collected by Casey’s devices, there are also moments when the camera — the cinematographer is Daniel Patrick Carbone — explores off-line moods and realities.Not that we learn much about Casey. She lives in a town that looks like it might be somewhere in the Northeastern U.S. — patchy snow on the ground, battered strip malls off the highway, tree-covered hills in the distance — with her father, who is heard but not seen. He keeps an assault rifle in the barn, where there is also a video projector. Casey watches ASMR videos when she has trouble sleeping.Most of what might count as her real life — school, work, friends — is either nonexistent or none of our business. Cobb, making her first appearance in a film, has a knack for simultaneously soliciting and deflecting curiosity about Casey’s inner life. Is she a troubled adolescent putting her mental health and physical safety at risk, or a canny role-player using her wide eyes and soft features to construct an avatar of vulnerability?She isn’t entirely alone. Sometime after starting in on the Challenge, she receives messages from a player named JLB (Michael J. Rogers), whose avi is an unnerving hand-drawn figure with sunken eyes. The camera follows him offline too, into a mostly empty modern mansion that seems worlds away from Casey’s attic bedroom.His presence in the movie has the effect of dialing up both the terror and the banality, and creating a certain amount of suspense about which will win out in the end. In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative. This isn’t “The Matrix” or a fantasy of sentient A.I. It’s a slice of drab, everyday 21st-century Americana and a daydream of something more intense.We’re All Going to the World’s FairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sundance 2021 Guide: Bundle Up and Settle in on Your Sofa

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySundance 2021 Guide: Bundle Up and Settle in on Your SofaNow that the film festival has gone virtual, you can watch like an insider. But where do you start? If you liked previous hits from Park City, try these new entries.At home, unlike in Park City, you’re first in line.Credit…Margeaux Walter for The New York TimesJan. 28, 2021Updated 5:09 p.m. ETAttending the Sundance Film Festival has never been an easy thing to do. Passes are pricey, accommodations are even pricier, the closest airport is nearly an hour away, and you end up waiting in long lines (in Utah, in January) for screenings — at least for the ones that haven’t sold out (which most do).But like so many film festivals in the Covid era, Sundance, which starts Thursday, has gone virtual this year. So while that means there’s no chance of randomly encountering celebrities in the bathroom (well, less of a chance), it does mean that anyone who can scrounge up $15 — the price of a single film ticket — can attend. You won’t even have to put on long johns and snow boots, unless your super is being especially stingy with the heat.So … what to watch? Even pared down, as it is this year, the festival program is a bit overwhelming — 73 feature-length films and 50 short films — and it’s not like you can make your selections based on reviews or buzz, as most of these titles have never been seen before. But if you’re the kind of viewer who wants to attend a virtual Sundance, you’re probably the kind of viewer who has enjoyed films from previous festivals, so here are some recommendations from this year’s slate that recall the great films of Sundances past. The festival runs through Wednesday. Tickets and other details are at sundance.org.If you liked ‘The Rider,’ try ‘Jockey.’Clifton Collins Jr. plays a jockey at a crossroads.Credit…Adolpho VelosoChloé Zhao’s powerful, earnest drama “The Rider” (which played in the Spotlight section of the 2018 fest) concerns a rodeo rider who finds himself sidelined from the work he loves, and uncertain where his life will go next. In Clint Bentley’s “Jockey” (playing in this year’s U.S. Dramatic Competition), the versatile character actor Clifton Collins Jr. (“Capote”) stars as a racing jockey facing a similar dilemma: As he makes one last run at a championship, the appearance of a young jockey who claims to be his son forces the aging athlete to contemplate who he’ll be when he’s not on a horse.If you liked ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ try ‘Ma Belle, My Beauty.’Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of André Aciman’s novel was one of the highlights of Sundance 2017, and for good reason: the beauty of its luminous Italian vistas was matched only by the tenderness of its dramatization of first love (and loss). The first-time feature filmmaker Marion Hill’s “Ma Belle, My Beauty” (in this year’s Next section) plays in a similar key, mixing gorgeous European locations — this time, the dazzling vistas of the South of France — with a story of sophisticated romantic entanglements, as a newlywed couple welcomes the woman they both once loved back into their home for a surprise visit.Arguing about movies at home may not be quite the same as in Park City.Credit…Margeaux Walter for The New York TimesIf you liked ‘Donnie Darko,’ try ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.’Audiences at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival knew they were seeing something special in “Donnie Darko,” Richard Kelly’s mind-bending deep dive into time travel, wormholes, doomsdays and suburban ennui. It’s so strange and distinctive that it’s all but incomparable, but those unnerving vibes are also present in the debut writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s Next selection, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Focusing on a lonely teenage girl’s journey into a mind-altering online role-playing horror game, it’s another emotionally resonant tale of teenage identity, with generous helpings of horror and science fiction mixed in.If you liked ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,’ try ‘Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.’Oscar the Grouch and his pal Caroll Spinney in the new documentary.Credit…Luke GeissbühlerOne of the breakout titles of Sundance 2018, Morgan Neville’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” was a poignant and heart-rending documentary about the life and legacy of the children’s public television favorite Fred Rogers. Marilyn Agrelo’s adaptation of Michael Davis’s book mines similar historical and emotional territory, detailing how educators and entertainers joined forces in the late 1960s to put new ideas about teaching and learning — and a new focus on inner-city children — into practice on “Sesame Street.” And like “Neighborhood,” “Street Gang” is loaded with enough archival clips and songs to stir nostalgia in the heart of even the most resistant viewer.If you liked ‘Blindspotting,’ try ‘On the Count of Three.’Carlos López Estrada’s comedy-drama was one of the opening-night films of Sundance 2018, and one of its most memorable — a pulsing, rousing story of two lifelong best friends dealing with changes in their lives and the world around them. That film was grounded by the relationship between its protagonists (played by co-writers Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs). A kindred relationship, with even higher stakes, is at the center of “On the Count of Three,” in which the actor and comedian Jerrod Carmichael (making his feature directorial debut) and Christopher Abbott are best friends bonded by a suicide pact.If you liked ‘Hoop Dreams,’ try ‘Captains of Zaatari.’One of the most acclaimed documentaries in Sundance history — and in the history of nonfiction cinema — is the 1994 sports epic “Hoop Dreams,” following two high school basketball players through a four-year cycle of hopes and disappointments. The first-time director Ali El Arabi also profiles two young sports fanatics: Fawzi and Mahmoud, best friends obsessed with soccer but trapped in a Jordanian camp for Syrian refugees. And like the subjects of “Hoop Dreams,” Fawzi and Mahmoud see their sport not just as a hobby, but as a pathway out of their grim surroundings and into a better, brighter future.You won’t run into celebrities at home the way you would in Park City. Probably.Credit…Margeaux Walter for The New York TimesIf you liked ‘Swiss Army Man,’ try ‘Cryptozoo.’Love it or hate it, no one who saw the 2016 U.S. Dramatic competition award-winner “Swiss Army Man” forgot its story of a forgotten man on a desert island who befriends a farting corpse. That same spirit of gonzo, anything-goes storytelling is in abundance in Dash Shaw’s animation-for-adults feature, which centers on a secret zoo holding rare and imaginary beasts (like the unicorn and the baku), and the humans who are drawn into its orbit.If you liked ‘American Teen,’ try ‘Homeroom.’The trials and tribulations of the typical high school student’s senior year were transformed into compelling drama in Nanette Burstein’s 2008 Sundance documentary “American Teen,” which focused on five students in small-town Indiana. The director Peter Nicks (who also made the Sundance 2017 award-winner “The Force”) captures a much more tumultuous time in his documentary “Homeroom,” which follows Oakland High School’s class of 2020 through a senior year shaken up by calls for the elimination of the district’s police force, and then overturned by the pandemic.If you liked ‘Brick,’ try ‘First Date.’Tyson Brown in “First Date,” a playful genre mashup from Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp.Credit…Manuel CrosbyOne of Sundance’s most noteworthy fictional high school films was Rian Johnson’s 2005 Special Jury Prize winner “Brick,” which viewed the types and tropes of the secondary school narrative through the lens of classic film noir. Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s “First Date” is also something of a throwback, crossing the classic high school dating comedy with ’80s-influenced action and “Repo Man”-esque surrealism, a playful genre mash-up with a beating heart underneath.If you liked ‘Stranger Than Paradise,’ try ‘El Planeta.’Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy “Stranger Than Paradise” was an early indie hit, and thus one of the first big breakouts from Sundance (where it won the Special Jury Prize in 1985). It remains among the most influential independent films of all time, so it’s not surprising to hear its echoes in the artist Amalia Ulman’s feature directorial debut, “El Planeta,” another black-and-white, absurdist comedy about survival. But it also goes in its own wonderfully personal direction, with Ulman not only writing and directing but also starring as a desperate student running small-time grifts with her mother (played by Ulman’s own mother, Ale Ulman).AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More