I never had a TV set in my room when I was growing up, so I\u2019d have to sneak past my parents\u2019 bedroom door, creep down the thickly carpeted stairs, and quietly settle into the ugly plaid couch in the family room (in New Jersey) or the basement (in Nebraska) when I had trouble sleeping.\u00a0There was something hypnotic about sitting there and surfing through the 70 or so channels I had at my disposal, and late-night television offerings of the early to mid \u201990s felt a bit like the Wild West: You could watch movies with unedited F-bombs(!!!), catch your weirdo neighbor\u2019s insane public access TV show, get sucked into infomercials for products you\u2019d never need (and would forget about before you woke up anyway), and glimpse fragments of strange TV shows as you flipped past channels you never really watched, growing sleepier and sleepier\u2026<\/p>\n
That feeling of being half awake at 3 a.m. in a dark room lit only by the dim glow of the ol’ boob tube is precisely the feeling director Jack Henry Robbins and his co-writers, Nate Gold and Nunzio Randazzo, seek to evoke in their lo-fi fever dream of a feature, VHYes<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s structure \u2014 in which the main character, 12-year-old Ralph (Mason McNulty), gets a video camera for Christmas and promptly begins taping clips from his favorite TV shows directly over his parents\u2019 wedding video \u2014 takes viewers back into their own childhoods, aping the way human memory (and film editing!) works. There are things that catch our interest and stick in our brains (consciously or subconsciously) that we can easily recall years later in vivid detail, while there are other things we either choose to forget or don\u2019t notice or lose interest in. You notice this as you watch Ralph\u2019s recording: Between glimpses of his parents\u2019 gloriously \u201980s wedding day, you see the late-night programs Ralph saw fit to save for later, as well as video he takes of himself and of his best friend, Sam (Rahm Braslaw), in the film\u2019s present-day. (Remember, there was once a time we couldn\u2019t access old photos on our phones or pull up clips off YouTube.)<\/p>\n VHYes<\/em> has a lot going for it \u2014 chiefly the fact that the fictional shows housed within it are all extremely funny in their own right. Which makes sense: Robbins says the project began with a few comedic shorts that screened at Sundance in 2017; reverse-engineering them into a narrative feels like it was probably a much more organic process than it would have been the other way around. Also, if you watch VHYes<\/em> and think that each sequence genuinely feels like it was part of its own real program, you\u2019re right: The filmmakers have also said that future home-video releases will likely include some of the segments in their entirety, like the intergalactic porn titled Hot Winter<\/em>, crazy Joan\u2019s Bob Ross\u2013wannabe painting program, and the punk rock music show Charlyne Yi\u2019s character hosts out of her parents\u2019 living room.<\/p>\n As the VHS recording goes on, things get increasingly stranger and more surreal. Ralph and Sam\u2019s genuinely unsettling Blair Witch<\/em>\u2013style footage inside an abandoned sorority house leads into a transcendent musical moment (think Weyes Blood as Julee Cruise), which leads into what feels like a whole other dimension where real life begins to converge with all of the TV programming. It don\u2019t want to spoil the Charlie Kaufman\u2013esque crescendo, but let\u2019s just say I didn\u2019t expect a film that derives so much humor from combative QVC presenters and Skinemax-style erotica to leave me so teary-eyed (and so thankful to have found a working VCR a few months back).<\/p>\n (Screened at Fantastic Fest)<\/em><\/p>\n I never had a TV set in my room when I was growing up, so I\u2019d have to sneak past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":12661,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1416,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-festivals","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: A<\/span><\/h3>\n
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