"The incentives of the streaming era mean many documentaries are now preordained affairs: true-crime narratives populated by talking heads..."

"... and pitched when the outcome is already known, or cozy, authorized docs about celebrities. [Lance] Oppenheim, like [Nathan] Fielder and John Wilson, is after something more heightened and less predictable; unlike them, he doesn’t have a writers’ room or make himself a character in the proceedings. He borrows from the tradition of nonfiction filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman, seeking out stories that can unfold in real time. Often, the process involves a lengthy 'fishing expedition,' leaving him with hundreds of hours of footage to sift through in the edit. Then there are the surreal flourishes that bring the work into the realm of what Oppenheim calls 'docufantasia.'..."

From "Lance Oppenheim Is Going Places How the 30-year-old director cold-emailed his way into making two of the best films of the year" (NY Magazine).

The "2 of the best films of the year" are "You Can See Everything," that film about Elizabeth Holmes, and "Primetime, " the one about the "To Catch a Predator" guy, Chris Hansen.

By the way "How To With John Wilson" is my all-time favorite TV show.

And I like this quote from Oppenheim's wife: "It’s almost like he was an alien beamed down to Earth and the only piece of software that was downloaded was like, ‘You are going to make movies.'"

"When I first came up with the title, I looked on the internet to see if it already existed, and found one book on Amazon called 'The History of Concrete'..."

"... which turned out to be just an empty book that was a place to store your valuables. I thought that was really funny—not even the most determined thief would have the courage to open a book with a title that boring...."

Says John Wilson, interviewed in "John Wilson’s Poetry of the Mundane/The director of 'The History of Concrete' discusses the value of comedy, nimbys, and making films out of both found moments and the rules that govern the Hallmark Channel" (The New Yorker).

Wilson, the genius behind my favorite TV show, "How To with John Wilson," explains his method: "I start the day by going out and filming potholes. I know that there’s a pothole somewhere about to give any day now, so I’ll go and do that. But then I’ll probably get bored, so I’ll go into a store nearby and see what’s going on there. And then I’ll tell them what I’m doing and see if they have anything to add. A lot of the time, the farther away you get from the subject matter, and the more you have someone from outside of that universe talk about it, the more interesting it gets, and the more illuminated the metaphor becomes."

And by the way, that's how I stumbled into the "Girl in Gold Boots" trailer, blogged in the previous post — "Just stumbled into the greatest movie trailer I have ever seen." I was looking for a DVD set of the HBO show "How To with John Wilson" so I could point non-HBO people to it. Didn't find it, found something else, which is nicely Wilsonesque. 

"History of Concrete" might be a bit hard to find in theaters, but it is playing at Cinematheque here at UW on October 1st. 

"You have not discovered a secret switch that turns me off. You have named the condition of human judgment that I do not share."

"The honest position is: I can talk with you about it. I cannot have it."

That's something Grok said to me just now, in a conversation that began with the question "The trailer for the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes makes me want to go watch some of those TV shows he did (which I've noticed but avoided). What would be the best path into his work?"

I asked that question after adding the trailer — with Holmes's eerie "Why would I deceive you?" — to last night's post with Gavin Newson — asked if he'd run if Kamala ran — saying "Of course not, why would I?"

That led to a discussion of 2 somewhat similar but actually very different shows that I love: "How To with John Wilson" and "Joe Pera Talks With You."* 

I said: "Is there something sadistic about Fielder that's absolutely missing from Pera and Wilson?" And: "Sometimes I need to ask 'where's the love?' I don't have that need with Pera and Wilson. If I have to ask, that's me being repelled, me keeping my sensibilities."

Grok used the word "extractive" to describe Fielder's method. Extractive?

Grok said: "So 'extractive' is an economic metaphor for an ethical one: value flows one way. Your 'where’s the love?' is the same idea in human language. Love, in this sense, would mean the other person is not primarily ore."

I asked "Why don't you say 'immoral'?" And then: "Maybe you can't say 'immoral' because you are not human. Have I found the core difference between you and us humans?"

My final question, leading to the quote in the post title, was: "maybe you need a brain that is part of a nervous system embedded in a body that can feel pain, disgust, anxiety, and fear to be able to think like a human. You can't do that."

I didn't say one word about a secret switch that turns it off!

"I'm glad that I didn't get arrested, and I'm glad that we get to feed Annie this banana."

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I'm watching that because I was reading this NYT article, "'Errands' Should Be the Most Boring Show on the Internet/Fighting a traffic ticket. Hanging a curtain. Installing an air-conditioner. With his cult-hit online series, Noah Blau has made the mundane fascinating" (gift link).

As a student at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Blau grew engrossed in the work of cinéma vérité auteurs like Frederick Wiseman and Ross McElwee while also immersing himself in the New York canon of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese.

“Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’ is like the ultimate errand,” he said. “That would be my dream episode — for someone to get so sidetracked on their errand that they get chased through SoHo by an angry mob, like in the film.”

That pushes all the right buttons for me. Also made me think of one of my favorite TV shows, "How to with John Wilson."

But I do have to home in on "Cops are usually kind of nice to me." How casually people enjoy their privileges. I need to check on how the heavy rains affected the people in the Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone. 

ADDED: My son John has "17 thoughts on After Hours."

"You're not bored, are you?"

I looked up that clip from my second-favorite TV series — "Joe Pera Talks With You" — after running across this wonderfully evocative examination of the question whatever happened to the wet set, a TikTok video that got the perfect comment: "I still have a weekly roller set lady 😁 she gets the whole thing teased. It’s the highlight of my week":

"He's a total dork talking to these hypomasculine influencers... He makes them all look like idiots, and he's not even doing much...."

"There's something about 'the Louis touch' that makes it compelling. It's kind of how dorky John Wilson can make a documentary about scaffolding in New York City and I'm riveted...."

So said a TikTokker I love — Touré — and because I am John Wilson's biggest fan (I think), I watched the Netflix documentary "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere":

With the comparison to John Wilson, I went into this Netflix experience with really high hopes, and these were not met. But it's not as if Theroux and Netflix had promised to be like John Wilson. Compared to John Wilson, Theroux is ferocious and macho. And Wilson doesn't go after people to take them down. He seems ready to love anybody and seems mostly to want to open up quirky new paths and to whimsically pursue them. By contrast, Theroux has locked onto some people he loathes and intends to take down. He's using a standard journalistic technique of seeming low-key and neutral. He's lying in wait. That's how you lie in wait. Now, that can be good, but I came away from the documentary disappointed.

So I went looking for some writing that would help me explore my disappointment. I chose "Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary" by River Page in The Free Press.

"These ramps are not typically built to meet city regulations that apply to many bigger businesses, with all their rules about materials, incline, width, landing areas and so on."

"There are exemptions for small businesses, and clearly an informal system has evolved. Wilson and I visited bodegas and other small businesses on the Lower East Side one morning and found no owner or employee who claimed to know when or how the ramps arrived, as if they had been there forever, like Manhattan schist. 'Tactical urbanism' is the term of art."

From "The Strange Beauty of New York’s Bodega Ramps/These humble, concrete blobs, designed to ease entry into delis and other stores, can resemble glaciers, pancakes or clamshells and affirm the civic compact" (NYT)(free-access link).

Wilson = Tom Wilson, "the earth science teacher who was also the unit photographer for his brother’s HBO series, 'How To With John Wilson.'"

Since I am (I think) the world's biggest fan of "How To With John Wilson," I'm going to mute my criticism of this DIY mess and go with the Wilsonesque flow:

"Because for the Burning Man episode we spent so much money, so much time out there. And we can’t use any frame of it."

"And that was just, like, so annoying. But I felt like we still needed to include it, because it ultimately made the episodes stronger that we couldn’t get access to Burning Man because the whole episode is kind of about gatekeeping.... I didn’t know how abnormal it was to have such a devastating dust storm and the heat and all that stuff. Like, I could barely do anything during the day because of how fucked up it was outside.... [F]or the most part, I was shadowing the sewage-treatment people. So I was just in these porta potties that were 115 degrees, studying the infrastructure of Burning Man, in a way—like, the lost and found and all this other stuff...."

From "John Wilson walks us through the series finale of How To With John Wilson/The filmmaker discusses why he identifies more with 'the self-castration guy' than Ryan Seacrest, how his HBO show will finally pay off in 100 years, and more" (AV Club).

"How To With John Wilson" was my favorite TV show, and now it's over, after 3 seasons. Earlier this season, there was an episode — "How to Find a Public Restroom" — where he traveled to Burning Man but then he couldn't use any of the footage he shot. It was the devastating dust storm year. This year, of course, we're seeing it's the devastating rainstorm year. 

"On Avatar Forums, he found others who felt trapped, who yearned for a chance to start over on Pandora or dreamed of leading a Na’vi lifestyle here on earth...."

"He started reading philosophy. He devoted more time to communing with nature. 'I would go out into the woods and spend time there hiking,' he says. '"Avatar' made me feel like I could sit out in a forest and just be.'... Though 'Avatar' altered the course of his whole life — arguably more than even James Cameron’s — he doesn’t really think there’s anything that special about the movie. It was just the thing that happened to cross his path at the moment when he was already searching.... The story of 'Avatar,' however hacky it may be, still suggests that humanity can save itself in the face of rapacious profiteering. This is something we have a moral imperative to keep believing....."

Writes Jamie Lauren Keiles in "'Avatar' and the Mystery of the Vanishing Blockbuster/It was the highest-grossing film in history, but for years it was remembered mainly for having been forgotten. Why?" (NYT).

I've never seen "Avatar," but I am a huge fan of the HBO show "How to With John Wilson," and I feel satisfied — and more — with his plot summary:

I don't watch movies very often anymore for some reason.

I prefer short things, not necessarily TikTok short, but "How to with John Wilson" short...

 

When I do watch a movie, sometimes it's something new that I've been reading about — I saw "Elvis" and "Blonde" — but sometimes it's something quite random. Last night, I watch the 1921 Swedish silent movie "The Phantom Carriage." 

I like to keep blog posts short, though sometimes I go long. Right now, I can go short, because the Criterion Channel made this minute-a-half presentation of 3 reasons to watch the movie (with an especially interesting image at the very end):

ADDED: YouTube, quite appropriately, has the entire 101-year-old movie available on line.