To loosely paraphrase the opening line of Eric Segal’s 1970 bestseller Love Story: What can you say about a film that smells like a squirrel died in your walls about a week ago?
Yesterday, noted experimental film auteur/white nationalist on paper Davis Aurini released an 82-minute-long monstrosity of a YouTube video, a “film” that he insists is not his version of his estranged film partner Jordan Owen’s The Sarkeesian Effect but rather a “separate independent work that should not be considered a ‘version’ of The Sarkeesian Effect or derivative of it,” despite the fact that it clearly is his version of The Sarkeesian Effect and completely derivative of it, to the point of using much of the same footage.
Reader, I watched it.
Like Owen’s totally different and not-at-all related The Sarkeesian Effect, Aurini’s wannabe masterwork is a stinky wet turd of a “film,” if it can even be called that. I went into it with such low expectations that I was struck less by Aurini’s mindboggling ineptitude as a cinematographer, a director, a writer, and a graphics wrangler than I was struck by how thoroughly tedious the whole thing is.
For a “film” ostensibly “separate” and “independent” and “totally super-duper different” from The Sarkeesian Effect, Aurini’s production sure looks a lot like the earlier “film.” It draws heavily from many of the same poorly conducted and poorly filmed interviews, including a number in which Jordan Owen, Aurini’s ex-film partner, appears prominently on the screen.
Or at least a portion of him. Like the original Sarkeesian Effect, Aurini’s masterpiece also includes numerous shots in which Owen’s hands disconcertingly poke their way into frame, twitching and sometimes playing with a pen.
Aurini clams he got permission to use these clips. I guess we’ll see if that’s true.
What else is there to say? The argument, such as it is, largely follows that of the earlier “film.” Starting off with ridiculously nit-picky criticisms of some of Sarkeesian’s specific claims, it ultimately spirals into a bizarrely grandiose attack on Marxism that has virtually no connection to anything other than the communist boogeymen that populate Aurini’s imagination. Aurini’s verbal assault on “cutural marxism” is more that a little but reminiscent of the weird Ayn Randian rant that took up what seemed like the last third of Owen’s film.
While much of that section of the film is a blur to me — it’s nearly impossible to pay close attention to something this tediously wrong about everything — I vaguely recall Aurini blaming “social justice warrior” interest in video games on Leon Trotsky and his strategy of “entryism.” Can anyone else confirm this happened, or was I hallucinating?
Technically, the film is a mess, with sound and picture quality varying dramatically from scene to scene. The graphics are laughable. Even the font choices are a disgrace.
And then there’s that background thing, Aurini, perhaps thinking he’s preparing a Powerpoint presentation rather than a film, pastes graphics and assorted film clips over a weird, undulating CGI backdrop. Sometimes he neglects to post anything over the backdrop, so there are sections of the film that consist of nothing more than Aurini babbling over this:
There is one sad omission I feel it is my duty to mention: The famous pizza box of Owen’s masterwork did not make it into Aurini’s Totally Different film.
RIP Pizza Box.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Two thumbs poking your eyes out.
A couple years ago I started a project of watching 2 films made by women for each film made by a man that I watched. It’s gone great. Here are films by women that made my top-5-of-the-year lists that I do because I’m a dork:
Fish Tank, Winter’s Bone, Advantageous, Prodigal Sons, Queen of Versailles, Stories We Tell, Night Moves, Meek’s Cutoff, Big Men, Babadook
You should also check out #52filmsbywomen tag on twitter (people vowing to watch one per week for a year)
Solid movie. 5/7
Well, it looks like Aurini actually isn’t any better of a director/ film editor than Jordan “so what if 90% of your donations went to buy me a bigger, more luxurious bathtub” Owen, after all!
First time commenting but I’ve been following for a while. I just felt the need to say something about Owen’s omnipresent hands… Those are the hands of a man who’s never done a day’s hard labor in his life, I sure hope he’s not one of those guys that’s always going on about how men built society while women sat on their butts refusing to pitch in. I don’t know a whole lot about him because I haven’t cared to subject myself to actually watching the full length of any of his videos, but since he is a Rand fan it’s not much of a stretch to guess what he might think about such topics.
@History Nerd
Trotsky? Katie sent us Trotsky.
She also sent us the Moscow show tunes you speak of.
And now she has sent us unicorns. With these fierce, gentle creatures as our allies, we cannot lose!
@ History Nerd
I think aurini chose Trotsky because he was the only other Jewish born communist aurini could come up with and Marxs is too obvious.
Solid movment, maybe
5/7 is a reference a viral story about a guy trolling a right-wing acquaintance.
I heard Leonard Maltin gave it 2.4 stars, stating, “Not quite as good as Laserblast. The lack of Eddie Deezen really hurt.”
Is that a fucking CDI in the third picture? Did he seriously use a picture of a Phillips CDI as a representative of game consoles? The console that hosted Faces of Evil, Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda’s Adventure. the three worst Zelda games of all time? I bet Aurini just looked at it and said “Yup, that’s a video game” and that was it. Fucking fake gamer boys.
@Tesformes,
Nope, even they’re not that bad. The CDI picture is in there because they were actually talking about Zelda’s Adventure and Wand of Gamelon.
82 minutes? That’s barely half the length of the Owen cut. Tsk. Go back and finish the job, Aurini.
@2-DMan, so a week?
1. NYEH HEH HEH!!!
Matt C – Babadook is the first horror movie in ages that really scared the shit out of me. I don’t believe in spirits or ghosts or any of that shit but I was honestly spooked walking around my house at night for weeks after watching it. Such a great film. Didn’t know it was made by a woman, so that makes it even better!
The great Papyrus wouldn’t approve of this poorly made production.
And both my eyes and sense of taste as a graphic designer hurt immensely just from looking at this mess. What is that, a picture of a menstrual mucous membrane? I mean sure the eeevil periods exist only to scare innocent cis men or something, but there’s a thing called good taste and it obviously wanted nothing to do with this film.
@Orion
Oh, let me guess, it was either:
“Look at what happens when you let women be the main playable character in a video game. You get Zelda’s Adventure.”
Or
“Women have been the main character in plenty of games! Look at Metroid, Catfight, and the Zelda CDI games!”
Is that about right?
How could I forget to mention Babadook? That’s a fantastic movie. Essie Davis is also really good in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which has a woman showrunner and is based on books written by a woman.
Another great horror movie with female directors is American Mary from the Soska sisters.
@tesformes
If his complaint is the same as every other #Git’s complaint (I haven’t watched that far), it’s the second one plus “AND THAT PROVES SHE’S A FAKE GEEK GIRL!!!111one”
Even though Nintendo doesn’t count them as Zelda games, not even as spinoffs, and I’m pretty sure Nintendo knows more about Zelda than they do.
I was going to watch this “documentary,” but I decided to have sex with a friend with benefits of mine because that’s much more exciting than anything Aurini produces. After reading the blog posts on his efforts, I think I made the right choice.
SFHC has it. Anita said it was too bad the early Legend of Zelda games tended to cast Zelda as a damsel in distress. Aurini retaliated by pointing out that Zelda’s Adventure exists. In his mind, this somehow makes Anita’s complaint a “direct lie”* (!)
Amazingly, he actually included, in his movie, Anita’s entirely reasonable rebuttal that the existence of a far less popular game made by different people doesn’t invalidate her commentary on the content of the main series.
EDIT: @Saphira,
Why not both? Embrace the power of multitasking!
Remember when the internet looked like Geocities? Yeah, this is geocities the movie
If we’re recommending movies directed (and, in this case, also written) by women, I’m gonna take the opportunity to plug Dee Rees’ “Pariah” again. It’s also a movie both by and about queer POC, which heaven knows there isn’t exactly an overabundance of. And it’s just such a great movie.
I second the recommendations of Fish Tank, Winter’s Bone, Meek’s Cutoff, The Babadook, and We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Some other good/great films directed by women:
Daisies (surreal, arty, hilarious)
The Kids Are All Right
Desperately Seeking Susan
Monster
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Near Dark
American Psycho
Clueless
Meshes of the Afternoon
In My Skin
In the Cut
Holy Smoke
Speaking of Jane Campion (the last 2 in that list are by her), her netflix series Top of the Lake is also great.
NOOOO!
Then Saphira will be like that angry pancake dude who David did an article on his angry pancake screed on the TRP subreddit, whose author then came in here trying to advertise his shitty “game” blog who then tried to humble brag that he was scrolling through WHTM while cheating on his girlfriend (after he negged us) who he was angry with because she had pancakes and didn’t encourage him to go to the gym at six in the morning and who said that he liked not sleeping much and working on his “hustle” and driving himself into either an early grave or a mental breakdown because he wanted to have a house DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH and a fancy car with his tech job.
TL;DR: Don’t be like Kyle, Saphira.
@Move recs: You could always watch The Matrix Trilogy, I mean, it was directed by two trans sisters.
I’m going to wait (and hope) for the Kevin Logan version of ‘Immersed in Subversion’. Seriously, his reenactments of Owen’s film was the only way I could watch it. (The music is also brilliant).