Jon the Critic

Tag: film

  • “OBEX”: The Little Indie That ‘Should’.

    I was updating my watch list of films being released in 2026 when I stumbled upon the title OBEX. I knew nothing about it, heard nothing about it, and was not at all familiar with writer/director Albert Birney or his previous body of work. Hell, even the premise didn’t really get me interested in seeking it out. What did sell me on it was its perfect blend of generally favorable reviews, a brisk 90-minute runtime, and the fact that it was available to stream for free on Kanopy. While the movie itself will most likely carve a permanent spot in the lower-middle tier when it comes time for my year-end rankings, I walked away from it feeling that its mere existence is of the utmost importance in the world of indie filmmaking.

    Set in suburban Baltimore circa 1987, the story follows Conor Marsh, a reclusive loner who spends his days working under the pseudonym “Computer Conor”, translating other people’s photographs into ASCII Art (for the uninitiated, which I was before looking up just what in the hell this art form was called, it’s making digital imagery using only characters from your keyboard). At the end of the workday, he watches VHS tapes on his tower of TV sets before adjourning to his bedroom where he uses more computers to sing 8-bit karaoke, all culminating in finally drifting into sleep using synth-heavy, ambient soundscapes.

    Conor’s only connection to the outside world is through brief interactions with his neighbor Mary when she drops off groceries, and he occasionally plays outside with his dog, Sandy, the latter acting as more of a reassurance for his seclusion, as 1987 was a year of the dreaded cicada awakening.

    Everything starts going downhill when Conor decides to order a computer game called OBEX, advertised as a personalized adventure. He records a mini biography of himself and Sandy and sends it off to recieve his floppy disc fanatsy game, only to find out upon playing that it’s a total scam and the game doesn’t do much of anything. Feeling cheated, he tosses the game. Not long after, his printer turns itself on and prints an eerie message that something is hidden inside his VHS collection, driving Conor to the brink of complete madness as he feverishly goes through each and every tape, ending with him not finding anything. While he sleeps that night, the villain from the game shows up and steals Sandy.

    Upon waking and discovering Sandy is missing, Conor walks outside and is greeted with a mysterious computer on his doorstep. He is then transported inside the OBEX game where he must navigate the game’s trecherous realms and confront his inner fears in order to reach the castle, defeat the villain, and rescue his dog.

    I’m all for a good story that blends reality with fantasy. With OBEX, however, once the shift is made from real world to video game realm, it doesn’t just feel like a change in scenery, but a different movie entirely. In my experience, anytime a story feels divided into two or more distinct parts that feel separate from eachother, it rarely works. This film is not an exception, but for the sake of reviewing it, the divided halves make it easier for me to break down my thoughts.

    Let’s start with the first and, in my opinion, vastly superior section of the film. I was almost immediately on board with the ultra low-budget, black and white asthetic. It was impossible to not see influences of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and, once the paranoia starts to really kick in, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. This is the stretch of film where the low budget works for the asthetic and not against it. You could find these clothes and props in someone’s attic or at a thrift shop. The suburban house and lack of different locations works for building the tension and fear of the unknown that come with living in isolation, and because us as viewers are limited to only seeing what the Conor sees, we get to truly feel that sense of unknown dread.

    Then Conor enters the video game realm and everything mentioned above that was a positive starts working against the film. As was not the case due to the limited scope of the first half, it becomes glaringly clear that the ideas outweigh the budget in the second half. The vast landscapes feel like they were shot in a field that was almost certainly down the street from the neighborhood that Conor’s house was located. The clothing seems like cheap Halloween costumes that were resurrected from someone’s dusty attic.

    Speaking of costumes, this allows me the perfect segue into the one big personal gripe I have with this part of the film. A video game aficionado I am not, but I did play enough growing up to at least have a good idea that things like Conor’s hat, the grassy landscapes, and the mystical shop that provides him with the necessary tools for his journey were probably references to The Legend of Zelda. Even so, I still had to look it up to make sure I was correct. I’m no stickler against a few winks or easter eggs for fans, but when the things happening on screen won’t entirely make sense for the uninitiated, it’s doesn’t make for good storytelling. Does it hinder the plot incoherent by not explaining these things? Not really. One could still deduce that the journey was one of self exploration that will give our hero the confidence to defeat the villain and rescue his friend. But a little exposition can go a long way, and it seems that the filmmakers are counting on audience’s prior knowledge of the medium to fill in any gaps. I also feel that my lack of admiration for the video games it is referencing made it harder to look past the lackluster production of this segment of the film.

    So why would I write such a piece on a film I was, at best, lukewarm on? The answer is simple: this is an important film and is a small piece of the big puzzle that is saving independent cinema as we know it.

    Yes, that is quite the heavy statement. Allow me to explain…

    I wrote and directed my own feature film when I was in my early 20s. The inspiration behind this bold decision was watching Kevin Smith’s 1994 indie sensation, Clerks, about a thousand times throughout my teenage years and into my early adulthood and thinking, “I could do that.” I soon discovered that Mr. Smith’s inspiration to make his shoe string budgeted, black and white slice of suburban reality came from watching Richard Linklater’s 1991 debut, Slacker, and thought to himself, “I could do that.” This inevitably sent me down a rabbit hole. Before I knew it, I was struggling to find enough hours in a given week to watch all of the small indie movies I had stumbled upon whose stories began with the filmmaker saying “I could do that.”

    I remember multiple people try to convince me that shooting my own feature was damn near impossible without a budget of at least a few million. I can also recall numerous conversations over the years with individuals, some with entire scripts completed, who were convinced that they couldn’t make their film until they secured proper funding and backing from a studio. I shudder to think of all the possible groundbreaking films we will never see, due simply to the creative minds thinking they weren’t “allowed” to follow their dream.

    While I watched OBEX, I thought to myself that same thought I had when I watched Clerks. Then I got to thinking when the last time was that I watched a movie and had that thought. This made me think even further about when the last time I watched a movie that was made by someone who had that same thought.

    It’s no secret that less and less movies are getting made each year, and the ones that are getting funded are usually bankable to investors. Hell, even the indie movies being made by young filmmakers are usually the biproduct of a successful YouTube or TikTok channel with a certain large number of followers that most people will never attain. The fact of the matter is that the indie movies made by filmmakers who said “screw the budget, I’ve got a camera. Let’s go!” are almost nonexistent these days. Films like OBEX, though very far from perfect, are a reminder that it is possible to make a movie with whatever it is you have available to you. This is why I hope this movie gets seen by enough people to inspire even one more person to pick up a camera and say “I could do that”.

  • “The Rip” and the Netflix-ification of Modern Films.

    Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s newest action thriller could’ve been great, but the hellish Netflix production requirements keep it merely at “just okay”. Who is really to blame?

    Historically speaking, January has never been a good time for movies. Theater attendance is usually at a massive low, giving studios the perfect opportunity to “dump” their hot garbage movies at a time where there’s virtually zero competition, reaping the benefits of the handful of movie-goers that still turn up during the slow season. Audiences have even coined the term “Dump-uary” to drive home just how abysmal month one of the new year is in the world of film.

    However, with streaming taking over, and all but killing the theater industry as a whole, January no longer has to be reserved for the worst of the worst in terms of quality. The majority of the public does their movie watching from home year round, thus rendering the need to curate the quality or scope of films around certain demographics and the times they will most likely be visiting a movie theater more and more irrelevant. If you’re still following, this theory proposes the idea that we should be getting even more quality films and getting them all year long, ya know, because of the wonderful world of streaming. And here comes Netflix, and possibly other streaming giants before long, who are determined to shit all over that dream and assure that piss-poor quality is no longer reserved for only the slow months, but all year, every year, for the foreseeable future. The reason? They blame audiences. The sad realization? They might not be wrong.

    Before I continue working out my existential crisis, let’s dive into The Rip.

    The story follows a team of Miami cops who specialize in drug house seizures, or “rips”. After their captain is killed, and amid rumors of dirty officers stealing money from the raids, they find themselves at the forefront of an internal investigation. In the midst of the heated interrogations, the second-in-command Lieutenant receives an anonymous tip that sends him and is crew to a drug house in Hialeah, stumbling upon an amount of money that none of them have ever seen before. As it becomes clear that outsiders are aware of the raid, the team starts to suspect that one of them is dirty and out to steal the money.

    This has all the ingredients for a solid cop action/thriller. How could it go wrong? The answer is simple; too much exposition.

    The film opens with the murder of the team’s captain and quickly cuts to a fast-paced montage of the crew being separately interrogated by Internal Affairs regarding the incident. It is here that I started getting the feeling that I was going to be annoyed by the script. On the surface, it’s cops being questioned. But what’s really going on is endless plot exposition that is flat out telling us what lead us here, and where we will be heading in the not-too-distant future. One of my biggest pet peeves in film is the distrust of the audience to figure out what is going on through context clues and turning to endless verbal explanation to guide us through the experience. And it doesn’t stop in the first act. No. This continues throughout the rest of the movie and culminates in the final “twist”, which literally has multiple characters flat out telling us what the twist is and how it happened. It’s almost as if they were catering to an audience that might not actually be paying attention to the movie. But why would anyone put on a movie and not watch it?

    Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were guests on the “Joe Rogan Experience” after the movie was released. Here’s the quote that has been making the rounds on the internet and helped give me that gentle push into crisis mode:

    “The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.

    I’ve heard rumblings over the years of streaming companies, mostly Netflix, tailoring their content (they’re not movies or shows anymore, now it’s “content” – a rant for another day) to fit the criteria of what is now being referred to as the “second screen experience”. Through data collection, the powers that be have stumbled upon a trend that was never really that hard to notice; general audiences are seriously addicted to their phones and will most likely be glued to them while they watch TV. If we lived in normal times, there’s a good chance that the execs would just say “Tough shit. Looks like they won’t know what’s going on in the movie”. That is the proper response. However, we live in improper times now and the execs have decided that the more bountifully profitable path is the one where they cater to the lowest common denominator.

    What starts to make the waters truly murky is the public’s response to Damon’s reveal. There are plenty of people who share my sense of dread that this is the death knell of the arts as we know it. As depressing as it is, the silver lining is that I know I’m not alone and screaming into the void. However, there are even more people who are impartial, stating that it’s just a change of the times and trends. The worst responses though, the ones that were, are currently, and will continue to be responsible for this bastardization of the arts, are the ones who openly admit to being the target audience for the second screen experience. Furthermore, they are actively challenging Netflix and other studios, stating that if they made more engaging content that was worth putting the phone down for, they would willingly curb their phone addiction for the time being. Now the conundrum has veered into classic “chicken or the egg came first” territory. Is Netflix curating their content to appeal to the second screen audience? Or are audiences turning to second screen viewing in response to said content?

    While I would like to believe that Netflix shot first, and that the second screen experience is purely in response to their dumbing down of scripts as a woeful misjudgment of what general audiences really want, I just can’t bring myself to believe that to be true. I don’t spend a ton of time on social media, but the amount I have spent is enough for me to know that it was the public who asked for this, maybe even unknowingly.

    The concept of people consuming the most popular movies and/or TV shows for the sole purpose of being able to talk about them afterward is nothing new. Back then, it was called “water cooler talk”, and anyone over the age of 25 should understand that term. It refers to a time when people would watch the latest big thing so that they could join in the conversation where the majority of workplace chit-chat went down; the office water cooler. Since the internet boom, the water cooler has been replaced with social media where there is no limit to when or how many people can join in at a time. Not only that, but where audiences, once upon a time, actually had to sit down and watch the movie or show in order to form an opinion and be able to hang at the water cooler, the internet has made it possible to bypass the entire “watching” segment of the process. It has become more common for amateur viewers, or “content creators”, to watch a piece of media and immediately take to YouTube or TikTok to post a video condensing all of the important information, such as plot and symbolism, into the shortest amount of time possible. It’s like being able to read the cliff notes in less than 10 minutes. Because of this, people feel less inclined to actually watch the movie or show anymore, knowing that they can get all the information they need to keep up with the Joneses in just a few quick taps of their phone screen.

    This new phenomenon has since succeeded in “cutting out the middle man”, so to speak. What it has revealed is that the public is now, and possibly always was, more interested in being able to merely say that they’ve seen the popular thing than they were in actually seeing it. Hell, I’ve read posts on places like Reddit where someone will be giving their review on a film as they are still watching it, proving that experiencing the art was never top priority. It was always about the engagement with others afterwards. Even a site like Letterboxd, which is a social media platform specifically for cinephiles, has become more about having the most amount of films logged on your watch list, how many people follow your profile, and who can write the wittiest one-liner review, instead of being a place where people from any background, age, or country can come to discover and discuss their mutual love of film.

    With all of this in mind, the question begs to be repeated; is the downfall of media literacy the fault of Netflix and other studios? Or are they just responding to what the public has consciously and/or subconsciously been demanding for decades?

    And with that, I’m going to go watch a movie to try and forget the question and it’s more-than-likely grim answer. Oh, and I’m going to leave my phone in the other room. I suggest you do the same.