Winning the Best Short Oscar must be a little like winning a few grand in the lottery. It’s a great experience, gives your career a positive boost, but it probably isn’t going to fundamentally change your life. No exception for Pepe Danquart, winner at the 1994 Oscars ceremony alongside Stephen Spielberg (Schindler’s List), Tom Hanks (Philadelphia) and Nick Park (The Wrong Trousers; short-subject animators seem to have a slightly better trajectory post-win). Luckily, the advent of the Internet means your accomplishment can find life beyond Oscar trivia.

That paragraph (originally broken unnecessarily into two) is the opening text of the very first Lunch Link, then cheekily called The Ploughman’s Lunch Link, which appeared exclusively in the comments almost exactly eight years ago. I was rather silly about the career of Danquart who had a number of additional credits to his name and has added three more features since I wrote that. I was also writing from a confused malaise a month out from the notorious 2016 election, musing on the way the silent bus passengers in the short both allow the woman’s awful tirade to continue, then use their silence to damn her in the end. I’m getting over my naive assumption that with patience racists would disappear on their own, consumed by the silent crowds, when I write “Well, 1994, I’d like you to meet 2016.”

Now meet 2024. And I won’t dwell on the most depressing historical parallels, but rather on the weight of the years, the process of unearthing this missive from the archives of The Solute, hundreds of pages each with a dozen article titles, collected over the past decade (it wasn’t for another five months after this that I made my first above-the-line post, luckily I remembered my second Lunch Link in the comments was “The Junkie’s Christmas,” narrowing down the month I started). I shuffled past an astonishingly eclectic collection of articles and thousands of conversations and jokes (we all seem to have had more time to post back then, even before the pandemic). I saw names that haven’t appeared in ages. I felt that old bastard Nostalgia on my shoulder, but I know the truer lesson of the search, that we’ve been through change so many times we forget how often it happens. The influx of new blood (including yours truly) when the Dissolve went away, the establishing of the daily schedule which formalized the regular morning threads (happened a lot later than you’d think). The features and writers that started and finished definitively or more often trailed off… I suppose there’s still a possibility I’ll put a tag on that Fit to Print series.

And, as time spent sifting through the pages looking for one specific comment can attest, it’s all still here, and come Hell or server failure it won’t disappear, not entirely. And this won’t be the last Lunch Link. Luckily “the advent of the Internet” – as a writer who could use several more years of practice might call it – means your thoughts, opinions, tastes, and your friendships can find life beyond what you might expect on a panicky December morning when you sound your voice, simply hoping to hear one in return. Thank you for the voices, and I’m looking forward to hearing them more.

But while I’m excited, this is all still bittersweet. This place has been my online home for years now. If anything, I’ve always wanted to spend more time here, and I’ve rued the times that I’ve been too busy or–to be more emotionally vulnerable for a second, as annoying as that is–too depressed and anxious to participate as much as I would like. There are too many fantastic articles I read but never commented on, and too many excellent conversations that I didn’t participate in. The comments and discussion have always been a big part of the soul of this place, and I’m hoping that carries over to the new site.

I’ve spent some time recently going back through The Solute’s history, and damn, we’ve had an incredible run, haven’t we? Just for the sheer joy and satisfaction of it, we’ve collectively spent so many years exploring our passions and frustrations about art, so many years taking stories apart to see how they work. We’ve delved into mainstream and the weird with equal enthusiasm. We’ve had a billion What Did We Watch threads (and all their spinoffs) where we’ve recommended, enthused, despaired, and generally stayed a part of each other’s lives, at least in this small way. The Solute has been such a diverse collection of views and interests that I can talk about some of touchstones of my version–The Shield and Paterson, say–and know that someone else here, just as much a regular as I am, will have zipped by those conversations completely. I started listing out some of my favorite columns and essays here, but it got too long and too unwieldy. If it were up to me, this place would be up forever, so you know what? Read it all. Read everything, including the comments sections. (It might take me a year or more, but I’m going to do my best to save all of those in the world’s most intimidatingly, gloriously nerdy document. Uh, in the meantime, if you know a faster way than going page by page, let me know.)

I’ve been writing this column for a while now, and I’ve never given a more heartfelt recommendation. Even if you’re somehow discovering this article years from now and the site is old and dusty … trust me, you want to embrace The Solute, and you want to follow its community and the various things they’ve gone on to do and create.

Thanks for everything, everyone, and I hope I’ll keep seeing all of you in the future at one place or another.

The Solute is a website created in 2014. You can find it literally right here, or, if that someday fails, on the Wayback Machine.

(This is why I at least admire the Seinfeld finale – they botched the execution, but there’s a genuine attempt to find the funniest ending for these characters)

There are only a few comedies I can think of that really tried to embrace having a funny ending. My favourite is 8 Bit Theater, because not only is the ending funny, it’s a kind of summary of the comic’s comedy. As you may well know, there are three main gags in 8 Bit Theater: running gags carefully scattered through the comic to come back long after you’d forgotten about them (most famously: Fighter’s attempts to get sword-chucks to work), pranks on the reader (with every ‘serious’ plot given an anticlimactic resolution), and, as a matter of course, the characters nitpicking and arguing the entire way through.

This culminates in the final boss fight, when the characters go up against the personification of Chaos. As the characters bicker about how exactly they’re gonna take down the bad guy, they turn back around to find White Mage has taken down Chaos with the help of her friends Priest, Shaman, and Healer – that is to say, four white mages, just as Black Mage was advised when he read a strategy guide back in strip seven. This is one final gag that brings together all three elements of the strip’s humour at their most extreme – the most absurd length of time between setup and payoff on a gag*, a dramatic payoff so anticlimactic that the villain isn’t even completely offscreen when it happens, and this all happening because the characters were arguing over something dumb.

*Author Brian Clevinger even remarked that it was always the plan to end that way, he just didn’t expect it to take seven years to get to the punchline.

There’s another comedy where the final joke is really the culmination of the humour, but unfortunately I haven’t seen it: Review, starring Andy Daly. Based on description from beloved Soluter Ruck Cohlchez, it sounds like that show ends with not only one last absurd expression of its antihero’s neuroses, but that you simply could not have a more absurd expression of his neuroses. There is simply nowhere to go after that final joke, not just because it’s unbelievably bleak, nor even because the protagonist is stuck in an immovable hell, but because there’s simply nothing more absurd or funny that you could do with the premise.

Now, this idea of endings is me riffing on the fact that this is my final essay here at The Solute. Next week, I’ll be fully moved over to Media Magpies – today I’m publishing an essay on Whedonesque characters – and I hope I get to see you there. Good luck with whatever you do.

This is not to say these characters don’t have depth, or that Superstore breaks the mold for a comedy. It’s a successful, funny ensemble-based sitcom in a store setting with a good “Will they/Won’t they?” storyline. But it exemplifies what The Bear and Life & Beth typically miss out on: (1) your character’s motivations are dramatic and funny, and (2) you can take control of the tone, so the drama immediately follows the comedy, or vice-versa. The combination of genres actually heightens the whole mood here, leading to scenes like the aftermath of the tornado or Dina very casually agreeing to be Glenn’s surrogate.

One of the single funniest moments on the show so far arrives in Season 2 after one supporting character makes a heartbreaking decision because of his undocumented immigrant status. Nicos Santos is a good actor, and this is a strong dramatic beat – beautifully undercut by Jonah – unaware of what just happened – punching him in the fucking face to prove he can put up a fight, thus paying off the running A plot and creating a huge belly laugh. This is already the worst day of Mateo’s life, and now he’s injured and down on the ground. It’s great drama and great comedy, all in the space of 90 seconds.

This frequent balance of gag and dramatic beat works because by the end of the truncated first season, the Missouri Cloud 9 employees all feel locked in place (save Sandra and Carol, more prominent in Season 2 and magnificent dramatic characters in their quiet insanity). Glenn, the manager, wants to be a good Christian dad, but struggles with his own naivete about the world and repressed anger. Like Skinner in The X-Files, Glenn genuinely cares about his employees and is sometimes at odds with an institution that doesn’t really give a shit. This naivete is also why assistant manager Dina – maybe the most evolved character since the pilot – clashes with him and Garrett, the store announcer and the one giving “the Billings” every day. Dina doesn’t need to be liked, living in a near-neurodivergent social order of her own making where the store must be respected, and the rules must be obeyed. (There is a Dina in every retail store.) Garrett only cares up to a point but is genuinely outraged when accused of doing less than the bare minimum to avoid getting fired. The man has his standards.

Main characters Amy and Jonah meanwhile develop feelings for one another because they share the same basic motivations: they both want to be liked, and they want other people to be happy. (The biggest difference between them is privilege and Amy’s sense of responsibility – as Jonah rightly points out, Amy likes to play the martyr.) Both have “justice sensitivity” because of these motivations, and this innately brings them together and puts them in opposition to Cloud 9’s anti-union, minimum wage, indifferent corporate culture. I don’t know if the show bible always included the employees’ frustrations with Cloud 9, but it provides a good plot thread and unites the two genres: the gags about Cloud 9’s crappiness end up sparking action among the employees. The store is a crappy place, but it’s where they have to be every other day (“wherever you go, there you are”), and maybe they can make it better, one way or another.

* In all fairness, Bojack had some incredible gags, especially in the first few seasons. Thinking now of Hollywoo, J.D. Salinger’s celebrity quiz show, and Todd getting the rights to Diisneyland.

Winner of the short subject animation Oscar in 1950, though probably its best-known pedigree it its origin as a story by Dr. Suess. This story was original performed as a radio play before this animated version by UPA (United Productions of America), maybe best known now for their character Mr. Magoo, and maybe slightly less now for their wartime cautionary character Private Snafu.

Despite its limitless flexibility as a medium, animation has often operated under tyrannical rules imposed by live action film. There’s no reason animation needs to do straight cuts from shot to shot. Scenes can transition one to another while keeping characters in the frame. Characters can take on the same hue as their backgrounds or exist only as outlines. They can hold stiller than real people and they can move with impossible liquidity. UPA was founded by ex-Disney animators in part to push against a narrower vision of how to use animation, and ironically it was their refusal to worry about fidelity to real life that gave them the freedom to feature human characters, a rarity in an animation era where anthropomorphized animals reigned.

And so Gerald can smoothly transition from a kitchen stool to a scooter in the park without relinquishing a frame and can climb an impossible German Expressionist staircase without effort. He’s blue when it’s cold and occasionally yellow when he’s not. He also has a delightful skip (boing) upwards every few steps when he walks. The animation is strikingly fluid and subtle when it wants to be (such as his mother’s swoon after reading the note he brings home from school). But who wants to be these things all the time?

For bonus watching, there’s the delightful follow-up “Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony,” the plottier but still fun “How Now Boing Boing“, and finally “Gerald McBoing Boing on Planet Moo” for completionists. Apparently there was also a cartoon series featuring Gerald on the Cartoon Network in the early 2000s, but once I learned the character has a dog that communicates through burps I lost interest.

I have yet to watch this without tearing up with laughter. For a video that barely hits 60 seconds in length and has literally one (1) actual joke (one of the hoariest there is), there is so much craft at play here. Tom Schalk’s incredible voice work is a highlight, ratcheting up from slightly condescending but benign to peeved to livid to absolute incandescent rage, a Rumplestiltskin-esque tantrum at a person not knowing the secret word instead of knowing it. And Schalk uses crudity perfectly, not just in language but in technique. The goofy ANGERY edit breaks the video’s style at just the right moment and doesn’t linger, and the sheer ridiculousness of Skull Boy himself, a dumbass toy with the tag still on clearly being operated by a hand, belongs on that wonderful Puppet Peak, far away from the uncanny valley. It somehow works backwards — the hand smashing Skull Boy headfirst into a box is not controlling him, but has become the external implement of his incredulous bile. Instead of failing to approximate something real and leading to rejection, the puppet’s simplicity leads the viewer’s brain to work harder to buy into the conceit of a tiny skeleton comedian and to more willingly accept the reality of his fury and frustration.

Which is another way to describe exasperation, well-known as the most cinematic emotion. But the other factor here is Skull Boy’s audience/mark, the person who is needed for the bit to work and essential for its glorious failure. If this guy is acting he is the greatest thespian who ever lived, at the very least the greatest one captured on YouTube. What he nails is the irrepressible release of a person confronted with impotent exasperation, how you can’t not find someone’s self-induced rage funny. Because he’s just a guy, his corpsing in the face of boney threats doesn’t have the contemptible simper of the Fallon-esque actor who can’t keep a straight face during a routine despite being an alleged professional*. And while he may not be frightened by this Halloween creature, he’s clearly trying to disengage, backing away and looking down despite how that just drives Skull Boy into more of a frenzy. His bemusement feels real, and Skull Boy collides with that reality again and again.

This isn’t the same dynamic as something like “Who’s On First?” where Abbott’s straight man causes Costello’s comedic noncomprehension, because Costello is still playing a (very funny) part, his questions construct the bit itself. Here, the only attempts at an answer to Skull Boy’s question are the incredibly deadpanned “death,” which makes no fucking sense yet retains the barest, most tenuous connection to a skeleton to count as actual engagement with the would-be joke, and the at-least tangible if still nonsensical “bones.” Each further query just results in more all-encompassing denial. “WHY MUST YOU FAIL ME SO OFTEN!” Skull Boy rages, and from that repetitive failure it is not hard to imagine that Skull Boy is stuck in a Sisyphean Hell where he is doomed to almost but never accomplish his goal. Worse, his audience is laughing at everything but the one thing Skull Boy wants and needs him to laugh at, he is cursed to make others happy while never finding happiness himself. Maybe this is a scary movie after all.

*A closer comparison in the SNL realm would be how everyone involved can barely hold it together during Chris Farley’s belligerent galumphing in Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker – it’s the same kind of reaction to a clearly insane person who demands to be taken seriously and a lot more understandable in how the inability to reconcile this conflict results in laughter

Another entry in our “early work by a horror auteur” theme for the week. This short from director Sam Raimi predates his gonzo horror breakthrough The Evil Dead by three years (and, given the long gestation of that project, may have been filmed contemporarily). “Clockwork” is difficult to see, both in the sense of “not a lot of copies in circulation” and “very difficult to make out the 8mm transfer to VHS”.

There’s no hope of reading the expressions of our lead (Cheryl Guttridge, a frequent collaborator on Raimi’s earliest projects), so we’ll focus on the blocking. If there’s an easy way to spot something by a director who’s going to handle bigger and better projects in the future (thinking also back to another horror director’s first film, John Carpenter’s “Captain Voyeur”), it’s not the lighting or the script or the effects, it’s the intentionality of the camera. Here the camera moves frequently through the house, particularly in the early going, but it never feels like movement for its own sake. The point of view is always moving, like a storyteller, between predetermined destinations – a smoldering cigar or a figure out the window.

I also think it’s interesting how much the “a young woman is stalked” trope was in the air before Halloween. “Clockwork” isn’t the first example by a long shot, but it feels way closer to the 80s slashers than When a Stranger Calls or Repulsion. 

Saw (2003) dir. James Wan

Short personal story here: I was at the premiere screening of the feature version of Saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2004, a time when the general public did not know what Saw was, let alone a Saw II-X or Spiral or anything else from the Book of Saw. It was programmed as a midnight show with much buzz about its intensity, so I didn’t go in completely blind, and yet there was a palpable sensation that we were seeing an unusual amount of unfettered sick imagination (the theater cranking the sound to 11 hurt my ears but not the sensation of being tortured). A giddy teenager was brought up on stage afterward and it took me a long while to realize this chipper lad was 26-year-old James Wan, the man responsible for the gruesome film we had just witnessed.

Gore was nothing new to horror, of course, but at that moment in time extreme gore existed a little to the side of the mainstream. Rob Zombie was just getting his thing going with House of 1000 Corpses, but money-making American horror was still in the spooky PG-13 wake of The Sixth Sense and The Ring. The big horror titles released in 2003, the year of this short and the year before the feature’s October release, included Final Destination 2 and Freddy vs. Jason, with bloody kills in anticipatable scenes, quick as lopped limbs. We were still a couple years from Hostel and the  official “torture porn” era when seeing an extended sequence of a man chained to a chair with a decapitating device strapped to his face wouldn’t seem so unusual. And that’s that contribution of Saw and its ilk, adding that confinement element to horror. Rather than a nightmare where you can’t outrun the monster, it’s the one where you can’t move, helpless against the terrible thing against your skin.

As for the short, it sells the energy Wan and collaborator Leigh Wannell (who also plays the lead) would bring to the feature. Curiously it includes the paper-thin lesson of the later film (enjoy life lest a puppet kills you with a reverse bear trap), but not Jigsaw, the villain who espouses this less throughout the franchise. Also it has a buzzkill of a wraparound – looks like the guy’s going to make it out with his mouth able to close – but not the feature’s famous opening and closing setpiece with two men chained up and discovering the reason the film is called Saw (is the “Saw” title of the short actually a past-tense verb?)

The short does, however, give the puppet an adorable hat, a detail that I really wish had survived.

Geometria (1987) dir. Guillermo Del Toro

Original version, mediocre transfer, but with English subtitles:

For the Spanish-speaking and/or second-time viewers, here’s a much better transfer with the original audio (though the above might actually be more accurately called the definitive version, more on that below):

This is some Halloween fun and a very early effort from the avuncular comedy-horror auteur. Del Toro spent, by his estimation, less than $2,000 on this film (“and that included catering and travel”). He cast his own mother and filmed in an open office space over the weekend. Post production was rushed so it could play at a local film festival alongside a more prestigious picture, and the reception at this screening, Del Toro notes, put him in a comfortable outsider position with the other filmmakers there.

Del Toro is a filmmaker who loves to talk about film, especially his own influences. Here he pays homage (i.e. rips off) Mario Bava and Dario Argento’s giallos and their use of stark colors, often using two deep colors against each other within the same frame. The movie’s script is based on a short story by pulp sci-fi author Frederic Brown, a writer with an O. Henry-like penchant for ironic twist endings. It’s a playful aping of his favorite artists and Del Toro speaks reverently in an interview years later with Criterion of the “raw power” of Bava’s work in Italian horror. He’s also typically self-effacing, pausing his reverie to cheerfully emphasize to the camera “you will find none of this in ‘Geometria.’ None! I am just expressing my love for it.”

He did go back to tinker with the rushed film festival version years later, fixing the music, futzing with the effects, and cutting it shorter by a minute and a half. He also redubbed all the voices himself in Italian just to underline the giallo connection, which is why the voicework in the top version is so hilariously weird. Here’s the original, longer version (in a bad transfer with subtitling) for the curious.

This short isn’t a horror film per se, more literally a found art project. Plenty of awkwardness, humor – intended and otherwise (I’m curious to learn more about the basketball team’s victory over cancer), and fabulous 90s video toaster effects. If there’s an undercurrent of horror, it’s in the inference of bad possibilities to be realized. A girl casually tells a story of embarrassment in way that seems blind to the real problem. American jingoism and the worst propensities for bullying meet in a sketch about Saddam Hussein. These are fleeting things, created to be remembered and regretted by a select few – things that would take on extra weight and scrutiny if broadcast on the Internet instead.

Schoenbrun is becoming more known for unconventional, creeping horror, with an aesthetic rooted in online archeological projects and a weary eye toward the Internet’s propensity for holding on to the world’s media and regurgitating it in new contexts. With videos created whole cloth to resemble an obscure section of cult pop culture (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow), it’s the interaction with the characters that give the videos their context. But in their films based on videos exhumed from anonymous dark corners of the web (here and A Self-Induced Hallucination), the excerpts can arrive with an uncanny emptiness. With these the viewer fills the role of the character giving meaning to the reclaimed A/V detritus, and how “The School is Watching” plays no doubt reflects each person’s own relationship to high school.

If nothing else it makes me grateful to have had my own pubescent foibles lost under the sands of time, for my embarrassing moments of growth – even harmless snapshots of them – to evaporate rather than live for years and decades on a server somewhere. Having the whole school watch is a rush, but the ability to have the school look away can be a gift, too.

(Hat tip to Greta The Narrator for pointing this one out!)