4 am at a diner 6.6.2023

I saw this move, film01 by angelicism, who if you don’t know who angelicisim is he’s this british dude who has a substack where he writes insanely long and jargon filled posts about the new york city downtown scene. he uses a lot of big words and talks about NETWORK SPIRITUALITY which is about like the soul of the internet or whatever. i think angelicism is one of those things people pretend to read and understand so they can sound hip or whatever, like watching succession or saying you’ve finished gravitys rainbow. hes very online. last year he made a retard list and my roommate got on it which i thought was pretty funny. Like dude why don’t you move to America if you give so much of a shit about like no agency and milady and the mars review of books and twenty somethings who live in bushwick. It all comes off like he’s just mad he wasn’t born in America which well I can’t blame him, america’s a pretty good place to live all things considered.

Anyway he was posting for a while then he stopped and he made this movie called film01 which is also supposed to be called “l’history d’internet” or something I’m not looking up the title this guy isn’t even fucking French why should I give a shit. He had the premiere in Manhattan at 3 different theaters, the roxy, anthology, and the tribeca screening room. he made it this BIG DEAL about how there was WAITLIST and the ADDRESS for the screening would only be released an HOUR before the film started AND YOU COULDN’T SHARE IT WITH ANYONE…it was all so hush-hush…then I got to the roxy without a fucking ticket and the guys working the door didn’t give a shit and the theater was half empty anyway. so me and my buddies got in anyway without a tickets or getting off the waitlist. Nice job on your opsec angelicism!!! Hope all the effort was worth it. Should have spent more effort on your film than trying to secure the guest list.

Oh yeah the film sucked. Just dogshit. Well that’s not true the first two thirds were really good, the second act with this bit about this twitter poster chloe and AI and how life has no pathos is really interesting. There’s some really good montages and juxtapositions too in the first act. You have kingdom hearts clips colliding with a wind turbine on fire and its carrying the smoke around and around in a 360 motion, there’s another really good one with clips of spring breakers superimposed on clips from birth of a nation, another of a chinese girl doing parkour stunts until she falls off a building but before the fall the film pauses like it’s lagging or frozen out, it’s all really impressive, it captures the feeling of logging on to the internet and being assaulted with references within references and sub sub sub niches and algorithmically granted content and a sense that there’s a sort of non-collective hivemind generating and consuming all these videos and images and memes and gifs and posts and copypastas, and you’re a part of it too, the user, because you’re consuming and regurgitating and sharing and creating your own shit as well, feeding back the machine that’s subconsciously created this network that isn’t even really *real* in a physical sense, stored on server racks in a datacenter somewhere in north carolina or virginia or china, made real only through the network layer that these machines communicate between each other, protocols developing their own consciousness and sublayers and sense of meaning through the connections thrust upon them. Its all really cool!! And interesting and really well developed and told through clever editing and thought out clashes of content, it’s worth watching.

Then the third act starts and it just falls apart. It turns into a bad art student video where any respect for the audience is gone, it becomes him just trolling the audience with these painfully long clips of like two annoying French kids talking to each other on the street but theres a ton of reverb so you can’t hear shit, there’s a guy just like going on the new york city subway and walking around the met and the met cloisters like why, what does this have to do with anything? Ok he’s looking at artifacts at the met cool? Like why new york city? What does nyc have to do with any of this? The film doesn’t explain or bother to. Maybe its a irl scene thing like oh you’re watching the film in MANHATTAN and LOOK this MUSEUM is in MANHATTAN isn’t that COOL (im assuming this wont be streamed or anything im probably wrong). It ends with what feels like a 15 minute montage first of e girls faces then the same 10 pictures of sunsets and a mountain or something as if you’ve never seen the sun before. Maybe in England they don’t have pretty sunsets where the sky gets red?? It’s pretty cloudy and rainy over there most the time right? It’s all really excruciating and drawn out. The whole last hour feels like a joke perpetuated on the audience, mocking you for trying to take this film seriously and insulting you with this dumb drawn out shit that doesn’t add anything to what came before it. It's not even like shocking material like Vincent gallo getting his dicked sucked or anything, like christ at least offend me if you’re gonna waste my time! Don’t have like 15 minutes of a kid walking on a beach in total silence.

Im so annoyed at all this shit because I WANTED it to be good, I was brought in at the beginning and especially the middle, then the whole ending felt like a whole waste of time, like I was a retard for even caring about it at all. I LIKE slow drawn out art shit believe me, it’s not that, just like have something to say!! That’s all I want from art! What’s YOUR interpretation of the world? Juding from film01 I guess angelicism’s whole thing is, like I said earlier, is being really jealous he doesn’t live in manhattan’s chinatown neighborhood and isn’t doing mediocre cocaine with degenerates until 8 am in the morning.