'Nerve' Is A Critique Of Internet Entitlement & Cruelty In An Age Of Gamergate

nERVE

Nerve is named after an app that drives the film’s drama, a mobile game that mobilises armies of willing participants into two camps. There’s the players, who perform outlandish dares to accrue real-world money and status, and the watchers, who lurk, anonymously, in the background, ponying up the crowdsourced cash for the competitors, and making entertainment-dollar demands as they go. It's a timely premise for a teen-movie, and one that directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost — the dudes whose debut Catfish remains a totem for the internet age — manage to turn into a piece of pleasing popcorn entertainment.

"The film’s biggest influence is David Fincher’s The Game: following its lead character into a game that takes over their life, grows increasingly outlandish, and teaches lessons."

Nerve is a critique of internet entitlement and cruelty in an age of Gamergate, but it’s also a one-wild-night, you-go-girl teen movie. Its game symbolises the internet in its many-faceted functions: sure, it's a horrible place where horrible trolls do horrible things, but it’s also a young person’s portal unto the world, a gateway to a new identity, to notoriety, to liberation. Nerve delivers a lecture on the ills of the online day, but also a narrative of fantasy fulfilment.

It begins with Emma Roberts’ everygirl teen, a sensible high-school student and perpetual wallflower, who grows tired of the condescension of her show-offy best friend, Emily Meade. Meade seeks validation in male attention and social-media performance, both of which intersect neatly in the world of Nerve. So, Roberts joins up in a pique of rivalry, hits the ‘player’ option, and hands over access to her bank account and every social media profile. Soon, she’s making out with Dave Franco, riding on his motorcycle, dashing about the New York night clad in thieved mermaid-y haute couture gown and sneakers, rocketing up the game’s leaderboard via ♥s and $$. Almost instantly, she’s become Internet Famous, people pulling out their phones for snaps whenever she passes by.

Schulman and Joost make this a blast to watch: Roberts and Franco are super-charismatic leads (if essentially generic characters), the directors cook up a host of great POV shots (from the perspective of phones, players undertaking terrifying dares, inside paper bags), and their photographic palette is all twinkling city lights and neon possibilities. They drew inspiration from Wong Kar-wai, no less, for that sense of the colour-saturated, romantic night, but the film’s biggest influence is David Fincher’s The Game: following its lead character into a game that takes over their life, grows increasingly outlandish, and teaches lessons.

Things, of course, turn duly dark, the watchers growing hostile, Roberts soon on-the-run, futilely trying to escape an entity that owns her online data. She’s made prisoner of the game, but there’s no hints of technophobia here: Schulman and Joost accept the central role of devices in modern life, and want to show only the range of possibilities for any application. Nerve delivers a due warning on the internet’s darkest issues: online bullying and public shaming, mob mentality and the safety of anonymity, and the access to private information by apps and, indeed, hackers. In such, it’s less a picture of a digital dystopia, more an exploration of the contemporary climate; less a film about technology, more about the human beings who use it. Which is pretty heady teen-film territory.

YOGA HOSERS

Anyone who saw Kevin Smith’s Tusk would remember the film for its bugfuck central premise, whether they were repulsed or impressed by it. Michael Parks, via Human Centipede-esque home-surgery, turns Justin Long into a walrus, thereby earning the film a place in cult-movie infamy.

I can’t imagine a single viewer left Tusk wanting to see more of the unfriendly teenage convenience store clerks who appeared in one unmemorable scene. Or wanting to see more of Johnny Depp’s wholly unfunny turn as Clouseau-sque Québécois PI, all prosthetic nose, fake moustache, comic cross-eyes and sketch-comedy-worthy Frog accent. Or, speaking of accents, that anyone left Tusk wanting to hear more “‘jokes’” — let’s use that term very lightly — about how Canadians say “aboot” and “eh?”.

And, yet, here comes Yoga Hosers, a movie that’s so bad it may represent a nadir in Kevin Smith’s career. Just marinate on that for a second: a low-point in two decades of post-Clerks dung-hurling that has essentially been one long nadir. It’s 88-minutes of nepotism, cronyism, dicking around, hockey sticks, terrible CGI and cut-rate direction; doing little-to-nothing, at any point, to justify its existence.

Those convenience store clerks return, and they’re played — notably — by Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith, AKA the daughters of the dudes behind this thing. IRL, the lead pair have been friends since kindergarten, and their obvious rapport is one of the few things in Yoga Hosers that works. The characters they’re playing, however, are cheap and easy totems of Kids These Days: forever staring at their phones, obsessed with getting likes and overusing the word ‘like’. They attend endless yoga classes with Long’s yogi, who bristles with rage issues, a false beard and the kind of zany mugging that passes for comedy herein.

"There’s an audaciousness to putting an idea so idiotic to screen, but the finished film is clear evidence that one ridiculous, pot-inspired concept does not a movie make."

There’s plenty of other one-note caricatures: Tony Hale plays a Bustery dad/boss, Natasha Lyonne his trashy, bitchy, big-hair-and-big-cleavage love-interest. Like Long, old Tusk alums Génesis Rodríguez and Haley Joel Osment play new roles, as screechy PE teacher and feckless history-book Nazi, respectively. There’s a Stan Lee cameo. Vanessa Paradis shows up, just to keep things even more in the Depp family; and, then, so does Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach. There’s Jason Mewes, too, to show Smith’s loyalty runs deep. And when Harley Quinn yells “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!”, the director is cravenly pandering to fans in the most depressing way.

Smith himself is even on screen, CGI’d to infinity as a marauding mob of Bratzis, murderous foot-tall Nazis made out of bratwurst, who serve as Yoga Hosers’ own WTF moment. There’s an audaciousness to putting an idea so idiotic to screen, but the finished film is clear evidence that one ridiculous, pot-inspired concept does not a movie make.

Once these wiener-monsters need to be explained away, this brings about the nadir of this nadir: a mind-alteringly awful turn by Ralph Garman. He plays the cryogenically-frozen Nazi scientist behind the Bratzis, which involves him delivering a sub-’Allo! ’Allo! German accent. Yet, that’s just the start of things, as soon Garman is — for no known reason, of either narrative coherence or comic worth — doing impressions of Al Pacino (hoo-ha! in the house), Arnold Schwarzenegger and Syl Stallone. They’re the kind of dad-jokes that would be met with eye-rolling resentment at a family dinner, yet here are deemed worthy of inclusion in a film, and somehow, even, deemed supposedly funny.

It turns out that Garman, whose cinematic credits involve some tiny roles in (shudder) Seth MacFarlane movies, is Smith’s podcast co-host; and that, given the film itself is billed as a “SModcast” production, his appearance may’ve been mandatory. The fact that I had absolutely no idea who this cringe-worthy human was whilst watching — suffering through, really — Yoga Hosers could, in the small minds of Smith’s legion of insufferable fan-broze, disqualify me from critiquing it. Hell, it clearly does for Smith himself, given the film makes “‘jokes’” — again, the word is used very lightly — about art critics being sub-human, worthy objects of a Final Solution.

Beginning with 2011’s Red State, Smith has set out to make films outside of the regular channels of studio production, on his own terms. Complete independence and artistic freedom sound great in theory, but Yoga Hosers shows the dark side of that idea: not since The Room has a film been more begging for a dissenting voice to stand up to its director. It’s a vanity project that’ll please only its maker, a textbook exercise in enabling.

Smith’s claims that he makes films only for himself make for the ultimate cop-out, a way of inuring thems from any (very legitimate) criticism. Yoga Hosers’ abysmal critical reception won’t be a commentary on its awfulness, the self-justifying logic goes, because it wasn’t made for critics. But, clearly, the film wasn’t made for anyone else, either; unless you’re one of Smith’s friends and family. Yoga Hosers is one dude pleasing himself first and foremost, but that doesn’t make it a work of unfettered artistic singularity, just pure cinematic masturbation.

GIRL ASLEEP

In Rosemary Myers’ debut film, adolescence is a shadowy nightmare from which you’ll, one day, eventually, wake. Girl Asleep delivers Bethany Whitmore as a perpetually-embarrassed teen who, in wood-panelled suburban Adelaide in the ’70s, is thrown into the terror of her first day at a new school. She’s befriended by geeky, frizzy-haired Harrison Feldman, and makes enemies of bitchy Maiah Stewardson; teenaged drama, as ever, reverberating at end-of-the-world tenor.

The horrors of high-school come home — literally — to roost, when her parents (Matthew Whittet, all moustache and tiny shorts, and Amber McMahon, all big hair and retro housewifery) send out mass invitations to her 15th birthday party. When the night comes, there’s choreographed dance numbers, public humiliation via song (Stewardson performing a number lovingly titled You’ve Got No Tits), and, eventually, a plunge deep into the adolescent subconscious; a Wizard Of Oz-ish dreamworld where figures from her life are reimagined as fairy-tale totems.

In its opening stretches, Myers cribs liberally from the cinematic playbook of Wes Anderson: symmetrical framing, mannered delivery, bright primary colours, cutesy costumes. When Girl Asleep tilts into its dreamworld, all the hand-crafted, distinctively-DIY, very non-CGI stylings seem more inspired by The Mighty Boosh. It’s charming stuff if you’ve got the stomach for tweeness, and certainly a singular work in the rarely-whimsical world of Australian cinema.