‘Hello Dankness’ Review: Through the Looking Glass

In the pop-culture universe deconstructed — and reconstructed — in “Hello Dankness,” the Ninja Turtles parse the Pizzagate conspiracy idea, Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has misplaced sleep over the top of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential marketing campaign and a “Home Alone”-era Macaulay Culkin spends his pandemic watching “Tiger King.”

Written and edited (although not, strictly talking, directed) by Soda Jerk — the identify adopted by Dan and Dominique Angeloro, sibling video artists from Australia who dwell in New York — the entire film consists of repurposed visible and audio clips, digitally tweaked and deftly edited to work together with each other, and to current a sequence of associations concerning the United States from 2016 by the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Even earlier than its title card, “Hello Dankness” opens with a full airing of the Kendall Jenner advert that Pepsi pulled due to complaints it trivialized Black Lives Matter. If you assume what follows is outlandish — properly, simply have a look at that business, which may simply have run earlier than the film in a standard theater and performs as if that have been occurring. In the funniest interlude, the Trump administration’s first three years are diminished, of their entirety, to the intentionally slapdash, meme-inspiring YouTube “Garfield” parody “Garfielf,” with Trump’s pompadour pasted on high of the fats feline’s head.

Covid-induced stir craziness and the unfold of misinformation on social media are proven as contributing components to what the film portrays as a nationwide psychological breakdown. You don’t need to agree with all of Soda Jerk’s diagnoses to admire their ingenuity. “Hello Dankness” belongs to a venerable underground-film custom of treating refracted leisure as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” may assist however smile.

Hello Dankness
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters.