Randomized Animotion: Take Dump 7/23/26

Boy, was I thrilled to see Obsession is on Peacock already! Some people are angry about the film's quick move to streaming, despite the sleeper success its enjoyed in theaters. It was still in the Top 10 last weekend! But, while I’m glad the children of today found themselves an old school watercooler/date movie to make bigger than the studios expected, Obsession has been out for two and a half months now. It’s time to let losers who either can’t afford, or can’t bother with, leaving the couch, join the conversation. 

An old-school watercooler/date movie is what Obsession is, albeit within the post-A24 context of modern Hollywood. The early sequences of an anxious young guy crushing on his cute co-worker, frustrating his more boorish friend, are totally Fast Times In Ridgemont High, or Swingers, or whatever earnest portrait of conflicted youth you recall most fondly. Unfortunately, any true attempt at emotional intimacy between the leads is ruined by a magic, wish-granting stick. The boy asks an inanimate rod for the girl to love him more than anyone else, and suddenly she’s hiding in corners, grinning psychotically, and basically acting like a follower of Paimon from Hereditary.

It’s not entirely clear why she’s gone so far beyond clingy. The wish wasn’t that she was “crazy” about him, just that she loved him more than anyone else. Though there’s hints of psychiatric issues in her past, like the high school nickname “Freaky Nikki,” the supernatural tinge to her behavior undercuts the potential metaphor for dealing with a romantic partner’s baggage or mental instability. Thankfully, writer/director Curry Barker seems to grasp this. Where most films of this type would bog down in exposition about the “rules,” Obsession pointedly grows more absurd and nightmarish whenever someone is trying to make sense of it all. And while Michael Johnston - intentionally or not - seems noncommittal and underbaked as the male lead, watching Inde Navarrette’s Nikki swing from amiable charm to psychotic agony to Girl From The Ring shit is a hoot. 

If the 26-year-old Barker isn’t on the same level as Ari Aster or the Philippou brothers, in terms of terrifying poignancy, he knows how to make it not matter. Obsession plays with sexual frustration, insecurity, the distance between a crush and a relationship, between yearning and wilding, but doesn’t claim to a thesis about any of this. Which might make Obsession a better date movie than one that did. Couples can just bond over how wild it was, and decide for themselves whether the walk back to the car should go deeper. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

When the 2024 Eno documentary, concerning Brian Eno (best known for producing James’ Laid and a noise for Microsoft), was released to theaters, it used a computer program that randomly pulled and connected a sampling from a large pool of scenes built from hundreds of hours of footage and interviews. This was a perfectly Eno-esque concept, promising a sustainable novelty, not unlike his Oblique Strategies cards and instrumental pieces built from tape loops. No two showings of the film would be alike. (Eno opens with a title card explaining that the program is not AI in the common parlance, with the scenes created entirely by humans, and then basically being sorted by a randomizer. Eno’s ability to grasp the fun of “generative” programs, while refusing to let that dignify greed or distract from existential threats, is refreshing in this time of mercenary, if not lemming-like, behavior from the arts establishment.)

Eno is now on the Criterion Channel, with a similar, but distinct concept: each month, the streaming service will post a new edit of the film generated by the program. I’m not sure if they’re making one edit and posting it, or making multiple edits and posting the best of a batch. If I lean towards assuming the latter, it’s only because I found watching the June and July edits so rewarding, individually and collectively, that it’s hard to believe there was no degree of human curation involved. The former had a little more name-dropping and a lot more U2, the latter focused on his philosophical concepts and footage of him mucking around with knobs in the ‘70s. Both opened with him dancing in front of his keyboard, both feature (different) clips of Laurie Anderson reacting to Oblique Strategies cards, and both had him, near the end, explaining why he doesn’t eat breakfast anymore. Otherwise, the content was totally different. I can't swear the breakfast monologue will be there in August, but it's not up to me.

It’s hard to say how Eno plays for someone who hasn’t been fascinated by him for decades. The program must be designed to pick scenes in a vaguely chronological way, so viewers always get a vague sense of who this guy is and why he’s of note. But there’s considerable assumption involved that you’ll be just as fine watching him talk about the Portsmouth Sinfonia or Coldplay, depending where the roulette wheel landed. For people already familiar with his accomplishments and into the mystique, this is heaven. Once a month, I can take a weekend nap with the movie on, letting new anecdotes, observations, and visuals like John Cale in a Hawaiian shirt recording 1990’s Wrong Way Up, blur together with those already processed, Eno getting longer and richer in my mind. If it randomized every time you pressed play, you’d go insane. Even weekly edits would be too demanding. But a new edit once a month is perfect for casual appreciation or discussion with friends. POPCORN CLASSIC.

Audiobooks! I listen to them a lot these days. Here’s a bunch I enjoyed recently:

Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
Stephen King, Revival
Stephen King, You Like It Darker
Joyce Carol Oates, Zero Sum: Stories
Iain Read, We Spread
Sinophagia: A Celebration Of Chinese Horror (anthology edited by Xueting C. Ni)
Final Cuts: New Tales Of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles (anthology edited by Ellen Datlow)

As you can see, the short story is my bread, and thrills are my butter. Though I have been indulging in novels as well, I'm only mentioning them if I finish them. Revival, about a rock musician in recovery who never got over meeting a real life Dr. Frankenstein as a kid, stuck out as an intriguing slow burn. I also liked how We Spread (by the author of I'm Thinking About Ending Things) pulled off a disquieting "just because you've got senile dementia, that doesn't mean they're not after you" joke with true ambiguity. But I mostly prefer a tight bedtime story, to a protracted novel, when it comes to the spooky.

More takes are available by request at anthonyisright at gmail dot com.