{"id":12843,"date":"2018-11-06T21:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T03:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12843"},"modified":"2018-11-04T16:18:26","modified_gmt":"2018-11-04T22:18:26","slug":"the-human-surge-2016-eduardo-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12843","title":{"rendered":"The Human Surge (2016, Eduardo Williams)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mostly wanted to watch this so I&#8217;d stop getting it confused with <em>Human Flow<\/em>, but also it has an interesting description, a killer poster, and four-star reviews from some Respected Critics.  Maybe re-reading the writeups before watching would&#8217;ve helped, since I didn&#8217;t enjoy this at all.  Smeared handheld shaky cam indifferently follows people around, then follows someone else &#8211; three aimless boys with shitty jobs (at least one has been fired) in three different countries.  No lighting either, and I&#8217;m wondering why this is even a movie, then something amazing finally happens an hour in, when the camera follows a kid peeing and unexpectedly goes inside an anthill, providing a smooth transition to a new segment along with a memorable visual metaphor.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image18\/humansurge.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Won a top prize at Locarno (same section as <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/12521\">The Challenge<\/a><\/em>, <em>Destruction Babies<\/em>, <em>Donald Cried<\/em>).  On letterboxd, Autumn responded to the &#8220;fascinating visual scheme,&#8221; which I looked for but did not detect, Felipe calls &#8220;the image texture a true aesthetic weapon,&#8221; which I don&#8217;t guess I&#8217;m a fan of.  Vadim raves about the movie&#8217;s originality in Filmmaker, Cinema Scope voted it a film of the year, and after reading Leo Goldsmith&#8217;s article, I can finally wrap my stupid head around the reasons for everyone&#8217;s formal interest.  Glenn Kenny <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/02\/movies\/the-human-surge-review.html\">in the Times<\/a> has a more mixed reaction:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A scene of teenage boys engaging in tentative sex play with one another for a webcam show is presented with sufficient flatness of affect to make a viewer suspect that Mr. Williams is also interested in blurring the lines between verisimilitude and tedium.  Just when you think you&#8217;ve got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective.  While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mostly wanted to watch this so I&#8217;d stop getting it confused with Human Flow, but also it has an interesting description, a killer poster, and four-star reviews from some Respected Critics. Maybe re-reading the writeups before watching would&#8217;ve helped, since I didn&#8217;t enjoy this at all. Smeared handheld shaky cam indifferently follows people around, then [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,2496,629,2494,2195,1668,634,2495],"class_list":["post-12843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-ants","tag-argentina","tag-eduardo-williams","tag-flood","tag-mozambique","tag-philippines","tag-webcam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12843"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12867,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12843\/revisions\/12867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}