‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ review: Ondi Timoner’s provocative article looks at The World Ahead – SXSW

you want to feel old Contrary to popular portrayals of millennial youth as disenfranchised, politically lethargic and inactive, this documentary may be the bazooka needed to shatter all those cozy assumptions. So timely Ondi Timoner’s latest work is so timely that it premiered almost exactly as the collapse of the SVB made international headlines, and although that particular possibility is not considered here, it would not require much sophistication after the festival to bring their film up not to date. .

After last year Last flight home, an emotionally intense but beautifully calibrated meditation on her father’s right to assisted suicide, Timoner returns to her power, an uncanny ability to sense the vagaries of pop culture while simultaneously embracing them as they happen. With awards season now a year away, it’s hard to say whether the immediate relevance of The New Americans will ensure it stays the course given what just happened to the once certain Laura Poitras winner in the space of six months. But the world that Timoner discovers here is not going to change anytime soon.

After a jarring, penetrating overture that uses flashy lo-fi game footage in a way that ultimately more than pays off, the film opens with an excerpt from an interview with Jordan Belfort, the original Wolf of Wall Street. . This is soon followed by comments from the infamous Anthony Scaramucci, who spent six days in the White House as Donald Trump’s communications director. And when you suddenly realize that these two might just be the voices of reason — especially later, when The Mooch says, “How much madness can you take?” – only you has Pay attention.

Belfort makes a very good point when he says that the United States as we know it was founded by colonists fleeing reality, noting that one of the key factors in the “American Dream” is that “if you fail, let them start you over As a video game, in fact, and Belfort’s comments unwittingly reflect what would become the film’s main thesis, namely that the influence of gaming culture has broken down the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. The New Americans may be the first post-pandemic film to truly reflect how the Covid-19 lockdown has affected American culture, contextualizing not only the collapse of the SVB, but also the riots on January 6 – both of which are a direct or indirect result of isolated communities.

For more on America’s financial institutions, see Michael Moore’s 2009 film Capitalism: A Love Story is a very good and surprisingly unbiased introduction. The New Americans however, is very much in the now, especially with the recent rise of “retail traders” – ordinary citizens who work the stock market using information from sites such as Wall Street Bets and Robinhood. This subculture began two years ago when the stock price of GameStop, a well-known electronics store, became a thing, although a minor catch is that even this accessible, light-hearted film battle explains to the layman how The worked.

The look takes some getting used to, with lots of cartoonish CG imagery and, more importantly, memes that at first glance appear to be there as light relief, a fun kind of sedative. But to quote Marshall McLuhan, the visionary Canadian philosopher who’s kind of been forgotten since the things he predicted came out quite strikingly, the medium here really Is the message. We are exactly where we are now Because the balkanization of the way we consume information, where a tweet can be as loud as a headline. It also fills in a lot of information about cryptocurrency, its power and fallibility in a surprisingly human way and plays closely with SVB.

How we will process all this is still a mystery. But the comfort of this sometimes overwhelming flow of information is that Timoner is, as always, ahead of the curve and as alert and open to the questions her film raises as you are. Also the music impressive.

Title: The New Americans: Gaming a revolution
Director: Ondi Timoner
Time: 1 hour 42 minutes