Girl Internet Show: The Kati Kelli Mixtape
There’s no doubt young YouTube video maker and artist Kati Kelli had massive talent, both as an actress and a purveyor of wild, digitized video diaries and short films. But there’s also heart at the center of her phantasmagoric and socially incisive clips. In one of these clips, presented towards the end of Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape, Kati upends her flurry of costume-wielding party vids and satirical monologues to stare right into her camera and say “22 and I’ve done nothing with my life…. except be ugly”. We don’t know if this a young woman addressing emotional fissures in one of the most glaringly public ways imaginable, or yet another one of her characters jabbing at the confines of self, image, and online status. Either way, Kati Kelli is transfixing, and Jordan Wippell (who served as cinematographer on Kelli’s first and only short film, also presented here) and Jane Schoenbrun have compiled most of Kelli’s videos into a free-form eulogy that shows the versatile, comedic, and undeniably talented Kelli as the perfect embodiment of a youth growing up (and with) the internet as their best friend, essay diary, and Catholic confessional booth.
From dancing dolls to a host of wig and costume changes, Kati Kelli posted videos on YouTube under the moniker “Girl Internet Show” from 2013 until her untimely passing in 2019. Even her oral history of how she assumed this online name is something worthy of a John Waters outtake. And while costumes, ordinary videos of her cat slopping up food, and tales of ex-best friends may seem like snippets of curated nonsense mixed with everyday life that anyone could post and capture, Kelli reveals an innate ability for line reading and storytelling that’s extraordinary. I don’t know if her camera monologues and satirical characters are scripted out beforehand or not, but they’re the stuff of post-modern comedy gold (see her “Abigail Yates” story video).
But beyond two- and three-minute video clips, Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape also reveals the gradual evolution of Kelli as an artist and filmmaker. Closing this experiment with a short film completed by Kelli just a few days before her death, Wippell and Schoenbrun have salvaged Kelli’s swan song about a young woman who undergoes “Total Body Removal Surgery”. Full of thorny humor, and remarkably prescient for someone who crafted so much of her life as a blip and dot on a fluorescent screen zapped out to the anonymous masses, I’m so glad to be someone introduced to her digital work. It’s hard nowadays to parse out the nuggets of creativity in a society swallowed up by endless clips and never-ending content. We know there’s truth and beauty mixed in there, somewhere. We just need to boil it out, and thankfully, Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape, has been presented, preserved, and salvaged for all its weird and wondrous worth.
The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee
Despite the questionable need to plant a sound-alike voice over on the limp body of a marionette Christopher Lee, I found this documentary about the actor to be endearing and informative. I suppose the inclination to craft an overview of such a legend’s life without the mire of talking head interviews and clips is warranted, but, when the talking head interviews and clips are so strong, why muck up the process with distracting animation? Regardless, Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee does the job of giving Lee the posthumous praise he rightly deserves.
There’s so much here I didn’t know about Lee, namely his secretive post-World War II service and the distaste he held for many of the films that made him famous. Just watch how he ruefully chides a reporter for calling him “the king of horror” at his knighthood ceremony in 2009. As someone who used acting as an escape from his predetermined life of “international diplomacy” thanks to his royal lineage, one would imagine Lee was eternally grateful for the Hammer films that made him an international star instead. However, this seems to be a common reaction for anyone typecast and who then spends the rest of their career trying to be versatile.
Alternatively informative and sweet (i.e. his relationship with Peter Cushing and the emotions that swelled up in him during his first day of the Lord of the Rings shoot), The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee also makes me realize just how many Lee films there are to see out there.
Daddy’s Head
I’ve noticed a subtle shift in the horror film setting over the past few years. Gone are the spiral-staircased haunted mansions (unless the filmmaker really wants to pack nostalgia), replaced by post-modern surroundings where coziness is long sketched-out and windows allow any evil to observe it’s human prey like tiny figures in a miniature.
Benjamin Barfoot’s trauma horror Daddy’s Head is the nadir of the post-modern house horror story, encasing young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) and recently widowed Laura (Julia Brown) in a stark glass and stone setting that not only was designed by the deceased father, hence echoing his tastes onto every movement, but hollow with the duo’s sense of loss.
It’s in these confines that young Isaac and oft inebriated Laura begin to see a creature scurrying around the edges of their home at night with a face that looks eerily like that of their deceased loved one. Yes, Barfoot’s title is more than allegory. Things only increase when they find a wooden structure in the nearby woods. Also built by the deceased, it begins to call to Isaac in forlorn ways.
A film full of dread and promise, Barfoot shows a keen eye for terrifying images (and perhaps more unsettling, sound). However, Daddy’s Head also reveals the shortcomings of the horror genre, which is build to a jump scare and then cut to the next morning, unsure of how to marry terror with a formal narrative.
Premiering on Shudder next month.
Fantastic Fest runs through Thursday September 26th in Austin, Texas. Check out https://www.fantasticfest.com/ for tickets and details. Stay tuned for continuing coverage.
Dallas Film Now. 