Y2K

Y2K: In an instance that could almost be classified as a bizarre pop – cultural lifting of forces and physics, there are recurrent youth nostalgia films and keeps proffering a memorable phase of the past which had been a dream for all the youth who experienced it cuts across the ages – but having to wait longer for the movie depicting it is still the order of the day.

“American Graffiti”, the debut film of the genre, was released almost a decade after in 1973 and was based in 1962. The film ‘Dazed and confused’ was narrated in 1976 and came out 17 years later in 1993. The storyline in “Adventureland” was in 1987 and it was released 22 years after that which was in the year 2009. There is this new label KYD, a millennial high school prom that screen last night at SXSW.

This specific subject matter takes place in December 31st in 1999 and December 31, 1999 is going to be released 25 years later. The same worries are revived every time someone makes a youth towards the late nineties very emerging pron for a 2024 storyline, which however won’t hit the screens until around 2054, if all of us are still alive.

That is all right as it seems to me that the reason the time which elapses between these youth nostalgia movies and the periods within which they are set is ever expanding, has to do with the advancement of media. Every decade, we have more of it – more screens, more images, more forms of technology that transform the mundane into a hall of distorted mirrors.

(In a way, “Dazed and Confused” wherein in the three decades since it was released makes a pronouncement in regards to the absence of technology in the ’70’s, has become that.) We are now in a phase in history where even the recent past is becoming and taking longer and longer to feel like the past. And ”Y2k”, as its title suggests, is set at a juncture when there was widespread panic about technology.

But it is also, very much, a late-’90s nostalgia movie, and for a while the director, former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Kyle Mooney, and his screenwriter Evan Winter, suspend us in the time-machine wooziness of that era. I’m leery of presenting us with characters as little-honored and embarrassing as the first AOL screen, without the black background and dial-up modem feedback, and then slowly bringing in an email and a video of Bill Clinton obscurely visible through many pixels.

“Y2K” is rife with the overload of historicity and nostalgia. A dirty local video rental. A CD compilation. The Pam and Tommy home video. Abercrombie. A white version of freestyling by the white kids. “Praise You” & “Tubthumping.”

Lest I forget, the last speeding and reproaching prohibitionist icon, the video-store clerk and the last-deficient trespasser in this case, played by Mooney and his softer features, admitting to drug-induced stupor and scruffy hippie dreads, Garrett – one of the most charming troll-like characters in a movie, voiced “yo” and what in a windy high pitched — most easily engaging parts of the 85-minute endeavor.

For a brief period, there is a deliberately employed “Y2K” that makes it seem as if we are witnessing a level of “Dazed in Graffiti Adventureland” meant to be for the dying ages of the millennium. The film commences on the last day of the year, and moves towards the east, both getting involved in the party held on the verge of the new millennium, and paying attention to two intelligent social misfits, which seems somewhat self-conscious reminiscence to ‘superbad’ films-’booksmart’.

Eli, the protagonist of the story, is the tall, cool and handsome pretty boy who turns out to be a “cousin” of sorts, what with the Culkinesque looks of Jaeden Martell, and, believe me, he plays a mismatched brother to Duncan.

The mouthpiece and fat one at body 7-Danny, a very Versatile Julian Dennison portrays him almost along similar lines as super bad Jonah Hill’s Seth except this time there is added frenzy (Hill is actually one of the producers here).

They woo and banter of whiplash, the inversed bravado and cow-nosed-sedated self-deprecation, and then they prepare themselves for heading to ‘Soccer’ Chris (whom the Australian rapper The Kid Laroi portrays) New Year’s Eve house party in the suburbs.

There is some assignment related to the event’s social. Eli has a thing for Laura (Rachel Zegler), a character that transcends every time-period and all wistfulness, the rather adored ‘popular-girl’. Most definitely not something that a kid like Eli born in all these eras is supposed to be able to achieve. Well, times change. Laura isn’t a prom-obsessed mean girl, That model is so ugone.

Dating myself a bit, she is a dense kid who is into the so-called “Новейшая компьтерная культура,” which, unlike in Eli’s time, is now considered cool. It’s quite tangible that the two have drifted towards being platonic flirts. The New Year’s Eve party is especially attractive: ‘Oh it’s 12, time to kiss who-whom‘. That is the minute after all the ageing drama that keeps playing in Danny’s head.

All of that is very tributchard and, I mean, in some way, very so-What. In the first movie he has directed, Mooney is good at making the party happen – the hiphop drunkeness drama, the ruckus of the different zones, the brazen hooking up and hooking. It is exhilarating; we know we have gone through this before but are all the more happy to take on this ride on the 1999 version of the fair.

But at this point the ride comes to a halt. It turns out that midnight has come. The fabled hour of Y2K. The lights go off and a moment later turn on again. But something has taken place.

Turns out, Y2K “is not a teenage party flick during the heyday of the craze.” The Y2K movie is a parody of a sci-fi disaster movie and all the Y2K worries came true. At the exact moment of some stupid new year celebration, all the devices do stop functioning.

Only to all come back, and work perfectly well. It turns out, Y2K is a sci fi machines gone rogue film. And yet, this is a Harvard prep dollhouses meets high school cheerleading movie. So how do the two blend?

In my book, not very well. Actually, let me refine that. It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the cheeky dystopian alien tech horror comedy that is the last hour of the film simply isn’t good.

The end-of-the-world scenario associated with Y2K starts in violence bloodshed when we witness what we can only term slumber party mayhem – Y2K apocal8 -In ‘Y2K the Y2K apocalypse starts off on a note of slasher grisliness. And upon each new blackout, the machines, rather than just switching off, also become killer devices.

We see the children stabbed with and cut to pieces with a microwave oven, a hand blender, and a power saw. At this point I thought we had entered Shaun of the Dead territory – and though the blood splattering quickly calms, yes, Y2K does indeed take on some zombie film characteristics.

The parts of the house appliances and pieces of the digital devices combine into a giant robot with a computer screen as its face; this wobbly T800 terminator robot is now both a killer and the spirit of the future machine era. They are the new world order. And they want our head on their plates!

Yet once Eli, Laura, and even two of the other kids escape to the woods or the emptied-streets (from where they see a picture of fire on the horizon), the action Erik Barbara Mullane Out on their own. But Garrett the stoner pops up, and Fred Durst pops up playing Fred Durst. Orient express the movie is boring.

Let alone the characters, who are out on their own take leave of the reality out of which they have traveled. The film lags. Out on their own, it’s lots of behind-the-scenes footage, then at one point you see, say. Yet Garrett the stoner pops up, and so does Fred Durst, playing himself. Now an ex-beastie boy of limp Bizkit after the Jan6 looks like a middle aged riot leading wannabe aspiring insurrections gone wrong. But when he finally wore his red cap Sxsw did the people go wild.

From an ideational point of view, ‘Y2K’ is an idea that belongs to 1999. The big idea of the movie is that this was the time when everyone crossed over into the digital world and similar to the internet and its devices, they became more machine than human.

Hence the monster machines in the movie are extensions of the self. Or something. But there’s another way to look at “Y2K.” However, the movie captures the fact that 1999 was more significant in terms of the history of fantasy — that it was the second key transition — this is the zooming in of the age that is yet to see a fantasy concept it cannot overdo.

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