That's Entertainment: Stopmotion (Robert Morgan, 2023)
It's like if "Whiplash" had evil clown dummies. Well, MORE of them.
One of the benefits of living with someone is that you get to know all of their various Bits and Guys; the little jokes and funny voices that inhabit them like a host of demons just waiting to come out. For some time now, my husband’s most frequent Guy has been Film Critic Guy, a guy who sounds like a mediocre film critic.
Film Critic Guy has many distinctive qualities — for example, he says he is “something of a cinephile” a lot. He refers to movies as “pictures” or “films;” he never calls them “movies.” One of his most important traits, though, is that if he doesn’t know what a movie is about, or doesn’t have anything to say about it, Film Critic Guy will describe it as “a love letter to the cinema.”
Mank? A love letter to the cinema. Cronenberg’s Crash? A love letter to the cinema. Eraserhead? A love letter to the cinema. The Jackass franchise? Well, you might say it’s something of a love letter to the cinema!
I don’t know why this is so funny to me. It just sounds like something a particularly boring critic would say. It sounds like what you imagine Academy Award voters saying to each other as they vote, once again, to give a Best Picture Oscar to a movie about how movies are the most important and wonderful movies in the whole movie-watching world.
Which is all to say: Stopmotion is one of my favorite horror movies of the past year. Normally, when I recommend a movie, I try to tie it into some kind of wider social or political context; I want to explain, not just why you’d want to watch the movie, but why you’d want to watch it right now. So, what is Stopmotion about? Well: It’s something of a love letter to the cinema. The stop-motion animated parts, at least.