Went to “The Skinamarink Experience” (presented by Beyond Fest and about as high-effort-cornball-kitsch as I’d expect from them) curious if a Q&A + high-quality presentation might give me a slightly better idea of where Ball’s coming from as a filmmaker. He’s on record as distinguishing “scary” from “creepy,” but I’m not sure his movie is either - I find it more “startley” than anything else. It’s a guy blowing up a balloon behind you for the express purpose of popping it - isn’t it more interesting to fill a balloon for the audience, leaving them with a full balloon and the knowledge that it could pop at any moment? A few moments towards the end I found successfully unnerving, which I didn’t my first time around - namely the sequence of vague still images and the ending, both notable for not, in fact, building to a loud sound (I wore earplugs - hey, the movie’s already got a ton of arbitrary filters on it, what’s one more - and it was still ridiculously loud) and shocking image. There are a handful of moments where Ball cuts from sound to silence, which are pretty consistently more compelling and effective than vice versa. In the Q&A, our host Mr. Patton Oswalt asked Mr. Ball if he ever felt the temptation to put any jumpscares in Skinamarink, to which Mr. Ball corrected “Patton, there are three fairly hard jumpscares in the movie!” He explained that he wanted to offer something to all audiences, the sort that want slow and droney and the kind who want discrete scares - he tried to split the difference; in response to my question about the influence of Michael Snow, he suggested that Skinamarink was his attempt to warp Wavelength into a crowdpleaser - he explained that he felt that with very few tweaks, conventional audiences could absolutely sit through movies like Snow’s. I think this is a total fool’s errand and firmly believe that conventional audiences can already sit through Wavelength as is (whether they would is a different question), and I think Skinamarink is almost completely lacking in any sort of formal rigor that might make it a successful mainstream mutation of Snow or Akerman, but hey, man, respect the hustle! Clearly it is, in fact, pleasing crowds, I’m happy to be the rare overly dogmatic-about-form asshole if it means weird swings like this play multiplexes (like the AMC Burbank! Er, one of them). A theatrical viewing offers an interesting contradiction - I think the grain actually works much better as visual texture when it fills your field of vision, but that also makes it extremely noticeable when the 10-or-so-second loop, well, loops. So many scenes that invite you to look as close as you can at this texture in search of an image when wham, a frame of grain is doubled cuz the loop is going in reverse - I can think of few other movies that so actively call your attention to their technical flaws, and in a movie I find to be largely defined by half-measures and questionable taste rather than all-out complete missteps, this seems to me to just be a glaring failure that I’m genuinely kind of stunned made it into the distribution copy!