Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

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Glowingwabbit
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#26 Post by Glowingwabbit » Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:57 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 2:39 pm
I'm not exactly surprised that I'm seemingly the only one on Earth beating the drum for Detention as one of the best films of the last decade
I'd place it in my top 10 of the decade. I'd say I've rewatched this and Spring Breakers more than any other American film this past decade. I actually hated it the first time I saw it, but revisited after reading some stuff Steven Shaviro wrote about it on his blog. It really caught on after that and I've come to enjoy it more and more with each revisit as there really is so much stimuli (too much for one viewing) to take in. I can't think of any other film that captures the insanity of our current moment of social media and pop culture deluge as well this one. So perhaps it's too soon for this type of film.

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knives
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#27 Post by knives » Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:41 pm

I was actually just thinking about this as I had just watched Happy Death Day 2U which has a lot of Kahn in its DNA.

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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#28 Post by Glowingwabbit » Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:47 pm

knives wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:41 pm
I was actually just thinking about this as I had just watched Happy Death Day 2U which has a lot of Kahn in its DNA.
I can see that. I wouldn't be surprised to see more films this coming decade that have a similar DNA even if the creators aren't influenced by Kahn directly.

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knives
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#29 Post by knives » Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:48 pm

One can only hope.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#30 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:53 pm

Coincidentally I placed a reserve for this last week for the horror project but it's still in transit. I expect to get to it this weekend.

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sinemadelisikiz
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#31 Post by sinemadelisikiz » Wed Feb 05, 2020 7:30 pm

Y'all aren't alone. I'd easily go to bat for this movie. Like Glowingwabbit, it's a film I like more and more each time I see it, and I've rewatched it a lot in the last decade. It's become one of my favorites and I don't think I would have checked it out or even heard of it if domino didn't sing its praises early on, so thanks for that!
I'm surprised that cinema like this hasn't caught on more, since this (and maybe Scott Pilgrim too) is the best examples of the kind of multitasking, over-caffeinated reality that comprises an increasing amount of human life in the 21st century. You could argue that the modern blockbuster is just as visually chaotic, but Detention is just so fun and doesn't die from over-seriousness. More Bugs Bunny than Transformers, you could say.

Twbb, I can't say it's really a horror film anymore than it's a teen comedy, body horror, sci-fi, or satire. It reminds me of descriptions I've heard a lot of modern music, where genre is pretty much irrelevant now and the lines between pop, rap, R&B, etc and so blurred as to be pointless. Still highly recommended, natch, and from the horror thread it looks like you have a more generous definition of the genre than I do, so it may work for you!

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domino harvey
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#32 Post by domino harvey » Wed Feb 05, 2020 7:50 pm

I think he may be going off my spec 100 I posted for the Horror List, wherein several of those question mark choices he's sought out were already designated by me! I agree with you to the extent that I think the film is its own thing beyond "Horror," but given the slasher movie and body horror elements running throughout, it's undeniably part of the genre... and like a dozen others! Glad to hear from more fans, wabbit, knives, and sine. Don't let us fool you, though: I think many members of this board would fucking hate this movie-- it's pitched at a level you either meet and engage with or you suffer through in torture (or, more likely, cry uncle and hit eject). It's a lot harder for me to imagine an ambivalent reaction than an effusive one in either direction

This film also has my second favorite cut to end credits music cue of the decade, behind the untoppable in any decade Killer Joe

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#33 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Feb 05, 2020 8:14 pm

It’s actually more complicated than that though not very interesting. I was going off of a different list of yours, was one of the few I hadn’t seen, looked it up and saw it defined as horror online, so maybe more unanimous than you think! From your descriptions it sounds like I’ll love it- not just the genre mixing but the perversity of generational attacks. Looking forward to reporting back in this thread shortly

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mfunk9786
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#34 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Feb 05, 2020 8:16 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Feb 05, 2020 7:50 pm
This film also has my second favorite cut to end credits music cue of the decade, behind the untoppable in any decade Killer Joe
The Hateful Eight gets me every time

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domino harvey
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#35 Post by domino harvey » Wed Feb 05, 2020 8:57 pm

I remember that ending scene but could not tell you what music played after it

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mfunk9786
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#36 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Feb 05, 2020 9:02 pm

Here you go, although I suppose the fact that you don't remember makes me off the mark re: it being so memorable!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#37 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Feb 05, 2020 9:12 pm

My vote goes to The House That Jack Built. It was very on-the-nose but extremely fitting to the middle finger, and possibly self-reflexive, ending and made me smile. Recently, Perdrix’s did the same but for very different reasons!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#38 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Feb 07, 2020 12:03 am

Nothing can prepare one for this experience, which is the first indication that this should be required viewing for those interested in bold experimentation with the medium. knives’ Happy Death Day 2U comparison is good but I was also reminded of the Scary Movie series (in the best possible way) for its unfiltered collage of shameless gags, though it has the smarts of the Landon film, The State company, and like a melting pot of the most imaginatively unhinged comedians of the 90s and beyond. I’d say in a weird way it was like the opposite of Tati’s Playtime where instead of populating a shot with a bunch of subtle visual jokes, this is a series of relentless tumbling eclectic ideas, from visual or verbal, to cultural and social, to broad genre and specific references, and then just random ridiculousness that has nothing to do with anything, established through the subjective experience of a psychedelic-amphetamine speedball. It’s a case of taking everything - and I mean everything - that popped into the head of its writers and throwing it at the wall to see what sticks, and this is a film that could not have been conceived of or worked one bit if it was carefully conceived or peer edited with reserve. This is unapologetic stream of consciousness, taking all the self-awareness of cultural collectivism and clashing perspectives to find a common ground of bewilderment. Some of the best gags involve a gen x view of millennials worshiping gen x for all the wrong reasons, while not being declarative and leaving room for the confession that this view is just as ‘unfair’ as the behavior they’re exploiting! It’s really a no holds barred deprecating exercise that admits the bias and thus gives itself rope by becoming part of the joke. I’m just rambling, because I don’t know how to actually talk about this movie, other than to talk about the Canadian kid who is hilarious in the vegetarian debate and well everything, the dialogue’s density of wit juxtaposed with one-offs about glow-in-the-dark body fluids or else something just as random, and the playing with non sequiturs that take unique transitory concepts and twists them to become new narrative signifiers. I think more than any of the actual nods, I loved the basic social jabs that are funny outside of any specific cultural awareness, so please know that this can be enjoyed even if you’ve been cryogenically frozen for a couple decades as long as you remember what developing around peers was like. I don’t know if I’m going to wind up loving this as much as some here, this is just as stream of thought as the film, but I see myself revisiting it often and catching something new every time. If nothing else, it’s one of the most original movies I’ve ever seen and must be seen to be believed.

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domino harvey
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#39 Post by domino harvey » Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:28 am

Fun fact: Gord is played by Canadian battle rapper Organik

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The Curious Sofa
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#40 Post by The Curious Sofa » Sat Mar 28, 2020 8:37 pm

Another thumbs up here. Detention has been on my radar for a while but I only got round to watching it tonight. There is nothing I can add to what has been written here, apart from that it’s been among the few things to genuinely give me joy over these last few awful weeks of being stuck indoors. For the first five minutes I thought it might become irritating, after half an hour I never wanted it to end. I can’t think of another film I’ve seen in the last few years so packed with ideas and jokes and so relentlessly fun.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#41 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Mar 28, 2020 8:52 pm

As knives mentioned upthread Happy Death Day 2U is pretty similar in its inventiveness so I’d recommend watching the first film and then that one if you haven’t already.

Are any of Kahn’s other films worth seeking out?

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swo17
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#42 Post by swo17 » Sat Mar 28, 2020 9:02 pm

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

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knives
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#43 Post by knives » Sat Mar 28, 2020 9:41 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 8:52 pm
As knives mentioned upthread Happy Death Day 2U is pretty similar in its inventiveness so I’d recommend watching the first film and then that one if you haven’t already.

Are any of Kahn’s other films worth seeking out?
Yes. His music videos are fairly generic, but his racing movie is a great parody on the level
Of Lord Love a Duck.

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The Curious Sofa
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#44 Post by The Curious Sofa » Sun Mar 29, 2020 4:37 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 8:52 pm
As knives mentioned upthread Happy Death Day 2U is pretty similar in its inventiveness so I’d recommend watching the first film and then that one if you haven’t already.

Are any of Kahn’s other films worth seeking out?
I've seen both of the Happy Death Day movies and enjoyed them very much, but they now seem sedate in comparison to Detention.

I'm going to track down Kahn's most recent film Bodied which was critically better received than Detention. Maybe that means it's not as good ? Following that logic, then Torque should be the greatest film ever made, it even gets dissed in Detention.

I also watched The Hunt last night, which tries for something in the ballpark of Detention and mostly falls flat. I liked Craig Zobel's Compliance a lot but his two films since have made me wonder if that was a fluke. The British horror satire Severance did something similar far better.

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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#45 Post by Cde. » Sun Mar 29, 2020 10:44 am

Bodied is easily one of the best comedy films of the past decade.

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Never Cursed
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#46 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Jan 05, 2021 4:49 am

Prior to seeing this, I was only familiar with Joseph Kahn as a director of what I thought were fairly middling music videos for popstar and godhead-to-some Taylor Swift. Bombastic, overedited, and too reliant on tacky visual effects, everything of his that I saw (with the exception of his toned-down video for Delicate) left me with little more than the cinematic equivalent of a breakfast cereal aftertaste. It somehow escaped my notice that, a couple years before making the videos to which I so passionately objected, Kahn had performed some kind of magic act and pushed this aesthetic within a feature so far past the boundaries of taste and human sensory comprehensibility that the result sort of horseshoe-theoried its way to greatness. Put differently, I loved this hyper-energetic-ass movie almost beyond words.

True, the film is overstimulated to the point where things like Nerve and Euphoria (the latter of which was surely influenced by this both in form and in pithiness) seem restrained in comparison, but the film uses this feeling of total overload to analyze both the exhausting act of processing in a world moving too fast and the use of nostalgic constructions of the familiar as a method of avoiding this process of processing through retreat into the comfortable. All information in this film is delivered at a bewildering pace, with ideas introduced, exploited, and overdone before the acknowledgement of such can reach the higher parts of one's brain (this of course being an effective simulation of learning and experiencing through the fast-paced newer forms of media). One of the major rhetorical tools the film uses to communicate these ideas are the duelling references to the pop culture of the 1990s and the early 2010s, thrown out at a speed and with a rakish cynicism that even a clued-in viewer can miss them easily. Any viewer of something reflexive like this has no doubt seen any number of works that use these references as a rather direct method of establishing feelings of familiarity/relatability/comfort in the feeling of inclusion, but Detention goes further through the importance of these signifiers to our overstimulated characters.
SpoilerShow
A good example of this can be found through the character of Ione, or more accurately her mother Sloane in Ione's body. For the first half of the film, the "Ione" of 2011 behaves so constantly as a stereotype of 1990s teen girl protagonists that it is distracting even for a reference-obsessed film such as this. When the audience learns of the body-switching plot (wherein Ione has chosen to live in 1992 and Sloane in 2011, each through the other's bodies), part of the shock of the twist is that it recontextualizes the references spat out with machine-gun regularity by 2011-Ione: they aren't (just) a distractingly audience-manipulative character trait, they are all that the brain-swapped Ione knows and can reference in a world moving much faster than someone in 1992 could be used to. 1992 Ione, the real Ione, is by contrast much more comfortable, able to effortlessly exist in a world that she has both already consumed through osmosis and she can add to through knowledge of the future (indeed, time-traveler Ione has already added to the collective pool of reference - she has invented the word guac!).

There are many lessons one can take from this self-dependent referentialism, but what I choose to take from it is a (not negative) sense of inescapability from the pummeling manner in which the world is delivered to the Gen Z crowd this movie focuses upon. When confronted with the quite frankly exhausting manner in which the world is presented to someone of this generation, a natural logical response is to retreat into some form of reference, to view the world in terms that one has already processed and come to understand independently. Trouble arises when one realizes that such notions of the referenced thing, both self-generated and derived from larger cultural understanding, are inherently colored by the impossibility of removing one's ideas of these things from the incomprehensibility of all the other stimuli (that is to say, for instance, "Guac" wasn't "invented" by the real Ione in a cultural and mental vacuum, but rather was the product of several preconceived and biased notions). These nostalgic escapes don't reflect the past with any accuracy (obviously) or ability to relieve us of the pressures of normal experience even though they feel like they do, but rather they provide a better method of processing and responding to those stimuli through the comparison of things already understood. We see examples of this throughout the movie: two characters study and refer to Patrick Swayze and Steven Seagal to "learn" how to fight each other; one character attempts to give himself the confidence to seduce another by play-acting as Captain Picard (with this attempted seduction failing because the seducer has fatally misjudged Picard's appeal as a sexual object(!) on the part of the seductee), and so forth.
Reading the contents of that spoiler box back, I'm worried that my arguments seem like a bit much. Was that a bit much for this very surface-level enjoyable film? Ignoring the larger value of the thematic stuff discussed in the spoiler-box, this film also possesses the distinct strength of being one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. The jokes and one-liners come so fast that some of them just don't have space to land, but the hit-to-miss ratio is just incredibly high for something as deliberately anarchic as this - basically every line is a wonderful aphorism ready to be printed on something that would ten years ago be described as "ironic." And I guess I should note before concluding here that my highly positive response to this film has definitely been influenced by my affinity for other films like this (I definitely seem to gravitate towards stylized films of introspective or humorously disaffected youth examining their own preconceptions and cognition - my two favorite movies of the past decade can be described in exactly those terms) as well as my general positivity towards seeing interesting depictions of my fellow members of Gen Z. I certainly can understand why this film was poorly received and why someone particularly removed from its wavelength would hate it, and I can at the same time happily admit an immensely strong personal bias in favor of the film. There is no way in hell I could have given this film anything resembling a fair shake, and there is no way that I could not have loved it. It was made for me like those Thoroughbreds posters were made for domino harvey. For my tastes a perfect movie.

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domino harvey
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#47 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:28 pm

I think your spoiler box argument is a great reading of the film!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#48 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 05, 2021 5:19 pm

That... is a terrific analysis Never Cursed. You nailed an intricate relationship between viewer and stimuli that completely makes sense to me, especially after going on a bit of a binge of Hollis Frampton and other experimental works that force the viewer to continue to confront this layered relationship in novel ways. Now I'm starting to see this as owing more to experimental cinema than any other modern narrative film I can think of offhand, in addition to the bottomless eclectic genre and film language borrowings and recontextualizations I already had enough of a challenging time parsing out!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#49 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:26 pm

Just discovered that Adrian Martin placed this film on his (long, just under 200) ever-growing favorite films list, and it definitely stands as an idiosyncratic outlier amongst a bunch of classics. Would love to get a commentary from him on some future edition, I can only imagine how insightful it could be.

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domino harvey
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Re: Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2012)

#50 Post by domino harvey » Sun Sep 17, 2023 11:03 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sun Jan 17, 2021 2:26 pm
Just discovered that Adrian Martin placed this film on his (long, just under 200) ever-growing favorite films list, and it definitely stands as an idiosyncratic outlier amongst a bunch of classics. Would love to get a commentary from him on some future edition, I can only imagine how insightful it could be.
Here’s his rave in print

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