If you told me in 2011 that kyle from Youtube would be directing a movie in 2024, I would probably think, "Oh, you mean Chris from Crippled Rejex? That lines up."
We are nearing the end of the year. Isn't this time of the season generally considered Oscar season? There hasn't been much, with the exception of Anora, that I have seen recently that would be in any way baiting an Oscar. What's stranger is that looking back on the entire year, I have seen maybe 3 movies in theaters that could be considered a straightforward comedy. The Mean Girls musical? Poor Things, kind of? After getting out of Kyle Mooney's Y2K this evening, I realized that I hadn't until that point laughed that much at a movie at Regal in 2024. And I didn't laugh like, a ridiculous amount or anything. But I don't recall seeing much else that even attempted to make me laugh. Poor Things? A Real Pain? ARGYLE? I'm looking through the list, and there isn't much. Not sure what my point is... It was nice to get to chuckle some.
The showtime was for 6:50. It wasn't raining, exactly, but rather pissing a misty kind of thing. Not ideal weather for walking to the Regal. I even mentioned to Tiff that perhaps we cancel the reservations- not that I wanted to skip it, but I felt bad making my girlfriend walk 15 minutes in the rain. She declined the declination. We left the house at 6:35. We got to the theater at 6:50, stopping at the deli for a bottle of Canada Dry Seltzer. We got no snacks for the movie, as we each had two chocolate chip cookies, made by Tiff. They were lovely. She puts the salt on them and everything.
We got into the movie at 6:55, and they didn't start rolling trailers until 7:12. I have written these times down the last few films I have attended, and have come to the conclusion that Regal turns off the lights and plays trailers generally 12 minutes after the showtime. For you trailer-heads out there... I know I'm one... Although I have grown sick and tired of seeing the one for Wolfman. I do still need to see see Werewolves, though.
Y2K is a horror-ish-comedy type thing. More along the lines of comedy with some cartoonish violence that plays for laughs, so I guess that puts it in that genre. Tone-wise it's like This Is The End, but taking place December 31st, 1999, like in American Pie or something like that. It's OK... The tone shifts violently very often, like one minute it will be several characters arguing about how underground music is better than the mainstream crap (A Kyle Mooney-style joke that I can't help but like, and really what made his characters and Youtube sketches funny back in the Obama admin), and then a character that's very central to the plot will get killed out of nowhere, and then we are supposed to feel sad, I guess? And then it immediately goes back to Limp Bizkit references. It's about as reference-heavy as I expected- it's kind of like what Didi did with the Crailtap.com era, which I thought was a cute device and it worked there- it works here too because the movies point is to be funny most of all, supposedly, and I laughed, as a millenial would probably do, at things like the main character wearing Es Koston 1's, and all the stuff about "I don't listen to that mainstream crap." Normal Kyle behavior. And obviously he wrote the thing. But that's pretty much where my enthusiasm drops, because the rest of the movie flops around between a sort-of teenager adventure thing and a kind-of apocalyptic thing. Y2K all the machines in the world (or this specific township) rise up and start killing people and taking others hostage to do something or rather? So they kill a bunch of high schoolers and then transfer all the parents to the high school where they are planning their uprise (how this works is unexplained). So the group of main characters have to join together to etc. It kind of makes sense, but the movie seems so concerned with being funny that it uses it's own goofiness as a deflection kind of- like if I were to explain a plothole, I'd feel like a dickhead because it's just a stupid movie after all, and it's supposed to be dumb- but can't it at least be cohesive? By the last 20 minutes (it's 90 minutes long BTW) I understood the gist, but was more concerned with it being over than caring how it worked out. Unexplainable hacker chick hacks the mainframe, Fred Durst becomes a central character etc. It's all Kyle-styled, but... That's about all of my compliments towards it. I don't love the movie. It was a comedy movie, a rarity now, but being funny sometimes is all that it has going for it. You'd be better off watching American Pie and then This Is The End back-to-back.
I am happy for Kyle, who was given such a big project to do. I still think he'd be better off going back to the low-budget path, and writing a film as Chris from Crippled Rejex... I feel like it'd be way more tonally cohesive than this. He clearly has a reverence for a specific time period, and I feel like his memory of how stoner kids and skater types would talk back then is pretty accurate. Again, this is about as much as good as I can say about this movie. Disapointed a bit, I mean what the hell was I expecting anyways?
We were able to get home around 9, which is a decent hour for a movie, at least during the winter hours. It's a little harder to push seeing a movie when it's June or July at 7 because it's still light out. But in the winter, what the hell else better is there to do...? Enjoyable night at the theaters overall though. I won't be watching this movie again but I'll certainly be returning to the Regal.