‘Hello Dankness’: A Gonzo Movie That Perfectly Ridicules America’s Ridiculousness

Hello Dankness is a film for our age of insanity, a work whose every fiber is attuned to the manipulation, division, distrust, disinformation and demented deliriousness of the last seven years of American life. A non-fiction collage culled exclusively from pre-existing movies, television and online material, it revisits our recent past through the filter of our favorite pop-cultural artifacts, in the process caustically mocking the left, the right, and everything else in sight. It’s a stinging political, social, and media critique made from digitally altered bits and pieces of entertainment favorites, at once hilarious, enraged, and as zonked out of its mind as many viewers will prefer to be while watching it.

Written, edited, and directed by Soda Jerk, an Australian sibling duo who relocated to Brooklyn in 2012 (and whose prior Terror Nullius was disowned by its commissioning body), Hello Dankness (Sept. 8, in theaters) is like the canniest YouTube video ever assembled, replete with all sorts of footage that suggests a copyright-infringement lawsuit (or 10) is on the horizon. It tells our national story through characters, scenarios, and songs that moviegoers and internet inhabitants will instantly recognize, albeit reconfigured to serve a new narrative—and, with it, a pointedly fresh purpose. In doing so, it provides a commentary on not only the nightmarishness of our current reality, but also on the nature of images: what they overtly and subtly say; how they can be re-engineered; and the fact that they’re defined by the context in which they’re presented and consumed.

If this makes Hello Dankness sound like a drag, rest assured that it’s a gonzo slice of cut-and-splice cine-madness. Its first act is to simply replay the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad in which the model joins a BLM-style protest alongside other multicultural hipsters and achieves rah-rah citizen-cop peace via a soft drink offering—a crass attempt to co-opt grassroots movements in order to further one woman’s celebrity and a corporation’s bottom line. That Soda Jerk don’t modify this reviled long-form spot is its own joke, and sets the tone for the ensuing snapshot of a country on the brink of a nervous breakdown, torn between Republicans and Democrats, idealism and avarice, compassion and a cruelty—comprised of racism, sexism, commercialism, and fascism—that seemingly knows no bounds.

Read more at The Daily Beast.