The effects of the pandemic on TV series have been very visible this season: productions postponed, canceled, or moving forward amidst the great difficulties caused by anti-contagion safety regulations, as indispensable as they are problematic to manage on a set. Some series have tried to make a virtue of necessity: Solos or the recovery of In Treatment, for example, they are also born as stories pandemic-friendly, which require few characters and few environments.
Among the various television experiments generated by the constraints of social distancing, Cinema Toast it is perhaps one of the most interesting, even if it has been noticed by few. Jeff Baena (a director who lovers of seriality know at least as Aubrey Plaza’s husband) has scoured the web and archives for old movies and other copyright-free video material, and then entrusted them to a host of other screenwriters and directors. The idea was to do something similar to the very first Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily ?, that is, reassembling existing films, superimposing a new dubbing and changing the music, so as to make the same images tell a completely different story.
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It is an anthology, each episode lasts 30 minutes and is completely disconnected from the others: in the first, Baena himself re-creates a romantic comedy of ’39, Made for each other and turns it into a mumblecore in which a young couple has to go smoothly at a Thanksgiving dinner which will be attended by both of his parents, divorced, with the mother now trumpized and the father remarried to another man. It ranges from comic surreality to drama: Report on the canine auto-mechanical soviet threat comeback corporate footage from the 1950s to depict a Soviet conspiracy against the US involving resurrected dogs and talking cars; After the end overturns a horror of ’59, Beasts from haunted cave: it starts with the killing of the monster and imagines what happens after the end, following the characters in the long return home, staging the rivalries within the group of adventurers and the consequences of the post-traumatic stress syndrome; Attack of the Karens takes up a classic like Night of the Living Dead, but the zombies turn white gods suburbs affected by a syndrome that turns racists into cannibals: as they advance with outstretched arms, they grumble All lives matter e I want to speak to the manager.
As in every anthology, there are more successful episodes and others less, but overall it is a fun, hallucinatory, extremely creative experience, to be done preferably late in the evening.
Cinema Toast
Jeff Baena
Showtime (USA)