Maniac is Stranger Things after half a semester at a liberal arts college. It’s back home during Thanksgiving break, first semester freshman year. It’s hanging out at the bar everyone goes to. It’s got you cornered in that bar. It’s monopolizing your time with a solid 15-minute monologue ranking the music videos of Spike Jonze in ascending order of formativeness as your eyes dart around the room, looking for your FWB from last summer or your weed connect or basically any other human being. It’s holding a copy of House of Leaves under one arm, front-cover-side out. It considers itself spiritual but not religious. It thinks cubicles are a metaphor. It has its doubts about Prozac.
What Stranger Things is to the 1980s horror, science fiction, and fantasy milieu reigned over by Spielberg, Carpenter, and King, Maniac — written by The Leftovers veteran Patrick Somerville and directed in its entirety by future James Bond auteur and True Detective Season One-derkind Cary Joji Fukunaga — is to the films of 1999, give or take a year. Instead of doing what the Duffer Brothers did with The Goonies and Ghostbusters and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Somerville and Fukunaga do it with Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Matrix. There’s some Coen Brothers in there too (Barton Fink), some Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), a whole lot of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), with outliers like Children of Men and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy thrown in for good measure. If you’re a TV person, and Netflix counts on it that you are, you’ll see shades of Mr. Robot, Legion, and the Adult Swim Infomercials in there too, but that’s not the meat of the thing, nor the point of it. Maniac is as much a product of nostalgia as Stranger Things, only now it’s the stuff you watched when you were 20 rather than 12.
Tags: decider, maniac, reviews, TV, TV reviews
Pingback: Porntube
Pingback: tom carpenter singer