Tex Avery: Celebs Rumors

Jessica Kiang It was either Nietzsche or Tex Avery — but one of our great philosophers — who asserted that there are two types of people in this world: those who walk through life blithely unbothered by manholes, and those who are destined to fall into them. Now, for curious members of the former class, comes an intimate examination of what it’s like to be one of the latter: “#Manhole,” Japanese director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s slick, increasingly deranged survival thriller about a man who will finally learn to know his true nature from a hole in the ground.  Popular, successful and possessed of highly covetable good looks, Shunsuke Kawamura (Yuto Nakajima, of Japanese boy band Hey! Say! JUMP) has the world at his feet. It’s the eve of his wedding to the pregnant daughter of his company’s CEO, and his co-workers have organized a surprise party to toast his good fortune. Walking home drunk from the festivities, Shunsuke suddenly stumbles. He comes to at the bottom of a deep concrete shaft with a nasty gash where his thigh interacted with the jagged edge of the broken access ladder. The moon is perfectly framed in the circular opening overhead. 

that title in our interview below.)Pendragon made the 10-minute short over the course of a year while in COVID lockdown. In an even deeper self-reflexive twist, his real human hands are often visible in the film. In fact, almost the entire story plays out on a camera monitor, with all of Pendragon’s meticulous, frame-by-frame labor visible in the margins, like so:Pendragon, who won a Student Academy Award for this film last year, talked to TheWrap from his homebase in Brisbane about his effort to strike the perfect balance between “meta” and “pure” storytelling, who he’s hoping to meet at the Oscars on March 12, and about how the short got tagged with a very long and title.There’s an existential crisis in the film, which has echoes of Kafka or “The Truman Show” or “The Matrix.” Did you have points of inspiration while you were developing the idea?Yeah, there were influences from live action films that deal with an alternate reality.

Caroline Framke Chief TV CriticKnowing that Netflix’s “Cat Burglar” was created by Charlie Brooker of “Black Mirror,” and that the “Black Mirror” take on a choose-your-own-adventure episode (2018’s “Bandersnatch“) represents one of that show’s biggest horrors, I kept waiting for “Cat Burglar” (out today on Netflix) to take some terrible turn of existential dread. But after playing through several “Cat Burglar” scenarios, the opposite proved true.