Cornholios
2018 · 6m · USA
Directed by Jess Lane
Genres: dark comedy, documentary, satire
Tones: absurdist, humorous, melancholic
Presented as a Maysles Brothers-style direct cinema documentary, three devoted Cornholio enthusiasts (obsessives of the Beavis and Butt-Head character) struggle to make ends meet in New York, their fixation rendered with the same melancholic dignity as any portrait of subculture.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Maysles Brothers-style documentary about Cornholio obsessives. Shot seriously. In black and white. This is the joke and also the film, simultaneously.
Jess Lane's Maysles-pastiche black-and-white doc about devoted Cornholio enthusiasts is exactly the kind of medium-specific gag that justifies its own existence — direct-cinema formalism deployed for Beavis fans is genuinely funny conceptually.
Shot in black-and-white in the direct-cinema tradition, treating Beavis-and-Butt-Head Cornholio devotees with the same formal seriousness as genuine documentary subjects — Maysles-as-the-bit with DeLong, Burgess, Rumrill is a deeply committed low-art gag.