In the pop-culture universe deconstructed — and reconstructed — in “Hello Dankness,” the Ninja Turtles parse the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has lost sleep over the end of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and a “Home Alone”-era Macaulay Culkin spends his pandemic watching “Tiger King.”
Written and edited (though not, strictly speaking, directed) by Soda Jerk — the name adopted by Dan and Dominique Angeloro, sibling video artists from Australia who live in New York — the whole movie consists of repurposed visual and audio clips, digitally tweaked and deftly edited to interact with one another, and to present a chain of associations about the United States from 2016 through the start of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Even before its title card, “Hello Dankness” opens with a full airing of the Kendall Jenner ad that Pepsi pulled because of complaints it trivialized Black Lives Matter. If you think what follows is outlandish — well, just look at that commercial, which could easily have run before the movie in a conventional theater and plays as if that were happening. In the funniest interlude, the Trump administration’s first three years are reduced, in their entirety, to the deliberately slapdash, meme-inspiring YouTube “Garfield” parody “Garfielf,” with Trump’s pompadour pasted on top of the fat feline’s head.
Covid-induced stir craziness and the spread of misinformation on social media are shown as contributing factors to what the movie portrays as a national mental breakdown. You don’t have to agree with all of Soda Jerk’s diagnoses to admire their ingenuity. “Hello Dankness” belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.
Hello Dankness
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters.
