Hear Me Out: Matt Johnson is the most underrated director in modern cinema
Blackberry, the new film from Matt Johnson, will be getting a widespread release in the coming month, and whether it’s a masterpiece or not, that is a very good thing. The satire about the rise and fall of the once popular tech company marks the Canadian director’s third feature film, but probably the first that will – thanks to its It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Glenn Howerton – give Johnson exposure to the masses. This is long overdue because for just over a decade now, Johnson has been putting out the most cleverly made and genuinely hilarious films of any modern director.
Whenever a person asks me for a film recommendation, my go-to is his 2013 debut, The Dirties. Winning the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative at Slamdance Film Festival that year, as well as the official endorsement and distribution from Kevin Smith, Johnson’s first film is a genre-defying piece that lays the foundation and sets the tone for everything he does. It’s the ultimate calling card as a filmmaker and signifies a style unlike that of anyone else, and it’s very, very funny. It’s also about bullying. And school shootings.
The plot follows two high school students called Matt and Owen, who are played by Johnson himself and fellow actor Owen Williams, as they make a student film about themselves taking revenge on the school bullies. This is perhaps the most obvious and immediate clue as to what sort of territory Johnson will lead us; bar Blackberry, which he doesn’t star in, in all of his films, his characters share the actors’ names. More important is the bare-faced aspect of people making a film, or being filmed. This element of blurring reality is absolutely intrinsic to his filmmaking and permeates everything he does. The mockumentary style Johnson uses is born out of complete necessity. How else do you seriously commit to making a movie with no budget and a crappy camcorder?
The genius of The Dirties, and everything since, is that Johnson makes the process of filmmaking intrinsic to the plot itself. Real interactions with real people inform the story. We see them editing in their dorm room — literally editing a sequence that we, as an audience, have just watched. In one scene, he arrives early at a school (that he does not attend) with a large duffle bag – the sort that would make you nervous to look at. Mirroring what the characters within the film do later on, it’s heavily implied that the bag is filled with guns which will be used to perpetrate a school shooting. The real-life janitor, who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, and asks for no proof of Johnson being a student there, lets him walk right in.
With Operation Avalanche, his follow-up in 2016, Johnson takes the same core tenets of this type of meta-storytelling and somehow manages to apply it to a period film. It’s not just a 1960s mockumentary, which would be zany enough, but one in which Johnson and Williams (playing tenacious CIA agents), along with actual cinematographer Jared Raab, actually sneak into Nasa. In Operation Avalanche, these CIA agents are undercover in an attempt to expose a Soviet mole. In doing so, they stumble across their own CIA’s plot to fake the moon landing, courtesy of a certain director named Stanley Kubrick. In one of the most impressive and audacious moments of 21st-century cinema, they orchestrate a scene (through a genius mix of 16mm film and visual effects) whereby Johnson has a lengthy conversation with the maestro Kubrick himself.
While Johnson’s features are undoubtedly fascinating, the project that solidifies his status as one of the most underrated artists working today is Nirvanna the Band the Show. Starring alongside Jay McCarrol, the show was developed from their eponymous web series. It revolves around the absurdly hilarious struggles of two talentless musicians trying to make it big in Toronto, engaging in some of the most bizarre stunts ever captured on television. In many ways, it continues the legacy of Peep Show and revitalises it for modern audiences – a task that many call impossible, but that’s because they haven’t seen Johnson’s magnum opus.
Johnson’s work can be categorised within the exciting domain of truly unique contemporary television alongside the likes of Nathan Fielder and John Wilson. However, even though Johnson’s approach to absurd comedy is strikingly original and different from what everyone else is doing, his genius has only been recognised by a minuscule but dedicated fanbase while both Fielder and Wilson have broken through. Maybe he is too unique for the mainstream, but for those who misguidedly complain that comedy is dead, Johnson’s art is the ultimate answer.
