Review Rundown: The One With Some Tough Summer Lovin’

This week finds the crew in a MOOD.

I mean, it happens.

At least it means that PICK OF THE WEEK is going to be easy to figure out. See if YOU can spot it. It’s kinda like Waldo.

Art. VR. Mysteries in a box. Four reviews. No mercy. Cobra Kai!

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CALDERA 360 — Caldera Entertainment
$10; Online; Ongoing

There’s an admirable attempt at gamification in CALDERA 360, an immersive art and burlesque exhibition shot as a series of 360 degree movies. Between looping videos of installation art, short performances by singers and burlesque artists, and some exhibits that can only be called “miscellaneous,” you’re instructed to navigate a pulsing webpage, dragging through abstract landscapes to collect each performance like a series of gaming trophies. After each, you can click back easily from your homepage, a symbol of each performance found gleaming (and each undiscovered greyed out). Sadly, the interface is cumbersome and nearly impossible to maneuver.

While individual acts are charming (I was particularly fond of a plaintive, wailing cowboy shifting through a deserted theatre, conceived by Marcus Whale, Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran), no thematic throughline seemed to connect them. Installation works sans performers worked slightly worse; though the camera offered 360 views, non-narrative installations often struggle in remote access to present the tangible immediacy that makes them a joy to physically explore. Overall, rather than a festival, these facts made the series feel like a somewhat frustrating gallery walk, unlubricated by the free wine and cheese that usually makes that sort of thing a pleasure. Still, for fans of abstract art, this might scratch the itch until the end of COVID makes exhibitions once again plausible.
— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large

Hunt A Killer: Murder at the Motel
$29.99; Remote (At Home Box); Ongoing

This escape-room-in-a-box was everything I’d hoped for and more: a classic whodunnit concept woven into a slightly seedy motel environment with a highly produced trail of breadcrumbs to follow to the end.

The experience provided me and my partner hours of entertainment as we sorted through contextually relevant documents of all varieties: hotel keycard records, receipts and handwritten notes found in the trash, the maintenance man’s labor log, guest complaints left at the front desk, and so much more. The storytelling was so expertly crafted that the game’s puzzles never felt like puzzles; it was all just part of a day’s work for us, the detectives on the case.

The game is labeled as “medium” difficulty and expected to be solved in 45–60 minutes, which seems possible, but optimistic. As regular escape room players and puzzle solvers, my partner and I painstakingly examined every document and kept detailed notes every step of the way, frequently stopping to hypothesize before we’d even reviewed all the evidence. We never felt frustrated, but we didn’t skate into the solution, either.

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It’s worth noting that we believe to have found a small-but-pertinent typo on one of the game components, and the partially vague solution left us with a few unanswered questions. That said, we were still able to successfully solve the mystery, and had so much fun in the process, that it’s easy to overlook these minor failures.

And while the game has no replay value for us, we’re looking forward to passing it along to friends. Most of the solving and deducing can be done without writing on any of the original documents, or, if absolutely necessary, be done in pencil and later erased.

These single-episode boxes can be purchased for $30 each — easily a good value for the experience. Whatsmore, I’m now convinced that the six-episode stories are also worth the financial commitment, too.

— Danielle Look, Denver Correspondent

LA Art Show 2021 — LA Art Show
$30; Los Angeles, CA; Event Concluded

For years I’ve been attending the LA Art Show. This year, I’m making my claim in (digital) print: the art fair model needs to be reimagined.

Billed as “the most comprehensive international contemporary art show in America,” the LA Art Show is an organized maze of booths offering a spectrum of art: at one end is fine art by modern artists such as Egon Schiele; at the other is a contemporary, bloated mashup of post-Banksy, urban pop art, infused with references to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Blek le Rat, and Robbie Conal. The 2021 show felt stagnant and many of the works derivative; the fair’s design only amplified this sensation.

A few experiential elements were incorporated, including an NFT selection, and those were the most compelling aspects of the entire event. Curated by Marisa Caichiolo, the DIVERSEartLA section focused on “women and non-binary artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art, science and technology represented.” Standout installations included Carmen Argote’s “Last Light,” Zeynep Abes “Memory Place,” and Ana Marcos’ “DATA | ergo sum | RELOADED.” All of these works probed identity via evocative methods; this was the poetic, emotional root of the fair, but the canopy above was sparse and malnourished.

In a noteworthy move, artist Susan Soffer Cohn built an immersive portal behind her booth. A narrow passageway with lighting and sound effects, “Le Jardin du Bonheur” (The Garden of Happiness) showcased her saturated paintings and served as a spotlight on experiential presentations. And there are existing variations on the traditional fair: the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel exhibits galleries’ contemporary art within the liminal space of hotel guest rooms (bathroom curatorial choices garner unique appeal).

The LA Art Show professes to “highlight some of the most interesting advancements in art.” If only those advancements included evolving and expanding the concept of the art fair itself.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor

Viva Las Vengeance VR Experience — Netflix & Partners
$24, discounts for groups; Multiple Cities; through September

Viva Las Vengeance is a fun immersive zombie shoot-em-up arcade thrill ride/gonzo movie activation that would be pitch perfect if it weren’t for what is hopefully a bad case of cultural tunnel vision.

Let’s start with what works with this marketing pop-up for Netflix and Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead franchise. For starters: the installation build. It does a top flight job of turning the top of a mall parking lot into a slice of the movie world.

The audience is invited to become part of the Las Vengeance crew: the combat savvy civilians who are the stars of the epic opening sequence of the movie. The mission: ride out in the Las Vengeance armored taco truck, mow down some zombies and rescue survivors the military can’t be bothered to get to.

But how? Through the magic of VR, haptic flooring and what feels like ride simulator tech. When you’re inside the game things LOOK like a game, but the sim tech makes it feel like you’re on a rough ride through an infested Sin City. In short: it FEELS awesome.

The game is, well it’s a shooting gallery. So not too much to write home about especially if you’ve spent time in arcades. The VR glitched out for one member of our crew, and since we were already running slim that meant I basically had one side of the truck to defend to myself. Again: not that much of a problem.

In fact, I was mostly on autopilot.

Which is when I noticed that the last wave of zombies — faster, stronger, more dangerous — were almost all Black people. Which was WEIRD. Because the other waves were pretty diverse, casting wise. I got to shoot an Elvis zombie in the head, just like in the movie. (Which I liked, by the way. So I am the audience for this!) Only a big wave of “scary brown people zombies” is not how it was in the movie. In fact, no matter what you think of Zack Snyder as a filmmaker, his track record of late is pretty good on this front. Ray Fisher was the heart of Justice League until the studio screwed that up royally, and Snyder came back and fixed that, making a better movie in the process.

Maybe the aggro zombies on the other side of the truck were all white dudes. I can’t say. I was where I was, I saw what I saw, and I have to say: it made it weird. How this didn’t get caught during the development process is… well I can’t say it is a mystery, but I can say it is disappointing. We did all this with Resident Evil 5 over 15 years ago. Like zombies, some things just won’t die.
— Noah Nelson, Publisher

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