Dream Team
Kalman and Horn’s latest retro-futurist homage to 90s basic cable thrillers offers a hodgepodge of satirical angles for the hyper-specific subgenre of television. But this is precisely its strength in embracing transparent cheese and sleaze.
Writers and directors Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn have carved out a specific cavern of cinema out for themselves. It’s completely autonomous of the conventions filmic “aesthetics” populate within A24-like fuzzy film filters although it may look just like one. The difference is Dream Team’s attitude, which is something admirably peculiar and offers something wholeheartedly genuine that you wouldn’t get elsewhere.
The treatment of what Dream Team employs is a complete and total participation within what’s being lampooned — late 1980s and early 1990s procedural softcore television. It feels like a lost set of episodes that you’d find playing in a late-night cable slot, through an insomnia-filtered haze. The dialogue is transparently self-referential and has a great sense of humor about the territory it both loves and pokes fun at. It of course has some odd specks within each “episode” of the show, like a musical performance that sticks out vehemently against the rules of the aesthetics it governs (which in a way is exercising the very autonomy of its freedom of expression).
Dream Team follows two of the sexiest Interpol agents in the world as they delve into the mystery of marine life, specifically coral, which they suspect pose a threat to human life. When multiple people are found dead with no apparent human assailant, agents Chase National and No St. Aubergine investigate the possibility that local coral life may be conspiring to kill. It helps to fire some of the neurons towards properties like Baywatch Nights’ second season. Dream Team concerns itself with some of that show’s science-fiction related curiosities but outright refuses to align itself within any notion of grounded rationalization. This is what will make or break the experience for most people.
In embracing the wanderlust that Kalman and Horn have woven through this and their previous work, Dream Team will provide just what it aims to emulate by way of satire. The way each episode analyzes facets of late-night programming sleaze sheds light on just how moronic specific aspects have always been in softcore, from dually busy and bare set design to dialogue not meant to be paid undivided attention to. A marine biologist explains to Chase and No the differences between the kinds of aquatic life that experience consciousness until she gets to dolphins, where all she manages to say is “dolphins have…culture” before moving on.
Yet it calls attention to all these shortcomings of what has once dominated the broadcast slots of North American consumerist desires by flashing its imperfections directly at us. It is by no means a tight and focused effort but that becomes a feature in the realm of that which it parodies, decidedly aiming for and achieving a mildly amusing middling experience. Dream Team achieves its goal in spades, but some adjustment of expectations may be required to receive it on its own wavelength.
Dream Team had its exclusive New York theatrical run at the Metrograph Theater on November 15th alongside a retrospective of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn’s filmography running through the 19th of November:
L For Leisure, Blondes in the Jungle, and Two Plains and a Fancy.
