The Man from Earth

One interesting thing about films, relative to — say — writing within video games, is the demarcation of amateurishness. (A description I don't mean to carry any moral valence.) The indie revival in games owes much, much of itself to the fact that games are a medium where polish and craftsmanship and production value can actively work against the core gameplay loop. Books, on the other hand, have such a fundamentally small gap between what we'd call unpolished, messy prose and avant-garde experimentalism that it becomes hard to apply the lens of quality at all. One of the joys of my recent cinema excursions has been getting to understand some of these mechanics — even when the films themselves aren't particularly successful. There's Vanya on 42nd Street, a film whose lack of production is literally part of the text, and which uses that fact to brilliant effect. And there's Mindwalk, a film forgotten to history, with interesting elements of its zeitgeist, that nonetheless conjures a…