Search results
Rating
- On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 14 reviews, with an average score of 7.8/10.
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › What_Did_Jack_Do%3F
People also ask
Is 'what did Jack do' a good movie?
Was 'what did Jack do' made for Netflix?
Is 'what did Jack do' a prank?
What is most assuredly positive about what did Jack do?
What Did Jack Do? 2020 17m Comedy Crime Drama List 93% Tomatometer 14 Reviews 70% Audience Score 100+ Ratings A detective interrogates a talking monkey that is suspected of murder.
- See All Photos
What Did Jack Do? Pictures and Photo Gallery -- Check out...
- Movie Reviews
Shot in a scratchy black-and-white reminiscent of the 1940s...
- See All Photos
- David Lynch's monkey noir short film surprises Netflix users.
- What Did Jack Do?
- Verdict
By Witney Seibold
Updated: Jan 22, 2020 6:25 am
Posted: Jan 21, 2020 8:05 pm
Spare a thought, briefly, for the poor souls who were idly browsing through Netflix on January 20th, 2020 and – entirely by chance – happened upon David Lynch's short What Did Jack Do? What could they have possibly thought was happening? As the 17-minute short progressed, and they witnessed David Lynch himself interviewing a talking capuchin monkey about how the monkey may have committed a murder, did the unsuspecting viewer think that their La Croix had been spiked with LSD?
That's certainly the impression one takes from What Did Jack Do?, a short film made by Lynch back in 2016, and one that is only now finding its way onto Netflix without any warning, fanfare, introduction, or the slightest whiff of context. It seems that if one were attending a David Lynch retrospective at a local art museum, or perhaps watching a Twin Peaks: The Return marathon on Showtime, then one might not be as blindsided by this wonderful, deconstructionist hunk of bizarre monkey-based noir. But appearing on Netflix the way it did, a viewer can only feel, perhaps, a dizzying sense of nightmarish disconnect from reality itself. As if your TV somehow opened a heretofore undiscovered aperture in the space-time continuum, and Plato's Realm of Ideas came spilling out in its rawest form.
What Did Jack Do? is – like Lynch's debut feature Eraserhead – decidedly and deliberately low-fi. It was shot in a shimmering, grainy, black-and-white, and Lynch artificially added specks of dirt to the frame to give it the feeling of a long-lost midnight film that has spent the last several decades languishing in a long-forgotten projection booth somewhere. The entire film takes place at a mystifyingly under-sized diner table whereat Lynch, playing a nameless detective, interrogates Jack Cruz (credited as “himself”) about his past. Jack is belligerent and will not cooperate. A passing waitress (Emily Stofle) mentions a killer might be in the area. The conversation between Lynch and Jack eventually steers toward a chicken named Toototabon and how deeply Jack loved her. Everyone's got something to hide, especially Lynch and his monkey.
Lynch has long been a fan of film noir, and if a genre can be assigned to most of his works (Twin Peaks and Lost Highway in particular), they might be described as “deconstructionist noir.” What Did Jack Do? features, boldly, well-worn clichés and high-mileage noir axioms delivered with Lynch's near-robotic intensity. Lynch appears to be re-contextualizing noir dialogue all the way back down the evolutionary ladder, finding the childlike, hard-boiled sentiment that may still lay embedded somewhere deep within its genes. What Did Jack Do? dismantles traditional noir dialogue by condensing every single bit of it into one location, and then putting it in the mouth of a capuchin monkey.
It is a difficult – indeed, perhaps an almost churlish – task to review a surrealist short by any kind of traditional standard, of course. Lynch has made a short film that is so completely and purely itself, that one cannot necessarily declare it to have succeeded or failed by any sort of rational measure. If it threw you off guard, frightened you, made you laugh, had you thinking about film noir in a more objective light, and began you on a path of doubt about the stability of the universe then it can perhaps be called a successful piece of surrealist art.
What is most assuredly positive about What Did Jack Do?, however, is the exhilarating feeling of witnessing something bracing and unusual from a stalwart and tenacious artist who has striven for over four decades to open up his mind – with scraping fingernails – to the rest of the world. David Lynch's sense of humor has become slightly more acerbic...
- Witney Seibold
So with What Did Jack Do?, I’m of the opinion that it’s not really about Jack or Toototabon nor is it meant to be indicative of some grand assessment of humanity - Lynch just likes the feel of the old detective noir movies and decided to try and capture the experience of watching one. All of the tropes are there:
Feb 24, 2020 · Last month, Netflix released What Did Jack Do?, a short film by David Lynch that he made for French TV in 2017. A Lynch short film is a rare event that we need to recognize. Most of his short-form work came early in his career, pre-Eraserhead.
What Did Jack Do? is a 2017 American black-and-white short film written and directed by David Lynch. It premiered on November 8, 2017, at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris. It was later released to Netflix on January 20, 2020.
Jan 22, 2020 · As Lynch’s detective probes the monkey at a railroad station café, we learn Jack could be responsible for a crime of passion, killing someone over his love for a chicken named Toototabon—which...
