Matt Johnson
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Back to the Future (1985)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Plot Music
…lovingly inspired by Back to the Future, and with it he decks out their RV in ‘time travel’ gear…
…a time travel story is crafted that’s so unabashed in its celebration of Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, it feels unreal that it’s even on our screens…
Imagine Flight of the Conchords mixed with a home-made Back to the Future, and you have some idea what to expect.
…convert their RV van into a time machine and travel back to 2008, in true Back to the Future fashion. What begins as a ridiculous fantasy becomes real once the RV hits 88 miles per hour…
McCarrol’s music, inspired by the original Back To The Future score…
…its imaginative homage to Back to the Future…
Despite the copious references to Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects and Elephant, Johnson stresses that violent films don't create psychopaths, though they do provide reference points to the steps that will eventually tip them over the edge.
We meet them in the opening scene hard at work on their project, a violent revenge fantasy that’s equal parts Being John Malkovich and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, although it’s mostly Pulp Fiction, at least when it comes to language and violence.
Matt’s idea seems like a goof at first, an excuse to riff on Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and screw around in his basement room on the computer.
Matt, who has a basement full of movie posters, has stuffed his debut auteur effort with swaths of dialogue from Pulp Fiction and obscurer references to films like Irreversible .
It’s also a film about the new breed of mass murderers, depicting Matt as a typical teen who’s been desensitized by shoot-’em-up videogames and movies, to the extent that he appropriates the dialogue and attitudes of Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight Rises without considering their real-world implications.
It’s like The Bear on steroids.
Tony just feels like watching four mid-season episodes of The Bear without context, wondering why you’re watching these irritating people without a compelling reason to like them…
…practically laid the groundwork for stories like The Bear…
…they also take their work seriously, and the kitchen carries the pressure-cooker intensity of The Bear.
However, in the wake of recent shows like "The Bear" and films like "Marty Supreme," there is a sense that Johnson's film is, to use a popular food-related phrase, reheated nachos.
Chicago has The Bear…
…capaz de combinar el espíritu de Jackass, Portlandia y The Office…
A sequence involving Toronto’s CN Tower — shot vérité, with punky Jackass energy…
Johnson and McCarrol’s weird mix of Jackass, Portlandia, and Letterkenny is undented…
Of course, he owes much of the success of the series to the form-blurring experiments of Jackass, but Nirvanna is so much more than this.
The Hangover (2009)
Directed by Todd Phillips
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
A scene in which Johnson clocks a shift in his surroundings — via an uncensored Black Eyed Peas song and an eye-watering The Hangover gag — is a genius moment of dawning realisation.
…cinema audiences were laughing it up at The Hangover…
…a time when blockbusters like The Hangover earned laughs by ways of derogatory slurs…
Matt’s mugging through an ill-timed Hangover screening…
…one of the funniest moments of self-realization that Todd Phillips’ The Hangover is a really bad film…
Matt and Jay enjoy a screening of The Hangover before they realise anything is wrong…
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Directed by Stephen Herek
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Themes Dialogue Plot
It's like if someone spliced Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and doused it in maple syrup.
…adopting a Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure style of conversations that overlap and make no sense…
Clearly ripping from time travel comedies like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Back to the Future…
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Directed by J. Mackye Gruber
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Themes Plot
The science fiction elements dive into the world of time travel and the dangers of utilizing it for your advantage (reference The Butterfly Effect).
Here they interact with their past selves, and end up changing the future "like that Ashton Kutcher movie". They mean The Butterfly Effect rather than Dude, Where’s My Car?
Sad (e.g. Looper, The Butterfly Effect)…
1975, Jaws at the drive-in theatre…
…a place that is pretty similar to Amity Island in Jaws, which is showing at every drive-in…
At one point, there’s even a scene featuring a drive-in theater screening JAWS.
…including allusions to Jaws and the stagnating 1970s…
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Operation Avalanche (2016)
Themes
Operation Avalanche is in many ways a Dr. Strangelove tribute, a found-footage Sixties caper wherein a team of CIA spooks infiltrate NASA and fake a moon landing to help win the Cold War.
The film owes much of its bite to the spirit of Doctor Strangelove, and it behooves one to remember that film became more, not less farcical as the stakes got higher.
Not only does the film visit the Shepperton Studios set of 2001 and get his autograph, it starts with a mention of the CIA investigation into whether he was a spy after Dr Strangelove pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War.
They are helping investigate Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove — an actual thing that the CIA did back in the day — when they finds out their employers are planning to send an agent into NASA to hunt down a possible Soviet mole.
If you're a fan of other period coming-of-age movies with killer soundtracks like The Wackness or Adventureland, Tony is going to be a tasty dish.
Still, the film's heart lies closer to coming-of-age stories like Adventureland (2009) and The Way, Way Back (2013)…
…capaz de combinar el espíritu de Jackass, Portlandia y The Office…
Johnson and McCarrol’s weird mix of Jackass, Portlandia, and Letterkenny is undented…
Flight of the Conchords (2007)
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Themes Characters
Imagine Flight of the Conchords mixed with a home-made Back to the Future, and you have some idea what to expect.
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are essentially the modern Flight of the Conchords, a band with high aspirations with sights on the stars.
In visual style, tone, and structure, Tony is an entertaining, warm, hangout flick that feels spiritually aligned with Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!
It’s a feel-good guy movie in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, another college period piece that similarly gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched escapades…
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Directed by Steve Pink
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Plot
No, absolutely not, but neither did making a hot tub a time machine in the aptly named Hot Tub Time Machine and here we are.
Goofy (e.g. Back to the Future, Hot Tub Time Machine)…
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
It somehow feels more dangerous and unethical than several “hidden camera” prank films that were released in recent memory, notably Jeff Tremaine’s Academy Award-nominated Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa and Kitao Sakurai’s Bad Trip.
…as newcomers are used to this kind of humor thanks to films like Borat and Bad Grandpa.
Whereas Gus Van Sant’s Elephant tried to skirt the issue and present it in very black and white terms (although suggesting everything from bullying to homophobia to video games to incessant piano concertos), Johnson makes no qualms about suggesting that school corridor bullying is to blame.
The subject of bullying is convincingly depicted, and there's an attempt to grapple with the transition from class clown to killer, but this lacks the depth, emotional clout and (oddly enough) empathy of Gus Van Sant's altogether superior Elephant.
Imagine Gus Van Sant’s Elephant laced with meta-movie mischief and the result might resemble Canadian first-timer Matt Johnson’s promising but patchy provocation.
Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" might be the high water mark for artistic meditations on the conditions that lead to teen massacres, but Matt Johnson's "The Dirties" exists outside of those expectations.
Friendship (2025)
Directed by Andrew DeYoung
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
Themes
If Tim Robinson’s excellent 2025 bromance horror show Friendship bore the tagline “Men shouldn’t have friends”, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s rejoinder ought to be, ‘Men have never needed friends more’.
Between the Tim Robinson-led Friendship and the recent Naked Gun reboot, it’s been a great year for theatrically-released comedies…
After all, most biopics are not-so-secretly odes to their subject's greatness, and that subtext has disturbingly become text in the wake of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and this year's "Michael."
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
Even James Mangold's underrated "A Complete Unknown" managed to subtextually weigh Bob Dylan's legacy against the couple years over which that movie takes place, while "Tony" and its look at Bourdain feels oddly too incomplete, even generic.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
…an earlier version of downtown Toronto populated by Goth fashion, billboards for The Dark Knight…
…large-scale billboards for GTA IV and The Dark Knight cluing Matt and Jay into the fact that they’ve somehow traveled into the recent past…