Tough Sell is a zine put together by 3 housemates in Bristol who go to see a lot of music / theatre / art / dance / film and publish this zine of the events they are planning to see, along with reviews and essays about things they’ve already seen. It’s amazing! They says it’s “inexhaustive, biased, of debatable trustworthiness.”
For their September 2026 issue they published a great piece comparing the Nirvanna the Band movie with Marty Supreme. It’s really good. I wanted to link to it so I could share with people (well, basically with Michiko, who suggested the movie to me in the first place), but they’re really more about existing in the analog world, which I also love. So I’m putting the text in here.
I”ll also give links to their things so you can follow them, etc, although, as I say, they do seem to be more analog.
They have a linktree
And an instragram
Some online shop on ko-fi (what is ko-fi????)
They have a website, tho it’s currently down. Maybe it’ll be back by the time you read this.
And this great essay.
++++
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie
@ Cube Microplex (05/08)
Sometimes a year will have two films with almost uncanny similarities – it happened in 2011 with Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, in 1998 with Antz and Bug’s Life, in 2006 with The Illusionist and The Prestige. And now in 2026 it has happened again – two films released focusing on how the corrupting forces of ambition and hubris can lead a man away from his talent towards foolish stunts, ultimately destroying the relationships with those he holds closest. These films, of course, are Marty Supreme and Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie.
While it will have been hard to miss the buzz about Marty Supreme, Josh Sadie and Timothee Chalamet’s ping pong Oscar contender, Nirvanna.. has perhaps flown a little more under the radar. Nirvanna The Band The Show started as a web series in 2007 and was revived as a TV show in 2017. It followed fictionalised versions of the creators Matt Johnson (the writer-director of the recent Blackberry film) and Jay McCarrol as they try to get a show at hip Toronto venue the Rivoli through increasingly outlandish stunts as opposed to, you know, writing some songs and playing some gigs. In the movie their latest scheme ends in them accidentally creating a time machine which transports them back to their earliest attempts.
An argument is kicked off by Jay’s plans to go perform at an open mic night back in 2025, and a small change in the past results in them returning to a present where Jay gave up on the Rivoli schemes and became an international superstar.
There are a multitude of parallels not only with Marty Supreme itself (where the protagonist’s table tennis career is continually derailed by his attempts at finding fame and respect) but with the best piece of public, durational performance art in the last couple of years—the Marty Supreme press tour. Where other films may have a plethora of branded tie-ins (Heathcliff Acai bowl anyone?) or interviews of co-stars declaring their soulmate bond, Marty Supreme spent months blurring the lines between Chalamet and Marty. In an 18-minute long video, Chalamet regales the film’s marketing team with incredibly Nirvanna-esque ideas to get people to come see the film—an idea to rain down orange ping-pong balls from a blimp has strong echoes in the opening of Nirvanna where they attempt to skydive from the CN tower into the SkyDome during a baseball game. The press tour even mirrored the fall from grace of the precocious talent—while it may have technically happened after Oscars voting closed, the impression that the pushback to a diss of opera and ballet in an interview lost Chalamet the best actor award is a fitting parallel.
While neither film is didactic in its messaging, it feels like both are cautionary tales of focusing on fame and ‘get cool quick’ schemes over actually just doing the thing. In the case of Nirvanna… this message is mirrored in real life in a similar way to the hubristic fall of the Marty Supreme press tour. The film starts with a clip from the duo’s very first video, ending with their confident assertion that their flyer scheme will definitely get them a gig at the Rivoli – the film immediately cuts to 17 years later, where the pair are still fruitlessly concocting the Next Big Plan.
But of course while these shots show the stagnation of fictional Matt and Jay, they simultaneously show the success of the real Matt and Jay – how they built from DIY, low budget YouTube videos to an entire feature film which (while still comparatively DIY and low budget) has become an international sensation. Their whole approach celebrates a just get out there and do it’ art making – filming in public without permits, improvising interactions with strangers on the street, committing to the bit so hard that you can use footage of yourselves from 17 years ago in your time travel movie. It is one of the best (and definitely funniest) films I’ve seen this year and, in reality as well as fiction, it is a beautiful ode to doing silly things with your friends.