Riley's First Date? (2015)

Riley's First Date? arrives as a seven-minute coda to Inside Out, bundled with the 2015 home release, in which a twelve-year-old girl's parents mistake a skating trip for a romantic assignation and dismantle their own dignity in the living room. Josh Cooley built it from a personal anecdote about meeting his father-in-law, and the whole apparatus runs on AC/DC and the suspicion that any boy with a bass guitar is trouble. It is a comedy of paternal nerves. It knows precisely what it is.

The social inventory is thin, and the short seems untroubled by that. Nobody in this household has a politics. The mother tries on youth slang and fails. The father interrogates a child about his intentions. The two of them reconcile over a shared affection for "Back in Black." There is no interrogation of gender roles, no ambient concern for the planet, no resentment of the comfortable suburban arrangement, no suggestion that any body or mind here is a site of struggle. The cast is the cast. The themes are the themes. A father, a mother, a daughter, and a boy who cannot read a room.

None of this is a failing. A short film about a first date does not owe anyone a thesis, and the restraint is part of its appeal. The emotions inside the parents' heads do the only cultural work on offer, and their work is slapstick. For classification purposes this is a clean specimen: warm, well-made, entirely indifferent to the questions of its moment, nostalgic about vinyl and nervous about adolescence. We file it accordingly, with no further notes.