![]() ![]() Like Marty in Buzzard and failed stand-up comedian/pyromaniac Trevor Newandyke in Ape, Sean fancies himself an antiestablishment rebel taking a stand against a corrupt system by adopting this crackpot lifestyle. None of Sean’s eccentricities come out of nowhere, though. Certainly, the fact that Cortez forgets to bring medication to his friend implies that what follows is simply a mental decline, exacerbating what was already a mind on the knife’s edge of sanity. This is especially crucial in The Alchemist Cookbook, seeing that it finds Potrykus pushing his obsession with proudly lonely outsiders to the level of the supernatural-or does it? Ambiguity runs throughout the film’s minute attention to the details of Sean’s solitary existence as to whether all those offscreen, faraway monstrous roars he hears are actually “real” or figments of his imagination. As Dave Kehr once noted about the great Spanish filmmaker’s Simon of the Desert, he’s able to find exactly “how much realism is required in surrealism.” Far from detracting from the surreality of the strange human behavior it depicts, this style simply reminds one of the crucial secrets to Luis Buñuel’s artistic success. Instead, Potrykus insists on realism, an approach he supports with an emphasis on long takes and stationary camera set-ups. He’s not into the knowingly campy archness of the acting and cinematography in The Greasy Strangler or the blaring hamminess of the performances in Masterminds. ![]() Potrykus’s directorial style is crucial to expressing this perspective. And yet, Potrykus’s films seem animated by a genuine fascination with his eccentric main characters: a sincere desire to dissect them, to understand them, to present them to us in all their unadorned loopy glory for either our amusement or disdain. ![]() Never does Potrykus try to make this main character appealing any more than he lets Sean off the hook for his increasingly crazy behavior out in the woods. Buzzard centered around a slacker named Marty Jackitansky who made it a badge of honor to try to scam the capitalist system in his own small ways, and who spent much of his free time perfecting a Freddy Krueger-like “Power Glove” with knives sticking out of it. That is not to say, however, that his oddball protagonists-Sean here, and the characters Joshua Burdge played in the director’s previous two features, Buzzard and Ape-are likable characters by any means. With Hess encouraging his performers to dial up the hick schtick to 11 and Hosking doubling down on the absurdist comedy routines, deliberately cheesy gore and unpleasant nudity at the expense of coherent characterizations, their films exude a condescension toward their characters that makes the experience of being an audience member unendurable in such soullessness.Ĭondescension is as far from Potrykus’s black-comic sensibility as one could imagine. Both of those films offer object lessons in what happens when self-satisfied filmmakers prize ostensibly beguiling quirks and cheap shock tactics above anything resembling recognizable humanity. The appearance of The Alchemist Cookbook on the cinema landscape certainly couldn’t be better timed, especially as a corrective to Jared Hess’s recent heist yarn Masterminds and Jim Hosking’s concurrently released horror comedy The Greasy Strangler. This moment is not only one of the most hilarious scenes I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while, but it’s also a pretty good encapsulation of writer/director Joel Potrykus’s methods, with Cortez’s commitment to a blatantly ridiculous dare a miniature version of Potrykus’s own ruthless commitment to chronicling the strangest of human behavior. Cortez takes him up on the challenge, and even though he clearly can’t stand the taste on his first bite, he tries his best to hide this from his friend and takes an even bigger batch for his second helping, only for him to finally give up soon after. About a third of the way into The Alchemist Cookbook, Sean (Ty Hickson) dares his friend Cortez (Amari Cheatom) to eat a can of cat food. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |