The gang has a legendary big night out.
Tag Archives: Jim Hosking
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: EBONY & IVORY (2024)
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EBony & Ivory is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Jim Hosking
FEATURING: Gil Gex, Sky Elobar
PLOT: Stevie arrives by rowboat in Scotland to stay with fellow musical legend Paul at his “Scottish cottage”; they go swimming, look at sheep, and have hot chocies and foot strokies, but never actually get around to (directly) composing the title song.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you’ve seen one Jim Hosking movie, then this is another one. Let there be no doubt about that. This is a Jim Hosking movie with Jim Hosking humor. Jim Hosking fans will approve.
COMMENTS: Blind (?) Stevie arrives on the beach in a rowboat, wearing a fur coat and lugging three suitcases. Paul calmly stands on the beach awaiting him. A synthpop tune plays; it doesn’t sound like anything Wonder or McCartney would write. “How was your journey?” asks Paul. Stevie responds that it was a very, very, very, very long journey, then repeats himself so there will be no doubt. Paul chuckles. Stevie asks, accusingly, “So, it’s funny, is it?” “Yes, it’s funny,” Paul replies. It isn’t. Or is it?
Jim Hosking has a unique formula to which he’s unreservedly, suicidally dedicated: a base of mundane absurdity, with frequent grossout moments and infrequent bursts of surrealism. His anti-comedy tricks include characters who are simultaneously childlike and obscene and who describe their interior thoughts like particularly unimaginative narrators, long-winded repetition of unfunny dialogue until it (hopefully) becomes funny, and deliberately flat performances that occasionally express a single emotion—aggravation. Oh, and he also favors oversized prosthetic penises. If you’re a Jim Hosking newcomer, see The Greasy Strangler first—because, as outlandish and off-putting as it may be, it’s more approachable than Ebony & Ivory. If you find that one amusing, there’s a good chance you’ll also enjoy this lower-key, slightly less transgressive offering.
Stevie is easily irritated, given to bursts of profanity and shouting most of his dialogue, and usually found picking an unnecessary fight with Paul. Paul (the cute one, the one the girls go mad for) is generally easygoing, although Stevie can provoke him. They have no character development to speak of. They mention (but don’t actively pursue) musical collaboration. Despite constantly arguing, they do somehow become fast friend at the end. They eat, drink, smoke joints, argue, go swimming in the nude, and stare at an expressionless sheep for entertainment. Running gags include spitting out the phrase “Scottish cottage,” discussing vegetarian ready-meals, background music that conspicuously does not match the mood of the scene, Stevie’s blindness, and hot chocies and foot strokies. There’s also a 5+ minute sequence where Paul tries to explain the nickname “doobie woobie,” a pseudo-sex scene, and a strange marijuana-inspired dream sequence. The movie gets much weirder at the end, with the pair randomly dressing like “ghosts from yesteryear” and communing with a massive bullfrog, followed by a climax with perfectly harmonious black and white sheep, which must be seen to be disbelieved.
Ebony & Ivory features only two characters, trapped together in basically one location for 90 minutes, which means that you really have to jive with the comedy style, or be bored out of your mind. It’s a cult item that’s beyond the power of recommendation. If you’re at all intrigued by this description, you’ll probably like it. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Hosking’s other work, you’ll probably like it. But if you don’t find endless repetition of catch phrases hilarious, you’ll probably want to give it a very, very, very, very wide berth.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: AN EVENING WITH BEVERLY LUFF LINN (2018)
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DIRECTED BY: Jim Hosking
FEATURING: Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement, Craig Robinson, Emile Hirsch, Matt Berry
PLOT: Lulu is unhappy with her cappuccino-store managing husband, so she runs off with a man who stole money from him to go see an old flame’s “one night only” performance at a nearby hotel.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though advertised in-film as a “magical” evening with Beverly Luff Linn, the onscreen evening is not so much “magical” as “eccentric.” Luff Linn is a hulking teddy bear, leaking stuffing, and with one eye holding on by a thread. It stays surprisingly true to romantic comedy conventions while employing light, sub-Brechtian alienation techniques.
COMMENTS: For a few viewers, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn will be their first exposure to the weird world of Jim Hosking. Most, especially readers of this site, will be drawn to it to see what the director of 2016’s transgressive The Greasy Strangler would come up with given a bigger budget and professional actors. The answer is that he compromised by scaling back the most aggressively bizarre elements of his shock debut, while still indulging in enough skewed reality to keep the comedy firmly on the surreal side of the ledger. So, for example, in Luff Linn you will see cigarette snuffed out in an absurdly oversized meatball, but no baths in vats of half-congealed grease; a couple of characters repeating the word “immediately” across scenes, but no painfully extended “bullshit artist” segments; Craig Robinson in a 40s-style one-piece bathing suit, but no full-frontal prosthetic nudity. Whereas Strangler felt a little dangerous, like John Waters meets Tim & Eric, Beverly is more like a Jared Hess awkward/quirky concoction, slightly out of step with reality, but without the offal and outrageousness. The results are not entirely satisfactory, but they are also not nearly as much of a sell-out as they might have been.
The plot, although a bit shaggy, is not so bad, with Lulu’s urge to reconnect with a younger and more vital romance bumping up against a couple of subplots in her husband’s suburban gangsta theft of a cashbox and Luff Lin’s mysterious melancholy (which results in his only being able to communicate in Frankenstein grunts for the much of the movie). Aubrey Plaza’s sarcastic resentment, Jermaine Clement’s clueless earnestness, and Emile Hirsch’s petty criminality are perfect matches to the material, but Craig Robinson doesn’t come over as the kind of charismatic mentor Lulu would fall for (which is perhaps part of the joke), and Matt Berry makes little impression as Luff Lin’s platonic partner/manager. Hoskins sprinkles in supporting performances from a couple of his regular stock company: Sky Elobar as a cappuccino-store henchman and Sam “potato” Dissanayake as an angry yet polite convenience store owner. He also finds a few more odd-faced weirdos to add freaky texture in a moon-faced toady and a hulking, pasty hotel clerk with a Ren-faire hairstyle. Though set in the present day, the anachronistic circa 1970s wardrobe choices—Colin’s turtleneck sweater and amber-tinted tinted eyeglasses—garb a world out of whack. It’s the kind of movie where three amateur robbers go on a robbery wearing women’s wigs as disguises, but never bother to cover their familiar faces. Low synths lay a doomy horror movie soundtrack over what is basically a light comedy, adding yet another level of alienation.
And yet, for all its absurdist insouciance, Luff Linn surprisingly has heart—something conspicuously lacking in Greasy Strangler. The boy gets the girl—the right boy gets the girl. The sentimentality may be a put-on, or it may be a concession, but it feels like an honest choice.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51LelNxG-BL._SL500_.jpg)
SATURDAY SHORT: LITTLE CLUMPS OF HAIR (2003)
Martin catches up with some friends at a pub hoping that the tape on his upper lip goes unnoticed. It gets noticed.
Content Warning: This short contains strong language.
262. THE GREASY STRANGLER (2016)
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“I was surprised by reactions to the film. I thought people would find it funny or absurd, but people look really shaken when they come out. When we screened it at South by Southwest, there was a filmmaker I know who makes very strange films. And afterward, he looked like he had been through the wringer: ‘I’ve never seen anything like that. I thought, ‘Oh, come on.’ What can seem fun to one person can seem totally deranged to someone else.”–Jim Hosking, Rolling Stone
DIRECTED BY: Jim Hosking
FEATURING: Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo
PLOT: Big Ronnie eats an extremely greasy diet and runs a scam tour of L.A. disco locations with his unmarried adult son and live-in cook Brayden. At night he transforms into a lard-soaked monster who strangles people. When Brayden catches the eye of a girl on the tour, Big Ronnie becomes jealous and determines to seduce her himself.
BACKGROUND:
- Jim Hosking worked as a music video and commercial director making short films on the side since 2003. His big break came when his bizarre and transgressive “G is for Grandad” segment of ABCs of Death 2 impressed that film’s producers, two of whom went on to produce The Greasy Strangler. Ben Wheatley and Elijah Wood also served as executive producers on the film.
- The movie was supported and partly financed by the venerable British Film Institute.
- This was 72-year-old actor and former punk-club owner Michael St. Michaels’ first leading role—unless you count his film debut in 1987s direct-to-VHS The Video Dead.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Big Ronnie’s big prosthetic, flapping in the car wash blower’s breeze.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Disco spotlight; pig-nosed stranglee; “hootie tootie disco cutie”
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Gross, greasy and bizarre, Jim Hosking‘s debut feature is the closest thing you’ll see to a modern John Waters Trash Trilogy film, filtered through the fashionable surreal comedy sensibilities of Tim and Eric or Quentin Dupieux. Strangler is more than the sum of those influences, however: it is its own little world where a lisping man with a pig snout can walk around town without raising an eyebrow, and a spotlight might suddenly appear on an alley wall for a character to do a spontaneous dance number. The fat-to-nutrient content is too out-of-whack for this to count as healthy entertainment, but it’s fine as a guilty pleasure treat. It’s too big, bold and weird to be ignored; it’s not 2016’s best movie, or even the year’s best weird movie, but it is this season’s most insistently in-your-face assault on taste and reality.
Short clip from The Greasy Strangler
COMMENTS: “Let’s get greasy!” shouted the producers from the Continue reading 262. THE GREASY STRANGLER (2016)