A musclehead challenges a baby to a race, with unpredictable results.
POD 366, EP. 151: INCORPOREAL GHOST IN THE CITY
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Discussed in this episode:
Babe: Pig in the City (1998): Read Scott Sentinella’s review. The weird (?) sequel to the smash hit about a talking pig is now on 4K UHD (standard Blu-ray included) with a new commentary track and interview with director George Miller. Buy Babe: Pig in the City. You can also now get it in a Blu-ray only double feature paired with the original Babe.
Incorporeal Man (2025): A drunk has the ability to walk through walls (but only sometimes, if the trailer is a guide). From Elevator Movie ‘s Zeb Haradon, made with deliberately primitive A.I. from an unfilmed 2008 screenplay. Incorporeal Man press kit and Incorporeal Man free on YouTube.
A Useful Ghost (2025): The spirit of a Thai man’s dead wife possesses a vacuum cleaner, and they resume their romantic relationship. “Absurd” has been reviewers go-to adjective for the debut feature from Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke. A Useful Ghost official site.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled on next week’s Pod 366, but Giles and Greg will return with a look at Sundance’s upcoming slate, and whatever other new releases and news pop up. In written reviews, Micheal Diamades reviews Radu Jude’s mad 2025 Dracula (which is scheduled to show up on Plex January 20), Enar Clarke essays fellow 2025 latecomer Traumnovelle (a more authentic and surreal adaptation of the novel that inspired Eyes Wide Shut), Shane Wilson advises you on whether you can leave I Never Left the White Room (2000) alone, and Giles Edwards investigates the real-life The Producers scam-film Eldorado (2012). Onward and weirdward!
66*. I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (2020)
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“And the sun flicks my eyes—
It was all a pack o’ lies!
I’m awake in a lonely room.
I ain’t gonna dream ’bout her arms no more!
I ain’t gonna leave her alone!
Goin’ outside,
Git myself a bride,
Git me a woman to call my own.”
–“Lonely Room,” Oklahoma!
DIRECTED BY: Charlie Kaufman
FEATURING: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Guy Boyd
PLOT: As a snowstorm approaches, a young woman travels for the first time with her boyfriend Jake to meet his parents, but inwardly she is struggling to work up the courage to end things between them. Strange things happen at Jake’s house: not only is his parent’s behavior awkward, but their ages change before her eyes. Meanwhile, the action frequently cuts to an elderly high school janitor as he makes his rounds; the third act will bring the couple into contact with him.
BACKGROUND:
- Based on Ian Reid’s 2016 psychological novel of the same name.
- An early prestige property for Netflix, who gave it a limited theatrical release in 2020 to qualify for awards season, then kept it locked into their exclusive streaming service.
- Several of the film’s monologues—including Buckley’s poem, her opinions on John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, and Plemmons’ “acceptance” speech— are lifted wholesale from other people’s writings (“Bonedog” by Eva HD, Pauline Kael’s review, and A Beautiful Mind‘s Nobel speech, respectively).
- The film-within-the-film, a romantic comedy credited to Robert Zemeckis, is fictional. (Zemeckis is thanked in the credits for allowing his name to be attached.)
- The end credits include a list of the various books, artworks, etc. referenced throughout the film.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A cartoon pig leads a naked elderly man through the sterile hallways of a high school in the middle of the night. Bloody droplets drop from the animal’s underbelly, staining the newly-shined floor, as he plods along—maggots, he explains, as he is a maggot-infested pig.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ice cream in a blizzard; animated maggot-ridden pig leads naked man to awards ceremony
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This labyrinth of awkward interactions, faulty memories, and uncertain identities may just be Charlie Kaufman’s most surreal film.
Original trailer for I’m Thinking of Ending Things
COMMENTS: Someone should take a pencil and catalog how many Continue reading 66*. I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (2020)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: OBEX (2025)
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OBEX is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Albert Birney
FEATURING: Albert Birney, Callie Hernandez, Frank Mosley
PLOT: Conor, a gentle shut-in, must navigate the dangerous world of a computer game when it kidnaps his dog.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Strange cicadan adversaries, point-and-click logic, and a celebratory eccentricity make OBEX an obvious odd-ball. Bonus points for being wholesome in its weirdness.
COMMENTS: 1987 was a year for cicadas. Billions of them globally, and who knows how many thousands emerging from their slumber to provide Baltimore a whirring, chirping Summer soundtrack. Reason enough to stay indoors—though left to his own device, Conor would do so anyway: he is a shut-in. For reasons only hinted at during Albert Birney’s low-key adventure film, OBEX, Conor only leaves his property when his dog Sandy is stolen by the the demon Ixaroth and spirited away to the mysterious land of Obex.
“Spirited away” may not be the correct phrase. Birney’s film exists at a strange intersection between (period) technology and classical fantasy, and Sandy’s plight is revealed through the monitor of ye olde Macintosh computer. Conor’s life, quiet and regular, relies on (then) state of the art home computers. His income is earned via text art portraits—lines and lines of punctuation forming a Pointalist-style image—and he ends the day with one or more machines running with midi-ambient or midi-karaoke music before bedtime. He lives alone with his dog, and his computers, and his stack of three cathode-ray televisions which, except on movie nights, all play different channels in the background. And every night he dreams about aimlessly driving his deceased mother in her old car.
The coziness of Conor’s space couldn’t be more different than the vast fields and forests of Obex, which our determined hero explores in the film’s second half. He encounters human-sized bug monsters, a kindly shopkeeper (a hold-over from his corporeal life, Maria, who does Conor’s grocery shopping every Wednesday), and makes a new friend out of an old one: an RCA Victor Model 14S774G—but call him “Victor.” His travels with Victor bring him to an automobile incongruously parked in the middle of an open stretch of greenery, its keys tucked in the visor, just like where Conor’s mother stored them. Other connections connect as well, and while we’re fairly sure we’re in the benighted land of Obex, we are almost certainly somewhere more allegorical as well.
From his small home to the wilds of Obex and into the heart of Ixaroth’s nightmare realm, Birney recounts Conor’s Quest (complete with a hat lifted, I swear, from King’s Quest) with heart, flourish, and more than a few sound-and-sight jests. And the film is more than just nostalgia, although there is plenty of that. OBEX is an unlikely adventure, an eccentric character study, and, to borrow another director’s observation, an unexpectedly gentle film. Capturing its combination of mirth, melancholy, innocence, and self-awareness in words is difficult—though perhaps the complimentary side of “quaint” might do. Cinematographer (and script co-writer) Pete Ohs captures the television-feel to a T, and having seen OBEX first on the big screen and recently on my laptop, it felt “right” in both sizes.
That’s what this is: a big adventure that fits right in your pocket, ready for when the whirring and chirping swarm of humdrum life is poised to overwhelm you.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)
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DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Holmes Osborne, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Lou Taylor Pucci, Miranda Richardson, Zelda Rubinstein, Will Sasso, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith
PLOT: In the near future, a terrorist attack transforms America into a cryptofacist police state. The third anniversary of that attack proves to be a day of great significance, with the launch of a new national surveillance agency, the release of an energy source/mind-altering drug called Fluid Karma, and the debut of an enormous luxury zeppelin improbably named for the wife of Karl Marx. On this day, the fates of multiple citizens collide, including an amnesiac action star who has written a startlingly prescient screenplay, a porn actor overseeing a burgeoning branding empire, a former beauty queen-turned-spymaster, a venal fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate who is being bribed by an assortment of neo-Marxist agitants, an international cadre of cult members whose purported invention of a perpetual motion machine masks an effort to bring about the end of the world, and, maybe most importantly of all, a war veteran and his twin brother searching for each other.
BACKGROUND:
- Kelly envisioned the film as part of an epic multimedia saga. In-film titles identify sections of the movie as chapters 4-6; the first three chapters were released as graphic novels (now out-of-print collectibles).
- The film had a notorious premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival when Kelly submitted the film before it was completed. He finished neither the editing nor the visual effects in time, and the extremely poor reception received by the work-in-progress prompted him to cut more than 20 minutes prior to general release (including virtually all of Janeane Garofalo’s performance as an Army general). The version shown at Cannes has since been released, although Kelly himself describes the film overall as unfinished.
- Several members of the cast are alums of “Saturday Night Live.” Kelly intentionally cast them to play up the screenplay’s satirical elements, and in general wanted to give his actors a chance to play against type.
- Budgeted at $17 million, Southland Tales grossed less than $400,000 at the global box office.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s little agreement as to whether Southland Tales is a good movie or not, but the one thing that seems to be beyond dispute is that is Timberlake’s Venice Beach lip sync to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is the standout scene. Timberlake’s yokel narrator Pilot Abilene spends the bulk of the film drawling overheated speeches that rely heavily on the Book of Revelation, which he delivers in the tone of a pothead conspiracy nut vainly trying to lift the scales from your eyes. But here, as he struts through a rundown arcade in a drug-induced haze wearing a blood-soaked undershirt and cavorting with a kickline of PVC-clad nurses, Pilot Abilene claims the screen for himself, demonstrating more comfort with the film’s absurdities than anyone we’ve seen thus far. It’s the one moment where Kelly’s delivers his commitment to over-the-top imagery with any degree of lightness; instead of the ponderousness of significance that accompanies every other set piece, this dance scene really dances.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mirror on delay; rehearsing the performance-art assassination
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Richard Kelly is ambitious to a fault, a spectacularly indulgent filmmaker who never had an idea he didn’t want to film and who makes sure you notice every element of his worldbuilding. Southland Tales is a quintessential Kelly experience, with one layer of Philip K. Dickian paranoid surrealism piled upon another layer of Altmanesque interconnectedness, rinse and repeat. The film has been carefully crafted to confuse, with absurd situations, offscreen backstories, and red herrings combining to keep characters and viewers equally at sea.
Original trailer for Southland Tales (2006)
COMMENTS: What good is a blank check? If cinematic success affords a director the chance to fulfill their dream, what dream should Continue reading 65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)