Tag Archives: 2022

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: QUANTUM COWBOYS (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Geoff Marslett

FEATURING: Kiowa Gordon, John Way, Lily Gladstone, Patrick Page, , , Alex Cox

PLOT: After three years in prison, Frank reunites with his pal Bruno to affirm that a murdered musician is alive; meanwhile, Colfax and Depew pursue increasingly desperate measures to remove themselves from a simultaneously occurring time-loop.

Still from Quantum Cowboys (2022)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Good times, looping and otherwise, await the viewer in this multivariously-animated adventure, with its scattered reality monitored by an all-observant supernatural entity, his recording crew—and his cat.

COMMENTSQuantum Cowboys plays like the fun-time menace of The Endless fused with the philosophizing of  Waking Life, with a story unfolding in the late 19th-century Arizona Territory. If that comparison doesn’t do it for you, I got others. While director Geoff Marslett hasn’t made a wholly new phenomenon, in the manner of igneous rock spewed from cinema’s core, he has through precedent and pressure forged a metamorphic rock, squeezing genres, tropes, and ideas into a film different from what has come before. And all its inner weirdness is coated with such easygoing charm that only upon reflection does the viewer realize a whole lot of odd stuff just happened.

Four layers of narrative interact and interlay as Quantum Cowboys unfolds. A pair of nobodies—sly Frank and honest Bruno (Kiowa Gordon and John Way)—shovel horse droppings as a band plays to a small crowd at the opening of a railway station. Mischief leads to tragedy when a US Marshall pursuing Frank for petty robbery shoots the band leader. Meanwhile, the traveling salesmen Colfax and Depew (David Arquette and Frank Mosley, the latter looking like a dead-ringer for a younger version of the former) attempt to make bank by importing ideas from the future to sell to the past. Looming in the background is the charmingly earthy Linde, whose ambitions include land acquisition by way of matrimony with a white man. Looming over everything is Memory, who attempts to fuse these various observed paths into a coherent, single reality.

Frank is our reluctant hero, pulled into the time travel nonsense triggered by Colfax and Depew, our reluctant villains. Frank didn’t experience personal growth during a three-year prison stint for robbery, but his release, and the unlikely events immediately following, set him on a path toward maturity—but one that can only conclude happily if he can engineer an outcome that doesn’t leave everybody dead. Scattered amidst his journey are plenty of alt-country music luminaries (such as Neko Case), as well as Alex Cox as a preacher only somewhat anchored to any given timeline. Bruno, with his simple outlook and honorable ways, gives Frank—and the film—a focal point; Frank needs his friend for direction, and his friend needs someone to direct.

I could easily tell that everyone involved had a good time, from the the sanguine trio serving as Memory’s recording crew to the multi-roled John Doe, who has no time for the other John Doe’s tuneless musicianship and coolly shoots up John Doe’s tavern to silence an unpleasant cacophony. Geoff Marslett and co-writer Howe Gelb (an Arizona-born singer-songwriter) let their animation team do their thing, making for a visual style that’s a coherent variation on being everywhere at once. The music rocks with a twang, the performers ooze charm, and the action gyrates to a delightful finale of friendship triumphing over obsession. As Linde observes the day after her nuptials, “Nothing’s meant to be. Especially this.” Quantum Cowboys probably shouldn’t exist, but, thankfully, here it is for our enjoyment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“May I be the first to crown Quantum Cowboys the new king of the psychedelic western? Visually it beats El Topo to the draw. It makes your brain slide further across the theater floor than Greaser’s Palace.” — Michael Talbot-Haynes, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

CHANNEL 366: THE KINGDOM TRILOGY (THE KINGDOM, THE KINGDOM II, THE KINGDOM: EXODUS)

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Still from "The Kingdom"

DIRECTED BY: /Morten Arnford (Kingdom, Kingdom II); Lars von Trier (Kingdom: Exodus)

FEATURING: Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Kirsten Rolffes, Søren Pilmark, Birgitte Raaberg, , Mikael Persbrandt, Lars Mikkelsen, Tuva Novotny, , , Lars von Trier

PLOT: This limited TV series follows goings-on, bureaucratic and supernatural, at Denmark’s largest hospital. As the prologue of each episode states:

“The Kingdom Hospital rests on ancient marshland—where the bleaching ponds once lay. Here, the bleachers moistened their great spans of cloth. The steam from the cloth shrouded the place in permanent fog. Then the hospital was built here. The bleachers gave way to doctors, researchers—the best brains in the nation and the most perfect technology.

To crown their work, they called their hospital ‘The Kingdom’. Now life was to be charted and ignorance and superstition never to shake science again. Perhaps their arrogance became too pronounced—like their persistent denial of the spiritual. For it is that the cold and damp have returned. Tiny signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid, modern edifice.

No living person knows it yet, but the portal to The Kingdom—is opening again.”

COMMENTS: It’s not out of line to call “The Kingdom” Lars von Trier’s ““; he’s stated that the David Lynch series is a direct influence.  But there’s much more to it. Both shows are anchored in the 90s, and both were resurrected some twenty-five years later to continue and conclude their stories. Both are, ultimately, about the ongoing battle between Good and Evil. “Twin Peaks” did so within the framework of the late 80s/early 90s nighttime network soap operas, grafted with Lynch’s retro-50s style, and adding surrealism, cosmic horror, and a pinch of meta commentary. “The Kingdom” frames that battle within the hospital/medical show, a staple of television drama. Many Americans will think of “E.R.”, although a more apt comparison would be “St. Elsewhere” with a little bit of “M*A*S*H” and an aesthetic heavily influenced by “Homicide: Life in the Streets.” It’s also firmly anchored in institutional satires like The Hospital (1971) and Britannia Hospital (1982). Stephen King1 is also a big influence. Von Trier uses popular tropes to deliver the horror bits: a ghost girl, haunted transports (ambulances in early seasons, a helicopter in “Exodus”), mass graveyards (or bleaching ground stand-ins), spirits on the premises. There’s also some play with severed body parts, and “Kingdom”‘s big set piece, the introduction of ‘Little Brother’ at the end of the first series.

The tropes of medical dramas are twisted here: the heroic doctor figure runs an underground black market; a doctor researching a specific form of liver cancer has an organ transplanted into him Continue reading CHANNEL 366: THE KINGDOM TRILOGY (THE KINGDOM, THE KINGDOM II, THE KINGDOM: EXODUS)

CAPSULE: FANG (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Richard Burgin

FEATURING: Dylan LaRay, , Jess Paul

PLOT: Billy lives with his Parkinson’s-stricken mother; his dispiriting routine is interrupted by a rat bite which seems to catalyze an unnatural change in him.

Still from Fang (2022)

COMMENTS: Billy’s world is cramped. He sweeps a broom for nine bucks an hour on a crowded warehouse floor for Mr. Wolfson. After a short walk home, he can only look forward to his small apartment where he looks after his fading mother, Gina. On top of this dreariness, he is trapped inside his own mind, and is forced nearly every waking hour to pretend to know how to interact with all these callous normies he finds himself amongst. Daily, he faces patrician disregard from Wolfson and maternal fury from Gina. But he has a refuge.

More than ten million years in the future, the planet Graix is thriving, with wide-open spaces and a civilization descended from rats which were sent from Earth in the deep past, when a nigh-unlivable planet forced humanity into a “Noah’s Ark”-style gambit.  Billy has much more to say about this world, as it is his—the good part, at least. His mother’s caretaker, a young woman named Myra, thinks so, too. After his spiel, she looks at his drawings of this world and sincerely opines, “This is really cool.”

Richard Burgin takes great care and consideration in and for Billy’s character, and Dylan LaRay is to be commended for his spectrum-informed performance. But Burgin cannot be too kind to Billy. The protagonist’s small world looks smaller on camera, with furtive lens movements coupling with angled close-ups. The lighting is overcast. And every other character is performed, it seems to me, as slightly “too much,” as a way of capturing the daily bombardment Billy endures. (Even ignoring the confined Hell of his life with his mom.)

The supernatural element may or may not be real. We can be certain of two things: Billy is primed for a mental breakdown, and he is bitten by a small white rat. He witnesses down fur growing from an awful wound on his arm, and his hyper-perception (the foley in Fangs is not a comfortable experience) takes a tone more sinister than even his underlying circumstances should allow. While there is a facsimile of comic relief—in the form of a pair of warehouse co-workers, one of whom invariably talks about breasts, as well as a delightful scene with a zealous hardware store clerk—there is not much of it. And knowing the genre, the character’s perturbation (undiagnosed autism), the mother’s affliction (Parkinson’s disease, stage five), and observing Billy’s life in the first ten minutes, we know this will not end well.

That in mind, please take the “Recommended” notice with this warning: Fang is very painful at times; but its most painful moments are its most impressive. Billy’s encounters with his mother—sometimes with Myra bearing witness—tilt dismayingly between disturbing and sweet, cruel and caring. At times, all four, as when she condemns her boy in the most vulgar and harshest terms, and then on the heels of this excoriation mistakes him for his father and moves to seduce him. Fang is at its best when it is true to what it is at heart: a hushed, harrowing tale of mental disintegration. While some of its more overtly “Horror film” elements misfire, the genuine sadness of the son’s and mother’s experiences was enough to make me shudder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A dash of body horror combined with a pinch of surrealism and a peck of psychological horror... Fang is a perfect midnight movie.”— Bryan Staebell, Scare Value (festival screening)