Tag Archives: 2024

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: KILL THE JOCKEY (2024)

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El jockey

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Kill the Jockey is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Luis Ortega

FEATURING: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Fanego

PLOT: Remo, a gifted and drug-addled jockey, finds himself on the run from the mob after paddock fence smash-up leaves him hospitalized.

Still from Kill the Jockey (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even before his traumatic brain injury, Remo is not well in the head, and director Luis Ortega’s narrative reflects that haziness. Once our fractured jockey hits the streets in a borrowed lady’s fur coat (with elegant handbag), all bets are off as Kill the Jockey careens toward its mystical photo-finish.

COMMENTS: The horse is secured in the center of the transport plane, monitored by a serious-faced attendant in an uncertain uniform. The man peers out the window, and observes the craft is approaching the airstrip. The horse’s ears twitch, ever so slightly, as it stands stock-still, darting its eyes left and right. We can tell it is unsettled—highly unsettled—but unsure as to why. Regardless, it makes no sudden moves as it attempts to get a bead on just what is going on, and why it feels so very disturbed.

This beast’s experience traveling through the air resembles the viewer’s journey through Luis Ortega’s metaphysical sports drama, Kill the Jockey; though, unlike the horse, we are treated to regular shots of comedy and a delightful soundtrack. Remo, the titular jockey, drinks (whiskey and ketamine), dances, and seems to be in dangerous pursuit of comatose living. Remo’s boss, Fanego, claims he loves his jockeys like sons, which may well be true, but certainly loves having an infant in his arms as a prop (observed, by one of his goons, as having been apparently the same age for the past seven years). Remo’s lover, Abril, doesn’t seem to love him any more. She tells him so, and in response to how she might come to love him again: “Only if you die and are reborn.” Remo takes on the challenge.

With the second act, cued by a close-up of two radically different-sized pupils on Remo’s post-coma visage, what is and isn’t actually happening becomes increasingly unclear. It appears that Remo, against the odds, survived, and also that he’s in for a personality change of foundational proportions. But why does he no longer affect a measuring scale? (His gun, apparently, weighs one kilogram; that’s around one more kilogram than he registers.)  When did he learn to apply face make-up so capably? And just how did Fanego’s Hispanic-white-boy baby suddenly become a black one? (I didn’t quite believe his claim that “…just happens as they grow.”)

The one certainty afforded us is that our hero, and his story, has come unblinkered. Remo becomes Dolores, Dolores charms her prison mates (and the warden) before dawning a jockey uniform for some underground competition. Abril falls in love again, anticipating the birth of Remo’s daughter. Then a blast of violence catalyzes a metaphysical transference, leaving Abril and Remo—and us—with a happy ending that goes down as gaily as a ketamine and whiskey cocktail.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A colorful Argentine oddity…  Luis Ortega’s alternately dark and daffy eighth feature is suitably untethered for a story concerned with the malleability of the self. That comes at some cost to its impact, however: Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.”–Guy Lodge, Variety (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024)

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“Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality?”–Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium pod Klepsydra, 1937

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopanska, Allison Bell

PLOT: An auctioneer witnesses the activation of a sepulchrum for a deceased retina while Jozef visits his dead/dying father in the titular sanatorium.

Still from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A film adaptation of the titular surreal short story by Bruno Schulz already earned a place on the List. Is another deserving? This version boasts the -esque animation stylings for which the Quay Brothers are rightfully renowned (with the technique utilized more heavily than in their Certified Weird feature Institute Benjamenta). ‘ Hourglass Sanatorium exploited the dream logic of the story, with events frenetically shifting from scene to scene. The Quays, in contrast, excavate the idea of time held back for an unspecified interval, its “limbos and afterbreezes,”i creating a somnolent Sanatorium of vague and enigmatic impressions.

COMMENTS: Like many films by the Brothers Quay, Sanatorium is difficult to summarize. A seven part structure forms less a coherent story than a series of tableaux nested within each other. The perspective shifts among dutiful son Jozef, an auctioneer, and a mysterious female patient, J. Jozef’s visit to his father, at the sanatorium where the dead still live because time is arrested, serves as a frame narrative within a frame narrative, within which isolated occurrences taken from a selection of Schulz’s collected writings appear.

We first meet an auctioneer on a rooftop, beneath a sky of swirling clouds, soliciting bids for unusual and impossible items like the thirteenth month and exotic birds’ eggs (recalling Father’s ill-fated menagerie in Schulz’s story “Birds”). His audience consists of only two chimney sweeps, and when neither makes a bid, he lets them to get back to work.

In the house below, a maid prepares for the auctioneer’s arrival. As he enters the room, she removes the dust cloth from an object perched on a table : a pyramidal box with oculus windows in its sides and a little drawer which opens to display the glassy retina of an eye. The auctioneer explains the mystery of this rare sepulchrum—at a propitious moment the eye will liquify and shed seven tears, and the preserved sights contained within will become Jozef’s dreams as he succumbs to the sanatorium’s will to sleep.

The auctioneer’s frame is live-action, filmed in the gauzy black and white style of Institute Benjamenta, as is J.’s (and a few scenes where an actor, and not a puppet, portrays Jozef). When the scene cuts to Jozef’s ominous train trip (he’s uncertain whether or not his father lives, and this uncertainty will persist), we enter the Quays’ puppet theater. Their minutely detailed miniature sets, to use Schulz’s words, “exude an air of strange and frightening neglect.” The sanatorium setting, its vaguely nineteenth century atmosphere with faintly Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024) →

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CAPSULE: MAGNETOSPHERE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicola Rose

FEATURING: Shayelin Martin, Patrick McKenna, Colin Mochrie, Mikayla Kong, Steven He, Tania Webb

PLOT: A 13-year old girl with synesthesia deals with a new school, first crushes, bullying, and other typical teen problems.

Still from Magnetosphere (2024)

COMMENTS: Synesthesia, the neurological condition commonly described as “seeing sounds” or “hearing colors,” provides a tempting, if underutilized, possibility for filmmakers. A director can use “draw on the lens” techniques, easily achieved on the cheap through commercial software, to depict a protagonist’s subjective experience of seeing rainbows and candy-colored floaters overlaid on reality, providing an easy excuse to add phantasmagoric visual flair to any story. Typically, an in-film illicit drug trip would provide the pretext for such effects. By addressing synesthesia, director Nicola Rose can create a childlike world of sparkly kiddie psychedelia—fluffy unicorn and cotton candy stuff, but with a tie-dye aesthetic—while staying safely within the confines of a Disney/Nickelodeon storyline.

Protagonist Maggie almost constantly, if inconsistently, hallucinates. Sure, there are the green and purple and yellow sparkles that fill the screen when she sings a ballad on her portable keyboard, and the fact that, when she concentrates, she sees all the other characters with individual colored auras: pink for her sister, brilliant green for her crush, a squiggly mess of multicolored threads for her conflicted bestie. That’s textbook synesthesia. But Maggie can also draw lines and shapes in the air, persistent tracers that form hearts and crowns and words that glow with neon colors. An art lesson is so visually intense for her that the screen glitches into an incoherent muddle as dissonant music plays, causing her to puke. Her Barbie doll, Cassiopeia, talks to her, frankly confessing that she represents Maggie’s insecurities (while denying that she’s part of her host’s “weird brain thing.”). This expansive magical realism, transcending the bounds of simply “hearing colors,” is poetic license that expresses Maggie’s inner sense of alienness. But it also makes the girl seem like she suffers more from Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder than synesthesia. Perhaps her parents slipped LSD into her bottle back in their hippie days?

While the tastefully trippy visuals are novel in this context, the plot is formula, occasionally approaching pure corn. Insecure teen girl has some ultimately minor affliction that makes her self-conscious, experiences normal teen girl problems, gains confidence and the tools to resolve life’s little disappointments with maturity, the future looks bright. There’s bullying, an inappropriate crush, and an LGBTQ subplot to deal with, and it all gets resolved as neatly as you’d expect. To pass the time while the pattern plays out, we have not only the hallucinatory bursts, but a lot of comedy. Maggie’s dad is a goofball thespian directing a community theater production of “Pirates of Penzance” (which also has a predictable arc, with the scrappy citizen-singers overcoming obstacles with help from an unlikely source). The primary comic relief comes from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” veteran Colin Mochrie, who plays weirdo handyman Gil, a guy who comes off like a kid-friendly version of Creed Bratton from “The Office.” He has a mysterious private existence somewhere outside of polite society and is given to inappropriate, absurd non sequiturs (“I saw action in ‘Nam so that boneheaded, ungrateful numbnuts like you could have a kitchen toilet!”) Gil also hunts rats with a chainsaw. I didn’t find his silly, unmotivated antics particularly amusing, but humor is subjective, and the jokes are for a much younger crowd.

We provide allowances for the script’s formularity, since the film is prosocially pedantic and aimed at a pre-teen to young teen audience. Still, the high ratings on this low-budget film are astounding: an 8.4 on IMDb (the original Toy Story has an 8.3), 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (Lady Bird has a 99% rating). Admittedly, that’s on inappreciable numbers (a mere 88 IMDb voters and 12 RT critics), but even accounting for the small sample size, these scores are a bit baffling. The movie is perfectly fine. The acting is competent, the effects cheap but effective, the message heartwarming, the comedy… probably works for some. But it seems that Magnetosphere is largely lauded for its good intentions rather than its actual quality. It’s a nice movie. There is a large element of self-selection here: with a very limited release, only people already well-disposed to this material are likely to queue it up. There aren’t enough teenage synesthetics to form a cult audience, and even those kids will be drawn more to the same mainstream Marvel/Hunger Games fare their peers devour—it’s mostly their parents who will be cheering Magnetosphere. For curiosity seekers like us, this is a decent, modest movie that won’t feel like a waste of time, but it’s not some hidden classic that justifies those gaudy metrics. A reminder to always be skeptical of high internet ratings on low-distribution niche items.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Magnetosphere is for the weirdo in all of us who believes in the beauty the world has to offer.”–Tina Kakadelis, Beyond the Cinerama Dome (contemporaneous)

Magnetosphere [DVD]

Magnetosphere [DVD]
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BOYS GO TO JUPITER (2024)

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Boys Go to Jupiter is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Jack Corbett, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, , Tavi Gevinson, Julio Torres

PLOT: It’s winter break in Florida, and teenage dropout Billy 5000 is gigging to get five grand, but instead finds a donut-shaped alien creature.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Mid-’90s-style computer-animation visuals in a mid-’00s-style slacker dramedy with a mid-’10s-style soundtrack make Boys Go to Jupiter something of a disorienting experience. Also: a dozen or so odd little aliens, a hyper-intelligent dolphin running a juice concern, and a Spanish-speaking mini-golf dinosaur skeleton.

COMMENTS: Too smart for school, but not mature enough to succeed as an adult, Billy 5000 also suffers from a strange last name, a misguided sense of purpose, and the weight of an impending technical correction crushing down on him. He seems all right, though, being one of those lucky teens: laid-back, sensible, and at least subconsciously accepting that life is stacked against him. Besides, he’s about to happen upon a singular opportunity for personal growth—it just won’t be the “Moolah” variety proselytized by the influencer he follows, or by rocking his Grubster™ gig.

Julian Glander has concocted (programmed? certainly directed) an unusual bildungsroman here, which could have so easily been drab and charmless had its pieces not been this selectively chosen and particularly assembled. The vibe from the simple 3-D animation isn’t uncanny so much as dreamlike, an element heightened by the prudent use of narrative pop songs. Billy flies above his delivery route, musing on life and wondering why everything feels so heavy… only to ground the scene with the realization he’s been carrying a sack of golf balls in his insulated delivery bag. (Freckles, the protagonist’s slightly younger—and far frecklier—friend starts as an aspiring hip-hop artist before deciding that the acoustic guitar is much more his thing: his grunge-style power ballad about different ways to eat eggs is a credit to the genre.)

The casual inclusion of outright surreal imagery is rattling, in a cute kind of way: simple faces may take up entire window frames, and, as hinted above, a Brontosaurus skeleton at a miniature golf course offers words of solace to its proprietor. Coupling the animation and the absurdity with an indie-drama vibe pays off handsomely, and that’s before we even get into the alien podcasters and dolphin machinations. Boys Go to Jupiter is both very strange and very laid-back, and zaps you for almost an hour and a half; a slice of life served up as exotic cocktail.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird…”–Natalia Winkleman, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: EBONY & IVORY (2024)

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EBony & Ivory is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Gil Gex,

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.

Still from EBONY AND IVORY (2024)

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:

“It’s hard to tell if it’s the best or worst movie of the year, largely because it’s so wantonly weird that it erases the distinction between the two… a niche offering with a genuinely avant-garde spirit, and if that limits its appeal (and it will!), adventurous moviegoers will find it to be a unique descent into a bizarro world of eccentric catchphrases and demented flights of fancy. No matter what the next five months bring, you won’t see a crazier 2025 film.”–Nick Schager, The Daily Beast (contemporaneous)