#The alchemist cookbook oscilloscope movie

Few working filmmakers are as in tune with the curious predicament of being young and capable yet too lazy to bother fighting an uphill financial battle, and still fewer that manage to casually assert their cine-literacy without making a show of it (see the one-two punch of Sansho the Bailiff and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid visual quotations that close the film). Such anomalous effects aside, though, the film remains an unmistakable Potrykus job. Then thereвЂ™s the subtle engagement of techniques that have become associated with modern horror filmmaking, like speed ramping and frame-skipping, and that here create unnerving tensions with the darkly comic aspects of the script. ThereвЂ™s the grisly, self-consciously unreal prosthetics utilized when it becomes evident that Sean has made an unwise pact with the devil (or is it Bigfoot?). While austerity has typically been PotrykusвЂ™s go-to directorial strategy in spotlighting the eccentric speaking patterns and physical tics of his performers, The Alchemist Cookbook does introduce some canny aesthetic digressions as the film wades into psychological horror. That said, itвЂ™s not until Cortez catches sight of the marauded opossum left to rot on the floor that his friendвЂ™s frail grip on reality really starts to slacken and the shit hits the fan-which, in PotrykusвЂ™s world, doesnвЂ™t entail anything more spectacular than two guys awkwardly pacing around and swearing at each other in a long take from the vantage point of a locked-off camera. CortezвЂ™s presence throws off the mysticвЂ™s mojo, and itвЂ™s safe to say that when he force-feeds himself cat food to lighten the mood in a set piece that recalls the gluttonous spaghetti-shoveling from Buzzard, it doesnвЂ™t provide for Sean the intended entertainment value.

Things start to go awry with the first arrival of SeanвЂ™s friend, the decidedly sane, if openly goofy, Cortez (Amari Cheatom), whoвЂ™s been shouldering the duty of periodically stocking SeanвЂ™s residence with worldly provisions like Doritos and Gatorade.

The Alchemist CookbookвЂ™s trajectory ends up being much stranger and less prosaic than that. Indeed, because of these piecemeal perceptual reference points, itвЂ™s even possible for a brief period of time to suspect that heвЂ™s just cooking meth like your average crestfallen social exile. SeanвЂ™s arcane undertakings and time-killing dawdles-measuring and mixing household ingredients, wrapping himself in Christmas lights and dancing to hip-hop, shouting at unseen terrors in the distance-are strung together in blunt cuts that obscure the time elapsed from one activity to the next, and from a visual standpoint, these scenes are as single-mindedly absorbed in SeanвЂ™s immediate vicinity as he often is. Under PotrykusвЂ™s aggressively elliptical editing scheme, the specifics of this grand plan are left purposefully unclear. In actuality, Sean, whoвЂ™s holed himself up in a backwoods camper with only a feline companion, is dealing with paranoia and delusion-namely the preposterous conjecture, seemingly cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Latin voodoo books scattered around his slipshod workspace, that heвЂ™ll be able to spontaneously generate wealth through some perfect storm of crazed overthinking. And while Buzzard clung to cause-and-effect drama, The Alchemist Cookbook veers without a compass into a realm of surreal stream of consciousness.Д«oth the filmвЂ™s title and its poster design hearken plainly to William PowellвЂ™s The Anarchist Cookbook, and sure enough, HicksonвЂ™s Sean spends a healthy chunk of his time brewing up DIY chemical concoctions like some overeager student of that notorious Vietnam-era revolution pamphlet. WeвЂ™re no longer in a geographically defined Michigan (though the film does continue the directorвЂ™s streak of shooting in his home state), but rather some liminal landscape between civilization and a lunatic mindscape. Swapping out the droopy features and greasy hair of his regular leading man, Joshua Burge, for the smooth proportions of Ty Hickson, Potrykus has again centered his attention on the economically frustrated, goal-deficient young American male, only here heвЂ™s modified the canvas.

#The alchemist cookbook oscilloscope movie

His new film, the beguiling The Alchemist Cookbook, begins where Buzzard left off, with the numbing social context a thing of the past and the hero, like some metamorphosing movie monster of yesteryear, transforming hastily into something beyond (or sub) human. Joel PotrykusвЂ™s last film, Buzzard, placed its loafer protagonist in a crushingly dull middle-American milieu until he went berserk, with the donning of Freddy Krueger fingers and Halloween-store masks crudely symbolizing the rejection of a status-quo existence while also staying well within the bounds of realism.