Joel Potrykus
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Joel Potrykus
Joel Potrykus is an American film director and screenwriter. His feature film debut ''Ape'' won the Best New Director prize at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival, while his follow-up feature ''Buzzard'' won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2014 Ljubljana International Film Festival. Early life Potrykus was born and raised in Ossineke, Michigan, then moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to study film at Grand Valley State University. Later, he earned his MFA in screenwriting from Emerson College. Career A stint as a stand-up comedian in New York City led to the inspiration for his first feature film, ''Ape''. While spending a year as a temp at a Michigan mortgage company led to the inspiration of his second feature film, ''Buzzard''. The book ''Walden'' by Henry David Thoreau was the influence for Potrykus' 2016 feature ''The Alchemist Cookbook'', which builds on his themes of slackers and loneliness. His fourth feature film ''Relaxer'', is a modern interpretation of Luis Buñuel's The Exterm ...
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Ossineke, Michigan
Ossineke is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Alpena County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 938 at the 2010 census. The community is located within Sanborn Township, several miles south of Alpena on U.S. Highway 23. The name is derived from the Anishinaabe word (either the Ojibwa or the Ottawa) ''zhingaabewasiniigigaabawaad'', meaning "Where the image stones stood", though the modern Anishinaabe name for the place is ''asiniike'', meaning "to quarry". Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of , of which is land and (0.27%) is water. Ossineke is part of Northern Michigan. History The image stones were thought to embody the spirit of Chief Shinggabaw, who promised to return there after death. After they were stolen by a rival tribe, the Great Spirit put them back and destroyed the raiding party. Later, a white fisherman stole them, using them to anchor fishing nets, and they are now som ...
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The Alchemist Cookbook (film)
The Alchemist Cookbook is a horror film directed by Joel Potrykus. The film was released on the 7th of October 2016 in New York City. The film stars Ty Hickson as "Sean" and Amari Cheatom as "Cortez". The film was produced by Oscilloscope Laboratories and by producers Andrew D. Corkin, Bryan Reisberg and Ashley Young. "Sean" is an outcast who isolates himself from society to practice alchemy, accompanied by only his cat. As his mental condition deteriorates the line of what is real and what is not becomes blurred, and as his chemistry turns to black magic, he instead summons a demon. The film breaks the conventional boundaries of genre, as elements of a black comedy, horror and a psychological thriller are all incorporated and intertwined. The Alchemist cookbook was released on an alternate release strategy, as a pay what you want film, in both theatres and on BitTorrent bundle. The film was an official selection at the 2016 South by Southwest Film Festival. Plot Sean lives in ...
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The Evil Dead
''The Evil Dead'' is a 1981 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Sam Raimi, produced by Robert Tapert and executive produced by Raimi, Tapert, and Bruce Campbell, who also starred alongside Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManicor, Betsy Baker and Theresa Tilly. The film focuses on five college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in a remote wooded area. After they find an audio tape that, when played, releases a legion of demons and spirits, four members of the group suffer from demonic possession, forcing the fifth member, Ash Williams (Campbell), to survive an onslaught of increasingly gory mayhem. Raimi, Tapert, Campbell, and their friends produced the short film ''Within the Woods'' as a proof of concept to build the interest of potential investors, which secured US$90,000 to begin work on ''The Evil Dead''. Principal photography took place on location in a remote cabin located in Morristown, Tennessee, in a difficult filming process that proved ...
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Down By Law (film)
''Down by Law'' is a 1986 American black-and-white independent film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni. The film centers on the arrest, incarceration, and escape from jail of three men. It discards jailbreak film conventions by focusing on the interaction between the convicts rather than on the mechanics of the escape. A key element in the film is Robby Müller's slow-moving camerawork, which captures the architecture of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou to which the cellmates escape. Plot summary Three men, previously unknown to each other, are arrested in New Orleans and placed in the same cell. Both Zack (Waits), a disc jockey, and Jack (Lurie), a pimp, have been set up, neither having committed the crime for which they have been arrested. Their cellmate Bob (Benigni, in his first international role), an Italian tourist who understands minimal English, was imprisoned for accidental manslaughter. Zack and Jack soo ...
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The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie
''The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie'' (french: Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie) is a 1972 surrealist film directed by Luis Buñuel from a screenplay co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière. The narrative concerns a group of bourgeois people attempting—despite continual interruptions—to dine together. The French-language film stars Fernando Rey, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, Julien Bertheau, and Milena Vukotic. The film consists of several thematically linked scenes: five gatherings of a group of bourgeois friends, and the four dreams of different characters. The beginning of the film focuses on the gatherings, while the latter part focuses on the dreams, but both types of scenes are intertwined. There are also scenes involving other characters, such as two involving a Latin American female terrorist from the fictional Republic of Miranda. The film's world is not logical: the bizarre events are accepted by the charact ...
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The Comedy (film)
''The Comedy'' is a 2012 American metamodern film directed and co-written by Rick Alverson, and starring Tim Heidecker. Supporting actors include Eric Wareheim (Tim and Eric), James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), and Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger). The film premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and screened within such festivals as Maryland Film Festival 2012. The film was distributed by Tribeca Film and theatrically released on November 9, 2012. It went nationwide on demand starting October 24, 2012. Despite the title and use of comedians as actors, Sundance festival chief programmer Trevor Groth says that the film is not a comedy, but instead "a provocation, a critique of a culture based at its core around irony and sarcasm and about ultimately how hollow that is." The film was deliberately leaked onto various torrent websites, though the file only shows the first ten minutes before abruptly cutting to Heidecker sitting silently on a boat behind a scrollin ...
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Buffalo '66
''Buffalo '66'' is a 1998 American crime comedy-drama film written and directed by Vincent Gallo, starring Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston. The plot revolves around Billy Brown (Gallo), a man who kidnaps a young tap dancer named Layla (Ricci) and forces her to pretend to be his wife to impress his parents (Gazzara and Huston) after he gets released from prison. The film was generally well-received; ''Empire'' listed it as the 36th-greatest independent film ever made. It was filmed in and around Gallo's hometown of Buffalo, New York, in winter. The film uses British progressive rock music in its soundtrack, notably King Crimson and Yes. The title refers to the Buffalo Bills American football team, who had not won a championship since the 1965 American Football League Championship Game (which was actually played on December 28, 1965). The plot involves indirect references to the Bills' narrow loss to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV, which was decided ...
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Taxi Driver
''Taxi Driver'' is a 1976 American film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul Schrader, and starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Leonard Harris, and Albert Brooks. Set in a decaying and morally bankrupt New York City following the Vietnam War, the film follows Travis Bickle (De Niro), a veteran working as a taxi driver, and his deteriorating mental state as he works nights in the city. With ''The Wrong Man'' (1956) and '' A Bigger Splash'' (1973) as inspiration, Scorsese wanted the film to feel like a dream to audiences. With cinematographer Michael Chapman, filming began in the summer of 1975 in New York City, with actors taking pay cuts to ensure that the project could be completed on a low budget of $1.9 million. Production concluded that same year. Bernard Herrmann composed the film's music in what would be his final score, finished just several hours before his death; the film is dedicated to him. The film was the ...
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O Lucky Man!
''O Lucky Man!'' is a 1973 British comedy-drama fantasy film directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis, whom McDowell had first played as a disaffected public schoolboy in his first film performance in Anderson's film '' if....'' (1968). The film was entered into the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. Plot The film opens with a short fragment outside the plot. Grainy, black-and-white, and silent, a title "Once Upon a Time" leads to peasant labourers in an unnamed country picking coffee beans while armed foremen push rudely between them. One worker (McDowell with black hair and moustache) pockets a few beans ("Coffee for the Breakfast Table") but is seen by a foreman. He is next seen before a fat Caucasian magistrate who slobbers as he removes his cigar only to say "Guilty." The foreman draws his machete and lays it across the unfortunate labourer's wrists, bound to a wooden block, revealing that he is to lose his hands for the theft of a few beans. T ...
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Made In Britain
''Made in Britain'' is a 1983 British television play written by David Leland and directed by Alan Clarke. It follows a 16-year-old racist skinhead and his constant confrontations with authority figures. It was broadcast on ITV on 10 July 1983 as the fourth in an untitled series of works by Leland (including '' Birth of a Nation''), based on the British educational system, which subsequently acquired the overall title of ''Tales Out of School''. It marked actor Tim Roth's film debut. Plot Trevor has been tried in court charged with throwing a brick through the window of a Pakistani man, Mr. Shahnawaz. Trevor's social worker, Harry Parker takes him to Hooper Street Residential Assessment Centre, where his punishment will be determined.DVD Outsider: Ma ...
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Vague Visages
In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is not vague since every number is definitively either prime or not. Vagueness is commonly diagnosed by a predicate's ability to give rise to the Sorites paradox. Vagueness is separate from ambiguity, in which an expression has multiple denotations. For instance the word "bank" is ambiguous since it can refer either to a river bank or to a financial institution, but there are no borderline cases between both interpretations. Vagueness is a major topic of research in philosophical logic, where it serves as a potential challenge to classical logic. Work in formal semantics has sought to provide a compositional semantics for vague expressions in natural language. Work in philosophy of language has addressed implications of vagueness for the th ...
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Sound On Sight
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the brain. Only acoustic waves that have frequencies lying between about 20 Hz and 20 kHz, the audio frequency range, elicit an auditory percept in humans. In air at atmospheric pressure, these represent sound waves with wavelengths of to . Sound waves above 20 kHz are known as ultrasound and are not audible to humans. Sound waves below 20 Hz are known as infrasound. Different animal species have varying hearing ranges. Acoustics Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gasses, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound, and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an ''acoustician'', while someone working in the field of acoustical e ...
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