Dir. Jim Hosking (2024)
Two musical legends gather together to discuss collaborating on a worldwide megahit song.
Some songs have legendary beginnings, apocryphal stories behind their lyrics, productions, and whatnot that are almost as fabled as the songs themselves. Smoke on the Water is about a casino fire as told and remembered by the band Deep Purple, while Hotel California is allegedly about a witches' coven, lending extra creepiness to the film's ethereal melodies. Have you ever wondered if one of those stories exist about Sir Paul McCartney's and Stevie Wonders' hit song Ebony and Ivory? No? Well what about a completely fake story where they Stevie absolutely fucking hates Paul McCartney?
Stevie (Gil Gex) has traveled across the ocean to a Scottish Cottage on the Mull of Kintyre to discuss the recording of a song with Paul (Sky Elobar). As Stevie continues to get more and more frustrated by Paul's open-armed acceptance and his dazzling eccentricities, the pair almost come to blows and the creative process comes into full focus. That's basically it. That's the whole movie.
Director Jim Hosking, responsible for cult gross-out hit The Greasy Strangler, is in full weird form here as he tells the story of two musical titans attempting to make a hit. If you thought that one was weird, you're in for an acid-tripping surprise here, because this is one of the strangest and most unnecessary films I've ever seen in my life. I believe there was a script to this film, because it was allegedly written by Hosking himself, but if you told me that these two men were given zero information other than the names of their characters and vague descriptions of their attitudes, I would believe you completely. If this were the case, absolutely nothing about this film would change.
Whether that's a good thing or not will depend on the audience. It's absurd, ridiculous, and makes almost no sense throughout. It's literally two guys prattling on about nothing but their hatred for each other for an hour and a half, with insane scenes like the family dream, cheesy feet, and of course the soon-to-be-iconic nugget slide. It's a very odd film, because the production values are decently high, there's a nice indie quality to the whole thing, and the filmmaker clearly knows what he's doing. It's also a terrible film, with dialogue and performances that feel like something a middle-schooler doodled onto a napkin at lunch and then performed in front of a Super 8 recorder in his backyard. Again, whether this sounds like torture will greatly depend on the audience.
The film has an air of genius, but the kind of genius that most people will dismiss as gibberish. It's like those modern art canvases with paint splatters that a toddler could do, a piece where you can tell there's something there, but you have no idea what or why anyone would want to make it in the first place. As a huge fan of bizarre cinema, this is a film that would seemingly be right up my alley. In this case, I am unfortunately not the target audience. This one was a little too weird even for me.
Who this movie is for: Absurdist comedy lovers, Awkward cinema fans, SCOTTISH COTTAGE dwellers
Bottom line: Ebony and Ivory may find a home with some fans of bizarre cinema, but for most audiences it's going to be a little too far in left field. It's not a film that particularly needs to be made, and it's not one that hits the notes that it attempts to hit. There are some moments of absurdist comedy that work well, and the performances are as strange and off-putting as they need to be. It's a swing for the fences of weirdness, and while it knocks it out of the park in that regard, it's not one that I particularly enjoyed.
