Podcasts about Pauline Kael

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Best podcasts about Pauline Kael

Latest podcast episodes about Pauline Kael

Kael Your Idols: A New Hollywood Podcast
Dirty Gigs: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

Kael Your Idols: A New Hollywood Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2025 109:30


Oooh! We got a grimy one for ya today. We dive right into the dirt with famed auteur Sam Peckinpah's minor (but still fascinating) work: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Warren Oates leads a quirky cast populated by Mexican sex workers and suspiciously corporate hitmen in this tale of sexual jealousy, work, and morality and we just have a ball talking about it! Topics include: the hosts views on violent cinema, the strange life of “the world's most interesting man” and Peckinpah's friendship with Pauline Kael.

Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books
David Denby, EMINENT JEWS: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer

Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2025 22:00


New York Times bestselling author, veteran film critic, and New Yorker staff writer David Denby chats with Zibby about EMINENT JEWS, which profiles Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. The conversation spans from Denby's early years under the mentorship of Pauline Kael to his decades-long career at The New Yorker, before diving into the cultural impact and complex legacies of the book's four iconic Jewish figures. Along the way, they discuss the evolution of Jewish identity in American media, the legacy of Bernstein as portrayed in Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Mel Brooks' fearless comedy, and what it means to reclaim the word "Jew."Purchase on Bookshop: https://bit.ly/42QJ84lShare, rate, & review the podcast, and follow Zibby on Instagram @zibbyowens! Now there's more! Subscribe to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books on Acast+ and get ad-free episodes. https://plus.acast.com/s/moms-dont-have-time-to-read-books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Director's Club
Episode 236: Jack Clayton (feat. Rachel Bellwoar)

Director's Club

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2025 123:49


What an honor and a joy it was to talk with Rachel Bellwoar, an extremely talented writer and pop culture enthusiast whose work I've enjoyed discovering over the years. Thanks to many mutual cinephile friends and podcasters, we crossed paths in the world of Facebook and I couldn't be more thrilled to have her on the show to talk about an underappreciated British director, Jack Clayton!Pauline Kael praised The Innocents as "one of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made” and rightfully so. We also talk about the majority of his work since his filmography was surprisingly on the lower end. Of course we sing the praises of his renowned gothic horror masterpiece but along the way, we discover a few other works of his that we highly recommend seeking out too. Thank you Rachel for coming on the show and looking forward to a future appearance.Just a heads up that I'll be taking a short summer break from podcasting starting in late May, hopefully returning in August. There may be a couple of surprise episodes popping up but I'll be moving and working on other projects for a bit. Stay tuned for the first week of May for an exciting episode before the hiatus featuring Marya Gates and Ryan McNeil, returning to talk about Martha Coolidge!00:00 - 08:47 - Introduction08:48 - 01:02:05 - Room At The Top / The Innocents01:02:06 - 01:33:10 - The Pumpkin Eater / Our Mother's House01:33:10 - 02:03:50 - Other Clayton Films / OutroFollow Rachel's Work:https://rbellwoar.wordpress.comhttps://bsky.app/profile/ziggystarlog.bsky.socialDirector's Club is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Director's Club at directorsclub.substack.com/subscribe

Hey, Did You See This One?
Episode 179 - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Hey, Did You See This One?

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2025 195:19


This month on Hey, Did You See This One?, we're celebrating Jason's birthday with No Themes, Just Friends—great movies, great guests, zero restrictions.Next up, we're diving into Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), a sharp, funny, twisty neo-noir starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. Our good friend Jared McInnis joins us to talk pulp novels, Hollywood, and why this cult classic still slaps.Please remember to like, comment, subscribe and click that notification bell for all our updates! It really helps us out!WE HAVE MERCH - https://www.redbubble.com/people/HDYSTMerch/shop?asc=u & http://tee.pub/lic/GdSYxr8bhtYStarring: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan & Corbin BernsenDirected By: Shane BlackSynopsis: Two-bit crook Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) stumbles into an audition for a mystery film while on the run from the cops. Winning the part, he lands in Hollywood, where he's flung into a tangled, murderous conspiracy with his childhood sweetheart, Harmony Lane (Michelle Monaghan), and hard-boiled private eye Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer). This deadpan, affectionate parody of film noir tropes is named for film critic Pauline Kael's influential 1968 collection of film reviews and essays.Watch LIVE at: https://www.twitch.tv/heydidyouseethisone every Thursday at 8 PM ESTA PROUD MEMBER OF THE UNITED FEDERATION OF PODCASTSCheck us out online at: https://www.ufpodcasts.com/We use White Bat Audio – a user that creates DMCA free music for podcasters and YouTubers. Please follow at: https://www.youtube.com/@WhiteBatAudioAudio version of the show: Spotify - https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/heydidyouseethisone Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hey-did-you-see-this-one/id1712934175YouTube Audio Podcast: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD6BOSx2RcKuP4TogMPKXRMCxqfh5k9IU&si=umIaVrghJdJEu2ARMain Intro and Outro Themes created by Josh Howard - remixes by Jacob Hiltz & Jake ThurgoodLogo created by Jeff Robinson#KissKissBangBang #RobertDowneyJr #ValKilmer #ShaneBlackMovies #DarkComedy #FilmTok #MovieTok #Cinephile #PodcastClip #PodcastLife #TrueCrimeVibes #DetectiveStory #FilmRecs #BirthdayVibes #NoThemesJustFriends

Critics at Large | The New Yorker
Critics at Large Live: The Right to Get It Wrong

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2025 39:31


In 1939, reviewing the beloved M-G-M classic “The Wizard of Oz” for The New Yorker, the critic Russell Maloney declared that the film held “no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.” The use of color was “eye-straining,” the dialogue was unbelievable, and the movie as a whole was “a stinkeroo.” This take might shock today's audiences, but Maloney is far from the only critic to go so pointedly against the popular view. In a special live show celebrating The New Yorker's centenary, the hosts of Critics at Large discuss this and other examples drawn from the magazine's archives, including Dorothy Parker's 1928 takedown of “Winnie-the-Pooh” and Pauline Kael's assessment of Al Pacino as “a lump” at the center of “Scarface.” These pieces reveal something essential about the role of criticism and the value of thinking through a work's artistic merits (or lack thereof) on the page. “I felt all these feelings while reading Terrence Rafferty tearing to shreds ‘When Harry Met Sally…,' ” Alexandra Schwartz says. “But it made the movie come alive for me again, to have to dispute it with the critic.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Lies, Lies, and More Lies,” by Terrence Rafferty (The New Yorker)“Bitches and Witches,” by John Lahr (The New Yorker)“Don't Shoot the Book-Reviewer; He's Doing the Best He Can,” by Clifton Fadiman (The New Yorker)“The Feminine Mystique,” by Pauline Kael (The New Yorker)“The Wizard of Hollywood,” by Russell Maloney (The New Yorker)“The Fake Force of Tony Montana,” by Pauline Kael (The New Yorker)“Renoir's Problem Nudes,” by Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker)“Humans of New York and the Cavalier Consumption of Others,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)“The Great Sadness of Ben Affleck,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)“President Killers and Princess Diana Find Musical Immortality,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)“Obscure Objects of Desire: On Jeffrey Eugenides,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The Nation)“Reading ‘The House at Pooh Corner,' ” by Dorothy Parker (The New Yorker)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Numlock Podcast
Numlock Sunday: Alissa Wilkinson on We Tell Ourselves Stories

The Numlock Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2025 34:39


By Walt HickeyDouble feature today!Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine.I'm a huge fan of Alissa, she's a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It's a really wonderful book and if you're a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it's a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on.Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be back, wherever we are.Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It's a really exciting book. It's a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work?Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn't read any books, because they don't make you read books in school, or they didn't when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in '03. It's sort of a meditation on grief, but it's not really what that sounds like. If people haven't read it's very Didion. You know, it's not sentimental, it's constantly examining the narratives that she's telling herself about grief.So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn't have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I'd never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else.Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don't remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades.From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn't realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that's 20 years of history.Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I've always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.”It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don't really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she's a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief.So that's the long-winded way of saying I wasn't, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer.That's really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion's experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there?The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she's in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John's brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it's all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it's at.So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That's the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the '80s as screenwriters still.People sometimes don't realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don't realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives.John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn't understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It's a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it.So it's, it's really, that's all very interesting. They're threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion's early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns.Then in the '80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There's an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together.So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there'd be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn't seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens.Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she's such an interesting figure, but she's also lived so very publicly that I'm just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole.Yeah. I mean, I didn't interview her for obvious reasons.Understandable, entirely understandable.Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John's nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion's magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that's not published and it's mostly her criticism.Most of that criticism was published in the late '50s and the early '60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you'd do back then. Yeah, wild stuff.A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she'd been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, '62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It's never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time.Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that.But in any case, even when she wasn't sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it's like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark's of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny.When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn't really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things.It's so opposite, I think, to most people's view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don't think is untrue when we're talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn't attempting to elevate the discourse or something.I just think that's fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn't matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don't think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It's right at the point where he's making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It's one of the funniest pieces. I won't spoil the ending because it's hilarious, and it's in the book.That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn't been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn't open.That's magnificent. That's such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn't been published. If it wasn't digitized, then it's not digitized. That's incredible.Yeah, it's there, but you can barely print them off because they're in PDFs. They're like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It's all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there's enough interest in her work that it's fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona.It's really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn't trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It's not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out?Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it's hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera.So it was the '70s. That's amazing.Yes, and it launched Al Pacino's film career! Yeah, it's wild. You watch it and you're just like, “How is this coming from the woman who's about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It's very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made.A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn't realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.”This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I'm gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It's not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It's very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.”I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That's really delightful.Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.”Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you.It happens to everybody, you know, don't get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher?So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion's one of the most influential writers of her generation, there's a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it?In the business itself, I don't know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn's work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There's a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren't produced. There's also her cookbooks, and I'm very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there.Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That's how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she's not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood's logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They're starting to win and rule the day.She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she's writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody's book, or she's thinking about a particular event, or she's been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she's been on the inside, but with an outsider's eye.That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one's about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we're many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing.But she's actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She's interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she's writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large.That's fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you're finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there's a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It's all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise.Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who's written for a long time, you don't always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you're like, “Oh, I guess you're right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those.I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she's using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she's running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She's not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it.Fascinating.Yeah, that idea that you don't know what you are potentially doing, I've thought about that. I don't know what mine is. But either way. It's such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it workedVery much, yeah. I'm gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I've been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there's a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I'm really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world.Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular?Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it's coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time.I should confirm this, I don't think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush's era. I think there's one piece on Obama, and then she's writing about other things. It's just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day.I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that's a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way.There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It's at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart's website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it's an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It's a really interesting essay, not least because I think it's an essay also about people's parasocial relationships with Joan Didion.So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don't really know what they're getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it.Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn't around for her to specifically address it.Yes, completely.On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What's the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice?Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn't know, hadn't read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that's as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It's certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There's a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It's very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it's very fun to read. So I'm happy about that. It's not ponderous at all, which is good. It's also not that long.It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I'm excited about. And I'll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there's a virtual date, and there's a good chance I'll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don't really post there anymore.Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you so much.Edited by Crystal Wang.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

Grey Matter with Michael Krasny
NY Times Film Critic Alyssa Wilkinson on Villains and Evil in Today's Films and Nickle Boys as the Year's Best

Grey Matter with Michael Krasny

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2025 59:01


We began this episode talking about Joan Didion as a Hollywood figure and the importance of John Wayne, as well as her importance as a political writer with early strong conservative political views. Didion's portrayal of Hollywood and her lesser-known film criticism also came up for discussion, followed by a consideration of the work of the legendary film critic Pauline Kael and how Wilkinson, a film critic for The New York Times, decides what films to review or critique. Alyssa Wilkinson then spoke of what she views as the job of the film critic, and she spoke of her strong admiration for "Nickel Boys," which she called this year's best film. She and Krasny spoke of blockbusters, disaster and apocalyptic films, and Spielberg's "Jaws," and the larger question of the effect on our imaginations of the so-called Hollywood dream machine.Krasny and Wilkinson discussed villains and evil in contemporary films and Martin Scorsese's notion of too many films being like thrill rides and avoiding ordinary people and nuanced drama. They spoke, too, of the Oscars and discussed the history of the Oscars, and then went on to the impact of social media and streaming platforms and technology shifts and the question of misunderstood and too-long films and the tensions between art and commerce. They returned to Didion and her overall importance and concluded with a discussion of Wilkinson's view on faith and how she became a film critic and her film critic-filled Brooklyn neighborhood.

The Hatchards Podcast
Lili Anolik on Didion & Babitz: Joan's Bethlehem vs Eve's Bedlam

The Hatchards Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2024 41:03


On this episode, we were joined by Lili Anolik, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and author of Didion & Babitz, a provocatively entertaining account of the feud between two key countercultural voices of the 1960s and '70s – the iconic Joan Didion and the lesser-known Eve Babitz. Lili spoke us to about her decade's long obsession with Eve Babitz, her scepticism of the Didion mystique, Pauline Kael, and the crucial role that Los Angeles played in the development of these two literary titans.Covering everyone from Charles Manson to Marcel Duchamp, Lili takes us headlong into two tumultuous decades, demonstrating why Eve Babitz considered Los Angeles in the 1970s to be the Moveable Feast that Hemingway and Fitzgerald experienced in the Paris of the '20s. Hosted by Ryan Edgington and Matt Hennessey. Produced by Lily Woods.

Culture en direct
Critique littérature : "Écrits sur le cinéma" de Pauline Kael, un concentré fascinant de méchanceté

Culture en direct

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2024 27:29


durée : 00:27:29 - Les Midis de Culture - par : Marie Labory - Au menu de votre débat critique : des livres de cinéma à lire et à offrir avec "Écrits sur le cinéma" de Pauline Kael et "Golden Eighties" de Nicolas Brevière ! - réalisation : Laurence Malonda - invités : Philippe Azoury Journaliste, critique et auteur; Murielle Joudet Critique de cinéma pour Le Monde

Salotto Monogatari
Salotto Retrocritica 4 - Dirty Harry

Salotto Monogatari

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2024 28:52


Oggi Paolo e Matteo parlano di quanto scritto da Pauline Kael su Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) per The New Yorker (15 Gennaio 1972). Insieme al loro commento viene letto un estratto di "Spettri di Clint. L'America del mito nell'opera di Eastwood", di Ciotta e Silvestri (editore Baldini + Castoldi, 2023). La versione del testo di Kael letta in puntata è stata tradotta da Marco e Simone. Qui trovate il testo integrale in lingua originale: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/dirty-harry-saint-cop-review-by-pauline-kael/ Partecipanti: Matteo Arcamone Paolo Torino Il nostro canale Telegram per rimanere sempre aggiornati e comunicare direttamente con noi: https://t.me/SalottoMonogatari Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2QtzE9ur6O1qE3XbuqOix0?si=mAN-0CahRl27M5QyxLg4cw Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/salotto-monogatari/id1503331981 Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNmM1ZjZiNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== Logo creato da: Massimo Valenti Sigla e post-produzione a cura di: Alessandro Valenti / Simone Malaspina Per il jingle della sigla si ringraziano: Alessandro Corti e Gianluca Nardo Per la gestione dei canali social si ringrazia: Selene Grifò

SPECULATIONS by Sofilm
Ep. 31 : Pauline Kael, Hippocrate et The Substance

SPECULATIONS by Sofilm

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2024 46:53


Un nouvel épisode particulièrement riche consacré à la critique Pauline Kael, à la série médicale Hippocrate et au médicamenteux The Substance ! Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Awesome Movie Year
Fellini Satyricon (1969 Venice Film Festival Winner)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2024 54:25


The tenth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features one of the Venice International Film Festival's major award winners, Federico Fellini's Fellini Satyricon. Directed and co-written by Federico Fellini and starring Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born and Salvo Randone, Fellini Satyricon won the Pasinetti Award for Best Italian Film at the 1969 festival and was nominated for an Oscar.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fellini-satyricon-1970), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/15/archives/fellinis-magical-mystery-tour-fellinis-magical-mystery-tour.html), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy.

Awesome Movie Year
The Wild Bunch (1969 Jason's Pick)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2024 61:24


The ninth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features Jason's personal pick, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Directed and co-written by Sam Peckinpah and starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien and Jaime Sánchez, The Wild Bunch was nominated for two Oscars.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/06/26/archives/violence-and-beauty-mesh-in-wild-bunch.html), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and Judith Crist in New York Magazine.Please like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring a Venice Film Festival award winner, Federico Fellini's Fellini Satyricon.

Awesome Movie Year
Z (1969 Foreign Film)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2024 51:44


The seventh episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features our foreign film pick, Costa-Gavras' Z. Directed and co-written by Costa-Gavras (from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos) and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Yves Montand, Jacques Perrin, Pierre Dux and Irene Papas, Z was nominated for five Oscars and won two.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/z-1969), Paul Schrader in Coast FM & Fine Arts (https://paulschrader.org/articles/pdf/1970-Z.pdf), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our animation pick, Peanuts adaptation A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Awesome Movie Year
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969 Josh's Pick)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2024 57:13


The sixth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features Josh's personal pick, Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Directed by Ronald Neame from a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen (based on the Muriel Spark novel) and starring Maggie Smith, Pamela Franklin, Robert Stephens, Gordon Jackson and Jane Carr, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was nominated for two Oscars and won one.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/11/specials/spark-brodiefilm.html), Variety, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our foreign film pick, Costa-Gavras' Z.

TRAPPO.
Nightclubbing! (Hulkamania Running Down Your Leg)

TRAPPO.

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2024 36:08


What exactly is this? Is it an episode of TRAPPO? Is it some kind of madcap experiment? Perhaps a commentary on the inherent banality of evil? Grace Jones is cool. Hulk Hogan is a terrible human being. Are we capable of caring for more than one person? What does Arnold Schwarzenegger's beard smell like? Have we summoned the ghost of Pauline Kael? I think we need to call everybody's favorite bio-exorcist. Frag grenades for days. The madness & the mania just blew our 24-inch guns out! Please visit the official TRAPPO blog (CLICK HERE) and leave us a comment. Tell us what you think of this... thing. Do you like this thing? Do you hate this thing? Would you like more things like this thing? Send us an email (CLICK HERE) and we'll tell you a secret that will shatter your reality. Follow us on Threads (CLICK HERE) and we'll have a great time sharing GIFs and misery until the sun explodes. Is this the end of TRAPPO? Stay tuned.

The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast
"Cruel Intentions" (1999, Dir: Roger Kumble)

The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 22, 2024 91:07


Corbin, Matt, and SPECIAL GUEST MATEA (Check out her ROBUST Letterboxd here) talk about CRUEL INTENTIONS, a truly wild erotic thriller/black comedy from the precise moment when the Americans were most sick and tired of their own bullshit. Topics include a lengthy diatribe about Clinton and Bush, the gauzy-TV look of the movie, and the movie's depiction of Step-sisters as well as the culture's. Check out a cool intertextual essay about the movie here.  Matt reccomends the podcast "Fall of Civilizations." Corbin reccomends Pauline Kael aggregregator accounts. Matea reccomends a book by the 40 Laws of Power guy, but she swears you shouldn't take advice from it.  When I said Hunter Thompson is hard to read, I didn't mean as literature, just that it's kind of tedious. Next week's episode is about "LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF" which you can watch here. 

Awesome Movie Year
The Comic (1969 Box Office Flop)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2024 51:51


The third episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features the year's biggest flop, Carl Reiner's The Comic. Directed and co-written by Carl Reiner and starring Dick Van Dyke, Michele Lee and Mickey Rooney, The Comic was inspired by Van Dyke's love of silent film comedians.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Greenspun in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/11/20/archives/comic-and-desperados-on-double-bill.html), Jack Goff in The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/comic-review-movie-1969-1254978/), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Lindsay Anderson's If ….

Awesome Movie Year
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969 Box Office Champ)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2024 58:29


The first episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features the highest-grossing film at the box office, George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Directed by George Roy Hill from a screenplay by William Goldman and starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is based loosely on the true story of the notorious Wild West outlaws.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/butch-cassidy-and-the-sundance-kid-1969), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and John Mahoney in The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/butch-cassidy-sundance-kid-review-1969-movie-743856/).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our pick for a notable debut from a major filmmaker, Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer.

BLOODHAUS
Episode 125: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

BLOODHAUS

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 8, 2024 70:42


Drusilla and Josh honor the late, great Donald Sutherland in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). From wiki: “Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1978 American science-fiction horror film[1] directed by Philip Kaufman, and starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy. Released on December 22, 1978, it is based on the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. The novel was previously adapted into the 1956 film of the same name. The plot involves a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who over the course of a few days discover that humans are being replaced by alien duplicates; each is a perfect biological clone of the person replaced, but devoid of empathy and humanity.”But also: House of Mortal Sin, Night Watch, The Amityville Horror, House of Psychotic Women, Identikit, MASH, Pauline Kael, sequels, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Suspiria, and more!NEXT WEEK: The Uninvited (1944)  Follow them across the internet:Bloodhaus: https://www.bloodhauspod.com/https://twitter.com/BloodhausPodhttps://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/Drusilla Adeline:https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/https://letterboxd.com/sisterhyde/ Joshua Conkelhttps://www.joshuaconkel.com/https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/https://letterboxd.com/JoshuaConkel/ 

Weird Studies
Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

Weird Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2024 85:46


Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics. Join the Weirdosphere online learning community by enrolling in Phil and J.F.'s inaugural course, THE BEAUTY AND THE HORROR (www.weirdosphere.org), starting June 20th. Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies). Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-1) and 2 (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com/album/weird-studies-music-from-the-podcast-vol-2), on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp (https://pierre-yvesmartel.bandcamp.com) page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia (https://cosmophonia.podbean.com/). Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies) Find us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp) Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau (https://cottonbureau.com/products/can-o-content#/13435958/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)! RERERENCES Orson Welles, F for Fake (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072962/) Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2 (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780816616770) Elmyr de Hory, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory) art forger Clifford Irving, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Irving) American writer Howard Hughes, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes) American aerospace engineer David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/178394/the-new-biographical-dictionary-of-film-by-david-thomson/) David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780679772835) Pauline Kael, [Raising Kane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaisingKane)_ “War of the Worlds” radio drama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)) The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse” (https://shows.acast.com/exclusive-subscribers-shows/episodes/horror-hosts-films-other-strange-realities-w-david-metcalfe-) Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dAGcorF1Vo&ab_channel=FilmKunst) Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius (https://mythcosmologysacred.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/G.-Cornelius-Chicane.pdf) Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780674012448) Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780904311242) Sokal affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), hoax Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration” (https://designmanifestos.org/werner-herzog-the-minnesota-declaration/)

BLOODHAUS
Episode 118: Images (1972)

BLOODHAUS

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2024 72:09


This week the hosts Joshua Conkel and Drusilla Adeline discuss doppelgängers with Robert Altman's Images.  From wiki: “Images is a 1972 psychological horror film directed and co-written by Robert Altman and starring Susannah York, René Auberjonois and Marcel Bozzuffi. The picture follows an unstable children's author who finds herself engulfed in apparitions and hallucinations while staying at her remote vacation home.”But also discussed: a real-life horror story, Gawker in the 00s, a mysterious butt stabber, Death of a Cyclist, Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall, Infested, Attack the Block, Arachnophobia, Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein, 3 Women, Persona, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Nashville, Gosford Park, Pauline Kael, Faye Dunaway's reality show, One Tree Hill,  The Eyes of Laura Mars, and more!NEXT WEEK: Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (2017)Follow them across the internet: Bloodhaus: https://www.bloodhauspod.com/https://twitter.com/BloodhausPodhttps://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/Drusilla Adeline: https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/https://letterboxd.com/sisterhyde/ Joshua Conkelhttps://www.joshuaconkel.com/https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/https://letterboxd.com/JoshuaConkel/ 

Critics at Large | The New Yorker
Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and the Benefits of Beef

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2024 46:16


The rap superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been on a collision course for a decade, trading periodic diss tracks to assert their superiority—but earlier this month the long-simmering beef erupted into a showdown that said as much about the artists as it did about the art. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz examine how the back-and-forth devolved from a litigation of craft into a series of ad-hominem attacks alleging everything from cultural appropriation to pedophilia. They discuss the way rivalries function in the creative world, fuelling new work and compelling audiences to pay closer attention to it than ever before. The hosts also consider other feuds of note, from a nineteenth-century debate over Shakespearean actors that ended in violence to the writer Renata Adler's blistering takedown of the film critic Pauline Kael in The New York Review of Books. Why do so many of these schisms revolve around fundamental questions of authenticity and belonging? And, once they start to spiral, is there any going back? “Conflict can be productive emotionally and also artistically,” Schwartz says. “But this is not a place that we can permanently reside.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“DAMN.,” by Kendrick Lamar“To Pimp a Butterfly,” by Kendrick Lamar“Control,” by Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica“First Person Shooter,” by Drake featuring J. Cole“Like That,” by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar“Push Ups,” by Drake“Taylor Made Freestyle,” by Drake“Back to Back,” by Drake“euphoria,” by Kendrick Lamar“6:16 in LA,” by Kendrick Lamar“meet the grahams,” by Kendrick Lamar“Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar“THE HEART PART 6,” by Drake“Stormy Daniels's American Dream,” by Naomi Fry (The New Yorker)“The Perils of Pauline,” by Renata Adler (The New York Review of Books)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Weird Games and Weirder People

Lin Codega is an entertainment journalist who co-founded Rascal--a worker-owned, alternative tabletop roleplaying game news outlet. They previously wrote for io9, Polygon, and MIT's Immerse magazine. They also make games, and a lot of other weirdly wonderful things we talk about in this episode! The first time I met Linda as at Gen Con, and my friend Richard said I should meet them, talked about het work a bit and them I went to talk to Lin. She made a bunch of interesting questions and I answered them, but my autistic brain got the best of me and I didn't ask anything back! Well, on this episode I try to rectify that talk to Lin about a lot of interesting topics, ranging from punk culture, the important of community, how our unfinished projects are not failures, but lessons we learned along the way, and a lot more! This is a short episode, and I do pride myself of longer and deeper episodes, but Linda managed to pack a lot in this short interview and I am sure you will love it as much as I did. Listen up and get weird with us! Check out Linda's links! Rascal: https://www.rascal.news twitter.com/rascal_news twitter.com/lincodega Thank you for listening to Weird Games & Weirder People! Please subscribe to the show to keep up with new episodes! If you would like to support the show, leave a review and/or head to our ko-fi page and pay us a coffee! It will help keep the podcast going! It will really help us!  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ko-fi.com/wgnwp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ You can also support me buy buying one of my games! Kosmosaurs just got released in print, and it is my new RPG inspired by Saturday morning cartoons about Space Dinosaur Rangers defending the galaxy from evildoers!   Get your copy right here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠bit.ly/kosmosaurs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Get other games of mine on Exalted Funeral: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/search?q=Diogo+nogueira⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Or buy anything at DriveThruRPG using this link: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.drivethrurpg.com/?affiliate_id=338514⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Or buy something from my itch store: ⁠https://diogo-old-skull.itch.io⁠ SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER! This is super new and I am trying a new thing! I share offers, news, behind the scenes, articles, curiosities, and rants about being me! Fun, right? RIGHT!? Check out our latest post:⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://diogonogueira.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join our Discord Server: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/uFH7b4wN⁠⁠⁠⁠ (this link is only valid for 7 days from the day the episode is released - always look for a new link in the newest episode). Stuff mentioned in the Episode: Rapscallion: https://magpiegames.com/collections/rapscallion/products/rapscallion-quickstart-1 Moth Eater: https://stone-soup.ghost.io/exclusive-preview-motheater-by-linda-h-codega/ The Spear Cuts Through Water: https://www.amazon.com/Spear-Cuts-Through-Water-Novel-ebook/dp/B08MPV7Z6Q Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind: https://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Abernathy-You-Are-Kind-ebook/dp/B0BY41XXJQ Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547604/fifty-years-of-idungeons-and-dragonsi/ Pauline Kael: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael

Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael
The Death of Film Criticism and the Infantilization of Cinema (+ Oscar Talk) w/ Jim DiEugenio

Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2024 113:54


On this edition of Parallax Views, Jim DiEugenio, writer of Oliver Stone's JFK Revisited and co-author of The JFK Assassination Chokeholds: That Prove There Was a Conspiracy, returns to discuss the death of film criticism as well as the rise of Marvel/DC superhero movies and what he judges to be their negative impact on the movie landscape. Although he's known to most as a JFK assassination researcher, Jim has also for many years been a film critic and has an insight into the golden era of film critics that included such names as Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Dwight MacDonald, and John Simon among others. In the course of our conversation we talk about such classic films as Lawrence of Arabia, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Michael Antonioni's Blow-Up, and Bonnie and Clyde among many others. We'll discuss the Golden Era of New Hollywood from the mid-60s to the mid-70s and why Jim mourns the loss of this era of film and film criticism. Additionally, Jim will give his take on the latest Oscar-nominated movies like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the Emma Stone vehicle Poor Things, and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. And he'll explain why he thinks the film critics Ebert and Siskel, with their show At the Movies, hurt film criticism. All that and much more!

Pod Casty For Me
Schrader Ep. 1: The Yakuza (1975)

Pod Casty For Me

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2024 126:49


The time has come, listeners, to discuss the films of Paul Schrader. That's right: Pauld Casty For Me has arrived, and this is the first episode. Of a new series about Paul Schrader movies. Basically imagine how the Clint Eastwood episodes went, roughly, but just replace all the specifics with Paul Schrader stuff. It'll make sense once you start listening. To kick things off, we're digging into Schrader's first produced screenplay, the 1975 Sydney Pollack neo-noir-yakuza picture THE YAKUZA, co-written with his brother Leonard Schrader and rewritten by Robert "China" Towne. We go deep on Schrader's strict Calvinist upbringing, early career as a film critic, persistent prickliness, and mentorship from Pauline Kael. Then, we turn our focus to THE YAKUZA (the movie), the yakuza (the guys), Robert Mitchum, and white dude who are obsessed with Japan. Plus, each of us is audibly succumbing to his own respiratory disease throughout the episode. Great way to start off the new series! Topics include: Paul's letters to Leonard, being a cinephile in the late 60s, LA movie theaters that no longer exist, how to pronounce "primer," Jake's very normal time visiting Japan, connections between the yakuza and Japan's far right, Ian's childhood arrow tricks, and more! Further Reading: Paul Schrader's "Letters to Len" Yakuza-Eiga: A Primer by Paul Schrader   https://www.podcastyforme.com/ Follow Pod Casty For Me: https://twitter.com/podcastyforme https://www.instagram.com/podcastyforme/ https://www.youtube.com/@podcastyforme Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PodCastyForMe Artwork by Jeremy Allison: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyallisonart  

Cine Alerta - Podcasts
Alerta Vermelho #235 - Não Existe Filme Velho

Cine Alerta - Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2024 81:47


Assistir filmes antigos é, pra muita gente, uma barreira que precisa ser quebrada. E, como comentamos vários clássicos aqui no Cine Alerta, aproveitamos pra discutir como e por onde começar a conhecer o cinema clássico, principalmente levando em conta a velha máxima de Pauline Kael: "Não existe filme velho. Existe filme que você não conhece!" Porém, alguns serviços de streaming parecem querer que o público pense que não existe filme velho e ponto, deixando seu catálogo órfão de longas importantíssimos para a sétima arte e que deveriam ser mais acessíveis. Alexandre Luiz, Davi Garcia e Filipe Pereira discutem a importância de conhecer os clássicos e como fazer pra adquirir o hábito e o interesse em filmes produzidos há 30, 40, 50 anos ou mais! Então aperta o play e vem participar dessa conversa! Depois de ouvir, mande opiniões, críticas e sugestões pra gente! Elas são sempre bem-vindas!

Making Tarantino: The Podcast
Telekinesis Pt. 2: The Fury (1978)

Making Tarantino: The Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2024 121:49


On this second part of the Season 2 premiere, Phillip was joined once again by Paul Rowlands from www.money-into-light.com to talk about Brian De Palma's next film after Carrie...The Fury from 1978. Phillip starts with the general information about the movie, and Paul adds his trivia and facts throughout. Paul also read the book and discusses how that is different than the movie. Then it's time to hear Listener Opinions from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The two then discuss the movie and their thoughts on all of it with some more trivia sprinkled in. Paul reads a Pauline Kael review of The Fury. Phillip then gives his Phil's Film Favorite of the Week; The Silent Partner (1978). Before the finish the show, Paul talks about some movies that he has been watching; Flora and Son (2023), The Holdovers (2023), Saltburn (2023), Kiss of the Tarantula (1975), and The Man with No Name (A Clint Eastwood Documentary) (1977). Come back next week when Phillip is joined by Erik Clapp from Cinema Force on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@cinemaforce1/videos for Space Vampires Pt. 2: Lifeforce (1985). Thanks for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/makingtarantinothepodcast/message

The Film 89 Podcast
Episode 111: Episode 111 - The Warriors (1979).

The Film 89 Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2024 72:48


On Episode 111 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Skye and regular guest host, Bill Scurry don their colours and venture into the violent New York of 1979 to discuss Walter Hill's cult classic film, The Warriors. Beloved by film critics such as Pauline Kael, the film was controversially pulled from cinema's by Paramount three weeks into its theatrical run following reported outbreaks of gang violence at theatres. The film wasn't the financial success that Hill had wanted but in the years that followed, The Warriors attained an ever growing following and a second life on television and home video, and is now regarded as not only one of Hill's best films, but as a beloved example of ‘70s American cinema. Oozing style from every pore and armed with a phenomenal synth-rock score by composer Barry De Vorzon, The Warriors is a film as worthy as any of the Film ‘89 treatment. 

New Books Network
The Sting

New Books Network

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2023 21:26


There's nothing like being conned at the movies. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about George Roy Hill's beautifully-constructed toy, The Sting. Dan explains how the long con in the film is like a theatrical production and how con games and films are similar forms of art. Mike revs up with a rant about why Pauline Kael is overrated, continues with one about how Robert Shaw is underrated, and finally claims that anyone who doesn't like The Sting needs to sit in a room for thirty minutes and reevaluate their life choices. So turn on that player piano and give it a listen! Paul Newman's posthumously-released memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, is a terrific glimpse into the actor's thoughts and recollections on life as one of the last bona fide movie stars. Follow us on X or Letterboxd. The bumper music for this episode is by Lord Vinheteiro: you can see the whole incredible video of his performing “The Entertainer” on an authentic-era piano here and visit his YouTube channel here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

FIFTEEN MINUTE FILM FANATICS

There's nothing like being conned at the movies. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about George Roy Hill's beautifully-constructed toy, The Sting. Dan explains how the long con in the film is like a theatrical production and how con games and films are similar forms of art. Mike revs up with a rant about why Pauline Kael is overrated, continues with one about how Robert Shaw is underrated, and finally claims that anyone who doesn't like The Sting needs to sit in a room for thirty minutes and reevaluate their life choices. So turn on that player piano and give it a listen! Paul Newman's posthumously-released memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, is a terrific glimpse into the actor's thoughts and recollections on life as one of the last bona fide movie stars. Follow us on X or Letterboxd. The bumper music for this episode is by Lord Vinheteiro: you can see the whole incredible video of his performing “The Entertainer” on an authentic-era piano here and visit his YouTube channel here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Film
The Sting

New Books in Film

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 25, 2023 21:26


There's nothing like being conned at the movies. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about George Roy Hill's beautifully-constructed toy, The Sting. Dan explains how the long con in the film is like a theatrical production and how con games and films are similar forms of art. Mike revs up with a rant about why Pauline Kael is overrated, continues with one about how Robert Shaw is underrated, and finally claims that anyone who doesn't like The Sting needs to sit in a room for thirty minutes and reevaluate their life choices. So turn on that player piano and give it a listen! Paul Newman's posthumously-released memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, is a terrific glimpse into the actor's thoughts and recollections on life as one of the last bona fide movie stars. Follow us on X or Letterboxd. The bumper music for this episode is by Lord Vinheteiro: you can see the whole incredible video of his performing “The Entertainer” on an authentic-era piano here and visit his YouTube channel here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Awesome Movie Year
Nashville (1975 Bonus Episode)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2023 58:51


NOTE: This episode was a timed exclusive over on our producer David Rosen's Patreon. Sign up to one of the tiers for access to bonus episodes and more great content from us, Piecing It Together and David Rosen. https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenThis special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features Robert Altman's Best Picture nominee Nashville. Directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury and starring Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, Ned Beatty, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Lily Tomlin and many more, Nashville was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nashville-1975), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/12/archives/nashville-lively-film-of-many-parts.html).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for future episodes.

Recreational Thinking
Episode 7: Directors Sets: Episode 2, C1-C2-C3-A (Bonus!)

Recreational Thinking

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2023 105:26


Contestants: Frederic Bush, Chris Miller, Greg Weinstein, Tucker Warner, Dan Blim (whole time); Cliff Galiher, Charlie Fritz (part of the time)NOTE: This is a free preview.  Please subscribe to my Patreon to gain access to the rest of the alphabet.Welcome to my new series!  Written by a serious cinephile (me) for an audience of cinephiles, these questions also work as a starting point for anyone who wants to learn about film for quizzing purposes AND anyone looking to go, as Pauline Kael put it, deeper into movies.Each game (of which there are four in this episode) consists of four rounds of play, Mimir-style, with 32 questions in all.  The answer to each question will be the name of a movie director, and all answers in the game will have a surname or mononym starting with the same letter.My goal is to cover all types of cinema — mainstream, arthouse, foreign, experimental, documentary, and more — and all eras of cinema as well, with special emphasis on members of underrepresented groups (e.g. women, POC, LGBT) and underrepresented cinemas.  The questions are hard, but the games are fast-paced and filled with banter.  I hope you enjoy — and don't worry, new episodes in the usual Recreational Thinking format are on their way too!As always, if you like what you hear, consider donating via PayPal or Patreon and remember to leave a review and/or rating on iTunes!

Awesome Movie Year
The Last Emperor (1987 Best Picture Winner)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2023 66:31


The eleventh episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Directed and co-written by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole and Ying Ruocheng, The Last Emperor was nominated for nine Oscars and won them all.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-last-emperor-1987), Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-20-ca-15017-story.html), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1987 installment, featuring our producer David Rosen's pick, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2.

No Cure for Curiosity
The Exorcist 50th Anniversary!

No Cure for Curiosity

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 31, 2023 37:45


The power of curiosity compels you!  On this episode, we talked about William Friedkin's The Exorcist with Cary Elza, (Associate Professor of Media Studies from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point) and Kathryn Lofton (the Lex Hickson professor of American studies and religious studies, professor of history and divinity at Yale University.)Whether you are an Exorcist fanatic, or hate horror movies, this episode will have something for you.  We talk about why The Exorcist caused a frenzy in 1973.  How the movie portrays religious faith.  And This the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist, which enraptured audiences in 1973, making it the third highest grossing film of that decade.  The Exorcist drove public fascination with the devil and exorcisms inside of churches,  across popular culture, and deep in the public imagination.  For those of you who like extra credit, here is some further reading:Pauline Kael's review from The New Yorker (Jan 1973) Collen McDannell's edited volume, Catholics in the MoviesPlease rate and review No Cure for Curiosity in your favorite podcast app. And tell your friends who might also enjoy No Cure for Curiosity! It helps other people find the show. And continue the conversation on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/NoCureforCuriosityPodcast.Our intro music was written by UWSP music student Derek Carden and our logo is by artist and graphic designer Ryan Dreimiller.You can send comments to nocureforcuriosity@outlook.com.

Writers on Film
Demetrios Matheou talks Means Streets at 50

Writers on Film

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2023 66:29


Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese's third feature film, and the one that confirmed him as a major new talent. On its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the critic Pauline Kael hailed the film as 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal film-making'. The tale of combative friends and small-time crooks is set amid the bars, pool halls, tenements and streets of Manhattan's Little Italy. Scorsese has said of his childhood neighbourhood, 'its very texture was interwoven with organised crime', and this quality would dramatically inform the tone and restless energy of his seminal film.Demetrios Matheou's insightful study considers Mean Streets' production history in the context of the New Hollywood period of American cinema, noting also the key roles played by John Cassavetes and Roger Corman. He analyses the importance of Scorsese's background to the film's characters and themes, including preoccupations with guilt, redemption and criminal subcultures; the development of the director's film-making process and signature style; the way in which he both drew upon and invigorated the crime genre; his relationship with emerging stars Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and the film's reception and legacy.Matheou argues that while Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) are regarded as Scorsese's greatest films of the period, Mean Streets is the more influential achievement. With it, Scorsese not only paved the way for a new kind of crime movie, not least his own GoodFellas (1990), but also inspired generations of independently-minded film-makers.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/writers-on-film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Letterboxd Show
‘Command Z' with Steven Soderbergh

The Letterboxd Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2023 53:51


Karaoke, time travel, screen chemistry and art as activism: As his new, satirical time-travel web series Command Z drops (starring an A.I. Michael Cera and a time-travelling tumble-dryer), Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh tells Gemma Gracewood about activist art, why he loves the reality show Below Deck, how he dealt with being bullied as a child, why governments should give tax credits for doing karaoke and watching comedy, why bad ideas travel faster than good, Steven's “no assholes” policy, how to create better film sets, and the 25th anniversary of Out of Sight. Plus: Gemma shares how Contagion got her through the pandemic, Steven reveals his favorite time-travel devices in movies, the enduring influence of film critic Pauline Kael and the American New Wave, using your juice to help other people, and a debate about which song should be Soderbergh's karaoke go-to. Watch Command Z online for a small fee — proceeds go to several good causes. Note: This episode contains explicit language (f-bombs and assholes). The interview was recorded during the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike in accordance with the DGA agreement with AMPTP. Sponsor: LG OLED Credits: Hosted by Gemma Gracewood, edited by Slim, production manager Sophie Shin, editorial producer Brian Formo. The Letterboxd Show is a TAPEDECK production. Links: The Letterboxd list of films mentioned; Soderbergh's Extension 765 merch store; Steven Soderbergh is thanked in the end credits” list; a list of Steven Soderbergh's Command Z film recommendations. Reviews of Command Z by Josh Lagle, Stephen Gillespie, and Dan Scannan. Books mentioned: The Heat Will Kill You First; Assholes: A Theory; Evil Geniuses.

The 80s Movies Podcast

On this week's episode, we remember William Friedkin, who passed away this past Tuesday, looking back at one of his lesser known directing efforts, Rampage. ----more---- From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Originally, this week was supposed to be the fourth episode of our continuing miniseries on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films. I was fully committed to making it so, but then the world learned that Academy Award-winning filmmaker William Friedkin passed away on Tuesday. I had already done an episode on his best movie from the decade, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., so I decided I would cover another film Friedkin made in the 80s that isn’t as talked about or as well known as The French Connection or The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A. Rampage. Now, some of you who do know the film might try and point that the film was released in 1992, by Miramax Films of all companies, and you’d be correct. However, I did say I was going to cover another film of his MADE in the 80s, which is also true when it comes to Rampage. So let’s get to the story, shall we? Born in Chicago in 1935, William Friedkin was inspired to become a filmmaker after seeing Citizen Kane as a young man, and by 1962, he was already directing television movies. He’d make his feature directing debut with Good Times in 1967, a fluffy Sonny and Cher comedy which finds Sonny Bono having only ten days to rewrite the screenplay for their first movie, because the script to the movie they agreed to was an absolute stinker. Which, ironically, is a fairly good assessment of the final film. The film, which was essentially a bigger budget version of their weekly variety television series shot mostly on location at an African-themed amusement park in Northern California and the couple’s home in Encino, was not well received by either critics or audiences. But by the time Good Times came out, Friedkin was already working on his next movie, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. A comedy co-written by future television legend Norman Lear, Minsky’s featured Swedish actress Britt Ekland, better known at the time as the wife of Peter Sellers, as a naive young Amish woman who leaves the farm in Pennsylvania looking to become an actress in religious stage plays in New York City. Instead, she becomes a dancer in a burlesque show and essentially ends up inventing the strip tease. The all-star cast included Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, Elliott Gould, Jack Burns, Bert Lahr, and Jason Robards, Jr., who was a late replacement for Alan Alda, who himself was a replacement for Tony Curtis. Friedkin was dreaming big for this movie, and was able to convince New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to delay the demolition of an entire period authentic block of 26th Street between First and Second Avenue for two months for the production to use as a major shooting location. There would be one non-production related tragedy during the filming of the movie. The seventy-two year old Lahr, best known as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, would pass away in early December 1967, two weeks before production was completed, and with several scenes still left to shoot with him. Lear, who was also a producer on the film, would tell a reporter for the New York Times that they would still be able to shoot the rest of the film so that performance would remain virtually intact, and with the help of some pre-production test footage and a body double, along with a sound-alike to dub the lines they couldn’t get on set, Lahr’s performance would be one of the highlights of the final film. Friedkin and editor Ralph Rosenblum would spend three months working on their first cut, as Friedkin was due to England in late March to begin production on his next film, The Birthday Party. Shortly after Friedkin was on the plane to fly overseas, Rosenblum would represent the film for a screening with the executives at United Artists, who would be distributing the film. The screening was a disaster, and Rosenblum would be given carte blanche by the studio heads to save the film by any means necessary, since Friedkin was not available to supervise. Rosenblum would completely restructure the film, including creating a prologue for the story that would be retimed and printed on black and white film stock. The next screening would go over much better with the suits, and a mid-December 1968 release date was set up. The Birthday Party was an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play, and featured Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee. Friedkin had seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and was able to get the film produced in part because he would only need six actors and a handful of locations to shoot, keeping the budget low. Although the mystery/thriller was a uniquely British story, Harold Pinter liked how Friedkin wanted to tell the story, and although Pinter had written a number of plays that had been adapted into movies and had adapted a number of books into screenplay, this would be the first time Pinter would adapt one of his own stories to the silver screen. To keep the budget lower still, Friedkin, Pinter and lead actor Robert Shaw agreed to take the minimum possible payments for their positions in exchange for part ownership in the film. The release of Minsky’s was so delayed because of the prolonged editing process that The Birthday Party would actually in theatres nine days before Minsky’s, which would put Friedkin in the rare position of having two movies released in such a short time frame. And while Minsky’s performed better at the box office than Birthday Party, the latter film would set the director up financially with enough in the bank where he could concentrate working on projects he felt passionate about. That first film after The Birthday Party would make William Friedkin a name director. His second one would make him an Oscar winner. The third, a legend. And the fourth would break him. The first film, The Boys in the Band, was an adaptation of a controversial off-Broadway play about a straight man who accidentally shows up to a party for gay men. Matt Crowley, the author of the play, would adapt it to the screen, produce the film himself with author Dominick Dunne, and select Friedkin, who Crowley felt best understood the material, to direct. Crowley would only make one demand on his director, that all of the actors from the original off-Broadway production be cast in the movie in the same roles. Friedkin had no problem with that. When the film was released in March 1970, Friedkin would get almost universally excellent notices from film critics, except for Pauline Kael in the New York Times, who had already built up a dislike of the director after just three films. But March 1970 was a different time, and a film not only about gay men but a relatively positive movie about gay men who had the same confusions and conflicts as straight men, was probably never going to be well-received by a nation that still couldn’t talk openly about non-hetero relationships. But the film would still do about $7m worth of ticket sales, not enough to become profitable for its distributor, but enough for the director to be in the conversation for bigger movies. His next film was an adaptation of a 1969 book about two narcotics detectives in the New York City Police Department who went after a wealthy French businessman who was helping bring heroin into the States. William Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman would shoot The French Connection as if it were a documentary, giving the film a gritty realism rarely seen in movies even in the New Hollywood era. The film would be named the Best Picture of 1971 by the Academy, and Friedkin and lead actor Gene Hackman would also win Oscars in their respective categories. And the impact of The French Connection on cinema as a whole can never be understated. Akira Kurosawa would cite the film as one of his favorites, as would David Fincher and Brad Pitt, who bonded over the making of Seven because of Fincher’s conscious choice to use the film as a template for the making of his own film. Steven Spielberg said during the promotion of his 2005 film Munich that he studied The French Connection to prepare for his film. And, of course, after The French Connection came The Exorcist, which would, at the time of its release in December 1973, become Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film ever, legitimize the horror genre to audiences worldwide, and score Friedkin his second straight Oscar nomination for Best Director, although this time he and the film would lose to George Roy Hill and The Sting. In 1977, Sorcerer, Friedkin’s American remake of the 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear, was expected to be the big hit film of the summer. The film originally started as a little $2.5m budgeted film Friedkin would make while waiting for script revisions on his next major movie, called The Devil’s Triangle, were being completed. By the time he finished filming Sorcerer, which reteamed Friedkin with his French Connection star Roy Scheider, now hot thanks to his starring role in Jaws, this little film became one of the most expensive movies of the decade, with a final budget over $22m. And it would have the unfortunate timing of being released one week after a movie released by Twentieth Century-Fox, Star Wars, sucked all the air out of the theatrical exhibition season. It would take decades for audiences to discover Sorcerer, and for Friedkin, who had gone some kind of mad during the making of the film, to accept it to be the taut and exciting thriller it was. William Friedkin was a broken man, and his next film, The Brinks Job, showed it. A comedy about the infamous 1950 Brinks heist in Boston, the film was originally supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer, with Friedkin coming in to replace the iconic filmmaker only a few months before production was set to begin. Despite a cast that included Peter Boyle, Peter Falk, Allen Garfield, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands and Paul Sorvino, the film just didn’t work as well as it should have. Friedkin’s first movie of the 1980s, Cruising, might have been better received in a later era, but an Al Pacino cop drama about his trying to find a killer of homosexual men in the New York City gay fetish underground dance club scene was, like The Boys in the Band a decade earlier, too early to cinemas. Like Sorcerer, audiences would finally find Cruising in a more forgiving era. In 1983, Friedkin made what is easily his worst movie, Deal of the Century, an alleged comedy featuring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines and Sigourney Weaver that attempted to satirize the military industrial complex in the age of Ronald Reagan, but somehow completely missed its very large and hard to miss target. 1985 would see a comeback for William Friedkin, with the release of To Live and Die in LA, in which two Secret Service agents played by William L. Petersen and John Pankow try to uncover a counterfeit money operation led by Willem Dafoe. Friedkin was drawn to the source material, a book by former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, because the agency was almost never portrayed on film, and even less as the good guys. Friedkin would adapt the book into a screenplay with Petievich, who would also serve as a technical consultant to ensure authenticity in how Petersen and Pankow acted. It would be only the second time Friedkin was credited as a screenwriter, but it would be a nine-minute chase sequence through the aqueducts of Los Angeles and a little used freeway in Wilmington that would be the most exciting chase sequence committed to film since the original Gone in 60 Seconds, The French Connection, or the San Francisco chase sequence in the 1967 Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. The sequence is impressive on Blu-ray, but on a big screen in a movie theatre in 1985, it was absolutely thrilling. Which, at long last, brings us to Rampage. Less than two months after To Live and Die in LA opened to critical raves and moderate box office in November 1985, Friedkin made a deal with Italian mega-producer Dino DeLaurentiis to direct Rampage, a crime drama based on a novel by William P. Wood. DeLaurentiis had hired Friedkin for The Brinks Job several years earlier, and the two liked working for each other. DeLaurentiis had just started his own distribution company, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which we’ll shorten to DEG for the remainder of this episode, and needed some big movies to fill his pipeline. We did an episode on DEG back in 2020, and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should after you finish this episode. At this time, DEG was still months away from releasing its first group of films, which would include Maximum Overdrive, the first film directed by horror author Stephen King, and Blue Velvet, the latest from David Lynch, both of which would shoot at the same time at DEG’s newly built studio facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina. But Friedkin was writing the screenplay adaptation himself, and would need several months to get the script into production shape, so the film would not be able to begin production until late 1986. The novel Rampage was based on the real life story of serial killer Richard Chase, dubbed The Vampire Killer by the press when he went on a four day killing spree in January 1978. Chase murdered six people, including a pregnant woman and a 22 month old child, and drank their blood as part of some kind of ritual. Wood would change some aspects of Chase’s story for his book, naming his killer Charles Reece, changing some of the ages and sexes of the murder victims, and how the murderer died. But most of the book was about Reece’s trial, with a specific focus on Reece’s prosecutor, Anthony Fraser, who had once been against capital punishment, but would be seeking the death penalty in this case after meeting one of the victims’ grieving family members. William L. Petersen, Friedkin’s lead star in To Live and Die in LA, was initially announced to star as Fraser, but as the production got closer to its start date, Petersen had to drop out of the project, due to a conflict with another project that would be shooting at the same time. Michael Biehn, the star of James Cameron’s The Terminator and the then recently released Aliens, would sign on as the prosecutor. Alex McArthur, best known at the time as Madonna’s baby daddy in her Papa Don’t Preach music video, would score his first major starring role as the serial killer Reece. The cast would also include a number of recognizable character actors, recognizable if not by name but by face once they appeared on screen, including Nicholas Campbell, Deborah Van Valkenberg, Art LaFleur, Billy Greenbush and Grace Zabriskie. Friedkin would shoot the $7.5m completely on location in Stockton, CA from late October 1986 to just before Christmas, and Friedkin would begin post-production on the film after the first of the new year. In early May 1987, DEG announced a number of upcoming releases for their films, including a September 11th release for Rampage. But by August 1987, many of their first fifteen releases over their first twelve months being outright bombs, quietly pulled Rampage off their release calendar. When asked by one press reporter about the delay, a representative from DEG would claim the film would need to be delayed because Italian composer Ennio Morricone had not delivered his score yet, which infuriated Friedkin, as he had turned in his final cut of the film, complete with Morricone’s score, more than a month earlier. The DEG rep was forced to issue a mea culpa, acknowledging the previous answer had been quote unquote incorrect, and stated they were looking at release dates between November 1987 and February 1988. The first public screening of Rampage outside of an unofficial premiere in Stockton in August 1987 happened on September 11th, 1987, at the Boston Film Festival, but just a couple days after that screening, DEG would be forced into bankruptcy by one of his creditors in, of all places, Boston, and the film would be stuck in limbo for several years. During DEG’s bankruptcy, some European companies would be allowed to buy individual country rights for the film, to help pay back some of the creditors, but the American rights to the film would not be sold until Miramax Films purchased the film, and the 300 already created 35mm prints of the film in March 1992, with a planned national release of the film the following month. But that release had to be scrapped, along with the original 300 prints of the film, when Friedkin, who kept revising the film over the ensuing five years, turned in to the Weinsteins a new edit of the film, ten minutes shorter than the version shown in Stockton and Boston in 1987. He had completely eliminated a subplot involving the failing marriage of the prosecutor, since it had nothing to do with the core idea of the story, and reversed the ending, which originally had Reece committing suicide in his cell not unlike Richard Chase. Now, the ending had Reece, several years into the future, alive and about to be considered for parole. Rampage would finally be released into 172 theatres on October 30th, 1992, including 57 theatres in Los Angeles, and four in New York City. Most reviews for the film were mixed, finding the film unnecessarily gruesome at times, but also praising how Friedkin took the time for audiences to learn more about the victims from the friends and family left behind. But the lack of pre-release advertising on television or through trailers in theatres would cause the film to perform quite poorly in its opening weekend, grossing just $322,500 in its first three days. After a second and third weekend where both the grosses and the number of theatres playing the film would fall more than 50%, Miramax would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just less than $800k. Between the release of his thriller The Guardian in 1990 and the release of Rampage in 1992, William Friedkin would marry fellow Chicago native Sherry Lansing, who at the time had been a successful producer at Paramount Pictures, having made such films as The Accused, which won Jodie Foster her first Academy Award, and Fatal Attraction. Shortly after they married, Lansing would be named the Chairman of Paramount Pictures, where she would green light such films as Forrest Gump, Braveheart and Titanic. She would also hire her husband to make four films for the studio between 1994 and 2003, including the basketball drama Blue Chips and the thriller Jade. Friedkin’s directing career would slow down after 2003’s The Hunted, making only two films over the next two decades. 2006’s Bug was a psychological thriller with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, and 2012’s Killer Joe, a mixture of black comedy and psychological thriller featuring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch, was one of few movies to be theatrically released with an NC-17 rating. Neither were financially successful, but were highly regarded by critics. But there was still one more movie in him. In January 2023, Friedkin would direct his own adaptation of the Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for the Paramount+ streaming service. Updating the setting from the book’s World War II timeline to the more modern Persian Gulf conflict, this new film starred Keifer Sutherland as Lieutenant Commander Queeg, alongside Jason Clark, Jake Lacy, Jay Duplass, Dale Dye, and in his final role before his death in March, Lance Reddick. That film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in Italy next month, although Paramount+ has not announced a premiere date on their service. William Friedkin had been married four times in his life, including a two year marriage to legendary French actress Jean Moreau in the late 70s and a two year marriage to British actress Lesley-Anne Downe in the early 80s. But Friedkin and Lansing would remain married for thirty-two years until his death from heart failure and pneumonia this past Tuesday. I remember when Rampage was supposed to come out in 1987. My theatre in Santa Cruz was sent a poster for it about a month before it was supposed to be released. A pixelated image of Reece ran down one side of the poster, while the movie’s tagline and credits down the other. I thought the poster looked amazing, and after the release was cancelled, I took the poster home and hung it on one of the walls in my place at the time. The 1992 poster from Miramax was far blander, basically either a entirely white or an entirely red background, with a teared center revealing the eyes of Reece, which really doesn’t tell you anything about the movie. Like with many of his box office failures, Friedkin would initially be flippant about the film, although in the years preceding his death, he would acknowledge the film was decent enough despite all of its post-production problems. I’d love to be able to suggest to you to watch Rampage as soon as you can, but as of August 2023, one can only rent or buy the film from Amazon, $5.89 for a two day rental or $14.99 to purchase. It is not available on any other streaming service as of the writing and recording of this episode. Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when I expect to release the fourth part of the Miramax miniseries, unless something unexpected happens in the near future. Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Rampage and the career of William Friedkin. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.

christmas american amazon fear california world new york city chicago los angeles england british star wars french san francisco new york times european boys italy devil north carolina italian pennsylvania oscars african academy world war ii aliens band broadway states guardian wood titanic academy awards oz wizard swedish stephen king terminator sting steven spielberg jaws brad pitt northern california paramount munich james cameron triangle exorcist preach david lynch ronald reagan santa cruz secret service matthew mcconaughey amish fraser best picture accused al pacino rampage good times forrest gump david fincher warner brothers bug blu birthday parties wages wilmington sorcerer cruising crowley stockton hunted petersen gene hackman willem dafoe citizen kane jodie foster steve mcqueen sigourney weaver braveheart chevy chase ennio morricone lansing best director paramount pictures william friedkin lear akira kurosawa french connection fincher fatal attraction blue velvet michael shannon persian gulf blue chips norman lear maximum overdrive peter sellers venice film festival lance reddick alan alda ashley judd new hollywood miramax bullitt brinks robert shaw morricone tony curtis roy scheider rosenblum peter falk michael biehn pinter friedkin paul sorvino encino deg john frankenheimer united artists emile hirsch harold pinter richard chase new york city police department peter boyle gregory hines gena rowlands cowardly lion twentieth century fox movies podcast elliott gould sonny bono pauline kael killer joe jason robards minsky jason clark pankow lahr keifer sutherland george roy hill jay duplass de laurentiis vampire killer weinsteins warren oates second avenue britt ekland papa don miramax films patrick magee jake lacy dale dye dominick dunne caine mutiny court martial herman wouk entertainment capital jean moreau matt crowley art lafleur boston film festival john pankow joseph wiseman owen roizman john v lindsay william l petersen
Awesome Movie Year
Dog Day Afternoon (1975 Jason's Pick)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 62:10


The eighth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features Jason's personal pick, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a screenplay by Frank Pierson and starring Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Penelope Allen and Sully Boyar, Dog Day Afternoon was inspired by the true story of a Brooklyn bank robbery in 1972.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dog-day-afternoon-1975), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/22/archives/screen-lumets-dog-day-afternoon.html), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1975 installment, featuring the Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear winner, Márta Mészáros' Adoption.

You're Missing Out
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) w/ Ian Faria

You're Missing Out

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2023 132:47


"The Ultimate Trip" Filmmaker Ian Faria joins us on the show to talk about Stanley Kubrick's complex and and entrancing science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We talk award-winning special effects, critic-confounding stories, and of course, that Pauline Kael review. Today's episode is brought to you by Audible. Try out Audible for free using our unique link here.Hosts:Michael NataleTwitterLetterboxd Tom LorenzoTwitterLetterboxd Producer:Kyle LamparTwitter Guest:Ian FariaWebsiteInstagram Follow the Show:TwitterInstagramWebsite Music by Mike Natale

Awesome Movie Year
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1975 Cannes Award Winner)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2023 47:09


The fourth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features a Cannes Film Festival award winner, Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Bruno S., Walter Ladengast, and Brigitte Mira, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won three awards at Cannes in 1975.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Richard Eder in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/28/archives/herzogs-every-man-for-himself-is-stunning-fable-full-of-universals.html), Stephen Schiff in The Boston Phoenix, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1975 installment, featuring our documentary pick, the Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens.

Awesome Movie Year
Jaws (1975 Box Office Champ)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2023 55:00


The first episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features the highest-grossing film at the box office, Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay co-written by Peter Benchley (based on his novel) and starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton, Jaws stood for two years as the highest-grossing movie of all time.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jaws-1975), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-hc-jaws-original-review-20150619-story.html).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at

Weekend Warrior with Dr. Robert Klapper

Doc discusses criticism without a bias in sports, arts and medicine. We hear from Dick Enberg and Pauline Kael discussing how or if you should remain neutral in reporting. The Weekend Warrior clinic is open and Peter talks about his swollen knee. Let's make some breakfast; how about a Klapper Egg McMuffin?

Weekend Warrior with Dr. Robert Klapper
Pauline Kael - Biased Critic

Weekend Warrior with Dr. Robert Klapper

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2023 5:30


Pauline Kael called 'em as she saw 'em and most, respected her for it.

DENNIS ANYONE? with Dennis Hensley
Author Sam Staggs (Did You Sleep With The Models?): “I Looked Up And There Was Al Parker…”

DENNIS ANYONE? with Dennis Hensley

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2023 66:34


Dennis is joined by author Sam Staggs whose Substack newsletter “Did You Sleep With The Models?” documents the five years he spent as Editor-In-Chief of the gay magazines Mandate, Playguy and Honcho in the early 1980's. Sam talks about how the project began as a book that he wrote during the pandemic and then evolved into a Substack newsletter with photographs and illustrations pulled straight from the magazines. He also discusses what it was like to oversee three gay porn magazines just as AIDS was starting to ravage the community. Sam also discusses two of his Hollywood-related books; All About All About Eve and Finding Zsa Zsa: The Gabors Behind The Legend. Other topics include: the many upsides of publishing on Substack, his friendship with film critic Pauline Kael, interacting with gay porn icons like Al Parker, Casey Donovan and Kristen Bjorn, the dishy lunch he once had with actress Joan Fontaine, the rumor that Nancy Reagan gave good head and the gay agent who passed on representing Did You Sleep With the Models? because he thought it should be primarily focused on AIDS. https://samstaggs.substack.com/  

BLOODHAUS
Episode 61: The Shining (1980)

BLOODHAUS

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2023 81:47


This week the children eschew the obscure and throw a bone to a classic by covering Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. From wiki: “The Shining is a 1980 psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written with novelist Diane Johnson. The film is based on Stephen King's 1977 novel of the same name and stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd. The film's central character is Jack Torrance (Nicholson), an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a position as the off-season caretaker of the isolated historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, with his wife, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), and young son, Danny Torrance (Lloyd). Danny is gifted with psychic abilities named "shining". After a winter storm leaves the Torrances snowbound, Jack's sanity deteriorates due to the influence of the supernatural forces that inhabit the hotel.” But also! Italian Greyhound Trouble, the best kind of cishet men, Henry Rollins and RuPaul, Parks & Rec, The Fisher King, Harold and Maude, Hairspray, Bergman Report returns with Summer with Monika, plus some spicy Stephen King takes, Sleepwalkers, the brown 80s, Hong Kong Phooey, Scatman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lolita, Babylon reappraisal, Pauline Kael,  Dorothy Parker, and Bernie Sanders talking through movies. NEXT WEEK: Poison for the Fairies Website: http://www.bloodhauspod.com  Twitter: https://twitter.com/BloodhausPod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/ Email: bloodhauspod@gmail.com        Drusilla's art: https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/ Drusilla's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydesister/ Drusilla's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/drew_phillips/        Joshua's website: https://www.joshuaconkel.com/ Joshua's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshuaConkel  Joshua's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/ Joshua's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/joshuaconkel     

Binge-Watchers Podcast
Vampire's Kiss: Johnny Spoiler and Crew React to Nicolas Cage's Bat Crazy Performance and Creepy Dolls

Binge-Watchers Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2023 54:50


For more information go to https://bit.ly/FORTHEPEOPLEBW Don't miss out on the fun, subscribe today! https://bit.ly/3Fu6lxx Johnny Spoiler and crew talk about energy vampires and toxic people in our lives. They try to avoid talking about controversial topics to avoid suppression by Google's algorithm. They also joke about being more popular than Black Adam and come up with a plot for a movie featuring themselves. The crew discusses monsters and which ones they would choose to be if they had to choose. They talk about vampires and the challenges of being one, such as the difficulty of obtaining a food supply and the risk of being caught on camera. They also mention other monsters, such as shapeshifters and hide behinds. The conversation briefly touches on a movie called "The Watcher" and a genetically engineered dog. The crew also talks about their preference for leaving pets out of horror movies. Johnny Spoiler and crew discuss TV and movies, including Quentin Tenino's supposed last movie, which might be about seventies movie critic Pauline Kael. They also discuss Andy Kaufman's induction into the WWE Hall of Fame and his history in real wrestling. Jordan Peele's upcoming Christmas movie is also mentioned. The crew also briefly talks about their own podcast and ads. The crew discusses the movie "Vampire's Kiss," starring Nicolas Cage. They describe the plot, which involves Cage's character becoming convinced he's a vampire after being bitten by a woman. They also discuss some behind-the-scenes details, such as Cage's insistence on using a real bat in a scene and eating a real cockroach in another scene. They also mention some humorous moments in the film and Cage's inspiration for certain lines and actions. Johnny Spoiler and crew discuss their favorite bits from the movie Vampire's Kiss, starring Nicolas Cage. Johnny Spoiler mentions the scene where Cage's character is buying fake teeth and his slow descent into madness. Dangerous Dave talks about how Maria Conchita Alonso, who typically plays a badass character, plays a victim in this film. The crew also mentions Cage's character terrorizing his assistant, particularly the scene where he jumps on her desk and declares himself a vampire. Another favorite scene mentioned is the one where Cage's character goes through the entire alphabet. Despite being an awful boss, Cage's character is still likable and quirky. The crew is discussing the Fandango YouTube channel and their interest in AI. Jordan Savage mentions a question from a Fandango interview about which possessed doll would be the top doll if they were in the same movie. The crew lists various dolls and movies with creepy dolls, including Annabelle, Chucky, May, the dolls from Dolls, and the puppets from Puppet Master. Dangerous Dave suggests the dolls from Tales from the Hood, specifically the ones from the civil war era that come after white people to kill them. Johnny Spoiler also briefly mentions the overlooked movie Dead Silence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Channel 33
Undermining Jimmy Carter's Presidency, Donald Trump's Looming Indictment, and Quentin Tarantino's New Film

Channel 33

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2023 52:06


Bryan and David start the pod by discussing a recent article about Jimmy Carter that some are using to discount his presidency. Next, they dive into Donald Trump's possible impending arrest, listen to Ron DeSantis's comments about it, and break down the logistical complications of indicting a former president and what this might do for Trump's reelection campaign (6:11). After the break, they discuss FDU's upset over Purdue in the NCAA tournament, the rumors around Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film, and the life of film critic Pauline Kael (27:09). David ends the pod by trying to guess this week's Strained-Pun Headline (38:30). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Engines of Our Ingenuity
Engines of Our Ingenuity 2521: Radical Buildings

Engines of Our Ingenuity

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2023 3:49