Eavesdropping at the Movies: Recent Episodes
Jose Arroyo and Michael Glass
"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo.
"I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.
We've tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes, Spider-Man, reignites our interest with Brand New Day. With Doctor Strange having cast a spell at the end of 2021's No Way Home to make the entire world forget Peter Parker, for reasons that Doctor Strange presumably cast another spell to make us forget, Peter, newly isolated, returns to fighting street-level crime in New York City while pining for his old relationships and suffering severe headaches. Can he revive his former life? Surely it wouldn't be a Marvel film if an enormously significant, cliff-hanging event had permanent consequences.Still, even for those as cynical as it's possible to be about the MCU, Brand New Day has plenty to recommend it. It aims for thematic depth - though how fully that's achieved is up for discussion - and is genuinely moving. Indeed, certain moments move the audience to cheer and applaud, which in turn moves Mike to harrumph bitterly. Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his second MCU entry following Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, demonstrates a gift for working with actors and a strong instinct for staging action, although Cineworld does its best to undermine those virtues with its poor projection.We also return to our discussion of IMAX and The Odyssey, asking whether the frame's envelopment of the visual field impedes filmmakers' ability to express through composition and framing, and considering whether there's something fundamentally anti-democratic about making films whose fullest form can only be experienced at a handful of cinemas around the world.Recorded on 1st August 2026.
Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer's ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven't seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of a war hero's attempt to return home and handle his past.Other than the film's tempo and structure, which tell the story swiftly and non-chronologically, but without ever losing us, we don't agree on much. For José, it's beautiful to look at; for Mike, the visual pleasures are few and far between. José likes the performances across the board; Mike expresses serious reservations about some of them. We also discuss the disappointment of the final action scene, the extent to which the film treats the Greek gods as real, Zeus' law and how well the film represents ancient Greek culture and ways of thinking, and whether its explicit contextualisation of the story as a metaphor for PTSD is earned.Recorded on 23rd June 2026.
Steven Spielberg returns to science fiction with Disclosure Day, an ambitious alien thriller that consciously recalls Close Encounters of the Third Kind, still one of his defining films fifty years on. We marvel at its extraordinary visual storytelling, virtuoso camerawork and sense of cinematic wonder, while asking whether its ideas about conspiracy, religion, the media and empathy are as sophisticated as its technical brilliance. We also revisit the perennial debate between CGI and practical effects, and consider the different worlds in which Disclosure Day and Close Encounters were made and released. Is Spielberg's enduring belief in communication and human connection still resonant in an age of fractured media and competing truths?Recorded on 13th June 2026.
Most videogames that receive cinematic adaptations are big - the likes of Uncharted, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and Resident Evil, all of which have been adapted, some several times, are among the biggest games in history, and their cinematic versions are typically intended to be blockbusters. Exit 8 is not. It is an independent Japanese game made by one person, turned into a low-budget, high-concept, Japanese horror film. And most cinematic adaptations of videogames are not very good. The medium has a long history of failing to translate well to film. Exit 8 makes a success of the transition, finding plenty of space in the slight source material to tell a story about routine, fear of change, and personal improvement.We discuss what makes the adaptation work and where it might not, think through the story's internal logic, and, as we did with Godzilla Minus One, remark upon the film's visual quality given its small budget, asking where all that money goes when Hollywood spends ten times the amount to achieve the same results. Exit 8 is a welcome surprise, particularly to Mike, who really thought it'd be rubbish.Recorded on 27th April 2026.
Seven years ago, we disagreed with the thrust of what Mark Jenkin's Bait had to say about the world as it is and as it ought to be, but appreciated its expressive strength. It was a film with substance. You could grapple with it. Rose of Nevada broadly conveys the same messages, but, as they derive primarily from the film's setting and less so its plot, is less forceful and argumentative about them, requiring us to accept them in shorthand and take them as read.Fair enough, perhaps - why make the same film twice? - but the story to which Jenkin's perspective is here allied is of little interest, and told with insufficient clarity, populated by dull, flat characters whose developments are poorly motivated - if at all. Jenkin is certainly a visual stylist, but he shows little instinct for effective storytelling or direction of actors here, and we question the response Rose of Nevada has received from other critics, which seems inexplicably universal in its positivity.Recorded on 27th April 2026.
In 2015, Matt Damon found himself stranded on Mars in The Martian, an adaptation of Andy Weir's novel of the same name, and had to improvise unlikely solutions in order to survive and get home. In 2026, Ryan Gosling finds himself stranded in outer space in Project Hail Mary, an adapation of Andy Weir's novel of the same name, and has to improvise unlikely solutions in order to save Earth and get home. It's fair to say that we're on familiar territory here, but who cares when it's this entertaining?Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known for gloriously imaginative and daft comedy, manage the competing tones in Project Hail Mary beautifully, moving easily between wacky discovery, dramatic reveals, and earned sentimentality, and never failing to show care and an instinct for the value of the image - some shots are breathtaking. Like Weir, they're unafraid to cannibalise their previous work in search of useful ideas, reworking the monkey thought translator from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into a computer that allows Gosling's reluctant hero to communicate with Rocky, the alien he meets. In this and elsewhere throughout, Project Hail Mary shows the same reverence for scientific inquiry and application of intelligence to problem-solving that The Martian did, which is a pleasure in itself.There's a huge amount to like here, at least until the long and excessively detailed ending, which sadly drags things down a little. We urge you to see Project Hail Mary while it's in cinemas - it's a massive crowd pleaser and one of the most satisfying experiences we've had at the pictures in a while.Amidst all this, we also discuss Gosling's particular brand of stardom and place in the Hollywood hierarchy in comparison with Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet, between whose names José feels Gosling gets smothered.Recorded on 1st April 2026.
Sirât is all about tone, and the time it takes to establish it. It begins with an array of massive speakers being set up in a desert, and over the next several minutes, we experience an outdoor rave, the music trance-inducing, the ravers moving freely and in their own worlds, as we gradually narrow our focus on an out-of-place father, Luis, and his young son, who we learn are searching for his daughter, last seen five months ago. Failing to find her there, Luis latches on to the mention of another, upcoming rave, and, while war breaks out in the background, uncertainly follows a group of ravers there.It's possible to spoil Sirât severely - some of what occurs is barely signposted and hard to believe, but just as we're told about the music that underscores everything, this is a film for dancing to, not listening to. It would be all too easy to watch Sirât at a remove and find the events depicted ludicrous and laughable, but director Óliver Laxe demonstrates such control of tone that it's easy to be lured into the emotional state he needs to shock us when he wants. The only thing you should be prepared to expect is a lack of easy answers. Sirât is a film about a world coming apart that leaves you wondering what it's all for.Recorded on 3rd March 2026.
We've previously seen Bacurau, writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho's last film, which we loved, and find The Secret Agent a similarly fascinating depiction of political corruption and persecution in Brazil, though much more grounded and fleshed out, particularly given the historical setting in 1977, at which time Brazil was subject to a military dictatorship. To José, who grew up in Franco's Spain, The Secret Agent's depiction of life under fascism richly, and scarily, evokes the dynamics at play in such a society. As Wagner Moura's protagonist discovers, simply upsetting the wrong person can be enough to have hitmen sent after you.Mike argues that the film takes too long to get going - in developing its picture of the lawless world in which Moura joins other political refugees and a dissident network, it makes us wait to find out who he is and why he's among that group. José doesn't share that assessment, finding the time well spent and trusting the film's pacing. We discuss the flights of fancy, including an animated segment which dramatises news reports of a supposedly supernatural severed leg killing people (in fact, the police and media are all too happy to make use of the nonsensical urban legend to cover up their extrajudicial murders); Moura's performance, which earned him an Oscar nomination; the generations' differing attitudes to maintaining historical records and keeping the past alive; and the hereditary aspect of positions of power, in which such figures as the police chief, wealthy industrialists, and even contract killers are always accompanied and assisted by their sons.Recorded on 2nd March 2026.
Those to whom Emily Brontë's only novel, Wuthering Heights, is important, have approached Emerald Fennell's adaptation warily. It's a book that a lot of women have grown up on, and the trailers raised questions. Would it be too steamy? Too modernised? Would it miss the point? We, however, residing outside that demographic and never having read the novel, can't meaningfully consider the issue of adaptation, and are more interested in the film taken on its own terms. Is it good?The answer is yes. Fennell's direction is visually expressive and inventive, and tonally confident. We disagree on aspects of Cathy and Heathcliff's dynamic, José arguing that theirs is as deep as a romance gets despite - or perhaps because of - how toxic they are for one another; Mike questioning Cathy's commitment and suggesting that the film doesn't sell the idea that social status and financial obligation requires her to forgo Heathcliff. We also consider the blind casting, sexual dynamics and depiction of BDSM (or BDSM-like) activities, and the female gaze that's built in to everything - this is a film about a woman, based on a novel by a woman, screenwritten, directed and produced by women, and aimed at a female audience.Recorded on 22nd February 2026.
Send Help sees Rachel McAdams marooned on a desert island with her asshole boss in a cartoonishly gory comic adventure the likes of which made director Sam Raimi's name. We discuss how feminist it really is - at the very least, it's a bloke's idea of female empowerment - and praise McAdams' and Dylan O'Brien's performances, upon which the entire film relies.Recorded on 15th February 2026.
Possibly the sweetest and lightest gay BDSM biker film ever made, Pillion opens up conversations on power dynamics, consent and boundaries, and made Mike cry. Everything about it is so assured, particularly Harry Melling's understated protagonist, meek and new to BDSM; Alexander Skarsgård's commanding, mysterious lover; and Harry Lighton's direction, the control of tone he exhibits a remarkable achievement for a first feature. We explore the film's themes, offer different interpretations of events, and ask what's good and bad about the relationship depicted.Pillion is a wonderful film, with, given the subject matter, a surprisingly funny and wholesome spirit. Highly recommended.Recorded on 11th December 2025.
One of Iran's most celebrated filmmakers, Jafar Panahi, has spent the last quarter of a century in conflict with the Iranian government, which objects to his films' criticisms of their actions and the wider social conditions in the country, and has both arrested him several times and banned him from making films for twenty years - which hasn't stopped him. His latest, It Was Just an Accident, won the 2025 Palme d'Or, and tells the story of former political prisoners who capture a man they suspect was their torturer.It's a brilliant thriller which, despite the gravity and darkness of its subject matter, is energetic and entertaining. It effortlessly raises both moral and practical questions - What's the right thing to do with their captive? Have they become the torturers? If they let him live, won't he just come after them again? - without entering morality play territory, neither pretending to have the answers nor admonishing its characters for their choices and emotional responses. It's a vivid expression of the lasting effect the actions of the Iranian regime have had on its people, for whom merely the suggestion that they might be able to exact revenge on their torturer causes instant emotional outbursts.We discuss all this and more, including the depiction of a lawless culture in which you're constantly expected to give bribes to get by; the filmmaking, in which no filming permits were provided and Panahi had to once again violate his filmmaking ban; the question of how ambiguous the end might be and what that means; and a comparison with American cinema in Trump's America and the question of what might be happening under ICE, the immigration enforcement agency that's expanded into a neo-paramilitary force over the last year.It Was Just an Accident is a magnificent film. See it.Recorded on 10th December 2025.
Russell Crowe shines in Nuremberg as Hermann Göring, who became the face of the Nazi Party following Hitler's suicide and the end of the war, as he's held in custody and probed by a psychiatrist as the titular trials approach. Indeed, while a mediocre film, its actors' performances are a pleasure - with the exception of Rami Malek, whose psychiatrist is twitchy, busy, and a failure. A shame that he's the protagonist, then.We discuss the film's structure and screenplay: José contends that Malek's character is not just badly played but an irrelevance, and the drama would be much better served by focusing on Michael Shannon's prosecutor; Mike criticises what he claims is a stupid person's idea of clever writing.And there's more to think about: how Nuremberg compares to Bridge of Spies, which similarly depicted a novel trial that had obvious implications beyond the courtroom, and Judgment at Nuremberg, the other major dramatisation of the trials; the film's tone, which is able to handle moments of humour but sometimes veers into the overly glib and kitsch; the present-day rise of fascism and the genocide in Gaza to which the film speaks; the use of real footage of Holocaust victims and the purpose to which it's put; and whether we think that its critique of the Catholic Church for its support of the Nazis, and suggestion that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was an unjustifiable atrocity, are surprising and bold things for a mainstream American film to do... or not particularly impressive, and shouldn't people just know this stuff anyway?Recorded on 23rd November 2025.
Jennifer Lawrence gives a career-best performance as a new mother struggling with depression and a rocky relationship in Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay, whose remarkable instinct for tone and atmosphere shouldn't be taken for granted. It's a character study whose artistry is all in the filmmaking and performances, which bring out great richness of feeling in material that, on the page, might seem to lack complexity. One could suggest that those who've experienced similar struggles to the film's characters hold the key to unlocking its depths, but that's a temptation to avoid - one of the film's achievements is the ease with which it gets you to feel what its characters are feeling. See it at the cinema, where you'll be able to properly submit yourself to it.Recorded on 9th November 2025.
Yorgos Lanthimos' fourth collaboration with Emma Stone yields a darkly comedic thriller about two conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO, determined to reveal the truth that she's an alien from Andromeda. We've all at least considered it.While funny and absurd, Bugonia is also tragic and misanthropic, and we're unconvinced that its ending is either earned or fitting, despite Mike's insistence that he's seen it coming for weeks. We consider the film's messaging, aesthetics, and tone; what its stars bring to it and how they differ; what the title might mean; and how a comparison with Alex Garland's Ex Machina reveals the lacks in the storytelling here. We pick at Bugonia left, right and centre, but despite our complaints, it showed us a very entertaining time, and there's a lot about it to recommend.Recorded on 9th November 2025.
Another classic Gothic horror is remade for the modern age: first we saw Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, and now Guillermo del Toro brings us his adaptation of Frankenstein. Like Nosferatu, Frankenstein is astonishing to look at, and, like Nosferatu, also written by its director, it probably would have benefitted from the attention of a professional screenwriter. Still, it's a pleasure to spend time in the word del Toro envisions, and we talk wide angle lenses, the range of performances - Oscar Isaac's busy, Jacob Elordi's brooding, Mia Goth's underwhelming - the difficulty of understanding dialogue in screen two at the Mockingbird, and what this Frankenstein thematically shares with One Battle After Another.Recorded on 4th November 2025.
Far from an outstanding film, but amazing to look at and too much fun not to recommend, we had a great time in Tron: Ares, which reverses the reality-computer interface that brought humans into the digital world in the previous two films; it's now the virtual that becomes real. An evil company searches for the code that will give its 3D printed computer assets longevity in the real world - so far, they crumble into dust after about twenty minutes - but the AI tasked with doing so goes rogue, hoping to use the code to bring itself to life. It's Pinocchio and Frankenstein with neon-oozing motorbikes, and as entertaining as that sounds. (We think that sounds entertaining.)Recorded on 12th October 2025.
We're joined by our resident Paul Thomas Anderson expert (and Mike's brother), Stephen Glass, to whom we've previously spoken about Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, for another discussion of One Battle After Another. Stephen's seen it in both VistaVision and IMAX 70mm, and can offer a sense of the experience Mike and José missed seeing it in IMAX Digital, and so begins a wide-ranging conversation about the film's aesthetics, tone, politics, influences and more.Recorded on 5th October 2025.
Mike isn't impressed with The Rock's attempt to take on a dramatic role in an intimate biopic after decades of popcorn blockbusters, seeing it as Oscar bait. José doesn't share his cynicism and likes the lead performance. We discuss what The Smashing Machine depicts - disagreeing, in particular, about whether the protagonist shares any blame for the issues in his relationship - as well as whether its look and storytelling are problems, and just how shoddy things are getting at Cineworld. Yet we keep going back.Recorded on 5th October 2025.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, directed by former video essayist Kogonada, is beautiful to look at and very likeable, but derivative and ultimately unsatisfying. We discuss its lighting, its attitude towards people's histories and the memories that live with them, and why a rubbish script Mike once wrote makes him particularly keen to sneer at it.Recorded on 29th September 2025.
Cheap, simple, high-concept and reasonably graphic, The Long Walk is a throwback to the days of the B-movie. In its dystopian, totalitarian version of the USA, an annual event, the Long Walk, is designed to inspire a work ethic and national pride in the citizenry, and in so doing restore the country to that self-defined global number one status it craves; to make America great again. The televised competition sets fifty young men, one from each state, against each other in a test of endurance: they must walk for as long as they can, maintaining a speed of over 3mph at all times, with success rewarded with unimaginable riches and the fulfilment of a personal wish, and repeated failure to keep up punished with on-the-spot execution. There is one winner.What promises to be quite dumb is not quite as dumb as Mike anticipates. The worldbuilding is fairly thin, and the premise of the competition an immediate hurdle for the audience to clear, but The Long Walk is able to develop thematically in surprising depth through the interactions and conversations between its competitors, who share their thoughts on the event, the personal histories that draw them to it, and their intentions if they win. With a number of reservations - we find its visual direction lacking and differ on how good the performances and screenplay are - it's easy to recommend The Long Walk, which shows us an America in need of revolution, and asks its characters what it might take to achieve it.Recorded on 28th September 2025.
By far Paul Thomas Anderson's most expensive film, with a budget some four or five times what he's used to, and probably his most accessible, One Battle After Another entertains us enormously and effortlessly without sacrificing the complexity and nuance for which his work is known. Set in an alternate America oppressed by Christofascism, the alternate part is that there's a very active militant revolutionary group, the French 75, setting bombs off and freeing detained minorities. Leonardo DiCaprio is part of it, and sixteen years after the conclusion of his group's activities, their work has entered countercultural legend, but he's become a drug-addicted, paranoid burnout, trying to raise a teenage daughter. When the powers that be come looking for them, they're separated, all hell breaks loose, and he has to step up.José finds One Battle After Another to be the film of the moment, the state of the nation film that Eddington could only dream of being, a powerful, invigorating expression of what ails America and what it means to resist. Mike is more cynical, seeing an element of mockery in the revolution that has no apparent intention to end and is carried out over generations. We love the easygoing style of filmmaking that Anderson seems to have grown into, comparing it to the rigid formality of his early work, and finding that he has a talent for action cinema that's never quite come out before. We also discuss the film's themes of youth and ageing, parenting, the Christian right and more.One Battle After Another is an unmissable film, the kind that fifty years ago would have defined America's national conversation. Cinema no longer holds that level of cultural cachet, sadly, but One Battle After Another is a powerful, energetic, and very funny reminder of what film can do at its best.Recorded on 28th September 2025.
Commitment is scary. It's especially scary when you drink water from a cursed puddle that wants to make a hybrid of you and your partner. Together tells the story of a couple moving to a new countryside home during a questionable period in their relationship: she has a new job and is responsible for the move away; he's emotionally distant since the death of his parents and relies on her for transportation and financial security. They love each other, but will they last?First-time director Michael Shanks demonstrates a good instinct for tone, effectively combining comedy and horror - that Alison Brie and Dave Franco (married in real life) are both experienced comic actors helps the film draw out the absurdity of the events it depicts. What quibbles we might have with details of its supernatural basis are easily ignored because its focus always remains on the central couple. It doesn't matter that some specific detail might not be explained to our satisfaction: the question is always, how do the couple respond to their predicament? Together never loses sight of what's most important, and that makes it one of the best horrors - maybe one of the best films full stop - that we've seen in a while.Recorded on 24th August 2025.
Most film and TV has quietly agreed to pretend that the Covid pandemic never happened. Perhaps it's too awkward to discuss it. Perhaps it'll date your work. Writer-director Ari Aster doesn't share these worries, telling a story about the days of lockdowns, mask mandates and conspiracy theories - days of particular hostility and division in the USA, in which individual freedom does constant battle with the greater good.Eddington is an ambitious attempt at the state-of-the-nation film: a darkly comic thriller with wild tonal shifts, a mass of interwoven themes, uneven pacing, and an eventual climb out of reality into absurdity. José finds much to dislike, particularly its dismissive attitude towards the young people it depicts supporting the Black Lives Matter movement; Mike is surprised at how much he likes it, given how let down he felt by Hereditary. Eddington is certainly a mixed bag, but we're glad to have seen it.Recorded on 24th August 2025.
One of the most hotly-anticipated horror films in recent memory, Weapons begins with seventeen third-grade children in a Pennsylvania town mysteriously waking up at 2:17am one Wednesday and running from their homes into the darkness. The shocking, unexplained disappearance and imagery of an empty classroom alone suggest an allegory of school shootings, and we ask what else can be read into the film, and discuss the depth with which it handles its themes. We have our issues with Weapons but enjoy it very much all the same, and find a lot to like. It's probably just a little overpraised.Two weeks later, with the film still on his mind, Mike opens up further discussion and proposes that maybe there's more to it than he gave it credit for - or that you have to be American to properly get it.Recorded on 10th and 24th August 2025.
A psychosexual thriller that's neither psychosexual nor thrilling enough, The Shrouds is a disappointment. There's great promise to businessman Vincent Cassel's invention of a technologically advanced shroud that creates a 3D model of the decaying body it houses, when we're shown the lust with which he observes his deceased wife's corpse. The film is peppered with recurrent imagery of her disfigured body, and its importance to Cassel's character is constantly reinforced, but the film is too talky, its imagery too bland, and its plot too convoluted to make the most of it. A shame.Recorded on 6th August 2025.
Mike loves Tim Key. This much has been true for some time, and he's thrilled to discover that the comic poet's unique approach to wordplay and social interactions finds a natural place on the cinema screen, in the character of an eccentric lottery winner who lures his favourite folk duo, long since broken-up, to the lonely island on which he lives for a private gig. Tom Basden's singer-songwriter finds the forced reunion an unwelcome intrusion from his past, and so begins a comedy about grief, loss, loneliness, and rice.The plot is easily predicted, the visual nous close to absent, but it has a good heart and, in Key, an irresistably energetic, unusual central performance. It filled the Mockingbird with laughter and left us all feeling warm and cuddly and sad and happy. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a charming film, well worth watching.Recorded on 5th August 2025.
We talk adult male friendships, stress and surreality in our discussion of Friendship, in which oddball everyman Tim Robinson finds himself enamoured with effortlessly cool new neighbour Paul Rudd, but lacks any of the social nous to naturally bond with him. The film gets huge laughs from meaningful subject matter, a far cry from our experience with The Naked Gun. Its tone is idiosyncratic, its observations on human nature ring true in their exaggerated way, and Robinson is a fascinating and hilarious presence on the cinema screen. Friendship won't be for everyone, but we highly recommend it.Recorded on 4th August 2025.
The Naked Gun is rebooted with Liam Neeson in the part that was once Leslie Nielsen's, and he shows just how hard comedy can be. We discuss everything the film gets wrong. If only they'd asked us for help.Recorded on 4th August 2025.
YouTubers-turned-directors Danny and Michael Philippou demonstrate a real eye for visual design and an ability to create imagery to truly disgusting effect in Bring Her Back, in which Sally Hawkins plays a foster parent whose daughter's death leads her to search for answers in the occult. The filmmaker twins are 32 years old, which, perhaps unfairly, leads us to ascribe the film's lack of depth and prioritisation of visual shock to their youth. Bring Her Back shows a certain immaturity, but great potential, and we're interested to see if the pair's storytelling and sensitivity to theme improves.We also discuss child actors in horror, as the film drives Mike to question the ethics of using children as Jonah Wren Phillips is here, both in terms of the desired effect on the audience and the potential unintended effect on the child. Not all unease is good unease, and Bring Her Back makes us ask: what cost is too high for such entertainment?Recorded on 28th July 2025.
The seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) series, Jurassic World Rebirth might be the first of the sequels to really come close to capturing the kind of wonder, excitement and horror that the 1993 original offered. That might be in part because it cribs liberally from it, with both moments and entire sequences closely evocative of their 32-year-old counterparts. But there's plenty else that's new here, and Rebirth is a characterful expansion to the Jurassic Park story.Thoughts of containment have finally been totally discarded - dinosaurs have now been roaming the Earth for some time, to the point that they're dying out everywhere other than a narrow band around the equator, which is illegal for human travel. So that's where we're headed, of course, as a pharmecutical exec seeking to make a fortune from dino-sourced drugs hires a team of mercenaries to extract blood from three creatures: one that swims, one that walks, and one that flies. It's a decent structure that tells you what to expect and allows for a variety of settings and action, into which are placed such charismatic stars as Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend. Director Gareth Edwards builds the world beautifully, exploiting it for that sense of scale that so defines his aesthetic, and reminding Mike in particular of his feature debut Monsters; and although in simple terms - this is, ultimately, a blockbuster sequel - the film has a moral message worth expressing.Jurassic World Rebirth is easily the best of the Jurassic sequels and equally easy to recommend. Just try not to focus too much on how it reminds you of a better film from 1993.Recorded on 13th July 2025.
DC, which for the best part of two decades has failed to put together a cinematic universe of comic book adaptations to rival Marvel's MCU, regroups and goes again with director James Gunn in charge of what will be known as the DCU - and what better superhero to introduce the new brand than the original: Superman.David Corenswet's performance and physique are extremely appealing, recalling an era before steroids and dehydration were considered compulsory in order for a man to be thought of as sexy. We appreciate the film's lightness of tone and sense of humour, although one of us argues that the whole experience is so audiovisually hyperactive and loud that the tone doesn't support all the jokes, and it's simply exhausting to endure. We also discuss wokeness, the right wing's determination to have a culture war, and obvious parallels between Lex Luthor's villainy and that of Donald Trump; destruction of cities and the concomitant human cost; what made the previous Lex Luthor interesting; and why putting on glasses is an effective method of disguise.Recorded on 13th July 2025.
Hollywood collaborates with the FIA, the motorsport governing body, to try to convince us that Formula One is not, in fact, televised Microsoft Excel, but actually very exciting indeed. To this end, it brings in accomplished genre action director Joseph Kosinski, star Brad Pitt, and every cliché under the sun. And it's great fun.There's hardly anything realistic about this story of a sixtysomething has-been given an unexpected shot at glory in racing's most prestigious competition, despite the extraordinary effort that's been made to evoke the world of F1, including shooting during real races and race events, with real drivers filling the scenes and even the real commentary team of Crofty and Brundle talking us through the action. The ironic curse of such detail is that the audience most attuned to recognising it is precisely that which will take issue with the film's inaccuracies; José, on the other hand, doesn't know F1 from a hole in the ground, and has no such problem.We discuss the incredibly intense action and praise the cinematography that captures it; Pitt's perfect fit for the role of a veteran driver who once had promise, made a series of mistakes, but nonetheless carries himself with a casual, appealing ease; whether the film is a corporate biopic, a term Mike is pretty sure he invented and is desperate to catch on; how you can't call yourself an artist when you're just selling a product; and whether Kosinski can make a film that depicts complex human interactions.F1 is far from a great film, but it pretends to be nothing other than what it is: a deeply derivative, expensively made, fabulously shot and entertaining advert for Formula One. It's easy to recommend. See it!Recorded on 13th July 2025.
In the 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl infamously directed two propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, for the Nazi Party. For the rest of her life, which ended in 2003, she denied knowledge of the regime's crimes, including the Holocaust. In 2016, her heirs gave her estate, which included a vast collection of personal documents, correspondence, and film and tape recordings, to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which itself gave permission to Sandra Maischberger and Andres Veiel, a journalist and filmmaker respectively, to use the material as the basis of a documentary. Riefenstahl, comprising countless elements of the archive, along with documents from other sources, builds a biography of a person who never came clean about what she knew about Nazi Germany, and never took responsibility for her part in it.It's a complex and layered examination of a life led between pride and denial, and has resonances today: take Riefenstahl's television appearance in 1976 alongside Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist and contemporary who refuses to believe her claims of ignorance during wartime, which is followed by recordings of phone calls to Riefenstahl in support of her stance and contempt for Kretschmer. The line between those calls and the metastasising popularity of extreme right-wing, "anti-woke" and similar ideologies today is self-evident, as is the difference between ideas expressed publicly and privately. Riefenstahl is more outspoken off the record than on it, demanding interviewers' cameras be turned off to prevent them from capturing candid revelations. In this sense and others, her life provides a window into fascism - what drives it - her initial response to seeing and hearing Adolf Hitler speak is almost sexual - what it represents and offers to its adherents, and how it shrinks and cowers when it doesn't get everything it wants.It's a problem for Mike that the film doesn't seem to think that the artistic and cultural impact of Riefenstahl's work is worth exploring, where to him it's the most interesting thing about her. Not only were her films technically and artictically innovative - something claimed by subjects in the film but not explained or examined - but her work arguably gives the Nazis their key, and enduring, victory. As thuggish and vile as the regime was, and despite its collapse, through Triumph of the Will and Olympia it created an image of itself as glorious and powerful with which we continue to associate it, and to which neo-Nazis today aspire to emulate. Few filmmakers have left a cultural legacy of such significance and duration, but the documentary isn't interested in the work - only the person.Quibbles apart, Riefenstahl is an excellent example of how to tell a complex tale with intention, clarity, and concision, while allowing for interpretation of the material presented, and it'll be the basis of endless conversations. Highly recommended.Recorded on 2nd June 2025.
A wide-ranging discussion follows the release of the final Mission: Impossible film... perhaps. José doesn't believe that they'll stop making them, nor does he want them to, but he is glad that Tom Cruise appears to be hanging up his boots - he's just too old now. While he reflects on Cruise's career and stardom, Mike's watched every Mission: Impossible film in anticipation of The Final Reckoning, and tracks changes in their aesthetics, sexuality, and comic tone, as the series worked its way towards finding the formula that's become its signature.Recorded on 27th May 2025.
The slasher series without a slasher returns for its sixth instalment, fourteen years after we last saw it. Where Halloween gave us Michael Myers, Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, Final Destination made death the villain - perhaps more accurately, Death, but we never see a cloaked man wielding a scythe. Where the figure of the slasher killer could, in principle, be evaded and even beaten, Final Destination's Death, non-corporeal and omnipresent, carries a key threat of inevitability. Nobody escapes Death.In each Final Destination film, one character's premonition of catastrophe gives them the chance to save themselves and others from death, but Death won't take being cheated lying down, and sets its sights on pursuing its near-victims to the graves they're currently avoiding. How? Through elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque accidents, of course. We discuss the ways in which Final Destination Bloodlines' set pieces work, how they focus on small moments and individual stories, and how they're a nightmare for the naturally anxious. José isn't shy of expressing his dislike of the film; Mike, the opposite, and he does his best to explain the appeal of watching so many people perish in such gruesome ways. We even ask whether a slasher series could be made with which José would see eye to eye, and imagine what it might look like.Recorded on 20th May 2025.
Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is a horror musical set in 1930s Mississippi, shot in part on IMAX 70mm film, starring Michael B. Jordan as a pair of identical twins who return to their hometown for a new start, only to encounter vampires. It's as ambitious as that sounds and full of ideas and culturally specific nuance, and José loves it. Mike doesn't.We discuss how the music draws on several influences, not just from the blues of the era but also from Irish folk and hip-hop; the getting-the-band-back-together feel of the opening, in which the twins bring their influence and riches to bear on the creation of the juke joint; the visual design, simultaneously confident and careless; the crowd-pleasing fantasy of an anti-racist Rambo; and the theme of vampirism - what it means and how it's used.Recorded on 5th May 2025.
What a joy! We were delighted to be invited to the University of Warwick Film and Television Studies department for a conversation with James MacDowell about Eavesdropping at the Movies: how it began, why we do it, what we get out of it, how we make it. We hope you enjoy what was an enormously satisfying hour and a bit in which we had the privilege to discuss our practice of film criticism with an audience keen to ask questions. Thank you to James for chairing and to Julie Lobalzo Wright for inviting us.Recorded on 29th April 2025.
Over the last couple of months, Chinese children's fantasy Ne Zha 2 has quickly, and arguably quietly, become the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, and the first animated film to gross over $2 billion. It's hard to keep up with the records it's been breaking - but can we keep up with the plot?No is the answer, but we readily accept that younger minds, and minds more in tune with Ne Zha 2's cultural context and mythological basis, won't feel as overwhelmed as we did. It did make us feel old, but this audiovisual whirlwind is beautiful and coherent - writer-director Jiaozi exhibits great control over the most energetic of action scenes, and has an eye for striking, colourful imagery. We discuss how closely some of the film's visual design and messaging might reflect the particular culture from which it comes, or whether it's so different from American cinema after all, and ask why this and last year's Inside Out 2 have been able to make so much money (the Pixar film grossing $1.7 billion and becoming the then-eighth-highest-grossing film of all time) with such little response from critics.Recorded on 24th March 2025.
After a little time off, we're back at the cinema to see Bong Joon Ho's sci-fi comedy, Mickey 17, in which Robert Pattinson dies. Repeatedly. Leaving Earth on a spaceship seeking to colonise an icy planet, Pattinson's Mickey is an "Expendable": a disposable worker given lethal assignments, regenerated by a biological printer, and sent out to die again. But when the 17th version of Mickey fails to die at the mandibles of the local fauna, he finds his way back to the colony, only to find that he's already been reprinted as Mickey 18 - and clone coexistence is strictly prohibited.We're disappointed by what looked like a marvellously energetic, knockabout comedy and social satire from the trailer. Even considering the film's very broad tone, there's too little in the characterisation to really buy in to, a severe lack of pace, and an ending that betrays it. Nonetheless, as failures go, it's an interesting one, playing with plenty of ideas, and featuring more than enough good jokes to support it. Our recommendation of Mickey 17 is far from whole-hearted, but you ought to give it a whirl.Recorded on 23rd March 2025.
We visit BFI Southbank for a 70mm screening of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's epic period drama. It's a super-sized film - 215 minutes, not including the intermission - and it deserves a super-sized podcast, for which we're joined, as we occasionally are, by Mike's brother, Stephen, who's already seen the film once. It's an extraordinarily complex, subtle and absorbing film that draws on countless themes and parts of history in telling its story of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect who escapes to America and finds a wealthy client enamoured with him.We dig in to the film's themes with breathless enthusiasm, and talk sex, racism, the immigrant experience, long takes, rape, capitalism, doing things for effect, art, aspiration, jealousy, the value of 70mm, and much more. José describes The Brutalist as his film of the year; Mike ponders whether he likes it more than the Robbie Williams monkey movie.Recorded on 28th January 2025.
"Steven Soderbergh's making a horror film from the perspective of the ghost" turns out to be a sentence specifically designed to appeal to Mike, who has been looking forward to Presence for ages. (José struggles to remember the film's title, even moments after having seen it.) But part of that pitch is deeply misleading. Presence's trailers were loaded with quotes from overeager horror publications that praised the film's fear factor, which leads to a little confusion when the final product is revealed to be a family drama that, despite the ghost whose eyes we see everything through, isn't even trying to scare us. And that's great! We just didn't realise that's what we were in for.What Presence gives us is a compelling exercise in film form and storytelling that constantly maintains our interest and which we thoroughly enjoy, but which sadly disappoints us in a variety of ways - though only a few of which we agree on. What interests Mike about the film's camerawork and handling of its invisible, point-of-view character leaves José unimpressed; Mike doesn't get what José does out of the critique of modern masculinity.But despite our disagreements and disappointments, we enthusiastically recommend Presence as an experiment worth experiencing. It's intriguing, efficient, and original - and there's very little like it.Recorded on 24th January 2025.
Nicole Kidman gives a compelling, vulnerable performance in Babygirl, as a woman for whom sexual satisfaction requires her to relinquish the power she otherwise projects throughout her life, and who begins an affair with a much younger man she finds herself unable to resist. Unfortunately, that's the only significant thing to recommend about the film, which we find superficial, badly thought out, and most crucially of all for Mike, nowhere near steamy enough. It's good fun to discuss, though, and gives us opportunity to reminisce about sneaking into films we weren't allowed to see when we were kids. Stick around to learn José's Looney Tunes technique for fooling the ticket guy.Recorded on 23rd January 2025.
The third film in Pablo Larraín's trilogy of iconic women, following 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer, Maria shows us the final week of the life of opera singer Maria Callas, who at the age of 53 is experiencing delusions, hallucinations, and the fear that her once-perfect singing voice has abandoned her. Mike isn't familiar with Maria Callas; José is (despite worrying before we started recording that he wouldn't have much to say when expected to explain who she is).No familiarity with her is required, however, to enjoy the film. Larraín's elegant direction, Steven Knight's intelligent screenplay, and Angelina Jolie's extraordinary, subtle performance combine beautifully to explore Maria's ego, fears, and passion. Maria's delusions, in which choirs fill town squares, orchestras back her in her apartment, and a fascinated journalist follows her around Paris chronicling her memories, are evident throughout the film... everywhere but in song. She knows all too well that her voice is leaving her, she hopes for and needs its return, and ultimately, the film renders her struggle with it a fight to hold on to life itself. It's sympathetic, understandable, and beautiful.Maria is the best film of Larraín's impressive body of work, and features perhaps the best performance of Jolie's. See it.(We also discuss Robbie Williams, because Mike saw Better Man, the Robbie Williams monkey movie, and is desperate to talk about it.)Recorded on 21st January 2025.
Writer-director Robert Eggers, whose reputation for aesthetically rich, deeply-researched and idiosyncratic horror precedes him, has long been working on a remake of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, the 1922 German Expressionist classic whose influence has been felt in the horror genre for a century. It's a big fish to try to take down, but it's source material that feels like it exists especially for him - how does he do?Very well, as it turns out... although, in classic fashion, we manage to talk around what a fantastic time we had by concentrating on our criticisms. Ignore them until you've taken yourself to the biggest cinema you can to see it - it's an experience you should have. Then come back and listen to us discuss the debt Eggers' Nosferatu owes to the colour tinting processes of the silent era, how the second half gets bogged down in tropes and plot, the delineation between sex and love, the pressure to be accessible, whether horror needs to be scary, and the important lesson we learned from Shrek Forever After.Recorded on 2nd January 2025.
You wait for ages for a film about a group of people sequestered in a room, questioning each other, keeping secrets, and repeatedly voting, and two come along at once. But while Juror #2's protagonist wrestled with his conscience, Conclave's Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, has little trouble consistently acting out of principle - sadly, many of his colleagues vying for the Catholic Church's vacant papacy don't share his clarity.Conclave is a marvellously entertaining mystery and thriller, a chamber play in which Fiennes' performance is a complex and deeply felt standout amongst a number of engaging, if less rich, star turns from Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini. We discuss whether the film is an advert for the Church, how it engages with religion, the striking visual design, liberalism vs. conservatism, representations of gender and nationality... and that magnificent twist. Spoilers within!Recorded on 1st December 2024.
A film whose brilliant conceit is so simple and compelling we can't believe we've never seen it before, Juror #2 tells the story of a juror whose responsibility it is to assess the guilt of a defendant who he knows is innocent of murder - because it was the juror who did it.Summoned to serve on a jury and quickly recognising the details of the case, Nicholas Hoult's Justin realises that the deer he hit with his car one dark, stormy night was in fact the defendant's girlfriend, for whose supposed murder he is on trial. So begins a morality play of sorts, Justin wanting to do the right thing and keep an innocent person from prison, but unwilling to expose himself as the real, if accidental, killer.It's a film that sets two institutions, the family and the court, at war. Justin's wife has a baby on the way, and is there any wrong that can't be justified by the protection of the family? We discuss this in the particular light of director Clint Eastwood's reputation as a lifelong conservative, Mike suggesting that the distrust the film shows towards the legal system, a government institution, has precedent in Eastwood's other work, but its critique of the sanctity of the family is surprising and invigorating.Juror #2 is a thoroughly engrossing exploration of a terrific idea, and you'll take its questions home with you long after it ends. What would you do? Are you sure?Recorded on 18th November 2024.
Hugh Grant brings his idiosyncratic brand of English charm to the world of horror in Heretic, in which he isolates and tests the faith of two young Mormon missionaries. It's a film that leaves you asking all sorts of questions, such as, "did anything he was up to actually make any sense?", but for a horror film so heavy on the dialogue and relatively light on the scares, it's fabulously enertaining throughout - a real achievement of direction and writing. See it!Recorded on 17th November 2024.
We enjoyed the first. We didn't care for the second. Does the third bring back the fun?No, not really.Recorded on 17th November 2024.
Ridley Scott returns to Gladiator after more than twenty years, telling a story that's broadly the same, but neatly picks up from the original too. Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal in the central role, and we discuss whether he has the movie star charisma to match his indie film credentials; we also talk action, visual effects, Denzel Washington's Iago figure, the trope of the gay villain, and more.Recorded on 15th November 2024.
2019's Joker, which gave the iconic supervillain an all-purpose mental health disorder, a tragic origin story, and a name - Arthur Fleck - was never meant to have a sequel. But it made a billion dollars, so Joker: Folie à Deux is here. And, being a jukebox musical based primarily on show tunes from the mid-20th century canon, we ask who it's for. The first film took risks in eschewing so many trappings of the comic book genre; did the filmmakers hope that their audience would respond similarly to further experimentation? Or is it a means of punishing an audience they attracted but loathe?If the film hates its audience... well, so does Mike, which might explain why he got on with it. José, on the other hand, liked the first film, and is happy to see more of Joaquin Phoenix and hear those classic songs. Joker: Folie à Deux is far from a great film, not that close to a good film, and doesn't have much of interest or intelligence to say about its themes - but it's fascinating that it exists.Recorded on 7th October 2024.
Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited passion project, Megalopolis, self-funded to the tune of $120m, has finally arrived. We love it. It's wild, imaginative, earnest, and beautiful. We discuss and decry some of the criticisms of it we've already seen while coming up with some of our own - how could we have known that an octogenarian might hold some rather traditional views? - in between breathlessly enthusing about what captivated us.Megalopolis is hardly a perfect film but it's a visual treat and a fantastic cinematic experience. Don't let the naysayers' sniping turn you off. Indulge!Recorded on 30th September 2024.
A welcome new instalment in the Alien franchise, which has moved between genres and directors, remained popular for over four decades, and offered fascinating expansions of its internal mythos, Alien: Romulus moves with the times to give Generation Z the opportunity to die in space. It goes like the clappers, orchestrates loads of entertaining, tactile action, and is unbelievably good-looking. It's also underwritten, arguably overstuffed with reference to previous films in the series, and features one of those entirely uncontroversial and ethically pure reanimations of a deceased actor through CGI and other technologies. Perhaps after seeing the muted responses to the ideas on offer in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the series has decided to seek refuge in the cloying bosom of nostalgia - but we differ on how excessive it is, while enthusiastically agreeing that Romulus is great fun, and easy to recommend.Recorded on 19th August 2024.
One of cinema's most infamous disasters, Caligula was conceived by producer Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, as an explicit, expensively-made adult film, about the rise and fall of the titular Roman emperor. In pursuing this, Guccione removed director Tinto Brass during post-production, so that he could have hardcore pornography shot and inserted into the film. On its release in 1979, Caligula was critically savaged on both moral and cinematic grounds, confiscated by police in some countries, banned in others, and the cause of lines that stretched around the block. It has remained an artifact of cult interest ever since, and the subject of occasional attempts to reconstruct it in a form that reflects something approaching its creators' original visions - to whatever extent their visions agreed with each other.Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is the most thorough of these reconstructions by far, benefitting from the rediscovery of 96 hours of original material, which had been rushed out of Italy and hidden during the film's release. Opening intertitles claim that every frame of art historian Thomas Negovan's cut is previously unseen. It's long been wondered whether there's a great film within Caligula; although we don't think The Ultimate Cut demonstrates that there is, it's entertaining and striking, and offers an idea of what might have been.Recorded on 18th August 2024.
Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn't have such an effect on us - even José found some things to compliment about it.Perhaps it's the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it had been building for a decade, that makes Deadpool & Wolverine work as it otherwise might not - its jokes about the X-Men joining the MCU at a low point really landed, for example. It's far from perfect - Ryan Reynolds' schtick remains smug, and the film tries to have it both ways, delivering snarky commentary on the sorts of things films like this do, then discarding the snark when it wants to do them itself. But it's pacey, energetic, full of intense action with a delightfully cartoony attitude, filled with so many attempts to make you laugh that some of them are bound to work, and featuring a pair of enjoyable, charismatic villains: Matthew Macfadyen's Mr. Paradox is a marvellously hammy presence, while Emma Corrin's Cassandra Nova's slight physique and genteel demeanour make her telepathic abilities all the more threatening.Recorded on 9th August 2024.
After a long time off, we return with M. Night Shyalaman's new thriller, Trap, in which Josh Hartnett's doting dad, Cooper, takes his daughter to see her favourite pop star at a massive arena gig, but finds himself surrounded and hunted by the FBI.We discuss the ways in which Shyamalan gives Cooper opportunities for escape but closes them off; the unusually disappointing lack of imagination and expression in some of the visual design and shot selection (something we're used to finding so interesting from Shyamalan); the attempt to sell a psychological background to Cooper, which is somehow neither intelligent nor daft enough; the production of the music and Saleka Night Shyamalan's performance as Lady Raven; Mike's fickleness in choosing whom to root for; and José's joy at seeing Hayley Mills. But despite picking at flaw after flaw, as we always do, we had a great time in Trap, and recommend it.Recorded on 9th August 2024.
Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation of Dune makes its first appearance on the podcast in the form of the second film in the series - we saw the first when it came out but never podcasted on it. With the lore in place, the scene set, and the characters established, Dune: Part Two is free to develop romance, engage in action, and tell the story of the construction of a messiah. It's beautiful, exciting entertainment - as long as you can remember everyone's names and what their magic powers are and what they're up to and why.José feels no such issues keeping track of Part Two's various story elements, but Mike hasn't done the homework and finds that the film isn't going out of its way to help him. But no matter! The imagery on offer is astonishingly pretty, reassuringly expensive, and tuned for maximum visual impact - though we wonder how poetic it is, and ask ourselves to what extent the imagery in Villeneuve's other work lingers in the mind, despite its premium sheen. We also discuss the degree to which we feel Part Two really feels like it's buying in to its more supernatural elements. It tells a story of prophecy, visions, and unlikely fates, but, Mike suggests, also offers mechanisms and plausible explanations for things we see, arguably favouring its scepticism to avoid putting off an audience unwilling to go along with the otherworldly.Whether you care or not, whether you can follow the details or not, there's no reason to not see Dune: Part Two on the biggest and best screen available. For the visual design and production alone, it's value for money - that the rest is good is a lovely bonus.Recorded on 3rd March 2024.
Wim Wenders finds inspiration in Japanese public lavatories in Perfect Days, a slice of life drama about Hirayama, a janitor who finds quiet happiness in his routine of travelling from public convenience to public convenience cleaning, photographing trees in the park, being welcomed at restaurants by proprietors who fetch him his usuals, and reading books before bed. We discuss Wenders' delicate touch and observational eye, Kōji Yakusho's central performance, for which he was named Best Actor at Cannes, how small moments indicate whole avenues of a person's life, and the film's theme of connections between the individual worlds in which we live.Recorded on 18th February 2024.
Writer-director Andrew Haigh's romantic fantasy, All of Us Strangers, flows beautifully from scene to scene, inviting the audience to question the reality of what they're shown but seldom requiring them to - it's about the feeling it creates. It's a film about isolation, building and rebuilding connections, how the past reverberates, and in particular, experiences of growing up gay in the homophobic society of the 1980s. Its themes are universal and easily understood, but people who share those experiences will identify with it more closely than most.We discuss the complexity and natural feeling of the protagonist's conversations with his parents, who carry with them, alongside love for their son, those homophobic attitudes; the way scenes flow into each other; how letting go of those questions of what and how things are real allows us to get the most out of the film; and we ask those questions anyway. We also take the opportunity to revisit the ending of The Zone of Interest, discuss audiences proudly displaying their dislikes, and have another think about The Holdovers with that in mind.Recorded on 6th February 2024.
Is the world right, or is Mike? Argylle, Matthew Vaughn's new spy comedy, has received terrible reviews and is bombing at the box office - but Mike thinks everyone else is wrong, taking it far too seriously, and missing the parody. José is more in tune with the vox populi, finding the film a slog, Henry Cavill's hair ugly, and Bryce Dallas Howard ill-cast. But we find concord when it comes to the film's action scenes, and we discuss the transitions between Cavill and Sam Rockwell, Howard's look and movement, Mike's continuing complaint about the peculiar look of British visual effects, and more.Recorded on 4th February 2024.
Writer-director Cord Jefferson's debut feature, American Fiction, combines satire with family dynamics to fairly charming, if visually uninspiring, effect. Jeffrey Wright's Thelonius is a novelist forced into a leave of absence from his teaching position, whereupon he returns to Boston and reconnects with his family, from whom he's distant. He's also furious that his latest manuscript has been rejected for not being black enough, and that what "black enough" means involves every negative stereotype of black people and culture imaginable. But when he sarcastically writes such a novel to shove society's attitude in its face, it's taken seriously by the white literary elite, who shower it with praise.From the trailer, Mike was expecting more focus on the satire, and more energy à la Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You. It's a surprise, then, that American Fiction spends so much time developing the family drama, but not an unpleasant one, and José finds that aspect the film's most interesting. We consider the idea that the film uses the family story to practice what it preaches, offering a story about black people that doesn't require them to be black in order to justify its existence - it's a universal story about distanced siblings, a mother with failing health, and broken marriages. And we discuss the film's ending, or lack thereof, in which the inescapability of the culture that demands stereotype is emphasised at the expense of a satisfying, earned conclusion to the story we've been told.American Fiction doesn't create a single artful image, and that ending is disappointing, but the film is also interesting, absorbing, and funny. Worth a look.Recorded on 2nd February 2024.
We find Maestro, Bradley Cooper's latest actor-director star vehicle, which dramatises the life of iconic conductor Leonard Bernstein, to be dishonest, illustrative, and superficial Oscar bait. We also find it cinematically ambitious at times, with great production values - not many films of this type are being made with $80 million budgets. A mixed bag.Recorded on 1st February 2024.
Alexander Payne evokes the Seventies in form and aesthetic in The Holdovers, a comedy-drama about the students and staff forced to stay at a New England boarding school over Christmas. It exudes charm and, over time, warmth, as the frosty relationship between student and teacher thaws, Payne handles the meandering tone beautifully, and it's full of good jokes. For José, it doesn't quite reach the level of the best in its genre; for Mike, it's a good genre film elevated by some mysterious cinematic alchemy he doesn't understand.Recorded on 26th January 2024.
The Zone of Interest is a title that accurately reflects the film it adorns: it's a term used by the Nazis to euphemistically address the 40 square kilometre area surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp, conspicuously refusing to mention the factory of death it enclosed, conveying a culture of at best wilful ignorance of and at worst tacit complicity with the Holocaust. Similarly, Jonathan Glazer's film is conspicuous in its refusal to show us the interior of the camp (with a notable exception, which we discuss), instead keeping its attention on the surrealistically normal country house with which it shares a wall, which is occupied by the camp's commandant, Rudolf Höss, and his family. The film is not interested in imagery of suffering, torture, and death: its subject is the culture and mentality of those who administrate and benefit from it.There's a huge amount to discuss in this thought-provoking film, and we reflect on our own experiences visiting Auschwitz, now a museum and memorial, in so doing. Our key insight from visiting, something obvious on paper but not clear until we were there, was the industrial nature of the camp, in which it used its victims up for the labour they could extract, allowing them to starve to death as the energy content of their bodies diminished, and replacing them with a steady intake of others. The film conveys some of this in the businesslike manner in which Höss's job is conducted - it's all phone calls, meetings, conferences, folders, agendas. And we discuss Höss's wife, Hedwig, and her complicity; the soundtrack, which beds the film in a constant hum of machinery and movement from the camp, and the ending, which offers a surprising and effective flourish that grounds everything we've seen in documentary reality.Recorded on 21st January 2024.
As José describes, the Expendables films set Jason Statham up as the logical inheritor of the action hero crown formerly held by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and so on - and true to his status as such, Statham has many rubbish films under his belt. The Beekeeper is the latest, in which we learn of a programme of state-sponsored vigilantes - the Beekeepers - who act on their own terms, when something goes awry, to protect the hive that is the USA.That the film is trash doesn't mean it's not fun, and Mike had a good time with the story's daftness, the obviousness with which its cogs turn, and the action, which, while far from brilliant and heavily reliant on sound effects, is also intense and entertaining. José decries the film's politics, dumbness, and use of British actors in so many of its American roles.Recorded on 16th January 2024.
Yorgos Lanthimos' latest absurd comedy, Poor Things, creates a wonderful confluence of themes, all through the lens of Bella, a grown woman with a child's brain, experiencing the world anew and detached from emotion. We discuss Bella's attitude to the world she encounters, the men who try to control and cage her, Lanthimos' idiosyncratic visual style and comedic sensibility, the examination of the nuances of sex, what Mike finds lacking in the brothel scenes, and more.Recorded on 14th January 2023.
Hot on the heels of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, which cast the titular rock & roll icon as the victim of a life controlled by his manager, comes Priscilla, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, which tells a similar story of a life controlled - but here, Elvis is the culprit. in 1959, 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets 24-year-old Elvis during his military service in West Germany; by 1963, she's moved in with him at Graceland, his famous Memphis estate. But the romantic life she desires is kept from her.Priscilla is as rich an experience and as rewarding in conversation as we could have hoped for. Coppola intelligently and insightfully weaves together themes of unequal power dynamics, in which pleasure is withheld; the societally-defined roles of men and women and how they harm those who enforce them upon themselves; the significant age difference between Elvis and Priscilla, especially exacerbated by her youth; why and how beauty is constructed; and so much more. Its gaze is a female one, and a particular one at that. It understands the appeal of Elvis to Priscilla, the world in which she becomes involved and the men for whom it's maintained, and the ways in which it deceives her, restricts her, and leaves her disillusioned. A marvellous, complex film.Recorded on 9th January 2024.
In 2002, Tony Leung and Andy Lau starred in the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese remade in the US as The Departed; twenty years on, the inspiration flows in the opposite direction, Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street a clear reference point for this fictionalised tale of real-life stock market manipulation, deeply embedded corruption, and the growth of a multi-billion-dollar company from meagre beginnings on the back of scams, confidence, appearences, and lies, with Leung starring as charming, oleaginous company founder and Lau as the anti-corruption official on his tail. We had terrific fun in The Goldfinger.Which isn't to say it's a perfect film. We have our issues. The imagery could be more expressive - though director Felix Chong (another Infernal Affairs alumnus: he wrote the trilogy) clearly has an eye for visual impact, and there's lots to be impressed by. We'd like to know why Lau's corruption investigator believes that chasing Leung's CEO is worth the disruption and danger to his family, beyond simply justice. We'd like any similar insight into what drives Leung, beyond simply greed. And if it is simply justice and greed, we'd like it to be better sold, bigger and brasher. We'd like the clash between the two to be more explosive. And the rather pat ending induces eye-rolling. But never mind all that. The Goldfinger is an entertaining and exciting tale of the rise and fall of a business empire that lived and died based on the fundamental corruption of the system and interests that built and supported it.Recorded on 30th December 2023.
Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, who has previously announced his retirement three times, tells us all that The Boy and the Heron (as it's titled in most of the world; How Do You Live? in Japan) is really, honestly, for real this time, I'm super serious, his last film. His longtime producer, Toshio Suzuki, has already cast doubt on this new claim, but for now, here we have Miyazaki's final film, which tells the story of Mahito, a young boy in wartime Japan, who loses his mother in a fire and is evacuated to his aunt's countryside estate, whereupon he meets a talking grey heron that promises that his mother is alive.José sees The Boy and the Heron as a masterpiece of cinema, a film that does things that other films have forgotten to do, a doorway to thinking about life, loss, and worlds within worlds. Mike... didn't really get on with it, but he puts it down to taste and maybe mood - any objection he has can be equally levelled at things he loves. We easily agree that Miyazaki's and Ghibli's reputation for visual design and craft holds, with image upon image here that dazzles. As for what it all adds up to? Take José's side. It's better to like things than be bored by them.Recorded on 30th December 2023.
Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz star as lovers, business partners, and rivals, in a motorsport biopic that's much more about the drama off the track than on it. In 1939, Italian racing driver, team owner, and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari founded the car manufacturer that would become one of the best-known and most prestigious marques in history; Ferrari the film tells the story of events in 1957, with the company in financial difficulties and his wife, Laura, distanced from him as they grieve the recent loss of their son, Dino. She tolerates Enzo's dalliances with mistresses, as long as he's home before the maid arrives - but his second family is secret from her.Mike sees an opportunity to right his wrongs from our podcast on Ford vs Ferrari, aka Le Mans '66, in which, he declares, he overfocused on insignificant details, while José rightly and happily enjoyed the big personalities, charming and interesting central friendship, and entertaining, dramatic races... by suggesting they've switched seats. José finds the cultural specificity of the time and place in which Ferrari's set lacking, criticising missed or misunderstood nuances, and is let down by Driver's blankness in key scenes opposite Cruz, whose brilliant performance subtly conveys Laura's richly complex competing feelings. Details schmetails, counters Mike: here we have a big brooding drama about deep interpersonal clashes, grief, loss, power struggles and ambition, centred around an actor with fake grey hair and a faker Italian accent - what's not to love?As with Ford v Ferrari, we both enjoyed Ferrari. It's just that one of us did so with a big, beaming, untroubled smile, and the other with a raised eyebrow that said "hmm".Recorded on 27th December 2023.
In something of a return to the sort of film that made his name, Taika Waititi co-writes and directs a quirky, charming comedy-drama set in Polynesia. Next Goal Wins adapts the true story of the American Samoan football team (and the 2014 documentary about it that gives this film its title), famously one of the worst teams on the planet, who begin the film in despair following their 31-0 world-record international defeat to Australia. Seeking new inspiration, they recruit Thomas Rongen, a Dutch-American coach with a reputation for losing his temper and getting sacked, to lead them in their quest for World Cup qualification.We discuss Waititi's comedic style, to what extent the film requires knowledge of the culture and sport it shows, the complexities of Rongen's history and relationship with his ex-wife, and how Fassbender, not known for his work in comedy, fits uncomfortably into such a role, but what he brings to it dramatically that you wouldn't typically expect. Most of all - we have fun! Next Goal Wins is an immensely likeable and charming film and it's Christmas, after all. Or at least it was when we saw it.Recorded on 27th December 2023.
A new, low-budget, Japanese-produced Godzilla movie takes us by surprise. Toho, with whom the series began in 1954 and who have produced over 30 Godzilla films since, have given Godzilla Minus One a wider release than usual, and we're glad of it. Unburdened by the lore and worldbuilding of the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse films, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki tells a story of Japan's post-World War II depression, a spiritual and blood debt a pilot feels for shirking his wartime duty, and a community brought together in defiance of both a culture that treated their lives as expendable, and of course, a monster attacking their city.Godzilla Minus One looks sensational for a film of its budget - reported to be under $15 million - and while hitting all the beats you'd expect of a blockbuster, arguably exhibits a subtly different pace and style of storytelling than Western audiences are used to, Mike suggesting that it gives an audience tired of having relentlessly convoluted cinematic universes foisted upon them a change in cinematic attitude for which they're hungry. It's not a perfect film - some of the performances let its emotional moments down, and there's little you can't see coming - but Godzilla Minus One is thoughtful entertainment that's really worth seeing at a cinema.Recorded on 17th December 2023.
Paul King, the director of Paddington and Paddington 2, brings us Wonka, another reimagining of a British children's classic. Roald Dahl's beloved 1964 novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has been adapted twice: once in 2005 by Tim Burton, but most memorably in 1971 by Mel Stuart, with Gene Wilder as eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. It's from the 1971 version that Wonka takes some of its cues (including musical ones), but in the service of that most 21st-century of cinematic artefacts: an origin story.Within, discussions of: What we make of the world in which Wonka is set, one in which institutions purportedly in place for the public good are instead supportive only of corporate power; the reinterpretation of the Oompa-Loompas as a wronged people whose representative is out to retrieve what was stolen from them; Mike's dissatisfaction with CGI and visual effects in British films and the production of the vocals in Wonka's songs; José's opinion on Timothée Chalamet's career and (apparently) uneven face; whether this film really benefits from its sentimental backstory and overtones; and how chocolate is best enjoyed.Recorded on 11th December 2023.
Nicolas Cage plays a meme. Not just in real life any more, but now also in Dream Scenario, a quirky fantasy in the mould of Charlie Kaufman and Woody Allen, although nowhere near as funny. Cage's biology professor starts appearing in countless people's dreams for no obvious reason, blankly observing the events within, and soon becomes a minor celebrity - but as his presence in the dreams grows more active, public opinion turns on him.Dream Scenario flirts with a variety of themes of modern society, such as fame, celebrity, cancel culture, power dynamics in academia, male ego, and the grammar of social media - arguably without meaningfully committing to any of them, but equally arguably avoiding the pitfalls that doing so might create. It dramatises the difference between who a public figure of opprobrium actually is and who the version of that figure is in the minds of the public that reviles him, depicting its angry mob with a mix of horror and amused fascination, but also refuses to indulge in cancel culture whining, explicitly critiquing the anti-woke world of the likes of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. (An additional and crucial detail of the film is that, unlike people at the centre of similar real-life pile-ons, Cage's professor has done nothing to instigate the hatred - his presence in people's dreams and behaviour within them is entirely without explanation.)Dream Scenario is an interesting film that builds on the infamous memeability - memeness? memeitude? - of its star to explore observations and nuances of modern, hyper-online, highly personalised culture. With all that said... we wish it were funnier.Recorded on 27th November 2023.
For our discussion of Ridley Scott's new historical epic, Napoleon, we have the privilege of being joined by Paul Cuff, a film historian and expert on the Napoleonic era in cinema, including and especially Abel Gance's Napoléon from 1927, about which he wrote A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon. Together, we ask whether Scott's film has anything to say about the man whose life it depicts - and if so what? - whether its ahistoricity matters, and how substantially it fleshes out its characters and the events and relationships dramatised.Recorded on 26th November 2023.
David Fincher's precise, controlled direction is a perfect match for Michael Fassbender's precise, controlled performance in this lean but complex story of a botched assassination, revenge, and the hitman's attempts to reassert precise control over his life.We discuss the world in which The Killer is set and the way in which its title character operates, lives, and sees his place within it; the functions we see in its premise of a murderer-for-hire bored with his job, be it a critique of capitalism or a satire on work; the many names he assumes and what we take from the fact that they're all drawn from sitcoms; the extraordinary audiovisual craft that we're used to seeing from Fincher and thankfully not inured to; how the film uses noir and thriller tropes and where it might overplay them; the film's obsession with process and procedure and why Mike likes playing it more than watching it; and more.The Killer is a brilliantly conceived and assembled thriller filled with cinematography and editing to admire, and a lot to chew on despite its slight appearance. See it.Recorded on 14th November 2023.
Based on true events, Killers of the Flower Moon tells a story that invokes the foundational genocide upon which the USA was built, but has its own peculiarities. The Osage Nation, a Native American tribe and unusually the owners of their reservation in Oklahoma, became extraordinarily wealthy in the early 20th century upon finding their land gushing oil - but in pursuit of their riches, the white population in the region devised a plan to rob them of their individual land rights, which were only allowed to be inherited. In telling this story, Killers of the Flower Moon justifies its three and a half hours of runtime - though there's no reason not to include an intermission! - and Leonardo DiCaprio, in particular, has never been better.We discuss the specific events depicted and the wider history to which they relate and that they evoke in microcosm; the complexities in DiCaprio's character, who participates knowingly in hideous crimes but truly loves his wife, whose community and family he's devastating, all the while not quite having the mental acuity to understand the full extent of what he's involved in; the quality and qualities of the performances and characterisations; the visual design, effects of lighting, and evocation of the feeling of so many mid-20th century Westerns through subtle and specific elements of the cinematography; and the idiosyncratic ending and what it has to say to its audience.Recorded on 29th October 2023.
Mike's favourite horror series, which fizzled out in 2010 after seven annual instalments, has been resurrected in fits and starts over the past few years, and if future sequels can maintain the quality of storytelling of Saw X, we want to see more of them. José still doesn't understand the appeal of the gore and torture, but accepts that it's part of the landscape here; what neither of us expects is such an involving and interesting first act.The serialised story that became so hard to follow during the 2000s is here eschewed in favour of a relatively self-contained episode of Jigsaw's life - the convolutions that followed his death way back in Saw III are nowhere to be seen here. We're in pure prequel mode, following him on a trip to Mexico to receive an experimental miracle cure for his terminal cancer, during which the film confidently takes time to build surprising and effective hope for him - everybody likes Jigsaw, the adorable little sadist, after all. The savage redemption that he sets out to offer later on is given weight by this stage-setting, and in the light of how ugly these films can be, it's a rather refreshing and bold bit of storytelling.We discuss the racial composition of the group of victims and the varying viciousness of the games they're forced to play, and just how hard they are to beat - disproportionate gruesomeness is this series' stock-in-trade, but is only three minutes to sacrifice a body part really fair? Mike praises the lighting, which proves images need not be hard to see to be dark. And we discuss the series' history, the differences between Saw X and its predecessors, and single out Tobin Bell, the man holding everything together. He got lucky in 2004 to find that his almost background role would quickly make him an iconic cinematic villain; the filmmakers got lucky that the bit-part player they'd hired to lie on the floor for two hours turned out to have the ability and presence to lead a billion-dollar franchise.Mike's always thrilled to see a new Saw film, and the fact that this one's good is merely icing on the cake - but most remarkably, José has found one he needs no nudging or persuasion to recommend!Recorded on 11th October 2023.
Kenneth Branagh continues to direct himself as Hercule Poirot in his ongoing project to make Agatha Christie's classic whodunnits all about him. A Haunting in Venice has less focus on the process and nuances of investigation than its predecessors, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile - and those already felt the need to punctuate the procedural with action, lest the audience get bored - but shows just as much interest in Poirot's story, at the expense of the suspects' and victims'. It's safe to say that these adaptations are not what they could, or should, be.Branagh enthusiastically uses dramatic angles and camera movement; wonderful to see but for the fact that he does so with little motivation, failing to create with them the effects and mood that he could. The casting disappoints José, who looks to these sorts of films for the stars of yesteryear who fill the ensemble, bringing their histories and personas to their portrayals of the snooty dowagers, nervous accountants and so on; here, no such stars are present. A few current names pepper the cast list, but most of the players that this whodunnit hosts form a who's who of "who's that?"We're already into diminishing returns with Branagh's Poirot series, the films increasingly missing the point of their genre - how can the audience play along with the mystery and marvel at the intricacy of its solution when we're rushed past the details in favour of hearing about the detective's inner life yet again? Mike found an element of that to like back in Murder on the Orient Express, but even a heart as large and generous as his can find no room for it any more. It's simply not good enough.Recorded on 11th October 2023.
For our 400th episode we indulge in a pair of horror sequels, both heavy on faith, possession, and Christianity. One is part of a modern universe of interconnected stories, characters, and demons, the other represents the reignition of a series whose sequels have been produced intermittently for fifty years without receiving anything like the acclaim of the film that spawned them. The Nun II is the eighth film in the ten-year-old Conjuring Universe; The Exorcist: Believer is only the sixth Exorcist film in half a century. Truly, they don't make them like they used to.Neither film in this double bill is very good in totality, but The Nun II contains imaginative and effective set pieces and visual ideas, while The Exorcist: Believer is content to discard a reasonably interesting first act in favour of useless and charmless reference to, and pathetic reenactment of, William Friedkin's 1973 original. We discuss what we think the films are about, wittingly or otherwise - horror is commonly understood to often allegorise and express the ills and worries of the societies that produce them, and we consider the ways in which these films might be doing so. And there's much to compare and contrast between them, including their characters' attitudes to the supernatural; the ways in which religion, be it Catholicism specifically or Christianity more generally, plays into their stories and atmospheres; and the kinds of imagery through which they attempt to instil fear in their audiences. And we take time to criticise many, many examples of the weakness of the storytelling in Believer.The Nun II, like its 2018 predecessor, is not very good, but it is fun. The Exorcist: Believer is neither good nor fun. Happy 400th episode!Recorded on 9th October 2023.
We heartily disagree on The Creator, a sci-fi film directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards, who made his name with Monsters in 2010, which he made largely by himself for half a million dollars, and quickly graduated to tentpole cinema with Godzilla and Rogue One. José had a wonderful time, finding it marvellous to look at and emotionally effective, though leaving room to criticise cinema's continued insistence that John David Washington is a star. Mike finds it dull, brim-full of clichés, and even a little ugly at times, although Edwards' sense of how to convey scale, already shown off in his monster movies, remains intact here.Also featured: ChatGPT and how AI will kill us all.Recorded on 1st October 2023.
The Old Oak, possibly Ken Loach's final film, is his least challenging for some time, and that's perhaps why it's an easier watch than normal. A northern English town sees the arrival of several Syrian families made refugees by the Assad regime; TJ, the owner of the local pub, begins a friendship with Yara, a daughter of one family. The film draws a connection between the displaced Syrians and British former mining communities, both of which groups have had their ways of life taken from them, and sees communal dining as a means to embrace other peoples and practise solidarity. We find it easy to see its cogs turning, and simplistic in its attitudes and characters, but although The Old Oak shows its share of misery and loss, it also conveys a hopeful feeling at times. An interesting film that will generate conversation, and worth seeing.Recorded on 1st October 2023.
One of the great concert films, if not the greatest, receives a 4K restoration four decades after its release, and comes to our local IMAX Digital screen. Talking Heads were huge at the time that 1984's Stop Making Sense was released, and José loved their music, but something about the film didn't appeal to him, and he never saw it. Though Mike is familiar with the band, he only knows a couple of Talking Heads songs and didn't expect to ever get around to seeing the film, so what a way to experience it.The restoration is beautiful and the huge IMAX screen shows it off spectacularly. We discuss the ability of celluloid to capture rich, textured imagery that digital acquisition formats have never matched; David Byrne's captivating presence, handsomeness, and exuberant movement; the film's cinematic style and what puts it above other concert films; the racial composition of the band, both the core members and additional musicians, and what it may or may not reflect about American culture of the time; and more.We're absolutely sold on Stop Making Sense's greatness, and, even forty years on from its release and the height of the band's popularity, immediately grasp why it's still held in such high esteem. See it at the cinema.Recorded on 27th September 2023.
Denzel Washington returns for the third and final instalment of the Equalizer trilogy, in which former government assassin Robert McCall devotes his time and skills to avenging for the little guy. This time, he finds himself in Mediterranean Europe, embroiled in a fight to protect a coastal town from terrorisation by the Camorra, the Mafia of southern Italy.
The Equalizer 3 shares the contemplative tone and pervasive sense of loss of its predecessors. Here, there's a focus on physical infirmity and vulnerability, a gunshot McCall receives early on forcing a long recuperation, slow, careful approaches to walking down stairs, and the use of a cane. Action erupts quickly and violently, emphasised by director Antoine Fuqua's camera and editing - McCall is wounded, but maintains his ruthlessness and murderous efficiency.
We compare the action and Washington to Rambo: Last Blood and its star, Sylvester Stallone, which took a similarly staccato approach to its action, clearly informed by Stallone's age and inability to move as gracefully as he used to - this film is doing something similar, but less thuggishly, if no less violently. We question the ease with which moral decisions are made in this world, in which right and wrong are easily distinguished and the involvement of a vigilante is sold as an obvious necessity and benefit; the film's look, which fails to show off its spectacular location; and some of its writing and contrivances, particularly concerning Dakota Fanning's character, a CIA analyst contacted by Robert, and the Camorra. And we discuss McCall as a neurodivergent superhero.
The Equalizer 3 is a flawed film with a fair bit of dumbness to overlook, but it is easy to do so when the portrait it paints of local life and close community is so absorbing and inviting, and its star has such presence, warmth, and intelligence. It's an easy film to recommend, bearing in mind that it's a work of vigilante fantasy. After all, if Batman's allowed to take the law into his own hands when the institutions around him fail, why shouldn't Denzel be? At least he doesn't pretend not to kill people.
Recorded on 10th September 2023.
José enjoys the examination of contemporary relationships in Ira Sachs' Passages, a Paris-set romantic drama in which a marriage is disrupted when one partner begins an affair with a friend. Mike thinks that the characters' problems aren't real problems and that if the unfaithful partner just grew up then everything would be fine.Recorded on 5th September 2023.
The second half of our Barbenheimer double bill takes us to the BFI IMAX in London to see Oppenheimer, the complex story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's infamous role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, the creation and use of which changed history. Writer-director Christopher Nolan, as he has done increasingly over his career, makes extensive use of IMAX 70mm film to tell the story, but as well the spectacle and landscape we're used to it showing off, here it's devoted to the intimate.
We're joined by Mike's brother and previous guest Stephen to discuss the film, and consider the use of IMAX for close-ups and portraiture, as well as the story's structure and how the editing and music create pace, the film's implicit attitude towards Communism, whether Florence Pugh is treated unfairly, the way in which black-and-white footage is used to convey a shift in perspective, how the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are handled, the Stan Brakhage-esque imagery that conveys the radical sense that all matter is energy waiting to be unleashed, and much more. For José, it's Nolan's best film. It certainly deserves to be seen on an IMAX screen.
Recorded on 23rd July 2023.
After a few months off, during which Mike has forgotten how to record podcasts - sorry about the audio early on - we're back for Barbenheimer weekend. Never mind your Infinity Wars, this is the crossover they said would never happen, and the clash of tone between joy-of-pink Barbie and sin-of-man Oppenheimer, coincidentally released during the same weekend, has unexpectedly and charmingly reignited the public's interest in going to the pictures. The question isn't, "which one will you see?", it's, "which one will you see first?"
And we picked Barbie. Our screening was packed with young girls typically unaddressed by the biggest releases, and this film does a great job of correcting that. José describes its treatment of patriarchy as a fact as one of the most radical things he's seen, and it's a sign of where we are culturally that it can be, and that every joke and piece of commentary the film builds upon it is implicitly understood by an audience the film treats as intelligent.
Yes, Barbie's a toy advert. Yes, you're always aware that every joke at the expense of Mattel and Barbie's cultural footprint has the company's stamp of approval. Yes, Mike brings up Jean Baudrillard. (He's such a Ken at times.) But it's also witty, ironic, self-knowing, and really good fun.
Recorded on 21st July 2023.
Rye Lane follows two new friends, both reeling from breakups, as they spend a day together walking the streets of London and getting into scrapes. It's a well-intentioned romcom with some things to like, but it suffers from the implausible writing and poor performance of the male half of its romantic pairing, and a lack of cinematic nous.Recorded on 20th March 2023.
Michael B. Jordan makes his first feature as director in his third Creed film as star. Creed III sees a retired Adonis Creed living comfortably with his wife and daughter, the walls of their mansion coated with trophies achieved during successful careers... until a figure from Adonis' past comes back to haunt him.If that language sounds clichéd, then good, because the film is nothing but. 2015's Creed was a powerful reinvigoration of the Rocky series, so perhaps it's fitting that this third instalment is reminiscent of those Roman numeralled sequels, all soap opera and surface. What could have been rich and dramatic is instead thin and uninterested in complexity. But the fights are nice and punchy and Jonathan Majors' Damian is a bright spark, so there's that.Creed III isn't a dreadful film, but it falls terribly short of its obvious potential and of the standard set by its predecessor.Recorded on 7th March 2023.
Like his previous film, Old, M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is an intriguing, self-contained, efficient thriller - although not nearly as satisfying as it could be. The setup: A family staying at that classic American horror location, the cabin in the woods, is taken hostage by four invaders who've had visions of the apocalypse.To say more would rob the film of some of its surprise, and its ability to keep you questioning what will happen is one of its pleasures - so think twice about listening to the podcast before you see it, because we spoil everything! There's a lot to like, including its portrayal of a same-sex couple so unremarkable that the characters' sexuality barely needs addressing (although more affection shown between them would have been welcome) and Dave Bautista's calm but imposing presence as the leader of the intruders. But it's so keen to have its sceptical protagonists arguing with what their opponents tell them that it doesn't explore the dramatic and moral questions it has the opportunity to, and it's too eager to be tasteful. When even José's asking for gruesomeness you know you've shown too much restraint.Knock at the Cabin is an interesting and engaging film but rather thin and could do with showing more bravery and style. Worth a look, though.Recorded on 1st March 2023.
We look at another supposed love letter to cinema, Empire of Light, which stars the beautiful Dreamland Cinema in Margate as the titular Empire, the best-developed character in an otherwise lacklustre film. Its themes of racism, patriarchy, mental illness and cinema as escapism form more of a patchwork quilt than a tapestry, and the film is thin throughout. Still, it did the job of activating our memories of cinemagoing and working in cinemas, which we discuss, and despite his knowing it shouldn't have, the story worked emotionally on Mike. It's really not good though.Recorded on 1st February 2023.
Steven Spielberg's long-awaited semi-autobiographical reminiscence of his childhood is here, and it's perfect. Too perfect. José swoons over the way The Fabelmans transports him to its place and time and shows love and understanding to everybody it depicts, but has to admit that a few rougher edges here and there would have done it a favour. There's only so much drama in the life of Spielberg's young avatar, Sammy Fabelman, and that which there is is on the tame side. But Spielberg's love for his parents is obvious and appealing, as is his love for cinema, which he's unafraid to get specific about - the sequences that show Sammy making and screening films convey an interest in the aesthetics, technicalities, and effects of film, rather than giving it the far vaguer "magic of the movies" treatment such "love letters to cinema" often offer.The Fabelmans is as unwilling to explore the dark side of humanity as we're used to Spielberg being, but it avoids his proclivity for schmaltz, and José loved it. So there.Recorded on 31st January 2023.
A film Mike was doing his damndest to avoid seeing but eventually agreed to, Babylon is an epic period comedy-drama about the excess and industrialisation of Hollywood in the '20s and '30s, and an epic bomb at the box office. Its aesthetics, characterisations, use of race and class, vulgarity, set pieces, bizarre ending and more are up for discussion. Did Mike have as terrible a time as he anticipated?Recorded on 29th January 2023.
Cate Blanchett's performance as the title character is the highlight of the otherwise unutterably deflating Tár. What begins as an unexpectedly captivating profile of a world-class musical conductor and promises to develop into a story of sexual and psychological intrigue ultimately fails to satisfy when it refuses to offer thrills and drama - not to mention plot resolution. We pick through our problems with it, including what we find implausible, its reactionary attitudes and low opinion of young people, and its embrace of ambiguity and lack of interest in developing the story of Tár's downfall.Recorded on 15th January 2023.
We disagree on Till, which dramatises the events surrounding the infamous lynching of Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old boy abducted, tortured, and shot in Mississippi in 1955, and his mother's decisive actions following the crime, which included having his mutilated body shown in a public funeral service with an open casket, and having brutal photographs of it published in the press. Emmett's murder and Mamie's activism forced the USA to confront the reality of its racism and catalysed the civil rights movement - of course, progress made subsequently was not instant and vast racial inequality and injustice is present in the country to this day, but the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 might not have happened if not for the events of nine years prior.While Till's story has often been told and referenced in music, documentary and other media, it's surprising to say the least that it's taken this long to be the subject of a major feature film. Perhaps it's the visceral nature of the case, the importance of the imagery of Emmett's body that has led to such reticence, and, as José suggests, nervous anticipation of what might be depicted could keep audiences away. That imagery in Till is shocking and upsetting, but the film keeps a tactful eye on what it shows, and refuses to depict Emmett's torture and murder.Still, while we agree on the sensitivity and care with which we feel the film handles these crucial elements, we disagree on almost everything else. José sees in Till an intelligent, complex exploration of racism and power structures; Mike finds amateurism in its visual compositions and excess in its orchestral score. It's a valuable film and one that never indulges in smugness or didacticism, but we refuse to provide a coherent opinion as to whether it's good or not.Recorded on 15th January 2023.
We take a trip to London to see Avatar: The Way of Water again, this time on the biggest screen in the country at the BFI IMAX, in high frame rate and 3D. We discuss the difference in experience between seeing it here and at the IMAX Digital cinema at Cineworld Broad Street, where we saw it previously. Mike questions why the film switches between 24fps and 48fps, rather than sticking with the high frame rate throughout - director James Cameron describes how HFR assists in making 3D imagery less difficult to resolve, and implies that he limits its use to avoid the so-called "soap opera effect" that made the Hobbit films and Gemini Man look so cheap, but Mike doesn't buy that it's necessary to keep returning to 24fps, and thinks Cameron's a big scaredy-cat. José, on the other hand, can't seem to tell the difference between the frame rates at all.We also discuss what a second viewing of the film brings into focus that we hadn't put our finger on before, Mike comparing it to the nature documentaries that IMAX have produced for years, and José implores the film community to drop its snootiness and embrace the opportunity to see such a marvellous spectacle while it's still in cinemas. It's really special.Recorded on 3rd January 2023.
The stage musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1988 novel, Matilda, about a young girl with hyperintelligence, telekinetic powers, uncaring parents and a terrifying headmistress, premiered in 2010 and has gone on to achieve enormous popularity, as well as seven Olivier Awards and five Tonys. This cinematic adaptation features the same music and the same director as the stage version, but does it have the same magic?Recorded on 29th December 2022.
An icon across continental Europe although perhaps lesser known in the UK, the life of Sisi, or Sissi - Empress Elisabeth of Austria to you - has been dramatised often, including in a famous trilogy of films depicting her youth that made Romy Schneider a star. In Corsage, the role is played by Vicky Krieps, and the perspective we're given is of a woman whose societal purpose it is to bear children and look beautiful reaching the age of 40, a milestone that focuses her mind. It's a film made by women about the particular effect that ageing has on women under patriarchy, but is it complex and insightful or predictable and obvious?Recorded on 28th December 2022.
A mere thirteen years after the release of the highest-grossing film of all time, its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, arrives to a cinematic landscape that has changed significantly. James Cameron's epic sci-fi franchise Avatar began life in 2009, when Marvel had released only two of its (at present) 30 films which would make universes, crossovers, and interconnected stories de rigueur for blockbuster cinema - and one of which would, briefly, overtake Avatar's record for worldwide gross. That's how long it's taken to create just one sequel to Avatar, with no indication that anything more complex than a linear progression of further sequels is planned. And there was no question that this sequel would, like its predecessor, make use of stereoscopic 3D - but while the 2009 film catalysed a new wave of interest in the technology, it has since fallen out of favour, as it always has over the years. As 2023 approaches, is The Way of Water out of date?Recorded on 26th December 2022.
There's an unwelcome element of particularly American and ill-fitting barbarism in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, a film that we hoped would be cleverer and more charming than it is. It's also more of a straightforward thriller than a whodunnit, with one particular alteration to the murder mystery formula meaning that so much is kept from the audience that it stops being fun to play along. There's still enough here to enjoy, but we'd like the third film to be more like the first, please.Recorded on 27th November 2022.
José gave an introduction to the MAC's screening of The Old Dark House, a 1932 comedy horror directed by James Whale, focusing on queerness. James Whale was openly gay - although what it meant to be openly gay in the 1930s is up for discussion - and knowledge of his sexuality has led to interpretations of his work in that light, including Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). The Old Dark House arguably invites such readings more explicitly than those, with the demeanour of Ernest Thesiger as Horace Femm (not to mention his surname), the relationship between Morgan (Boris Karloff) and Saul (Brember Wills), and the casting of a woman in the role of patriarch, with actress Elspeth Dudgeon credited as John Dudgeon.As well as its queerness, we discuss its preponderance of tropes and how well they cohere, its use of distorted imagery, its pacing and more.Recorded on 27th November 2022.
The Menu is a smörgåsbord both of scenes, its plot dropping ideas as soon as it picks them up in its rush to entertain, and of styles and genres, with black comedy, satire and horror combining. But while it's witty and engaging, it's also inconsistent, unfulfilling, and, although the flights of fancy with which it imbues some of its action are good fun, fairly trite. As is way The Menu thinks of the food it mocks, so is the film itself: it looks delicious at first blush but fails to impress under scrutiny. And such small portions!
Recorded on 20th November 2022.
The sequel to the best Marvel film by far has to deal with tragic circumstances - the star of the first, Chadwick Boseman, died at the age of 43 in 2020. His role was not recast; instead, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows us the funeral of his character, T'Challa, and his sister, Shuri's, difficulty in dealing with his death. Letitia Wright, playing Shuri, has primarily been a source of comic relief in the MCU until now - we discuss how she copes with the dramatic heavy lifting now required of her.
Despite the foregrounding of Shuri, Wakanda Forever is reliant on an ensemble, and quite a radical one, as José puts it: the story of a male superhero has been adapted to feature a group of women in his place, and what's perhaps most remarkable is how the film does it without the feeling of overt messaging and tokenism that is often present in tentpole films that do something similar. And the villain, Namor, has been given an ethnic background José assures Mike was never present in the comics, his new Mayan origins and historical conflict with the conquistadores allowing for his underwater civilisation to mirror Wakanda.
While memorialising Chadwick Boseman, Wakanda Forever is able to see a future following the loss of his character. That it would deal with Boseman's death with tact and sensitivity wasn't in doubt, but that the world of Black Panther could thrive without him was, and this sequel shows that it's certainly capable of doing so.
Recorded on 13th November 2022.
We wanted to like Bros more. Co-writer and star Billy Eichner jumped at the chance to expand the boundaries of the wide-release Hollywood rom-com to tell the story of a gay romance and give representation to people who are usually marginalised, if included at all, in mainstream comedy, and whose inclusion is often at their expense. It's a shame, then, that it's dull, uncreative, flat, comedically unimaginative and unskilled, and preachy. What a colossal waste of an opportunity.
Recorded on 30th October 2022.
Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh, best known in cinema for his breakthrough comedy-drama In Bruges and, most recently, the critical and financial success of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, on which we podcasted twice, reunites with the stars of the former for an exploration of a male friendship, its dissolution, and the subsequent fallout.
The Banshees of Inisherin offers something of a chamber play: it might not be set in a single room, but the titular island of Inisherin is isolated, barely populated, and promises little by way of escape or a future. Brendan Gleeson's Colm begins to feel this keenly, and abruptly declares his hitherto long friendship with Colin Farrell's Pádraic over, intending to devote his life to his music. We discuss how depression might play into his actions, the role of the island in inhibiting ambition, the difficulty an intelligent actor has in playing dumb, the balance of comedy with drama in comparison with McDonagh's other films, the peculiar masculinity of the way the breakup plays out, how the story might be seen as a modern myth, and how convincing the sense of place is.
There's a lot to admire about The Banshees of Inisherin, which is arguably McDonagh's best film, and (equally arguably) his least flawed - which sounds like damning with faint praise for a filmmaker whose work is typically interesting and novel, admittedly, but those flaws have sometimes cast large shadows over otherwise wonderful work (looking at you, Three Billboards). Here, such issues are easier to accept, and it's consequently easier to enjoy the film's achievements. In short - see The Banshees of Inisherin.
Recorded on 23rd October 2022.
We indulge in a caper inspired by a real-life attempted overthrow of the US government - no, not that one. The Business Plot of 1933 was alleged to have been planned by business leaders, aggrieved by Franklin D. Roosevelt's election, who sought to remove him and install a retired major general as dictator, and in telling a loose version of this story, writer-director David O. Russell chucks in a doctor, a lawyer, and a wildcard, played by Christian Bale, John David Washington, and Margot Robbie, respectively.
Amsterdam has been a colossal bomb at the box office, and despite its many attractions - including surely the richest and most exciting cast you'll see all year - we can understand why. It's on the long side, it's fuzzy, it's overwritten, and its messaging, while agreeable, is banal... but it's also full of charm and novelty, and Christian Bale hasn't been this fun to watch for ages. Mike's typically had a cool relationship with Russell's films but finds this one easy to like; José is less in tune with it, particularly its comic tone, but still enjoys his time with it. It's imperfect, but deserving of a more welcome reception than it's had, and worth seeing.
Recorded on 16th October 2022.
Trauma as metaphor has become a trope of horror in recent years, and Smile features it more bluntly than you've ever seen. We discuss its messaging, storytelling, and camerawork, and remark upon the ways in which 2014's It Follows may have inspired it. In the sense of Ali Baba and the Forty People Who Were Inspired.
Recorded on 16th October 2022.
Don't Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde's second feature as director, after Booksmart, which we loved, is an irredeemable mess of a psychological thriller. We pick through its carcass in an attempt to figure out which bit of it we liked the least.
Recorded on 9th October 2022.
The absence of presence that is Idris Elba, who we'd like to like one day, stars in Beast, a Jurassic Park knock-off that pitches him against both his distant daughter and an excessively affectionate lion. It's a film that Mike enjoyed unironically but can't claim to find much quality in; José, showing off, provides a coherent response, seeing the film's weaknesses and having no fun.
It's a mechanical film in more ways than one. The character relationships crash inelegantly into place, the action hasn't met an idea from a better film that it didn't try to copy - and the seats share the load, tilting and rumbling along with the images. For reasons beyond our understanding, our local Cineworld offered Beast only in 4DX, the theme park-style augmented exhibition format that purports to enhance the cinematic experience through practical effects such as moving seats, wind, and strobe lighting. It's a technology that José despises to its core, arguing that it betrays a lack of trust in the film's own ability to excite its audience, while Mike, who is in his thirties, likes filling himself up with fizzy liquid and sugar and being shaken around all afternoon.
Still, no amount of physical animation can either distract from or add to the vacuum of cinematic substance that is Idris Elba, Beast's central problem and central lack. It makes for a film you won't regret ignoring.
Recorded on 28th August 2022.
Nope, Jordan Peele's third film as writer-director, following his zeitgeist-capturing Get Out and complex, ambitious Us, invites its audience to speculate on audiences and spectacle. The kinds of things it wants us to think about are clear, and we discuss its themes of commercialised tragedy, fear of the audience, and photography as truth, among others - but what it has to say about them is at best muddled, and, more frankly, disappointingly uncritical. Like Peele's previous films, Nope is a terrific conversation starter, but unlike them, its contribution to that conversation is weak.
Recorded on 12th August 2022.
David Leitch, who directed the surprisingly enjoyable Hobbs & Shaw, delivers another surprisingly enjoyable action comedy. Bullet Train is set upon the eponymous Japanese train, which, for two hours, hosts an assortment of assassins getting into scraps and scrapes at the behest of their various employers. It's stylish, funny, smart, and features a wonderful central comic presence from Brad Pitt, who seems to have relaxed into himself in recent years, his performances exhibiting a delightful spontaneity. Definitely worth a watch, and going on the trailers, Mike really didn't think he'd be saying that.
Recorded on 11th August 2022.
We visit the MAC for a screening of the new 4k restoration of Psycho, one of the most analysed films of all time, and arguably director Alfred Hitchcock's most famous. It's a film we've both seen several times, but not for a few years, and in the cinema setting for which it's meant, instead of the classroom, there's a renewed and reinvigorated wonder to its imagery and editing.
We share our feelings about this screening, things we'd forgotten or had never noticed before, and how elements of the film have aged. We find plenty of room for criticism, but although we conclude that Psycho works for us more as a collection of a few iconic scenes than a thoroughly engrossing story from beginning to end, those scenes shine, and nowhere more vividly than on a cinema screen.
Recorded on 31st July 2022.
Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is here: a colourful, expressive telling of the story of Elvis Presley, through the eyes of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who opens the film by claiming that he's not the villain he's renowned to have been. But the film flattens any complexities in the history it tells so thoroughly that we have no option but to continue to see him as one.
Still, it starts vibrantly and excitingly, understands and loves the sexual allure of Elvis - the lengthy introduction to him leads up to a fabulous scene of crotch-gyration - and Austin Butler is fantastic in the starring role. But once it settles down, is it anything more than a filmed Wikipedia page? Does it offer insight into the story it tells? José will have to tell you, because Mike fell asleep.
Recorded on 10th July 2022.
We're into the land of diminishing returns with Marvel, it seems, with the novelty of a shared cinematic universe having worn off and the big storyline everything was building to for ten years now over. Of course, another big event is sure to be on its way in another decade, but will we care by then?
Not if Thor: Love and Thunder is anything to go by. Between the thinning appeal of Taika Waititi's self-satisfied comedy and the uninvolving and lazy plot, characters, and imagery, it's an unmemorable failure of Marvel's action comedy formula. Admittedly, Christian Bale makes his Voldemort-esque villain, Gorr the God Butcher, more threatening than you might expect, given his simplicity and lack of screen time, and there's some fairly charming comic business between Thor and his semi-sentient weaponry. Tough to recommend just for those, though.
Recorded on 10th July 2022.
A one-off experience visits Birmingham's Electric Cinema: The Afterlight, an 82-minute collage assembled from footage in which every person in frame is now dead. Director Charlie Shackleton accompanies the film on its tour, not only to give post-screening Q&A sessions, but also because he is in possession of the only copy of the film in existence - a single 35mm print that gradually degrades with each successive screening, picking up scratches and other wear and tear, and when it's finally too damaged to watch any longer, it's gone for good.
It's a compelling idea, invoking questions of film preservation, the ways in which film captures and preserves moments in time, and the peculiar cinematic magic (and particularly magic of celluloid) that brings ghosts to life through illumination. And Shackleton is a charming, intelligent and witty speaker, the best advertisement for his own film, although his style and confidence activate José's cynicism circuits - do we really believe that he hasn't kept a copy of the film for himself?
But as for the film? It's an enjoyable experience, the footage assembled into a rough narrative of sorts that takes us through similar actions and settings seen across countless cinematic sources, and both the choices of source material and the editing's sense of rhythm create an appealing mood throughout, but much of the specific choices feel too vaguely motivated. Why has this shot in particular been included? Why the focus on one setting or action instead of some other? These questions are never satisfactorily answered, and the film meanders with too little intention.
One point of comparison in particular comes up in our discussion: The Clock, Christian Marclay's 24-hour installation film that we saw large segments of both together and separately when it visited the Tate Modern three years ago. It's similarly constructed of clips from films, its rubric to find shots that show clocks and other timepieces so that the film itself can function as a clock. We think about the difference in how often Shackleton and Marclay take creative liberties with their source material and build something new and expressive with it, and the different ranges of that source material to begin with (one of our biggest criticisms of The Clock being the unimaginative Anglo-American cinephile context from which most, if not all, of its sources came).
Criticisms notwithstanding, The Afterlight is an interesting and enjoyable one-off experience that literally - and we do mean literally - has to be seen in person, and if it screens near you it's worth the evening. It won't look as good as it did for us, admittedly, but at least it'll look even worse for the next audience.
Recorded on 7th July 2022.
Alex Garland's Men is as blunt as its title, with nothing of the profundity it would like to think it possesses. It's slow and boring, too. Very pretty though. Well done to the cinematographer.
Recorded on 6th June 2022.
Top Gun is back after a mere 36 years away. We talk Tom Cruise's unusual longevity as a star, the ways in which this sequel uses and develops its predecessor's plots and characters, the direction and editing of the action, and how Maverick has become Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Recorded on 5th June 2022.
Problematic and protested against upon its release in 1980, and remaining so today, Dressed to Kill is nonetheless stylish and engrossing, showing off some truly great filmmaking. We talk Psycho and cinema's transgender villains, why Nancy Allen should have been a star, Brian De Palma's greatest deaths, and the version of Michael Caine that José doesn't like.
Recorded on 2nd June 2022.
The Italian Job is a classic British caper familiar to everyone who's grown up in the UK, so often has it been shown on telly and so embedded in British culture is the iconography of the red, white and blue Minis, the chase through Turin, only being supposed to blow the bloody doors off, and of course, the cliffhanger. Even those who, like Mike, have never watched it from beginning to end, know and love it as an unimpeachable icon of British cinema.
Which may be curious, considering Mike's dislike of a UK that has left the EU in a storm of angry little Englanderism and British exceptionalism, as that reliving-the-war, one-in-the-eye-for-the-Europeans attitude can be read throughout The Italian Job - but, José argues, it's a film that conveys affection for the continent, too, in its globetrotting nature and the beautiful scenery it shows off; and after all, its release came just a few years before the UK joined the EEC, which would later become the EU, in 1973. So it's not quite that simple.
The Italian Job's notion of national identity is also conveyed through class, which is clearly delineated here, particularly through its use of Michael Caine and Noël Coward, who each connote specific strata of the class system. Importantly, this is no tale of class warfare - everyone's in it together for Queen and country, and the gold heist that everything's leading towards is explicitly given a national purpose. All that gold isn't being stolen just for fun: who it's being stolen from and for are key.
While our heads swirl with all these issues and more - including whether the chase is a good as all that, and the sexism of the comedy delivered by Benny Hill's character - we have a grand old time at The Electric seeing The Italian Job. It falls short of cinematic greatness, but it's jolly good fun, and those iconic images and sequences, which might only have existed in your mind's eye for years since you last chanced upon the film on TV, don't disappoint when you see them once again.
Recorded on 1st June 2022.
Returning guest Celia joins us from Canada to discuss the 1970s Tyneside noir of Get Carter, a moody story of a man's investigation into his brother's death that's today considered a classic of British cinema. We discuss its setting in Newcastle, Michael Caine's stardom, the influence of its director, Mike Hodges, along with two other British directors, on Hollywood aethetics, its use of women, and more.
Recorded on 31st May 2022.
Flatpack Festival and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery are running a marvellous exhibition until 30th October 2022: Wonderland tells stories of filmgoing and cinema culture in Birmingham. It begins with the earliest days of cinematic experimentation, including a visit from Eadweard Muybridge to demonstrate his moving images, through the glory days of the picture palaces in the 1930s and 40s, the influence of Asian and Caribbean immigration, and the slump of the 1980s, to where we are today, with a combination of multiplexes and more specialised venues, including, of course, the Electric, which continues to proudly boast the title of the UK's oldest working cinema.
It's a densely packed exhibition, full of elegantly and concisely organised information, focusing not only on places and eras but also people: individual attention is given to notable figures such as Iris Barry, the UK's first female film critic, Waller Jeffs, who popularised cinema in the 1900s with his annual seasons at the Curzon Hall and travelling show, and Oscar Deutsch, the Balsall Heath-born creator of the Odeon brand, the first cinema of which opened in Perry Barr in 1930.
Wonderland: Birmingham's Cinema Stories is free to visit at BMAG until October 30th, and it's a must-see for anyone interested in filmgoing in Birmingham. The history it describes is cultural, technological, social and economic, and it's beautifully curated and designed to do just that. It's also got a big interactive map in the middle where you can look for your house and see the five cinemas that used to be on your road back in 1940. Don't miss it.
Recorded on 30th May 2022.
Gaspar Noé dials down his typical cinematic spectacle to bring us a slow and moving exploration of dementia and how it drives a loving couple apart. He still has one visual trick up his sleeve, however: Vortex uses splitscreen to show us two lives lived in close proximity but not shared. His cameras follow their subjects individually, sometimes observing them go about separate activities, sometimes occupying almost the same perspective as the characters sit together and engage in conversation, nearly giving us a unified widescreen shot that captures both husband and wife in the same frame - but never being able to. But while Vortex is given structure by its visual design, what it depicts is as crucial as how it depicts it. It's not a sentimental film, but neither is it harsh - and it's well worth your time.
Recorded on 24th May 2022.
We've seen a lot of the multiverse lately, and Everything Everywhere All at Once brings to it a combination of Gen Z existential angst and mid-life where-did-things-go-wrong woe, in a frantic comic-action-sci-fi wrapper. It's a lot of things in one, and we discuss as many of them as we can remember, including its campness, puerility, basis in multi-generational immigrant life, film references, endless endings, and much more. It's full of life and imagination, and despite its unevenness, easy to recommend.
Recorded on 23rd May 2022.
Composer and musician Neil Brand brings a live show to the Electric Cinema as part of Flatpack Festival - Neil Brand Presents Laurel and Hardy is touring around the country, giving audiences a taste of Stan and Ollie's work before they were paired together, and showing us what their double act was like before the development of sound cinema. The show culminates in screenings of two of their silent shorts, Big Business and Liberty, accompanied on the piano, of course, by Neil.
It's a great introduction to both Laurel and Hardy and silent comedy in general, which thrives when accompanied live. Neil's own passion for the duo, whose films he grew up with, is evident, describing their appeal to him and showing a clip of Stan, a drama he wrote about Stan visiting Ollie on his deathbed. He introduces us to the term "reciprocal destruction", a term that brilliantly distills something you immediately realise you associate with both Laurel and Hardy and the cartoons their comedy inspired: when someone attacks an opponent, the assailant must then wait for the victim to attack them in return, only then returning fire, each volley increasing in aggression and destructive power, until chaos reigns. And although we take issue with one of the chosen clips, of an early Stan Laurel film that includes a gay stereotype that is used uncritically here to earn laughs, it's a blip in an accomplished, well-constructed and entertaining show that we recommend you see.
Recorded on 21st May 2022.
Marvel's invasion of the multiverse is now well under way, and in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this dense network of alternate realities sets the stage for a race to save - what else? - the world. Which world? Dunno. Our world, the most important one, at least, but maybe all the others too.
While director Sam Raimi has history with superhero movies, having helped to bring the genre to a new maturity with his Spider-Man trilogy, it's his low-budget horror experience he brings to bear on the MCU - there's more than a little Evil Dead in here. It's surprising and invigorating, and the low-rent, rough and ready feel it conveys integrates well with the expensive computer-generated embellishments we're used to from Marvel. Multiverse of Madness is visually dazzling.
Sadly, it's not dazzling anywhere else, its plot overstuffed, its thematic through lines unsatisfying and problematic. It relies quite heavily on specific knowledge obtained from previous films and television programmes in the series; the less of that context you have, the less this story will mean to you. And magic and the multiverse are quickly becoming the cheap, mechanical get-out clauses they've always had the potential to be, rather than thought-through, coherently applied storytelling elements: write yourself into a corner? Make up anything you like! Magic and multiverse can paper over any cracks your plot might have. The result is a disappointingly joyless experience whose visual splendour can only fleetingly distract from some fundamental issues with the story and themes.
Recorded on 8th May 2022.
If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is to be believed, CODA, a comedy-drama about the tension caused in a deaf family when the one child who can hear wishes to pursue a career in singing, is the best film of 2021. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not to be believed, and the fact that a straight-to-video Hallmark film can win the most prestigious award in cinema is a damning indictment of film culture today. Still, taken on its own merits, CODA is perfectly likeable and you'll enjoy spending time in its company. But really. This isn't good enough.
Recorded on 17th April 2022.
Writer-director Robert Eggers, who previously wowed us with The Lighthouse, returns in style with a brutal, bloody Viking epic, based on Amleth, the figure in Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's the first of his films to see a wide, mainstream release and large-scale ad campaign to match, and it's perhaps for that reason that it is in some sense less demanding that its audience put the work in to understand and interpret it - although there remains plenty of room for that, and it's in a different league to the blockbusters with which it's competing. It's a film to put down what you're doing right now and see at the cinema - it's vicious, atmospheric, and beautifully shot, and you won't regret seeing it where it's meant to be seen.
Recorded on 17th April 2022.
Upon revisiting our podcast on the previous entry in the Harry Potter-adjacent Fantastic Beasts series, The Crimes of Grindelwald, we find that we could virtually have copied and pasted its content for our discussion of The Secrets of Dumbledore. It's again less than the sum of its parts, a fantasy adventure with some charms, several good performances, but incoherent storytelling, and too little that convinces us to get invested in the characters' lives and the fate of the world they seek to save.
Recorded on 17th April 2022.
Sony's Spider-Man Universe has given us a charming Venom origin story, a rather less charming Venom sequel, and now another film about a well-intentioned man inadvertently possessed by something that demands he feed on humans. In Morbius, Jared Leto's brilliant scientist finds a cure for the blood disease that has tormented him and his best friend throughout their lives - except that it comes with a side of vampirism.
In short, Morbius is not a success. José describes it as what people who claim to hate Marvel, which has produced some very good films, truly do hate. It's as blunt, CGI-laden and uninvolving as that kind of criticism implies. Mike tries to be fair to it - the hallway bit isn't too bad - and we agree that there's one actor to like in it, although we disagree on which one that is. José accuses the film of failing to appreciate that one thing a star should deliver is physical appeal; Mike accuses José of shallowness.
But as fun as it is to tease José, Morbius is not a fun film to have to sit through in order to get to do that. One to avoid.
Recorded on 3rd April 2022.
Director Adrian Lyne, who made the Eighties his erotic, thrilling playground with Flashdance, 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, returns with the erotic thriller Deep Water, his first film in twenty years. Repeatedly delayed and eventually denied a cinema release due to COVID, it's available on Hulu in the US and Amazon Prime everywhere else, and is easy to recommend - until the last act kicks in.
José contends that Ben Affleck has never been better as the quietly but increasingly jealous husband of a wife who publicly and aggressively displays her unfaithfulness to him - as whom Ana de Armas gives a star-making performance. We discuss their interplay and how it grounds the film, as well as the use of setting and lighting - that dank, grimy shed in which he spends time with his snails, buried within the vision of his perfect mansion, is a wonderfully expressive metaphor for Affleck's character. We put the film's mixed reviews down to its abysmal ending, which Mike finds it hard to ignore, but don't let them put you off enjoying this otherwise fabulously entertaining, extremely watchable thriller.
Recorded on 3rd April 2022.
A Palme d'Or-nominated millennial comic drama from Norway, whose lead, Renate Reinsve, won Best Actress at Cannes last year, The Worst Person in the World explores universal themes of how to find a direction in life, our expectations of our own lives and others', falling in and out of love, and how to handle the twists that life throws our way. But it speaks to José and Mike differently.
To the older of us, it's a great film, one that articulates its themes with complexity and develops its characters expressively. To the younger - a millennial, to whom it should speak more directly - it's a film that's difficult to connect to, that occupies an emotional register to which he doesn't relate. We discuss that register, the ways in which the characters behave and respond to one another, the use of chapters to structure the story and narration to tell some of it, and the imagination and life of certain scenes. Many of The Worst Person in the World's qualities are obvious, but we don't agree on its greatness. As they say in Norway, c'est la vie.
Recorded on 28th March 2022.
Referential and reverential of classic slashers from decades past, Ti West's X is likely just the sort of thing the dedicated horror fan wants to see - but to Mike, it's a pretty unsophisticated and tedious imitation of much better films, and to José, it's unpleasant, racist, sexist, and ageist. But on the plus side, no film has made him - a man who is decidedly not delighted by being frightened - jump and yell with the kind of regularity and energy that X inspired, which really livened things up for Mike. Unfortunately for you, José won't be watching it a second time, and if you can't drag him along, it's not worth it.
Recorded on 28th March 2022.
In the high-concept mould of Speed and Unstoppable, Michael Bay's Ambulance gives us an ambulance, hijacked by bank robbers, that isn't allowed to stop moving. It's a real throwback to the era of genuine stunts, cars flipping over on fire, helicopters flying under bridges, and charismatic villains - with much less charm than you'd like, insultingly mechanical use of archetypes to manipulate your feelings, and low expectations of its audience. We discuss how well or badly it balances its actors, tells its story, uses its milieu to offer a portrait of the society in which it's set, and more.
Recorded on 27th March 2022.
The latest in a long line of Batman reboots, The Batman claims the definite article for itself - and deserves to. Richly shot, dark, romantic expressiveness spilling from every frame, The Batman leans in hard on bringing the noir of the source material to the screen with unabashed sincerity. It's the best Batman film of them all.
Recorded on 15th March 2022.
The latest in a long line of star-studded adaptations of Agatha Christie's murder mysteries, Death on the Nile sinks without trace under the weight of Kenneth Branagh's all-consuming ego. Failing to understand that one of the pleasures of such films is the attention given to the impressive cast, he instead gives his focus entirely to his own performance as Poirot, engaging in mythmaking and heroics at the expense of everybody else. In its limited capacity, the focus on Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express worked for Mike - here, there's no defending it.
Recorded on 21st February 2022.
Having gone through fourteen years of development hell, the first of Sony's planned videogame adaptations arrives - Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, turns the famously cinematic action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving games into surprisingly enjoyable action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving cinema.
Well, "famously" is relative - Uncharted is an enormously successful blockbuster series with which Mike is familiar, but José didn't even know there was a series on which the film was based. With the benefit of his experience, Mike discusses how the film adapts five games' worth of material and the expectations he had, and we consider the characters' relationships and personal stakes, conceptualisation of the action, the similarities and differences to Indiana Jones, and Antonio Banderas' villain.
Recorded on 21st February 2022.
As Birmingham's Electric reopens following a protracted period of uncertainty as to whether it was gone for good, it turns to a programme of classics to invigorate its audience. We catch The Apartment there, Billy Wilder's dark romantic comedy, which Mike has never seen and José not for years, to discuss corporate alienation, whether the suicide story structure works, the cynicism in Wilder's work and his personal history that it can be seen as a product of, the appeal of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, and the takers, those who get took, and the mensches.
Recorded on 3rd February 2022.
Kenneth Branagh writes and directs a drama based on his own childhood in Belfast, at the time the Troubles began. We discuss the portrayal of a happy family, the lack of effect almost every visual decision has, problems with the storytelling, and the nostalgia that runs throughout the film. It's not a skilful film, but it is a likeable one.
Recorded on 3rd February 2022.
We explore 1947's Nightmare Alley, directed by Edmund Goulding, and compare it to Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of the material, which we find superior in almost every way. Mike in particular finds, in the reflection of Goulding's version, useful ways to appreciate del Toro's, which at first blush he found uninspiring. We discuss the portrayal and use of the geek, the differences in the introduction of the protagonist (played by Tyrone Power and Bradley Cooper in the old and new films respectively), del Toro's greater focus on mood and scene setting, and how thoroughly Goulding's film adheres to the noir genre. And we express our joy at seeing del Toro's version at the grand reopening of the Electric, the UK's oldest working cinema, which we completely forgot to do in the last podcast.
Recorded on 23rd January 2022.
We talk swoony visuals, alcoholism, a femme fatale pastiche, moral descent, Bradley Cooper's sexual presence and more in our discussion of Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel of the same name.
Recorded on 21st January 2022.
José gives Mike a history lesson on the Spanish Civil War, the scars it left on Spanish culture and society, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's own relationship to it and the dictatorship to which it led, under which he grew up and which fell in the few years prior to his ascent to prominence. His new film, Parallel Mothers, inspires this review of the past, embroiled as it is in confronting Spain's modern history and, José argues, adapting elements of it to the melodrama of motherhood that forms its primary plot - a plot which is used to explore questions of lies, psychic violence, and instrumentality that are part of the film’s critique of Spain’s Pact of Forgetting, its political and cultural agreement to avoid confronting the legacy of the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship, which the itch to scratch historical memory is seen to disturb.
It's a film with serious flaws, and a disappointment given Almodóvar's estimable body of work, especially the masterpiece that was his most recent film, Pain and Glory, but a film that creates this kind of discourse is to be valued. It's pat, one-dimensional, and with a leadenness of tone that isn't typical of Almodóvar, whose sense of humour is usually so reliable - but still worth seeing.
Recorded on 20th January 2022.
We talk feminism, body horror, monsters, trans tropes, masculinity and more in our discussion of writer-director Julia Ducournau's shocking, transgressive, and surprising Titane.
Recorded on 13th January 2022.
We're remotely joined by filmmaker, previous guest, and, crucially, Mike's brother, Stephen Glass, for a discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson's period romance, Licorice Pizza. Stephen last helped us explore Anderson's previous film, Phantom Thread, and again brings his knowledge of and passion for the director's work to our discussion.
We consider the efficiency with which Anderson creates rich portraits of characters and their lives from few details; how the blossoming love between the protagonists, a boy of 15 and woman of 25, avoids feeling exploitative or uneasy as the age difference suggests it might; how the film is able to feel loose and free despite conforming to its genre; the likability, or otherwise, of the setting and era; Anderson's focus on faces and use of reflective surfaces; and whether one particular running joke that begins as hilariously, stunningly outrageous, overplays its hand and ends up in the realm of the unacceptable.
Licorice Pizza is a sweet romance draped in a loving portrait of a particular place and time, and laced with good jokes. Still, your mileage may vary, as Mike's devoted, grumpy intransigence in the face of José's and Stephen's enthusiasm demonstrates, but even he has to admit it's a very good film.
Recorded on 10th January 2022.
Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut feature as a director, The Lost Daughter, paints a powerful portrait of Leda, a middle-aged woman for whom motherhood never came naturally, and whose exposure to a young family on holiday ferociously reminds her of her experience of raising two daughters. It's a film that bravely and forcefully repudiates the notion that motherhood should be natural to women, the key expectation of them, and joyful.
We discuss Olivia Colman's performance and the appealing ordinariness she's conveyed on television and in film for two decades, and Gyllenhaal's direction of a script she wrote, which arguably omits too much context for some of what we see, but which is at its core devoted to telling its story visually, taking opportunities to spend time exploring Leda's state of mind - although it could work through some of Leda's behaviour more convincingly. Nonetheless, The Lost Daughter is a striking, expressive film that tells a story we don't often hear, about a kind of person we don't often see.
Recorded on 4th January 2022.
We talk subverted expectations, how an artificial performance makes sense on a character who's pretending to be something he's not, the way in which forty years of oppression eats into a person's soul, rejection of familial expectations and the performance of unspoken fraternal duty, and more, in our discussion of Jane Campion's fascinating, complex, and beautiful drama, The Power of the Dog.
Recorded on 4th January 2022.
We've enjoyed Adam McKay's previous couple of films, The Big Short and Vice, in which he dramatises real events in a pointed, opinionated, satirical manner. He now brings the same attitude to the apocalypse, painting a picture of a world in which an asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, poised to end the human race's existence unless something is done... and nobody cares.
We debate its merits and failures, agreeing that it's a comedy with few laughs, but José arguing for its place in the national theatre of ideas that cinema has always been in America, and as a response to that question we've been hearing asked for several years now - how can you satirise a reality that's this absurd to begin with? Mike asks why McKay's previous films worked where this fails, and suggests that it's an inability to be indirect, to work in poetic ways - something that's effective when being openly sarcastic, as in The Big Short and Vice, but that falls short in Don't Look Up's appeal for earnestness and depth of character.
An ambitious film, then, attempting to holistically satirise the state of things as they currently stand - but at best, a mixed bag.
Recorded on 28th December 2021.
Paolo Sorrentino reaches into his childhood to tell a story that's in equal parts comic and tragic, with access to the off-kilter and fabulistic, in The Hand of God - whose title references that infamous goal scored by Diego Maradona, who Sorrentino semi-seriously credits with saving his life - as he dramatises here. We discuss the imagery, the familial banter, the curious opening scene, choosing Naples over Rome, and an oddball friendship with a happy-go-lucky smuggler.
Recorded on 28th December 2021.
After eighteen years away and vast changes in the blockbuster landscape in which it once broke incredible new ground, the Matrix series is back with a fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections. Keanu Reeves' Neo is once again plugged into the Matrix as Thomas Anderson, but having trouble separating reality from dreams of events that happened twenty years ago... if dreams are what they are.
We discuss Resurrections' endless self-reflexivity, how it uses motifs and themes of the previous films, updating them where necessary and bringing more out of them (Mike is glad of the much improved use of mirrors). We also consider the film's inclusivity, which is key to the Wachowskis' work, and an uncomplicated joy here - it's not difficult for people from a range of ethnic backgrounds and situated in different places along sexual and gender spectra to coexist in a blockbuster with no particular importance placed upon their identities, as Resurrections proves. You just have to want to do it, and the world that results is beautiful. And, at heart, it's a middle-aged romance - for which José swoons!
Resurrections isn't without its issues, and we consider those too - Mike asks whether the sense of wonder associated with the special effects of the original films is simply gone forever in a world in which literally anything can be done, and is, with all-powerful CGI, and we agree that the action is a Bourne-inflected disappointment, especially so in a series that itself spawned so many imitators of its own action scenes two decades ago.
But seen in its entirety, The Matrix Resurrections is an imaginative and interesting continuation of the story begun twenty years ago, and a holistic triumph of well-intentioned, positive and effortless representation. Whoever thought we'd get a fourth Matrix? And that it would be this different, and this good?
Recorded on 22nd December 2021.
Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story is here at last. The obvious question it raises is just why such a well-regarded film needs a remake - and the answer quickly becomes clear. Robert Wise's 1961 adaptation of the 1957 stage musical is indeed a classic, but this new version comes from and enters a different America, one in which its message, José argues, is more urgently needed but faces a more difficult challenge to be heard. And on top of that, it's just a really good film.
We discuss the film's use of colour and lighting, the brutality of the violence and believability of the gangs and particularly Riff, the Jets' leader, the purpose and effects of having a lot of dialogue spoken in entirely unsubtitled Spanish, and much more. The songs are timeless, the romance heartfelt, the imagery beautiful. West Side Story is a great success.
Recorded on 13th December 2021.
In 1975, caring for her infant son and unable to spend much time away from home, Agnès Varda turned her camera on her neighbours on her street, Rue Daguerre in Paris. In Daguerréotypes - the title a pun on the photographic process for whose inventor the road is named - she both observes them at work, running their shops and providing their services, and asks them questions about their lives, discovering where they're originally from (most are not Paris natives) and how they met their husbands and wives. It's a gentle, relaxed form of portraiture, one that combines imagery of the practicalities of daily work with the subjects' descriptions of dreams and histories - although the use of a travelling magician's show is arguably a little too precious. We discuss the different ways in which we respond to their stories, José commenting on Varda's clear affection for the subjects, Mike arguing that there's a tragic dimension that overhangs the film, with talk of dreams and escape.
Daguerréotypes is a sensitive portrait of a local community and a time capsule of an era that is now half a century old, and worth watching.
Recorded on 5th December 2021.
A true story of love, ambition, passion, betrayal, and retribution, House of Gucci is entertaining, interesting, and beautifully played... so why isn't it good enough? We discuss its lack of seriousness of purpose, its failure to express itself with visual flair and use the camera to show us things we really need to see, and how it would have benefitted from giving Lady Gaga's Patrizia the unambiguous spotlight, rather than making her part of an ensemble. House of Gucci is a film that we have no problem recommending, but given everything it could have been, to come away feeling like it's a trifle is disappointing.
Recorded on 5th December 2021.
As he did with 2016's Jackie, director Pablo Larraín explores the life, image, and legacy of a woman publicly struck by tragedy in Spencer, a fabulistic biopic that imagines a Christmas holiday spent with the royal family at Sandringham, during which Princess Diana struggles with the knowledge of her husband's affair and the watchful eyes of both the royals and the paparazzi.
We discuss our own relationships to both Larraín and Diana, and consider how the film draws on various aspects of the princess's public image in painting a portrait of a woman losing her mind. The film is set squarely within that mind, and Mike argues that it uses several tropes and techniques common to horror in order to dramatise Diana's fracturing mental state. José expresses his love for Kristen Stewart's outstanding lead performance, one that doesn't impersonate but evokes, and conveys differing stages of psychosis with subtlety.
We don't agree on everything, and the film isn't perfect, but Spencer is a really remarkable, expressive exploration of an iconic figure.
Recorded on 14th November 2021.
A film of surprising delights - certainly for Mike, who hates anything that looks like it could appear on ITV - Mothering Sunday tells the story of one key 1924 day in the life of a young maid. It's a film filled with grief and lust, beautifully shot and featuring the best of British acting, Colin Firth and Olivia Colman's performances subtly modulated and multifaceted. It's imperfect, failing to engage with race as it perhaps should, and a framing device feels rather unnecessary - but it's a moving and sensitive film.
Recorded on 14th November 2021.
The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson's love letter to The New Yorker, is, as you might expect, a charming way to pass a couple of hours - but not as funny or as tight as we might like, and certainly a disappointment in the light of his last two films, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs (although, in fairness, reaching those heights even twice, let alone a third time consecutively, would be a big ask for anybody). Still, despite The French Dispatch's pleasures, some gorgeous imagery and a terrific, star-packed cast, we're left asking what it's all about, really - is it more than a vaguely diverting trifle based on Anderson's favourite publication? And why can't an ode to an icon of American sophistication be set in America?
Recorded on 31st October 2021.
Edgar Wright's highly anticipated psychological horror, Last Night in Soho, reaches cinemas, and we dive into its themes, its visual magnificence, its relationship to the era and environment it portrays... and its problems. It's impossible not to admire this film for its lush cinematography, impressive special effects, and the best of its performances, but its screenplay leaves a huge amount to be desired, not just in how it conceptualises the world and people it portrays, but also, more simply, how clumsy it is in telling its story, bafflingly dropping entire character threads that seem like they obviously have places to go, and handling at least one secondary character's entire subplot very poorly. We discuss the film's dream logic, or lack thereof; its fear of the very lure of the grimy world it needs to show us, and the moralism that accompanies it; how it trades in nostalgia of Sixties Soho, despite being keen to exhibit is dark side; and the thematic simplicity of almost everything - things are good or bad, to be loved or feared, and room for complexity, there is none.
With all that said, it's still a very enjoyable couple of hours, a discussion piece, and thanks to its fabulous imagery and in particular the performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith, easy to recommend.
P.S. Mike would like to acknowledge that he is aware that in the course of speaking too quickly for his brain to issue timely corrections, he wildly overstated how much the ghostly figures in Last Night in Soho are referred to as "blank" or "blanks". It happens maybe once or twice, if he remembers rightly, and in passing. But he asserts that nonetheless, their faceless, amorphous, anonymous design and relentless, zombie-like behaviour does make them a fair point of comparison with the Blanks in The World's End. So nyah.
Recorded on 31st October 2021.
In a chilly outdoor screening at the Coffin Works in Birmingham, we indulge in Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic. José's seen it many times, Mike never in its entirety. We discuss how this 100-year-old film holds up today and still entertains a general audience, its differences from and similarities to Dracula, its source material, and more. Including how cold it was. Mike only wore a t-shirt.
Recorded on 22nd October 2021.
Don't believe the trailer, which gives a poor impression of what's in store: Ridley Scott's latest historical epic is lighter on the action than you'd expect, and, for a blockbuster, formally adventurous. Based on true events that took place in 14th century France, The Last Duel tells the story of a lifelong feud and a sexual assault... then it tells it again, and then once more. Three perspectives are brought to bear on the events, those of Jean (Matt Damon), a soldier and vassal; Marguerite (Jodie Comer), his wife and the daughter of a treacherous lord; and Jacques (Adam Driver), his oldest friend, and squire to a count - each controls a third of the film, shaping the story as they understand it. It's an ambitious project, drawing consciously on narratives and discourses around patriarchy and sexual assault whose importance to our cultural conversation have become increasingly established in recent years - but does it work?
Richard Brody's review of the film in the New Yorker helps to shape our discussion, and it can be found here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-last-duel-reviewed-ridley-scotts-wannabe-metoo-movie
Recorded on 17th October 2021.
Venom returns after his surprisingly enjoyable, if trashy, 2018 solo debut, but we don't find much of a way to have fun with this sequel. Its cast is underserved by both the direction and screenplay, Tom Hardy appears to want to be seen as a slob, there's not a memorable shot throughout, and most of the comedy, while promising in principle, falls flat. Mike asks where the real carnage even is, the film scared to show anything even cartoonishly gory, while José decries the carnage generally present in American cinema in general, this film, like so many, unable to conceive of a way to generate excitement without blowing things up and causing destruction.
Recorded on 17th October 2021.
Daniel Craig's Bond bids us goodbye in No Time to Die, the culmination of his fifteen-year tenure as the gentleman's spy - but is it really Bond? The character, and the films in which he appears, have changed in tone and attitude in recent years, in response to several factors, including criticisms of misogyny and the cinematic influence of the Bourne series, all of which results, for José, in a film that while good, just isn't Bond any more. We consider what makes No Time to Die's Bond different, discussing his clothing, the intensity of serialisation from one film to the next, and the Bond girl - and, as Mike suggests, the character's key change in attitude: Craig's Bond takes things seriously and is capable of being outraged.
Although we pick at these things, the film is easy to recommend. The action is well-executed, Rami Malek's villain beautifully played (if lazily written), and the entire affair is hugely enjoyable. Where Bond goes from here, who knows, but No Time to Die is a good send-off for Craig's incarnation.
Recorded on 3rd October 2021.
We're joined by Dr. Ben Lamb of Teesside University, television scholar and Sopranos megafan, to discuss The Many Saints of Newark, the prequel to The Sopranos. Set in the 1960s and 1970s, it depicts a young Tony Soprano - played by James Gandolfini's son, Michael - and offers a portrait of the family, time, place and culture that shaped him, but focuses primarily on his uncle Dickie, to whom he looks up.
We also discuss the film's incorporation of the 1967 Newark riots, and the black gang that rivals the Italians'; how violence is used and what it expresses about the characters; whether the film is cinematic; and whether some of its characters' actions are believable. And, key to the discussion: While Ben and José are familiar with the show, Mike's never made it past episode one, and that disparity raises questions - how much knowledge of the show is required to understand this film, how much does it reward fan investment, and does it inspire Mike to finally watch the series?
Recorded on 26th September 2021.
Aretha Franklin, an icon of American music, receives a dispiritingly by-the-numbers biopic in Respect, which takes this perfect subject for such a film and does nothing very interesting with her. We discuss, among other topics, the film's dependence on clichés, its poor lighting, Franklin's relationship with her father and upbringing in a prosperous household, Jennifer Hudson's performance in the central role, and that scene, so common to music biopics, in which the signature song is developed.
If one of the functions of the biopic is to introduce newcomers to a person's work and provide an insight into what made them worthy of their story being told... then the Queen of Soul needs another biopic. Respect certainly isn't devoid of entertaining and engaging moments, but, ultimately, it fails its subject.
Recorded on 14th September 2021.
The fairytale figure of the undine has been used and developed in the arts for two hundred years, and Christian Petzold, whose Transit we loved, brings his clear-eyed but sensitive aesthetic to it in Undine. Paula Beer plays the titular character with transparent emotion, in the opening scene regretfully informing her ex-boyfriend, as he dumps her, that she will have to kill him. It's a moment that captures the timbre of the film that follows - fantastical, potent, full of drama, but grounded throughout.
We also discuss Undine's knowing and deliberate setting against a sociopolitical backdrop, the film devoting significant time to Undine's lectures on the history of Berlin, tying them and the city to her relationships, and the way the film conveys the tactility of new lovers, unable to keep from touching each other. We disagree on the film's greatness - to Mike, it's something of a trifle, particularly in comparison with Transit, but José is in deep love with it. But we're agreed that it's well worth your time.
Recorded on 13th September 2021.
Based on the trailer, Mike was interested in The Night House, a horror film about a recently bereaved woman and the secrets she discovers her husband was keeping - but it took him a good third of the film's duration to remember why. It's an ugly film, one of the poorest-lit you're likely to see, and the culmination of its mystery is almost offensively stupid. José finds the thematic ground it covers has potential, and Rebecca Hall's performance is very good - she's unafraid to make herself unlikeable, which is likeable indeed. Still, she's really the only reason to see it. If you actually can see it through the terrible lighting.
Recorded on 13th September 2021.
A new day, a new entry in the MCU, and on this occasion we're introduced to an entirely new set of characters and mythos: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings fills us in on the history of a young Chinese-American man and his dad's magical jewellery. Like Doctor Strange and Black Panther, it's a film whose connection to the wider MCU is light, establishing characters, a setting, and story elements that are certain to tie in to subsequent films, but free of the obligation to prioritise them at the expense of itself. And like Doctor Strange and Black Panther, that freedom works in its favour - it's of a piece, interesting, pretty, and entertaining.
We discuss the film's setting in a Chinese-American immigrant context, comparing it in particular to The Farewell and Crazy Rich Asians: all three films dramatise the cultural differences between the new and old country, and the ways in which the younger generation might face challenges in visiting or returning to their ancestral home. Indeed, Awkwafina appears in all three films, and, even in supporting roles, expresses this subject all by herself. We also think about the MCU's use of the film to address its own past, a character from Iron Man 3 returning: Shang-Chi not only rejects the way the earlier film totally reconfigured him from the comics, but also addresses the Orientalism with which he has historically been associated.
And there's more besides - Tony Leung's beautiful, evocative performance of a character that nonetheless doesn't quite work; the quality of the action, much of it a cut above what we typically expect from Marvel; and that classic Disney trick - if in doubt, animate a cute animal. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a promising start to the MCU's next phase, and we look forward to finding out how its world will integrate down the line, but it's worth seeing on its own terms.
Recorded on 12th September 2021.
Benedict Cumberbatch gets himself embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis in The Courier, a dramatisation of the true story of Greville Wynne, a British businessman recruited by MI6 to smuggle Soviet secrets provided by high-ranking GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky. It's a film that offers pleasures in its performances and in the telling of a story you likely haven't heard, but its storytelling is often banal and sometimes unclear, and, José contends, it's full of tricks and tropes that are just there for effect - and often not very good ones. Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, set in a similar period of the Cold War and also telling a true story of a citizen's recruitment to engage in an overseas mission, is an obvious point of comparison, and perhaps The Courier's greatest gift is that its mediocrity helps to show off just how assured and polished is Spielberg's cinematic technique, even if the ideological purposes to which he puts it leave us rolling our eyes.
The Courier isn't a terrible film, and its performances do make it worth a look... but it isn't a very good film, either.
Recorded on 23rd August 2021.
Ryan Reynolds' schtick, so irritating for so long, is winning us back, and Free Guy is built around his entire star persona, the self-effacing originality of which José remarks upon. Reynolds plays Guy, a videogame non-player character - an extra, essentially, following a programmed routine within a virtual world - with a lightness and sweetness that defines the tone of the entire film.
We discuss what the film represents about videogame culture and what it discards, the desire for romance that drives the story, what Mike questions about its ending, and more. Free Guy is a charming and entertaining action comedy, whether you know games or not.
Recorded on 23rd August 2021.
Matt Damon gives arguably a career best performance in Stillwater, as a tightly-wound, reserved, Oklahoma roughneck doing his best to support his daughter, who has been convicted of murder and resides in a Marseille prison. We discuss the film's origins in the real case of Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher, consider how well the characterisation works and where it might fail, and work through our fundamental responses to the film: for José, it's is an unusual and complex critique of American society and culture; for Mike, it's hard to take seriously, its animus obvious and milquetoast. Wherever you land, though, Stillwater is a deeply engrossing drama and worth seeing.
Recorded on 6th August 2021.
Disney has already turned one of its theme park rides into a box office colossus - is it time for another? They seem to think so, bringing us Jungle Cruise, an adaptation of one of the attractions from Disneyland's grand opening in 1955, the Jungle River Cruise, starring The Rock, who we still refuse to call Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Jack Whitehall, as explorers searching for the Tree of Life.
The film gives the ride more than a nod and a wink, The Rock's character operating a cruise along the Brazilian Amazon, complete with the real ride's cheesy dad jokes - and there's effort made to reckon with the attraction's history of racist representation of indigenous peoples. How successfully it does so is up for debate, the film indulging in its own cultural imperialism - despite being set in Brazil, there isn't a word of Portuguese spoken; and no matter the purity of their intention, the characters are still in Brazil to take something that doesn't belong to them.
We also discuss the film's feminism and sexual politics, as embodied by Blunt's and Whitehall's characters, the setting in 1916 and the use of England rather than the USA as a point of origin for its story, and consider who the film is for - Mike sees its relationship with the likes of Jumanji, Indiana Jones, Hook and The Mummy, and is sure that he'd have loved this as a kid as much as he did those. It fails to really explore the poetic potential of some of its ideas, and one too many action scenes feel like they need explosions to keep things exciting, but on the whole, Jungle Cruise is a likeable bit of popcorn fodder with three terrific performances, and chemistry to match.
Recorded on 6th August 2021.
Freely based, as the closing credits tell us, on Jean Cocteau's 1930 play of the same name, The Human Voice sees Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar working in the English language for the first time. The play has long been on Almodóvar's mind, inspiring, significantly, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, among other works of his, and this short film joins the pantheon of adaptations of the play, which has seen its single character, a woman speaking on the phone to an unseen, unheard lover, played by such stars as Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, and Anna Magnani.
Here, Tilda Swinton plays that role, bringing to it a sense of reserve that didn't quite make sense to José until the final sequence and the resolution to the story - perhaps an effect of having seen the play adapted so many times and not having seen the character played this way before. Conversely, Mike feels he instinctively understands the character, remarking upon her change from being out of place, both geographically and emotionally, to her assumption of control of her world and destiny. José, who identifies with Almodóvar's work like nobody else's, picks up on the themes, motifs, visual designs, settings and interests that tie The Human Voice to the rest of his oeuvre, and finds where this short fits in and where it doesn't. Specifically, he argues that Almodóvar's control of language and knowledge of how people speak is typically overlooked in favour of his visuals, but here becomes obvious precisely because of the decision to use English rather than Spanish, which results in less poetry and nothing memorable throughout the entire monologue.
That flaw is evident but minor in the scheme of the entire film, which is an elegantly made and interesting study both of Swinton's character and of Almodóvar's own style and lifelong interests. The Human Voice is on Mubi, and well worth your time.
Recorded on 3rd August 2021.
A chamber piece that asks what happens when your life of carefully constructed lies is exposed, Shiva Baby is a smart, tense comedy set in that most aggravating of situations: the funeral, in which you're forced to be judged by lots of people you want to avoid but aren't allowed to kick up a stink. We discuss debut writer-director Emma Seligman's handling of the story's shifts in tone, in particular how she intensely ekes out tension; the light in which it depicts its women, who bookend scenes with sarcastic off-screen barbs and gossip; and the main character's relationship to technology, and how her use of it to seek power is a double-edged sword.
Recorded on 6th August 2021.
Apparently dissatisfied with the dismal reception of 2016's Suicide Squad, DC has bravely decided to vaguely reboot the property with a spot-the-difference name change to The Suicide Squad, probably hoping that this new film will effortlessly send its predecessor down the memory hole. We ask whether it hits that whimsical tone it clearly wants to and discuss imperialism, satire, racism, gazing at males, rats, story structure, excessive volume and more.
Recorded on 3rd August 2021.
Reminding José of 1970s auteur exploitation movies and Mike of The Twilight Zone, M. Night Shyamalan's Old confines its characters, and most of its action, to an isolated beach at a high-class tropical resort. As you might expect with Shyamalan, it's best seen with little advance knowledge, as the plot twists and turns, revelations throwing previous events into new light.
But we do, indeed, encourage you to see it - it's perhaps the most entertaining film Shyamalan's made in some time, and although his dialogue isn't the finest you'll ever hear, his camerawork is some of the most interesting. He's a director who always seeks an interesting or expressive composition, who isn't satisfied with shot-reverse shot, and his enthusiasm for the image is infectious. Some things could be better - some dramatic moments could be heightened, and it's a fairly thin film that may not reward a second viewing, when there's no hope of surprise. But the first viewing is an engrossing one, and we recommend it.
Recorded on 24th July 2021.
1996's Space Jam is beloved of people Mike's age throughout the Western hemisphere, despite basketball's limited reach beyond North America - it was a Looney Tunes film, full of imagination and laughs, and is today a nostalgic linchpin for millennials. And because millennials now make films, it's back, twenty years on, with Space Jam: A New Legacy, featuring LeBron James in Michael Jordan's central role as the basketball star who joins forces with the Looney Tunes to defeat a team of superpowered villains.
But the wit and tone of the 1996 original is nowhere to be found here, beyond those unacceptably brief moments in which Bugs Bunny and co. get to shine. There's a heavy focus on family, a theme that's come up more than a few times on recent podcasts and never feels intelligently explored, with LeBron's son held hostage in scenes that are supposed to heighten the sense of threat but in fact just grind any sense of entertainment to dust. But even that isn't the film's biggest problem - it's the corporate project of it all.
Now, that a big-budget studio property has a corporate project to it is no surprise, but the extent of A New Legacy's is shocking. As LeBron and his son are sucked into Warner Bros.' computers, the studio's back catalogue becomes their universe, quite literally. The Looney Tunes have a planet. Harry Potter has a planet. Game of Thrones has a planet. Even Casablanca has a planet. And throughout, clips from old films are invaded by the Looney Tunes, references pop up constantly, and characters from countless properties pepper the crowd at the climactic basketball game. Any of these alone is nothing to screech about, and indeed, spotting characters and references is fun on its own merit - but the ethos behind it all, of making Warner Bros. the sole provider of culture in a universe pathetically dependent on the work it cannibalises from itself, is as revolting as it is revoltingly proud of itself. It really has to be seen to be believed. But in order to believe it you'd have to see it. What a dilemma.
So, no. We don't recommend Space Jam: A New Legacy. Mike's still going to try to get José to watch the first one though.
Recorded on 24th July 2021.
What began twenty years ago as a series of car chases and races has since spiralled out of control into an action behemoth encompassing ten films, a TV series, videogames, and theme park attractions. But for the spinoff film Hobbs & Shaw, Fast and Furious 9 is Mike's introduction to the Fast & Furious series, with José having seen some of the previous instalments, but not all.
We discuss the soap opera storytelling, the way it expresses humour - what it thinks are jokes are really just aggressive, macho posturing - and what it thinks of intelligence, José contending that it represents the worst of American culture in privileging stupidity and making it victorious, with Mike offering a complementary drop of nuance, arguing that it does at least believe that its heroes are smart... but it's a stupid person's idea of what being smart is. Core to the film's failings is its almost complete lack of irony, only the car-turned-space shuttle indicating that the film has any understanding of comedy and how absurd it all is.
There's no recommending Fast and Furious 9, its shortcomings exposed by the competence of almost every other action blockbuster (even Hobbs & Shaw, which had its own problems, but was a pleasant surprise). On the basis of this, Mike's curiosity has been sated, and he's happy to continue avoiding this godforsaken series for the rest of his life.
Recorded on 15th July 2021.
Marvel's triumphant return to our cinemas is... a film that fills in a plot hole nobody cared about for a character who not only should have had a standalone film long before now but who has since been killed off. To say that Black Widow feels like a kick in the teeth is an understatement, but still, the MCU is back with us and we see what it has to offer.
And what it presents us with is something much more earthbound than the spacefaring antics in which Marvel has increasingly indulged: a good old-fashioned Russian spy story, and a family reunion of sorts, Natasha Romanoff driven to reconnect with the other undercover Russian agents who formed her surrogate family as a child. We ask whether the theme of family is done justice here, especially the father's part in its expression. And, among others, we ask questions of the action filmmaking, the lack of humour in heroes, Romanoff's conceptualisation, how the women are filmed, and whether it's necessary to eschew edginess in order to pursue a progressive politics.
Black Widow is a film we enjoyed, though on reflection, picking out the reasons why is harder than picking at its flaws - but it certainly hasn't dampened our willingness to continue following Marvel's movies.
Recorded on 13th July 2021.
An offbeat, gentle, surreal, intriguing and slightly camp comic drama, French Exit is a pleasant surprise for us both. Michelle Pfeiffer's widowed heiress, reduced to selling her late husband's property, takes what's left of her life - her cat, adult son, and attitude - to an apartment in Paris, where she resolves to spend her remaining money before ending her life. Sounds hilarious.
And indeed it is, its director, Azazel Jabocs, demonstrating a mastery of tone. We discuss what makes the film work, its visual design, its relationship with and attitude towards money, how that campness José perceives is kept subdued, and more. French Exit isn't a perfect film by any means, but it is a good one, and a charming way to spend a couple of hours.
Recorded on 4th July 2021.
The sequel to one of the first films we discussed on Eavesdropping at the Movies, The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard reunites Samuel L. Jackson's hitman, Ryan Reynolds' bodyguard, and Salma Hayek's hitman's wife - whose role is significantly expanded from the first film's bit part. The vaguely sketched plot - Antonio Banderas wants to blow up Europe or something, and that's enough detail - is the wire hanger upon which jokes and comic character interplay are draped, but, crucially, is the comedy successful?
Whether it is or isn't, and what we read into the audience response, is up for discussion, as is the deployment of the stars' personas and cinematic histories, what renders Ryan Reynolds' schtick endearing here where it's normally irritating, and whether the film's sexual dimension is overly vulgar or too one-sided.
José has seen The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard twice now, and is no less in thrall to Hayek's aggressive, wild performance the second time, loudly and enthusiastically responding to it. Mike is much less impressed with the film, but does admit to warming up to it in the second half, after a particularly mad joke that we won't spoil here (but do in the podcast). If there are more Hitman's Bodyguard films to come, hopefully with increasingly deliberately clunky titles, we're up for them.
Recorded on 4th July 2021.
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda shot to fame in the mid-2010s with Hamilton, he had already enjoyed success with his 2005 musical, In the Heights, with a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, winning four Tonys for its Broadway production in 2008. Set in Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighbourhood in Upper Manhattan, it now comes to cinemas, following the lives, struggles and dreams of its inhabitants, who simply cannot stop singing.
Well, singing and rapping - and it's the rapping that shines, Miranda's lyrics as witty and intricate as those in Hamilton, while the singing is less impressive, and the domain of the film's women, who Mike wishes had been given the opportunity to rap. We discuss our disappointment in the direction - the film is full of visual ideas that aren't executed to their fullest potential - and its relationship to the cultures and peoples it portrays.
In the Heights has its flaws, but despite them, it's an immensely likeable portrait of life in its locale, José in particular, an immigrant to North America himself, recognising a lot of what it depicts and loving the way it shows off the cultures around which it's based. We pick fault with it, because that's what we do, but don't let that stop you from seeing and enjoying it.
Recorded on 20th June 2021.
We explore Come and See, a 1985 Soviet film whose reputation precedes it - it's regarded as one of the greatest war films of all time. In 1943 Belarus, a young teenager, Flyora, joins the resistance, but as he travels from village to village across Nazi-occupied Belarus, experiencing worsening horrors and atrocities brought upon the locals, the extent to which he is out of his depth gradually becomes clearer and clearer.
Part of Come and See's reputation is of being hard to watch, something we both take issue with - it goes to some deeply unpleasant places, but it's a gradual descent rather than an onslaught. That the film is regarded as such a trial has likely caused some filmgoers to unnecessarily avoid an experience that they would value. While it depicts shocking imagery and events, it's shot with an ethical eye - everything that's shown has a purpose, and that which would be excessively prurient is often avoided.
We also consider the use of supernatural and fairytale aesthetics to place us in the mind of an innocent teenager, and the repeated portrait photography that shows the deepening scars the film's events leave upon him. We also discuss the film's view of Hitler and how it espouses a kind of great man theory in placing him as an icon at the centre of the Nazis' crimes, and the explosion of audiovisual imagination that is the final scene.
Come and See is a beautifully made expression of the hideous costs of war on the innocent, and on our humanity. It's imaginative, intelligent, moving and shocking, and, we might add, beautifully restored. If you've avoided it on the basis of its notoriety, we urge you to reconsider. It's truly great.
Recorded on 17th June 2021.
A Quiet Place Part II picks up moments after its 2018 predecessor ends, its characters desperate for refuge from the terrifying predators hunting them. Seeking survivors, they encounter a family friend, now a recluse, having lost his wife and children. Emboldened by her discovery of a way to combat the aliens, the family's deaf daughter makes a beeline for a radio station she believes can help, and what was a home invasion horror becomes an action adventure.
While accommodating this alteration in tone, A Quiet Place Part II offers, as sequels tend to do, more of what made the first film so successful, and it's terrifically entertaining cinema - but a diminished experience, compared to its predecessor, in almost every way. We consider the film's view of society, the uncritical whiteness in its casting and its inability to imagine ways of living that don't involve the nuclear family unit; and the lack of threat we feel, despite its functional and well-orchestrated set-pieces - we simply never feel like these characters are at any real risk of being allowed to die.
We have problems with A Quiet Place Part II, but don't let them dissuade you from seeing it. It's exciting and made José jump time and time again - we just wish, both in cinematic and social terms, it could see beyond its rather narrow boundaries.
Recorded on 9th June 2021.
Disney's latest update of its back catalogue sees Emma Stone bring punk rock to Sixties London in Cruella, a beautiful, stylish, but clunky affair. Like Maleficent before it, Cruella offers an origin story to a key Disney villain: Estella, as she's named when we meet her, takes a circuitous route to her destiny as a star fashion designer, grifting with friends to make ends meet, and waging war on the leading fashionista of the day, Baroness von Hellman - played by a fabulously wicked Emma Thompson. Oh, and there are some Dalmatians involved.
We discuss the quality and intentions of Cruella's characterisation and Stone's performance, the conspicuously expensive soundtrack, the use of CGI animals, whether the film is as queer as some of the hype has suggested, the role of men and masculinity, and why it is that fashion movies are one of very few areas in cinema where women get to play fun villains like the Baroness. Cruella is an imperfect film, less than the sum of its parts - but at their best, those parts are worth it for their own sake.
Recorded on 3rd June 2021.
Billy Wilder directs this adaptation of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama concerning a man on trial for the murder of an old woman - did he do it? What's up with his wife? Will his lawyer's nurse catch him smoking? As with Christie's stageplay, The Mousetrap, upon the film's conclusion, the audience is kindly asked to refrain from revealing its twists and revelations, but we at Eavesdropping at the Movies respect no such requests. Spoilers within.
Charles Laughton is pleasingly hammy, Marlene Dietrich composed, and Tyrone Power a loud, sweaty, stressed out mess - and somehow mostly in the background, despite his central role as the accused murderer. We discuss their performances and characters, the pleasures and methods of Agatha Christie's mysteries, and Wilder's direction, which hopes, in that classic Hollywood style, to render technique invisible. Witness for the Prosecution is an engrossing mystery filled with interesting bits of business that enrich its characters, and a classic.
Recorded on 23rd May 2021.
Cinema is back! And to celebrate, we see the new spin-off of the Saw series, Spiral, which... is not a good film. But it gives us much to think on, especially the surprisingly big names of its cast, which includes Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, and Max Minghella. Slasher series don't traditionally accommodate stars, but, beyond the fact that they're typically too expensive, Spiral offers a warning against their presence: the screentime they require pulls too much attention away from the thrills, the reason we're really there. The deaths we're accustomed to enjoying in Saw films just aren't given to us in sufficient excess or quantity in Spiral; Chris Rock's protagonist, a detective hunting a Jigsaw copycat, dominates the story. As if catching the murderer is more exciting than watching him work. Honestly.
Despite our disappointment in the film, we enjoy our return to the cinema after nine months away, José finding a new appreciation for the meditative quality of submitting himself to a movie he can't pause in a darkened room, after a year of experiencing a fractured, distracted mental state watching streaming media. Mike likes the bigness of the screen, and that's as far as his introspection takes him. In an increasingly vaccinated Britain, this return to the cinema is more optimistic than the shaky and short-lived reopening of last summer, and feels like it stands a good chance of lasting. And a damn good thing, too. We've missed it.
Recorded on 20th May 2021.
We explore René Clair's adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel of - in the US - the same name, And Then There Were None. In terms of quality, it's nothing to write home about, sadly, but is interesting nonetheless.
Recorded on 13th May 2021.
We explore Dario Argento's Suspiria, his 1977 horror classic, and its loose remake by Luca Guadagnino, from 2018. We've never seen either, although Argento's film casts a long shadow - those who've seen it never forget it, and it's easy to see why. Its visual design is bold, imaginative and beautiful, the images it creates extraordinary, its violence heightened and wild. José loves it, literally wowed by it, captivated by its cinematic flair and interesting casting. But, Mike argues, it's a film that offers nothing beyond the aesthetic, uninterested in its own characters or story, which leaves him cold.
Our responses to Guadagnino's remake are reversed entirely. For Mike, it's superior: ambitious, keen to mine the threadbare original for thematic depth, and laudably attempting to weave together generational guilt, dance, institutional corruption and women's bodies into a complex tapestry, although one which requires too much audience participation to complete. José thinks he's giving a pretentious work of ego far too much credit, is turned off by the dance scenes, annoyed at the lack of connection he finds between its wider themes and central coven, angered by its grey, wintry colour palette and dry cinematography... in fact, he's angered by all of it! Now he knows how his friends felt as he valiantly tried to argue them into appreciating Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name, which he loved, but which many of them greeted with similar hostility.
The original a cult classic, its remake a very different take on the core premise - both are worth watching. But if our responses are anything to go by, your mileage may vary considerably.
Recorded on 11th May 2021.
Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce star as the previous and current Popes respectively, in The Two Popes, an imagined biopic that uses their personas and public profiles as jumping off points to explore a range of ideas. We discuss the success with which the film has been adapted from the original stage play, but the lack of visual artistry it nonetheless exhibits; the ways in which it uses - and ignores - the characters' histories and mistakes; the sincerity that underpins the entire film; and the rather cheap and simple, if entertaining, use of football to convey Pope Francis as a man of the people. Although we find all sorts of areas to pick at, The Two Popes is easy to recommend - witty, charming, brilliantly performed by Hopkins and Pryce, and keen to explore meaningful ideas with seriousness and solemnity, when the moment calls for it. Worth a look.
Recorded on 2nd May 2021.
We're joined by returning guest Celia, on the phone from Canada, to discuss writer-director Emerald Fennell's unusual revenge thriller, Promising Young Woman. Following the rape and - implied - suicide of her friend Nina, which goes unpunished, Carey Mulligan's Cassie drops out of medical school, and now spends her nights feigning drunkenness, allowing men to pick her up and take her home, alarming them with her sobriety as they begin to sexually assault her. When a chance reunion with a former classmate reveals that Nina's rapist is engaged, Cassie embarks upon a campaign of vengeance against those she considers responsible for and involved in committing and allowing her friend's rape and its cover-up.
Celia loves it, finding that it invokes and brings to life many subtle and important observations about life for women in the patriarchy, enjoying the various forms Cassie's revenge takes - particularly the "exercises in forced empathy", in her words - and feeling a call to arms; José decidedly doesn't, decrying those observations and revenges as cinematically unrealised in what is merely a filmed essay, albeit one that admirably exhibits a style, an aesthetic and a point of view. Mike bravely sits in the middle, pretending to be superior to the other two by virtue of not exhibiting an extreme response to the film. The discussion is varied and passionate - and full of spoilers. Love it or hate it, Promising Young Woman is a thought-provoking, vital film, and well worth watching.
Recorded on 18th April 2021.
Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford star in Gild- sorry, Affair in Trinidad, Hayworth's first film upon her return to Hollywood after four years away, and a blatant rip-off of a certain classic film noir from 1946. (There's also a chunk of Notorious thrown in for good measure.) Expensively cobbled together at Columbia boss Harry Cohn's instruction, its production was rushed, with its script barely presentable and Vincent Sherman's direction lazy, but audiences weren't put off - it made $7m domestically, blockbuster box office in 1952.
Now featured as part of Columbia Noir #2, a box-set from the same series that includes The Garment Jungle, we take the opportunity to see what Affair in Trinidad has to offer - for José, the answer is, "not much, besides Rita Hayworth, gorgeous gowns and rich cinematography" - and discuss more besides, including Hayworth's name and image, and how and why they were changed. Affair in Trinidad is far from a good film, but one of historical interest, and certainly worth seeing for any fan of Rita Hayworth.
Recorded on 18th April 2021.
A film that offers a beautiful evocation of community, as Riz Ahmed's drummer suddenly loses most of his hearing and joins a retreat for the deaf, Sound of Metal also feels regrettably, and unforgivably, dishonest in some of the ways it engineers its story. In this respect, we disagree over one of the film's key scenes, but agree about what it goes on to depict in the final act. Despite the severe problems we have with the film, it has pleasures to offer, including an outstanding central performance from Ahmed, whose wide-eyed, puppy-dog expressions transparently convey fear, anger, worry and determination, sometimes all at once. For Ahmed alone, it's worth seeing Sound of Metal.
Recorded on 11th April 2021.
The fourth entry in Legendary's MonsterVerse, the first crossover in the series, sees a journey to the center of the Earth and Hong Kong made the playground of its titular colossi. In this cinematic universe seeking to challenge Marvel et al., Mike finds visual splendour and an ambition to reach for something a little more meaningful than your usual blockbusters. Indeed, the character of Godzilla, in particular, is well-known to derive from Japan's horrific experience as history's first and only target of nuclear warfare, and Mike argues that the MonsterVerse seeks to continue to use its creatures as giant metaphors that punch and breathe fire, unleashed by humanity's insatiable consumption and arrogant claim on the natural world. José isn't that impressed with this reading, but finds things to enjoy, particularly the beautiful imagery - though, he argues, while it demonstrates incredible skill and craft on the part of the artists who created it, art is precisely what it lacks. But luckily, although we butt heads over Godzilla vs. Kong, Birmingham remains intact.
Recorded on 11th April 2021.
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, riots erupted when thousands of anti-Vietnam War protestors clashed with police. Seeking to crush the energetic counterculture, the US government put on trial a group of eight defendants, some political organisers, some cultural radicals, some with hardly any influence, a pacifist, and a Black Panther, hoping to convict them for conspiracy to incite the riots. Aaron Sorkin's writing is a good fit for this story, the disparate group of defendants arguing amongst themselves sharply, and many scenes flowing beautifully towards their own internal climaxes; the same cannot be said of his direction, the film lacking much visual flair and instinct for expressive imagery.
We revisit our common theme of British actors playing Americans, José finding more fault with it here than Mike does - we can, at least, agree that Sacha Baron Cohen's accent is atrocious, his Abbie Hoffman a weak point. Mike expounds upon how much he hates himself for how much he likes Sorkin's HBO drama The Newsroom, comfort food for the American left, which he sees echoes of here.
We find flaw upon flaw with The Trial of the Chicago 7, but despite every one of them, it's an immensely watchable film with a terrific ensemble cast and entertaining dialogue. With an awareness of its limitations and economy with the truth, we recommend it.
Recorded on 28th March 2021.
Anthony Hopkins is magnificent as The Father's title character, an old man losing his grip on reality to dementia, in debut director Florian Zeller's adaptation of his own stage play. We discuss the techniques the film uses to situate the audience within the mind of a dementia sufferer, and whether they lose their potency as the film develops. The Father's origins on stage are obvious in its sparse setting and focus on dialogue, and we suggest that the raw power of seeing the performances live, an immediacy, is lost here - though the cast, particularly Hopkins and Olivia Colman, are impressive nonetheless. Mike argues that the film somehow lacks enough plot to even fill its 97-minute duration, and would have worked better as a short film - José suggests that it ends up in cliché.
Still, for a while at least, it's an extraordinarily effective dramatisation of what it might feel like to suffer from dementia, convinced of your own mental acuity while contradicted by everyone and everything around you. The Father doesn't offer a pleasant experience, but it is a valuable one.
Recorded on 28th March 2021.
A gentle drama about Korean immigrants making a life for themselves in 1980s Arkansas, Minari's tone is consistently light, despite some of the upsetting events that occur. Mike argues that it reflects a child's perspective of life, protected by their parents from the worst of life, or simply not understanding the darkness in what they experience - writer-director Lee Isaac Chung based the film on his own upbringing on a farm in Arkansas. José identifies strongly with the story, commenting on the similarities and differences with his youth as a Spanish immigrant to Canada. Minari is a good-natured film with no room for cynicism, and, for José, a joyous experience to watch.
Recorded on 28th March 2021.
In 2017, Justice League, DC's answer to Marvel's continuing Avengers crossovers, flopped. Director Zack Snyder had left the film several months before release, his role taken over by MCU regular Joss Whedon, and significant changes were made in an attempt to lighten the tone of what had so far been a rather bleak series. Immediately, talk erupted of a director's cut - the so-called Snyder Cut - that would represent Snyder's true vision, uncompromised by studio executives' fears and directives. Initially no more than a meme responding to that film's quality, it was given oxygen by Zack Snyder's insistence that it did actually exist, and it now reaches us via online streaming in the age of Covid-19. There's perhaps no other set of circumstances in which it would have been made real - on top of the original budget, the creation of this director's cut cost some additional $70m - but what an opportunity to compare and contrast two versions of the same film.
At four hours in length, this is a version of Justice League that would never have seen a theatrical release, but the time it affords its characters to develop is welcome, and a huge improvement over the sketchy treatment some of them received in the original film - particularly Cyborg, played by Ray Fisher, who arguably becomes the central character in the Snyder Cut. We discuss and disagree on the decision to change the original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 to 1.33:1, which José loves but Mike considers a mistake, and look over a few key scenes and shots to explore the differences between Snyder's and Whedon's aesthetics.
And we discuss that new ending, additional scenes which help the Snyder Cut conceive of the overall story as epic, mythological fantasy, and more.
It's a surprise to us both that we enjoyed Zack Snyder's Justice League as much as we did, but there you have it. The four hours flew by and if this leads to the studio's renewed interest in completing Snyder's planned series, we're up for it.
Recorded on 24th March 2021.
Frances McDormand and a cast of non-professional, real-life nomads unite to explore the life of the modern American itinerant in Nomadland. We consider the line between fiction and reality, the non-professionals who appear bringing their real experiences and stories with them, and discuss what drives a person to their way of life. Like director Chloé Zhao's previous feature, The Rider, Nomadland is a textural, contemplative film, and perhaps one that grows in stature upon reflection - while José loved every moment, Mike was bored by the tempo, but finds much to praise nonetheless. A film worth taking the time to sink into.
Recorded on 21st March 2021.
The story of a civil rights activist who deserved a biopic long before now, told from the perspective of the man who killed him. Fred Hampton chaired the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and using his oratorical skills and powers of persuasion formed the Rainbow Coalition, a political movement in which black, white and Puerto Rican organisations combined and worked together. Hampton was identified as a threat by the FBI and his death is considered an assassination under COINTELPRO, the FBI's illegal programme of disruption of domestic political organisations. He was killed in December 1969 at the age of 21.
We ask whether it's a problem that Judas and the Black Messiah frames his story as part of his murderer, William O'Neal's. For José, the entire story is badly conceived, as Hampton should be the clear focus; for Mike, the problem is in the execution, with O'Neal underdeveloped - but it's possible that this informant thriller genre structure is what allowed the film to get made in the first place. Mike remarks upon Hampton's pragmatism in contrast to the narratives around Martin Luther King Jr., murdered only a year before Hampton, which arguably tend to convey idealism for the future as opposed to action in the here and now.
Judas and the Black Messiah is an imperfect but important exploration of an extraordinarily impressive man we should have known more about before now.
Recorded on 21st March 2021.
Ethics and truth in the land of documentary come under the microscope in our discussion of Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne's love letter to his childhood friend, Andrew Bagby, is a sensational and moving film that you should know as little as possible about before watching. It's exceptionally effective, built out of a combination of interviews, home footage, still photos and more, masterfully edited to generate emotional affect - but despite its qualities, there are real issues fundamental to its form. It's a hybrid of two types of film that find themselves in competition here: it's a documentary, a form about openness and truth; and a thriller, withholding information until it reshapes everything you've learned so far. It's a tension that may well be impossible to avoid - to resolve it might be to totally change Dear Zachary from the deeply personal, passionately made film it is.
The story Dear Zachary tells is powerful, moving and utterly gripping, and the conversation to which it will lead you is rich and illuminating. We recommend it without reservation, even though we have serious reservations about it.
Recorded on 14th March 2021.
First-time writer-director Noah Hutton imagines, in Lapsis, a near-future gig economy dystopia that isn't that different from our own. Unable to pay for his brother's healthcare, Dean Imperial's Ray takes on contracting work for a Google-esque tech giant, hiking through forests laying cables. Imperial's performance is a standout, his Ray always sympathetic and legible, and Hutton's sketchy, piecemeal world-building suits the film - until it doesn't. Lapsis creates a recognisable milieu and has a leftist politics with which we broadly agree and are happy to see, but as its story develops it wants to evoke the feeling of doom one would expect of a revealed conspiracy, without the burden of having to bring together its disparate subplots and building blocks in order to explain anything.
Despite our reservations, we enjoyed Lapsis and are glad to have seen it, and are keen to see what comes next for Noah Hutton and Dean Imperial.
Recorded on 14th March 2021.
An expensive flop in its day, The Day of the Locust maintains a cult intrigue for its critique of Hollywood and descent into madness. It's new for both of us, and we discuss the qualities its cast brings, what could be better about its industry commentary, its moments of surprisingly graphic violence, and who, or what, its titular locusts are.
Recorded on 28th February 2021.
We explore a wonderful Taiwanese film that Netflix forgot it had, A Sun. An intimate yet epic drama about the effects of a single mistake that reverberate through a family and down the years, it's gorgeously lit and shot, and although it feels as long as it is, every moment is earned and valuable. It asks fundamental questions of its characters and of us, the most important of which is: What does it mean to be a good person?
Recorded on 21st February 2021.
Our two-part discussion of Rocky concludes with a look at the entire series of eight films, including the two Creed movies. It's a series that's deeply interested in its own history, regularly referring to it in montages of characters' memories, journeys back to iconic locations, and the reintroduction of one particular character in Creed II. The series rewards its audience for its investment, although despite featuring a soap opera-like series of melodramatic plot developments over its many films, almost everything that refers to a previous film refers to the first one. Other than the events of 1976's Rocky, which laid the foundation for the series, only Apollo Creed's death and Ivan Drago's defeat in Rocky IV have lasting impact on later films.
We discuss how, following his superhero-like physicality in the Eighties, the character of Rocky is brought back down to Earth in his old age, his body ravaged by time, his life broken by loss. And we think about how the milieu evolves over time, the music, for instance, changing from barbershop/a capella singing in the Seventies, through power ballads in the Eighties, to rap and hip-hop in the 2010s. And we discuss much more besides.
You can track significant changes in cinema and culture over the last fifty years through the Rocky films. Each one feels like a snapshot of American life at its time. We can't recommend most of the films as examples of great film art, but the last three, Rocky Balboa, Creed and Creed II, stand above the first five, the Creeds especially feeling like a breath of fresh air with the directorial talent on display. But it's a fascinating series to work through, earnest and open-hearted throughout, and immensely likeable.
Recorded on 21st February 2021.
In this first of our two-part discussion of the Rocky films, we look at the film that began the series almost 50 years ago. There's a lot about 1976's Rocky that... isn't that good. John G. Avildsen's direction is drab, the story basic, the themes rudimentary - but with that comes a roughness and a sincerity to the whole affair that might be just what makes it work after all. Sylvester Stallone's Rocky is a physical brute, softened by his unusual - and unusually pretty - features, his inability to avoid trying to befriend any animal that crosses his path, his demeanour that's at once confident and shy, and his intellectual simplicity. José argues that the boxing is a diversion, a Trojan horse within which to sneak Rocky and Adrian's love story. And we think about the character of Apollo Creed, his use as a substitute for Muhammad Ali, and why he couldn't have been white.
Rocky was a phenomenon upon its release, an immediate cultural touchstone that contains images and scenes so iconic that, five decades on, we continue to attach the same emotions to them and draw the same pleasure from recalling them. Well, we say "we", but, as is typical, Mike has never seen it before. So while José revisits, Mike joins the party for the first time, and we discuss the quality, significance and impact of this iconic film.
Recorded on 21st February 2021.
Why this film was made... is rather beyond us. News of the World invokes the era of fake news in name only, its premise - following the Civil War, a former Confederate captain travels the American south reading out newspapers for a living - interesting in principle but almost entirely ignored in favour of a by-the-numbers, surrogate father-daughter road movie. Paul Greengrass' direction, eschewing the style and energy that made him famous, is barely an impersonation of that of classic Westerns, full of landscapes and sunsets, signifying nothing; Tom Hanks is as tediously noble and upstanding as ever, his character's supposedly shady past alluded to rather than detailed, allowing us to feel pleased for his redemption without ever having to dislike him for what he needs to be redeemed for. Helena Zengel, the German youngster who plays Hanks' mysterious companion, is a highlight, a presence you can't take your eyes off - though her character is as thinly sketched as everything else.
News of the World is bad, but not offensively so. It's an unending stampede of clichés and tropes, unthinkingly employed and uncreatively executed. We don't like to advise people stay away from films, but if this is next on your list, we assume you have already seen every other film ever made.
Recorded on 14th February 2021.
Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whose partnership in the 50s and 60s helped define American comedy, collaborate on a film for the first time in 1996, as director and screenwriter respectively, giving us a comedy so sharp and outrageous that José's laughter made Mike miss half the dialogue. An adaptation of the French farce, La Cage aux Folles, The Birdcage sees Robin Williams' South Beach drag club owner, Armand, attempt to force his life into the closet for one night, for the sake of his son, Val, whose deeply conservative in-laws are set to visit for dinner. But Nathan Lane's flamboyant Albert, Armand's longtime partner, is unable, and at first unwilling, to participate in the subterfuge as requested, and chaos ensues.
The Birdcage relies heavily on stereotypes - it's not only theatrical but a farce, in which everything is heightened - and though they're enjoyably insane in themselves, the film's brilliance is in how it reveals the real people within them, people whose love and pain are rendered sensitively and richly, through the truly genius performances from Williams and Lane, which work together beautifully while in two different registers, the former internal, the latter external. José suggests that the film's outlook, despite embodying so vividly a pro-gay message, is nonetheless normative of a certain kind of structure of love, the only difference between the film's two families being that the mother in one is male - and even then, Albert is occasionally referred to as Armand's wife and Val's mother. He even, at one particularly stressful moment early on, claims that he is a woman. ("You're not a woman", replies Armand, to which Albert cries, "You bastard!") But although this could be suggestive of a trans identity, and the drag club certainly houses trans people, 1996 is a little early for such complexity - publicly coming out as gay, never mind trans, was still rare, shocking, and even dangerous.
There's a lot more to discuss, including the portrayals of Gene Hackman's conservative, scandal-embroiled senator, Hank Azaria's Guatemalan houseboy, and Val, who Mike thinks is a bit mean and smug, and Mike Nichols' overall filmography, which José has been considering of late, having been reading his recently released biography by Mark Harris. The Birdcage sits high among his oeuvre, for José, and it's not hard to see why - he's literally never laughed as much in his life.
Recorded on 7th February 2021.
A pro-union, pulpy noir in 1957, not long after the House Un-American Activities Committee was at its height, is nothing to be sniffed at, even if its stance is to align union interests with business, and blame most of the bad things that happen on organised crime. The Garment Jungle dramatises the infiltration of the mob into New York's Garment District with arguably surprising elegance, particularly considering its shaky production in which the first director, Robert Aldrich, was fired and replaced with Vincent Sherman. We discuss its significant use of location filming, implied - or otherwise - moral failings of its characters, Robert Loggia's driven union organiser, the lack of quality of its dialogue and acting, and what appeal there is in it today, beyond an academic interest in the period. It has, after all, been lovingly restored as part of Columbia Noir #1, a six-film boxset - but we're glad it has.
Recorded on 7th February 2021.
John Smith's 16-minute short, Citadel, gives voice to the City of London - Prime Minister Boris Johnson's voice, specifically. Filmed during the first few months of lockdown in 2020, it builds an oppositional portrait of British life under Johnson's blustery leadership - it's Boris Johnson vs. the British people, and the City vs. the British people.
But in tying Johnson to the City, it ignores his shockingly unsympathetic stance, for a Tory leader, towards business - summed up succinctly in his overheard comment in June 2018: "Fuck business". Late on, it depicts the British public as lambs to the slaughter as Johnson decrees they must return to work, but while Smith employs a soundtrack of outdoor construction, the homes he is able to show us are suggestive of the middle class, their inhabitants likely able to work from home.
Still, Smith only has so much to work with, stuck at home as he is, and Citadel is an evocative and concise film, cleverly conceived, shot, and edited. Its simplifications are small in comparison to the pleasures of its imagery, wit and tone. A treat.
Recorded on 7th February 2021.
A young, destitute couple seek survival and stability in Yuzo Kawashima's 1956 drama, Suzaki Paradise: Akashingō (in English, this subtitle is given as Red Light, or Red Light District). Tsutae and Yoshiji spend their last few yen on a bus to anywhere, ending up on the outskirts of Tokyo's red light district, separated from it only by an ominous bridge that is spoken of by the locals as though fearful, dreaded, even mythical. They take to their new home differently: Tsutae easily finds work as a waitress at a bar, comfortable for reasons that become clear; Yoshiji, a former office worker, has trouble adjusting, and, though it's not put into words as such, spends much of the film depressed.
We discuss the portrayal of Tokyo's unfortunates, their attitudes to life and to each other, and the tightrope Kawashima walks between wallowing in poverty porn and sentimentalising the couple's situation. The motif of the bridge is a potent one, recurring throughout, and we consider how it's used, what it signifies, and how it combines with the film's theme of patriarchy and how it oppresses both women and men.
Suzaki Paradise is a concise and potent film, an intelligent dramatisation of social and economic issues in post-war Japan, and an expressive melodrama. It's worth seeking out.
Recorded on 17th January 2021.
A key film in Paul Newman's career that gave us one of cinema's most iconic lines, Cool Hand Luke is known to both Mike and José - but previously seen by neither. The reasons that it became a cultural touchstone remain crystal clear, despite it failing, to a significant degree, to grab us as it might. We question the authenticity and purpose of Luke's rebellion, the depiction of prison life, and the flimsy Christian allegory that tirelessly insists upon itself. The brutality perhaps seems unfairly tame today, an unavoidable consequence of coming to the film more than fifty years late, but its comedy still works beautifully and Newman's charm has gone nowhere. It's a fantasy, we conclude, for the privileged - an ultimately mortal fight against The Man, the point of which may very well be its lack of focus and clarity of purpose. Jesus was crucified for our sins; will we be recounting the story of Luke in two thousand years? Only time will tell.
Recorded on 16th January 2021.
Occupying some similar thematic terrain to Coco, Pixar's 2017 masterpiece, Soul uses an afterlife-bound journey with a tight deadline to explore what it is that makes us human, in the context of a life devoted to music. When Joe, a music teacher and passionate jazz pianist, dies in a classic open manhole cover accident, his soul, now separated from his body but desperate to live, escapes an A Matter of Life and Death-inspired travelator to Heaven and ends up in the Great Before, a meadow populated with unborn souls preparing for their upcoming lives. Mistaken for a mentor, he is assigned 22, a cynical, sarcastic soul with no desire to live on Earth, and when he tries to return to his body, she accidentally comes with.
As well as to Coco, Mike finds Soul comparable to another of Pixar's films: Soul handles philosophical concepts the way Inside Out did psychological ones, rendering them visually imaginative and narratively physical. 'The zone', where people describe themselves when feeling that transcendent state of flow when an activity consumes them, is in the Great Before a real place that Joe and 22 visit; the unborn souls develop personality traits signified by Boy Scout-style badges. The storytelling is economical and concise, characters' priorities and attitudes smoothly and legibly changing as their goals and relationships shift. It's a beautifully told story.
José considers the social and economic setting of Joe's life, the music he loves and the barber he visits, about whose life he learns - the film humanely understands people and hardship without wallowing in despair, finding space for joy. We wonder how well it will play to kids, thrilled that Pixar refuses to speak down to its audience, if a little unsure about how much will translate to the younger members of its target audience. Predictably, Mike finished the film in tears, despite an ending he found to be overly mechanical and inorganic.
Soul is a beautiful, wonderful film. To José, it's a masterpiece. To Mike, possibly not, but only because Coco exists. See it.
Recorded on 31st December 2020.
Despite a couple of charmingly enthusiastic performances from Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig, Wonder Woman 1984 disappoints, betraying what the title character stands for. We discuss the gender dynamics and representations, the Eighties setting, the Trumpian themes of greed, lust for power and the use of mass media to con, the opening scene that offers a glimpse of what the film could have been, and more. Although we criticise the film throughout our conversation, there's still enough in it that we liked to force us into a mixed conclusion. But what's wrong with it is really, really wrong indeed.
Recorded on 31st December 2020.
Small Axe ends with what, based on his 2014 profile in the Guardian, we take to be a tale partially inspired by Steve McQueen's own childhood. In Education, a young dyslexic boy, Kingsley, is transferred to a school for the "educationally subnormal", a real practice in the 1970s that disproportionately involved black children. The institution to which he's sent is barely a school, the children left unsupervised by bored teachers and allowed to run riot - but it's covertly investigated by a group of activists hoping to fight and end the system.
Mike relates to the film, recognising in Kingsley's mum the same righteous anger and desire to fight for her son that his own mum showed for him as a youngster, and to its evocation of British school life. (It may be set twenty years prior to his school years, but British kids have had to perform London's Burning on recorders and tambourines since time immemorial.) The aesthetic evokes the era vividly, the visual quality of the images, the shot selections and editing all perfectly emulating the look of Play for Today, the iconic anthology series. And as with the rest of Small Axe, a concise historical struggle within Britain's wider racist society is effectively rendered complex...
... up to a point. Though the situation and its effects are complex, the characters are mostly fairly one-note, and the film's ending is rather pat - even a little phony, though it's forgivable for this series to want to end on a hopeful note. Still, it's an intelligent, thoughtful film that fits in perfectly amongst the rest of the series, and as we have throughout, we implore you to watch it all.
Recorded on 20th December 2020.
The theme of assimilation is given a fascinating twist in Alex Wheatle, the fourth Small Axe film. While Mangrove and Red, White and Blue, in particular, depicted black people's attempts to assimilate into mainland British culture and life and the racism they faced, the title character here is a young black man brought up in an abusive children's home, orphaned from his parents, and whose move to Brixton sees him culturally dislocated and having to, in effect, learn to 'be black'.
Cultural and familial dislocation are connected through Alex. The abandonment by his parents led to his upbringing by the state, amongst white Britons, and when an influential Rastafarian he meets in prison expounds on the importance of education and knowing one's past, to Alex, he's speaking just as much about his personal past as about the history of the African disapora. This is the most interesting aspect of Alex Wheatle and we focus on it, but there's more to discuss, including the continued invocation of music as a kind of life-giving force, how Alex learns to be black and British and the spaces in which that happens, and director Steve McQueen's expressive formal visual storytelling.
Alex Wheatle elegantly tells a unique and complex story, and we continue to urge you to watch this remarkable series of films in its entirety.
Recorded on 20th December 2020.
Another Steve McQueen rendition of a true story, Red, White and Blue examines institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police, as did Mangrove - but from the inside. Leroy Logan, a research scientist, applies to the police with the express intention of combating its attitude and behaviour towards black people, in part because of his father's own abuse at their hands.
The theme of black British identity runs throughout Small Axe, and here it's intriguingly augmented by imagery of the Queen; we discuss how it can be interpreted, including as a symbol of the common nationality the Windrush generation ostensibly shares with British-born white people, and a painful reminder of the fact that that shared identity is not truly embodied, and also as an icon of the establishment Leroy hopes to disrupt and improve. We also concentrate on Leroy's relationship with his father, which frames the entire film, and how their attitudes, experiences and understanding of each other intersect.
Recorded on 6th December 2020.
José hasn’t seen a worse film from David Fincher than Mank, a contentious biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter whose collaboration with Orson Welles resulted in The Greatest Film of All Time™, Citizen Kane. Mike had rather a good time, despite seeing numerous problems with the film, raising the question: How much background knowledge is the right amount for enjoying Mank?
Mank doesn’t even explain, for instance, that the film Mankiewicz and Welles would create is considered one of history’s greatest, so some knowledge of the subject is clearly necessary; too much, though, and its missed opportunities and purposeful alterations to and adaptations of the facts become evident and impossible to ignore. Mike finds that he’s just ignorant – or is that informed – enough to understand the film’s background and setting without going crazy, as José does, as it clashes with his knowledge of the history.
We discuss Mank‘s obvious inspiration in Pauline Kael’s discredited essay, Raising Kane, which argued that Mankiewicz deserved sole credit for Kane‘s screenplay; its flashback structure that shows us where the screenplay came from and why Mankiewicz is the only person who could have written it; its depiction of Hollywood in the 30s (not to mention Mankiewicz in HIS 30s); the parallels that it draws with Hollywood and, more generally, the state of the world today, and more. Almost every criticism José makes, Mike agrees with – but he cannot and will not deny that he had a good time, finding the film witty and energetic where José felt it musty and lethargic. It’s a poor showing from a filmmaker with a largely exceptional oeuvre – unless you’re in that Goldilocks zone with Mike.
Recorded on 6th December 2020.
Do English people get Preston Sturges? Is his work all it's cracked up to be? These questions are on the table as we tackle The Palm Beach Story, a film Mike's twice been encouraged to see by Canadians, and twice found infuriating and tiresome. José's a fan, and we discuss the differences in our responses to the film, the pleasures that can be found within it, and how Sturges gives comically sensitive voice to the strong, silent American male, with several helpful interjections from Celia, friend of the podcast and the first Canadian who told Mike he just doesn't get it.
Recorded on 29th November 2020.
Small Axe continues with Lovers Rock, a stunning musical set in a house party in the 1980s. Hit follows hit on the soundtrack, and José in particular is blown away by how Steve McQueen's camera observes its euphoric subjects, concentrating on specific body parts, taking as much time as it likes to explore the mood, the resulting experience as sensuous as any we can recall. We discuss the cross-national identity the partygoers occupy, the Christian symbolism conspicuously on display, the open-ended narrative structure, and more, but always returning to the bold and brilliant dancefloor sequences. A masterpiece.
Recorded on 29th November 2020.
Small Axe, Steve McQueen's remarkable anthology of five films made for the BBC, begins with Mangrove, a dramatisation of the 1971 trial of the Mangrove Nine, a key event in British history in which the institutional racism of the Metropolitan Police was successfully litigated by members of the black community in Notting Hill. While it is undoubtedly key, it's an event with which neither Mike nor José is familiar, and the film embodies the BBC's iconic mission statement of "inform, educate, entertain", doing all three wonderfully.
We discuss the way in which Mangrove both fits into and demonstrates an evolution of McQueen's filmmaking - it's as powerful and subtly impassioned as any of his previous work, but, perhaps owing to the medium for which it is made, unusually accessible, less keen to make the audience seek its depths for itself. The long-term implications of the trial in raising the nation's consciousness about institutional racism are clear to the characters, and they're not shy about discussing them, indulging in justified and welcome exposition. Mike discusses the differences between the characters, particularly Frank Crichlow, the owner of the titular restaurant, and Darcus Howe, an intellectual who is introduced to us as such, how they play off each other, and particularly the way in which Howe persuades Crichlow of his central place in the West Indian immigrant community and their fight to address the racism they face from the police. And José picks up on McQueen's style and visual expressiveness, confidently holding some shots for a long time, and carefully composing others with considerations of framing and colour to create striking imagery.
Mangrove is the first of an extraordinary series of films about black British history and the experience of West Indian immigrants and their children in the 1970s and 80s, and our podcasts on the others will follow. They're on iPlayer and unmissable.
Recorded on 29th November 2020.
You find us in reflective mood, as we reflect upon a reflective Swedish comedy, Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Hopping between vignettes, Andersson's dispassionate camera sits in corners of rooms, its wide angle lens taking in everything on display from wall to wall, as often absurd and sometimes unsettling action slowly unfolds. The final film in Andersson's "Living" trilogy (2000-2014), it asks, "what are we doing?"; and, as José points out, in one especially disturbing scene, "what have we done?"
José delights in its sense of humour, the film offering deadpan responses to surreal events; while it's also up Mike's street, the film's studied slowness begins to grate on him, and when it loses him after an initial flourish of spontaneous and unpredictable oddness, it fails to win him back. We discuss its origins, its title inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Hunters in the Snow; its focus on life's less fortunate, and how we interpret their behaviour; moments of stillness that eschew the opportunity for jokes; and its historical references, to World War II, to the brutality of white, and particularly British, imperial history, and to elements of Swedish history that our primitive knowledge of the country keeps us from properly accessing.
Our instinctive responses disagree, but perhaps mostly because of the difference in how comfortably we matched the film's mood. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is an undeniably well-made, carefully considered and original work of individual expression and curiosity, and one that inspires boundless questions and interpretations of its own.
Recorded on 15th November 2020.
1924's The City Without Jews, an Austrian silent film adapted from Hugo Bettauer's enormously successful novel of the same name, published two years earlier, imagines a European city undergoing hyperinflation and mass unemployment, blaming the Jews for its problems, and expelling them. Unthinkable! Needless to say, it both drew on and prefigured actual events, but some of the imagery is chillingly evocative of what was yet to occur, including the Chancellor's proud address from a balcony to the ecstatic crowds below, and the entire depiction of the Jews' eviction, from being kicked out of their homes to the trains that remove them from the city.
Despite its historical interest, the stories that surround it, including the murder of Bettauer by a Nazi less than a year after its release, and its obvious and depressing relevance 100 years on, The City Without Jews is not a great film, its story and world feeling somewhat poorly thought-out, and its ending rather pat, perhaps the result of the significant changes made in adaptation that led to Bettauer falling out with the director, Hans Karl Breslauer. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating and thought-provoking film, and worth watching.
Recorded on 15th November 2020.
The winner of the 1971 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis tells an aching story of doomed love within a wealthy Jewish community in Fascist Italy. The 1938 racial laws, enforcing the segregation of Italian Jews, have just been introduced, but the titular family's titular garden offers insulation from the rising tide of fascism - for a while.
Mike finds the film's love triangle somewhat banal, but is impressed with the subtly observed way in which the central characters allow themselves to remain comfortably ignorant of the increasingly hostile and dangerous Italy beyond their walls; comparisons to frogs in saucepans abound, not to mention the present-day normalisation of absurd corruption and violence in the Greatest Country in the World™. José is more keen on the romance, but still, the film's sociopolitical side remains our focus. We consider the film's use of physical space, the ways in which the Jewish characters can navigate it without being suspected by the racist public, but find themselves eager to retreat to safety as the film develops. We note that The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was made 25 years after the end of the Second World War, but 50 years prior to today: it's now conspicuously an historical artefact that speaks to the time in which it was made, and whose proximity to the horrors it dramatises is necessary to keep in mind. And Mike reflects on his relationship with his Jewishness in this day and age, and how the film demonstrates that whatever divisions we may find among ourselves, to those who hate us, there's no distinction.
It's also Bonfire Night - well, the day after, but it's a Friday evening so the festivities continue - and we celebrate by closing the window and trying to ignore the fireworks going off outside.
Recorded on 6th November 2020.
We're enraptured by a musical neither of has seen before, 1932's Love Me Tonight, starring Maurice Chevalier as a charming and roguish Parisian tailor, and Jeanette MacDonald as a princess he falls for. Its soundtrack is peppered with Rodgers and Hart classics, and its stunning audiovisual design is endlessly experimental, expressive and exciting. In amongst our swooning over the film's many pleasures, we find time to discuss the careers of Chevalier and director Rouben Mamoulian, discuss what makes it a uniquely American form of fairytale, and examine the fascinating censorship and production records made available on Kino Lorber's special edition Blu-Ray.
Recorded on 23rd October 2020.
Fourteen years have passed since Sacha Baron Cohen's first tour of the USA as Borat, his friendly, clueless, and decidedly un-PC Kazakh journalist. Borat gave his unwitting participants, real people who didn't know that he was a character, space and encouragement to display their bigotry, sexism, racism, and stupidity - now he's back to do it again, in a world in which bigotry, sexism, racism and stupidity are no longer deemed necessary to hide.
Sexism in particular is this film's bedrock, the film introducing a daughter, Tutar, who Borat didn't know about, and when she stows away on her father's trip, he decides to offer her to Mike Pence as a token of Kazakhstan's friendship. Women are chattel, and the only objection raised when Borat decides to give the fifteen-year-old Tutar breast implants is that he can't afford them. Women's role as playthings for men, and the society that refuses to allow them control over their bodies, shape almost every scene, including a debutante ball, a conversation with a Christian doctor, and of course, THAT scene with Rudy Giuliani.
We also discuss the question of the reality of what we're seeing and how the film's camerawork and editing fails to convince us of it, how comedy has changed in the last decade and a half, and how the film unexpectedly gives its unwitting participants the opportunity to be tolerant and welcoming. And we each share memories of our grandmothers.
Recorded on 23rd October 2020.
The second feature-length computer-animated film ever made, after Pixar's groundbreaking Toy Story, Antz is an oddball. A public feud between Jeffrey Katzenberg and then-CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner, led to Katzenberg founding Dreamworks SKG and subsequently feuding with Pixar's John Lasseter, who was making the suspiciously similar - and ultimately more successful - A Bug's Life. Pixar is the historically more successful and well-regarded studio, and the direct comparison between these two films usually sees Antz considered inferior, but Mike's long been fond of it, and in revisiting it we discuss both how far it shows us animation has come in the last twenty years, and its many qualities, including its rather grown-up tone and references, imaginative and expressive visual design and cinematography, and witty dialogue.
Oh, and we try to work out how children think.
Recorded on 18th October 2020.
Jacques Tati's masterpiece, 1967's Playtime, is an extraordinarily ambitious work of visual comedy and social satire. Mike's been keen to see this for fifteen years or more, knowing of its reputation for detailed visual design and the 70mm cinematography that shows it off, waiting for the right moment. José, when Mike suggests we watch it, thinks he's seen it many years ago, but soon realises he was probably thinking of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Tati's rather more charming comedy of fourteen years prior, so it takes him a while to get into Playtime's rather more offbeat gear.
And he is ultimately a little cold to the film, though not immune to its appeal and pleasures, while Mike loves it unconditionally. In a somewhat alternate, near-future Paris, the plot, such as it is, follows two characters: Monsieur Hulot, the character Tati played in several films, as he stumbles through a France he finds unfamiliar and devoid of humanity; and Barbara, an American tourist visiting the city. In approximately six fairly distinct vignettes, Tati explores a vision of a consumerist, modern, and alienating Paris, the Eiffel Tower, symbolising the warm, cosy Paris of old, a long way away, merely a distant feature on the horizon or a reflection in a window. It's an attitude for which José has little sympathy, though Mike suggests that the development of the final scene, a kind of funfair around a traffic jam, can be seen as a synergy of the traditional and modern, and finds it moving.
There's a huge amount to discuss, including the design and execution of the jokes; the impossible scale of the set, nicknamed 'Tativille' and whose astronomical cost would ruin Tati, who was forced to file for bankruptcy; to what other films, if any, it can be compared; the visual design, cinematography, choreography, and colour; the use of nationality, particularly American; and how the film might play differently today compared to upon its initial release - Mike arguing that it may have anticipated changes to the real world that would later materialise, such as the cubicle office, whose familiarity to us diminishes the otherworldliness we might otherwise feel.
Playtime is a significant work of satire and well worth seeing, particularly given its beautiful restoration in 2014. Don't miss it for fifteen years. Don't be Mike.
Recorded on 9th October 2020.
One a great masterpiece of cinema, the other a cultural icon of its day, we compare and contrast Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner with Nora Ephron's technologically updated remake, You've Got Mail. We discuss how each film treats its conceit of two people who dislike each other unwittingly falling in love over anonymous correspondence, the former film's couple hating each other less vitriolically, the latter giving us more insight into the details of their messages; the latter making their story the entire focus, the former handling it as the main part of a range of stories that take place amongst its characters.
We consider whether James Stewart's Alfred and Tom Hanks's Joe are nice people, and what the films' endings have to say about them and the women they fall for. José focuses on the films' approach to class and power, praising The Shop Around the Corner's portrayal of working people and decrying You've Got Mail for barely even seeming to notice its uncritical acceptance of corporate power. And we consider more besides, including how Lubitsch's camera makes a static setting evocative and expressive, that Godfather bit, and the similarities and differences in Hanks and Stewart's often-compared personas.
Recorded on 9th October 2020.
A corrupt police force intersects with the glamour of Hollywood in L.A. Confidential, the tightly-plotted neo-noir that won the Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress in a year dominated by Titanic, and established the status and careers of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey. Over twenty years since its enormously successful release, does it hold up? We discuss its basis in the real history of L.A. and its sense of place, whether the screenplay deserves its plaudits, how it functions as a noir and more.
Recorded on 27th September 2020.
Horror tropes pervade I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman's oddball drama about a girl doubting her relationship, but it can't be considered a traditional horror. Instead, it turns these tropes inwards, likening a controlling, toxic relationship to an isolated, threatening, haunted house. It's a fascinating and brilliant idea, but despite the film being well-observed and intriguing, it's not engaging enough, and offers little opportunity for confident interpretation. Mike has little sympathy for its developing surreality; José wants more humour. Still, it's an ambitious, interesting film, and worth delving into.
Recorded on 27th September 2020.
Birmingham's full-size IMAX cinema closed in 2011, having proved unprofitable (the independent venue it became, the Giant Screen, closed four years later for the same reason), so it's off to the Manchester Printworks, home of the second-largest screen in the UK, for our second viewing of Tenet. We ask whether the full IMAX experience is worth it, Mike comparing the feeling of the images offered to those he saw in Dunkirk and The Dark Knight; José argues that it's detrimental to the film to be exhibited in different cinema formats, as shooting in IMAX's 1.43:1 aspect ratio, where the film is supposedly best seen, with the knowledge that it'll be cropped for conventional cinema screens for its wide release and home media, means that artistic, interesting composition is impossible - you can't compose well for two frames at once.
Mike suggests that an easily overlooked pleasure of Christopher Nolan's cinema is turning his films over in your own head, playing with the logic, asking questions of it and trying to unlock the puzzle box - something he's been doing since his first screening, and which we both spend some time on after this one. Laying out the timeline, speculating on what might happen that we're not shown - this isn't the first of Nolan's films to invite that type of reflection. And Mike describes the pleasure of understanding things that aren't hidden but simply too many to grasp all at once the first time - now that he broadly knows the film, things that left him confused at first now smoothly fall into place.
We reflect again on the film's score, performances, and action scenes, finding that rather than changing our initial impressions, this second viewing helps us to perceive and explain better what made us feel the way we did at first. We find more to discuss - the use of Elizabeth Debicki's height, the cost of Nolan's adherence to achieving visual effects without the use of CGI, the pleasure of the way in which Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character interacts with the heroes, whether Mike is just shit at watching spy movies - but our overall experience hasn't changed. What we liked, we still like; what we didn't, we still don't.
Recorded on 30th August 2020.
After a long wait and three delays, Christopher Nolan's latest high-concept blockbuster, Tenet, has finally arrived in British cinemas. This description is a spoiler-free zone, but the podcast is decidedly not, so tread carefully before you listen: We spill every secret the film has to hold. The ones we could figure out, anyway.
Following our revisitation of five of Nolan's massive flicks - the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, and Inception - we're keen to see how Tenet fits amongst its brethren. We consider, as we have done repeatedly, Nolan's action direction, the aesthetic design, the tone, the concept that drives everything, how it's explained, what we love, what let us down, and, well... to detail anything further would be indecent.
Mike is gobsmacked by it, finding brilliance in some of the film's execution, though is keen to make more than a few criticisms. José is much colder towards it, dismissing it as no more interesting than comic books for children - can Mike's enthusiasm rub off on him? Tenet has its flaws, but it's ambitious, intriguing, large-scale, wonderfully cast and acted - it's worth your time.
Recorded on 26th August 2020.
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael gives us the opportunity to reflect on a woman who, for José, stands above all other popular film critics, and whose work has always remained resonant. Pauline Kael effused about, excoriated, and defined an era of cinema and the culture that surrounded it, and changed the way films were written about. Through interviews with other critics, filmmakers and her daughter, Gina James, What She Said tells the story of Kael's life, work, philosophies, and controversies.
And not very well. The documentary doesn't ask interesting enough questions about Kael's life, glossing over areas that just beg to be explored, such as the relationship that produced Kael's daughter, which is handled only with a cursory line of superimposed text. José finds fault with the use of Sarah Jessica Parker to recite excerpts of Kael's reviews, feeling it to be wasted time; Mike argues that we're here because of her work, so it's sensible to include examples of it, and the use of appropriate film clips to accompany the words works well. Wasted time or not, the film doesn't show much interest in digging deep.
However, there's pleasure to be had in spending time with What She Said's interviewees, and sinking into its vast assortment of archive footage and illustrative film clips. It's a fan film, in the end, and enjoyable if approached with that in mind, and though Mike finds it hagiographic, José is glad of it as a corrective to Kael's detractors, of whom there were many, who saw her as a harridan and whose sparring with her almost always had an obviously misogynist component. It's an unsatisfying documentary, but well-meaning, and recommended to anyone with an interest in film culture and its history.
Recorded on 16th August 2020.
An ambitious, large-scale Netflix production, The Old Guard throws special ops, behind-enemy-lines-style action together with intriguing superhero-style mythology. Charlize Theron leads a team of immortal warriors, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years old, who find themselves on the run from corporate and military-industrial pursuers.
José is captured by the film from the beginning, his love for Theron's action stardom and the film's mysterious setup pulling him in; Mike takes an age to warm up to it, his inherent suspicion of all things Netflix keeping him wary. But when the story develops its romantic side, he softens, and both agree on what the film does best: the defiant declaration of love from one man to another, surrounded by armour-plated, heavily armed police. The Old Guard approaches representation of different sexualities and ethnicities in heartfelt, open ways, and the prospect of sequels that develop that further - perhaps even a universe - is promising.
Ultimately, José loves The Old Guard much, much more than Mike, but it wins us both over.
Recorded on 16th August 2020.
Could we have found a Christopher Nolan film that José actually enjoys? We explore the brilliantly imagined and executed Inception, a heist movie set inside the human mind, talking up the intelligence and creativity with which the central concept is used, the elegant and effective intercutting and structure, and the noirish, expressive romance that underpins the entire affair.
We've had some disappointments with Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, but Inception was just the antidote. Boy, are we fired up for Tenet now.
Recorded on 14th August 2020.
We finish off Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, the most entertaining and enjoyable of the three films. In a Gotham free of crime thanks to the draconian Dent Act, passed in the wake of Harvey Dent's murder at, so the story goes, the hands of Batman, who hasn't been seen since, the intriguing, intimidating, revolutionary figure of Bane arrives to terrorise and occupy the city. A recluse since the events of The Dark Knight, the threat of Bane gets Bruce Wayne back in his cowl, but he finds he's met his match.
We again question the film's politics, Mike arguing that its fascism isn't so much particular to this series as a core component of Batman in principle, and that maybe the most a Batman story can do is ignore it, rather than fix it. Its aesthetics come back into focus too, in its cinematic style and militaristic sensibility, José taking issue with both, though he loves the opening set piece. He finds a new appreciation for Michael Caine, and we take pleasure in the new additions to the cast, particularly Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway, and we leave the series in agreement that no matter our problems, it ended on a fun note.
Recorded on 6th August 2020.
Having established a muted tone in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's Batman series receives a welcome injection of flair in Heath Ledger's Joker, the villain and main attraction of 2008's The Dark Knight. Ledger's Joker captured imaginations and helped the film to a billion dollar box office gross, back when hitting that milestone was rare. José, as with Batman Begins, never got The Dark Knight, while Mike was so hyped for it that he saw it twice in IMAX before its official release. We discuss what holds up today and what doesn't, what the appeal is, the 70mm IMAX cinematography, how and why the film became a cultural meme, and what ideologically drives it.
Recorded 5th August 2020.
Planet Earth is dying, dust storms are wiping out crops, and all-American single dad, former NASA pilot and corn farmer Matthew McConaughey is our last hope for survival. A "ghost" appears in his daughter's bedroom, appearing to communicate by affecting gravity, and decoding the messages leads our hero to discover the last remnants of NASA, their observations of a wormhole near Saturn, and their journeys through it to planets that might be able to sustain human life. Eventually convinced of the plan's value and necessity, McConaughey agrees to lead a mission through the wormhole himself, leaving his family behind, but hoping to rescue them in the long term.
Mike was moved and surprised by Interstellar upon its release in 2014, but on this second viewing moves significantly towards José's unimpressed response, wondering whether it was simply the novelty of seeing new things to which he responded so positively. He compliments the film's scientific literacy, but complains that its dedication to incorporating scientific principles and registers can impede what should be dramatic developments, making them dry and clunky; José, who has no ear for science, finds that it's an irrelevance, unable to tell what might be drawn from reality and what isn't, and feeling that the film doesn't dramatise it well.
Everything is rendered through the central family and in particular the father-daughter relationship, strained because of the father's mission, and consistently the film's most important consideration, a little simple considering the global nature of Earth's problems and the countless other families the mission is intended to help. The mission's revelations and problems affect the entire world, and are discussed as such in dialogue, but we feel only the impact on this family - Interstellar speaks of societal problems but doesn't show or dramatise them. Mike argues, though, that that central connection is handled well, the most effective shot, in a film full of startling visuals, one of a father's face looking at his children.
We think about the action, and what it lacks. There are plenty of high-concept set pieces, but all seem to miss something in the execution. And we discuss the black hole scene, the design of that space and what it means, and how, while Mike was totally swept up in it upon first viewing, it quickly falls apart.
We're glad we've seen Interstellar again, and at the IMAX Digital, the best available screening outside of true IMAX - because our response can't be blamed on watching it on a laptop. We saw it as it should be seen, and emerged disappointed. Oh well.
Recorded on 4th August 2020.
Cineworld's reopening brings socially distanced screenings of past hits while the studios figure out their strategies for new releases, and with the highly anticipated and imminent release of Christopher Nolan's new sci-fi, Tenet, his previous blockbusters are once again showing. José chooses Batman Begins, hoping to understand what he didn't get when he first saw it in 2005, and why it matters.
To Mike's generation and demographic, Batman Begins is, if not a great film, an important one, as its muted aesthetic and attempt to render Batman and Gotham as plausible entities, capable of existing in the real world, signalled a significant difference from the outlandishness of both previous and contemporary comic book adaptations, and its tone conveyed a seriousness of purpose - how honestly or successfully is up for debate - that contributed to the idea that superhero films could begin to be taken seriously and even considered as Oscar contenders. And, although his previous three films had all been successful, Batman Begins was the first blockbuster of Nolan's career, and the financial success and cultural impact of his work would only increase, making him a dominant figure in cinema for people like Mike.
But Nolan's Batman trilogy has always left José feeling lost - something that might be true of Nolan's work overall - and he's keen to work out what he might be missing, whether it's more than just a generational thing, or whether, indeed, it's the children who are wrong.
We think through how Nolan reimagines Batman, and how differently Batman Begins feels now that it's fifteen years old. Mike suggests that the benevolent billionaire figure of Thomas Wayne, Batman's dad, is no longer believable, if indeed it ever should have been, and José turns a peeve about Nolan's almost entirely European casting into a working theory about the Britishness of his film, and what that means for its fidelity to the themes and tone of the comic books on which it's based.
We'll be following this up with discussions of the two successive Dark Knight films, as well as Interstellar and Inception, in this impromptu Christopher Nolan season. It's all thanks to finally being back at the cinema, where, as José loudly shouts in the face of everyone who think their big telly is great, all films are best seen - especially Christopher Nolan's.
Recorded on 31st July 2020.
Our exploration of William Friedkin ends almost where it began, with his second collaboration with Tracy Letts, who, following the adaptation of his second play, Bug, adapts for the screen his first, Killer Joe. A key film in Matthew McConaughey's career, one of the first in what would become known as the McConaissance, Killer Joe sees his seductive, charming romcom persona repurposed to threatening, chilling effect in the ugly world of trailer parks and contract killing.
We discuss THAT scene with the chicken leg, and compare and contrast it to THAT scene with the crucifix in The Exorcist, asking what might be outrageous about one but not the other. We ask what we're missing in Letts' screenplay that others see, and José argues that Friedkin has throughout his career been drawn to second-rate source material - material that here is unquestionably elevated by the cast, who are almost all excellent and believable, in particular Gina Gershon, of whom demanding things are asked, and Juno Temple, who carries with her an otherworldliness that lightens what is a very dark part in a very dark story.
And we take the opportunity to think over the set of Friedkin films that we've now seen, including his biggest hits, and consider what we've learned, what his achievements and strengths are, where he fails or what he lacks, and where he stands amongst his contemporaries and peers.
Recorded on 30th July 2020.
No exploration of William Friedkin would be complete without The Exorcist, 1973's iconic horror about a little girl possessed by a demon, and so watch it we do.
We watch the theatrical cut, which Mike's excited to see, since the only one he's seen before is "The Version You've Never Seen", the extended cut released in 2000, and he finds this version superior, with better pacing and fewer distractions. José has always had a significant problem with the crucifix scene, and we go into why, and he argues that the film exhibits a desire to shock above all else that is typical of Friedkin. Mike argues for the sympathy we feel for Father Karras and his centrality - Max von Sydow's Father Merrin is in theory the eponymous exorcist, but is that actually the case? And we think over much more besides, including the thrill of the special effects, the disparity between how Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells is used and its subsequent iconic synonimity with the film, whether the film should be clearer about the boundaries of its demon's abilities, and ultimately, the fact that it's so famous - or is that infamous? - that even Mike's mum still references the projectile vomit bit.
Recorded on 23rd July 2020.
As likeable as it is incoherent, Jade oozes style and steaminess. David Caruso's assistant district attorney, searching for the killer of a businessman, finds himself delving into a world of kink, prostitution and power, in which Linda Fiorentino, his former lover, is embroiled.
William Friedkin's attraction to the taboo is at home in the world of the erotic thriller, but as enjoyable as Jade is, it's a film you watch with one eye on its substantial problems. It's a film in which everything is done for effect, and damn the consequences - especially the final twist, which turns the film's sexual liberation and power dynamics on their head, for no good reason. Still, it's a film we were both happy to watch twice, and as superficial as it may be, that surface is highly polished and glossy.
Recorded on 23rd July 2020.
To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin's 1985 neo-noir, is kinky, colourful, offbeat and as much a Los Angeles film as The French Connection is a New York one. A young and androgynous Willem Dafoe plays a notorious counterfeiter pursued by two Secret Service agents, one by the book, the other corrupted. We discuss the film's style and tone, its subject matter and setting in L.A.'s liminal, casually confrontational criminal underworld, its sensuous cinematography, and how it reflects and contrasts with The French Connection, particularly in the context of the films' morally cloudy protagonists.
José has a soft spot for To Live and Die in L.A. despite acknowledging several problematic facets to it; Mike can't say he loves it, finding little satisfying to bite on other than the extraordinarily expressive imagery and Dafoe's captivating presence. Still, it's a bold, evocative work of very, very Eighties noir, and deviant enough to keep you on your toes.
Recorded on 19th July 2020.
William Friedkin remakes Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, telling four strangers' tale of their two-hundred-mile journey through the South American jungle, transporting dangerously explosive cargo for a US oil company. Though a flop upon its release, we find some nice things to say about Sorcerer.
It's impressively narrated, largely wordlessly, although we wouldn't have minded some character development, and Friedkin's preference for spectacle over depth is on display: as with The French Connection, the end leaves us asking, "is that all it's about?" The treatment of South America and its people is lazy if not worse, the central characters ending up in this hell as a form of cosmic punishment for their sins. But there's a keen sense of pace to Sorcerer, despite how long it takes for the journey to even begin, some memorable images, and one outstanding, stunning set-piece. Its present-day reappraisal is understandable, and despite its problems, it's worth a look.
Recorded on 19th July 2020.
A classic of Hollywood crime, The French Connection paints a bleak picture of life and justice in America, as Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle demonstrates that no matter how low the drug dealers he pursues, he can sink lower. We ask what its depiction of New York's underbelly and the accuracy of Doyle's hunches despite his revolting behaviour says about the filmmakers, and consider Pauline Kael's assertion that the film is "what we once feared mass entertainment might become". Underneath the iconic style and unforgettable chase, is there anything meaningful to The French Connection?
Recorded on 14th July 2020.
Adapted from Tracy Letts' 1996 play of the same name, 2006's Bug, directed by William Friedkin, sees two lonely people with traumatic histories connect and share a descent into madness. It's a bit of an experiment, its theatrical roots obvious, some questions left unsatisfyingly unanswered, and it's not until the final act that it takes off. But it's interesting, features strong performances from Michael Shannon (who also played the role on stage) and Ashley Judd, and is essential viewing for anyone interested in Friedkin, Shannon, Judd or Letts.
Recorded on 5th July 2020.
Spike Lee's latest joint sees four US Army veterans, the Bloods, return to their former battlefields in Vietnam in search of two things: the body of their fallen comrade and leader, Stormin' Norman, and a cache of gold bars, intended during the war to pay the Lahu people for their help fighting the Viet Cong, but taken and buried by the Bloods for themselves. Set in the modern day, exploring the history of black oppression and racism in the USA, and released on Netflix among a backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, Da 5 Bloods could hardly be more relevant. But is it successful?
No, argues José. Spike Lee is in full-on propagandist, pamphleteer mode here, delivering lessons about racism and class, warfare and imperialism, black martyrs and heroes, but inartfully and clunkily. Although his direct address is striking and powerful, the Rambo-esque action adventure story to which it's married lacks imagination and intelligence, and really functions only as a frame from which to hang the film's essays. Its representation of the Vietnamese is at best crude and even arrogant, a scene with a man selling oranges and chickens particularly egregious, and its characters are thinly drawn, their relationships and development unsatisfying. Mike argues for one or two things he likes, particularly the way in which Stormin' Norman is integrated into the story and the flashbacks to the war are put together, but ultimately cannot but agree with José's disappointment.
Da 5 Bloods is an overpraised film that promises more than it delivers. But someone has finally managed to make a Vietnam film without using "Fortunate Son", so there's that.
Recorded on 28th June 2020.
A slow, careful drama, Vitalina Varela - named for the non-professional actor at the centre, who plays a version of herself - tells a story of grief, anger, and discovery. Vitalina, abandoned by her husband in the 1980s, travels to Portugal from Cape Verde to confront him, but finds that he has passed away just days ago. She is left to explore the house he has left empty and the life he led without her for some forty years, and the film gives ample time to the feelings and questions that arise within her.
We discuss the economic situation depicted - this is a slum in Lisbon, built into the ground, feeling a world away from the vibrant, wealthy capital nearby - and Varela's visual power, her performance one of presence as much as acting, as she moves slowly through the town like a ghost. Leonardo Simões' cinematography is extraordinarily beautiful, thoughtfully composed and intricately lit, and Mike remarks upon how the edges of the 4:3 frame blend into the blackness of a widescreen television, giving a feeling of an expanse of darkness. We ultimately disagree on how much we liked it: José was engrossed throughout, Mike found the tempo a trial - but stories like Vitalina Varela's are necessary to tell, rare to see, and worth experiencing.
Recorded on 3rd June 2020.
A film dear to Mike's heart since childhood, and a large blot on Steven Spielberg's career despite its financial success, Hook imagines a world in which Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie's flying boy who never grows up... grows up and forgets how to fly. When the adult Peter, a workaholic corporate lawyer unaware of his origins, travels to London with his family, his children are kidnapped, forcing him to return to Neverland, confronting his past, his attitude, and his erstwhile adversary, Captain Hook.
Hook is a chunky, colourful family film with flaws all over the place. Its action is unexciting, its plot composed of several disparate strands and themes that never cohere elegantly. José takes issue with Dustin Hoffman's accent and John Williams' score, finding the former pointless and unsuccessful, the latter prescriptive and overbearing. But Mike defends them, finding charm in them, and appreciating as an adult what never stuck in his mind as a child, in particular the central emotional conceit: that for all the costs of growing up, the refusal of the Lost Boys to do so, and the fact that all adults in Neverland are pirates, Peter's happy thought - the crucial feeling that allows him to fly again - is of becoming a father and holding his newborn son. And José finds beauty in the lighting and staging of the film's London townhouse scenes that he never appreciated upon its first release.
A messy film, but with pleasures. And anyway, it turns out that if you saw it five hundred times as a preteen then no criticism anybody can make can matter.
Recorded on 1st June 2020.
From a central focus on two aspiring young basketball hopefuls from Chicago, Hoop Dreams weaves an incredible tapestry of race and class in America, without once explaining itself to the audience, without once winking and imploring us to notice something. William Gates and Arthur Agee, two black boys of about 14 or 15 years old, are plucked from their neighbourhoods by a scout for St. Joseph's High School in Westchester, a white suburban private school that dips into the inner city looking for talent to boost its basketball team, chucking back any kid that doesn't show enough promise. Over the course of several years, we follow William and Arthur's development.
William and Arthur don't start in the same place - William is touted as the next Isiah Thomas, a former St. Joseph's alumnus who reached the NBA, and receives as an individual gift a personally guaranteed scholarship to St. Joseph's from a wealthy benefactor. Arthur is labelled with no particular expectation beyond that he shows the potential to go pro, and whose partial scholarship becomes a financial burden once the school decides they've had enough of him - they want tuition fees from him now. The stresses put on these boys come from all angles - their school demands they perform for the team while keeping their grades up, their parents and communities put all their hopes into their success, and achieving stardom, a vanishingly unlikely prospect, feels like the only hope for a life free of minimum wage jobs and the power being cut off because of unpaid bills. Over the course of three hours, we understand intimately who William and Arthur are, the familial and socioeconomic circumstances that shape them, and follow them as they grow, learn, and encounter hurdles throughout their time at St. Joseph's.
Hoop Dreams is an all-time great documentary, a portrait of life in early Nineties America that is both a state-of-the-nation declaration for its time and effortlessly legible and relevant today.
Recorded on 30th May 2020.
A somewhat elliptical family drama from Pablo Larraín, Ema tells the story of a young woman who returned a child she adopted, feels the loss deeply, and wants to get him back. We discuss the central performances from Mariana Di Girolamo and Gael García Bernal, how their characters throw the most painful insults at each other but remain so obviously in love, Ema's sexual fluidity and willingness to use sex as a tool, the poetic opening movement to the film including the astonishing on-stage, colour-shifting Sun, and whether Ema's pain is as apparent as we'd like.
Recorded on 21st May 2020.
On a very special Eavesdropping at the Movies requested by our listeners, José takes us through the career of Burt Lancaster, every one of whose films he has been watching during the lockdown. Lancaster is a star through whose career a whole history of movements and evolutions in Hollywood can be tracked, from the studio noirs of the 1940s right through to the anti-war allegories of the 1970s, taking in all of the social, political, stylistic, industrial and aesthetic shifts that would take place in a constantly changing America.
On screen, Lancaster was capable of moving fluidly between genres and styles, including noir, action-adventure and Westerns, won the 1960 Oscar for Best Actor for Elmer Gantry, was regularly amongst the top box-office stars from 1950-1965, and worked with some of the great screenwriters and playwrights, including Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Off screen, he was one of the foremost independent producers of his day. He fought against McCarthyism during the height of the Red Scare, employing blacklisted screenwriters when nobody else would, later made a number of anti-racist revisionist Westerns, and championed progressive causes throughout his life. José argues that Lancaster conceived of the cinema as a national theatre of ideas, a place in which conversations could be had and arguments advanced, a conception that ties his entire, varied career together.
Mike, on the other hand, has barely seen anything of Burt Lancaster's, and José has put him on a crash course of five or six films in order to get a sense of his work, style and persona. He's left with questions to throw at José: Why Lancaster hasn't lingered culturally as strongly as some of his contemporaries? Is it his politics? His acting ability? His style? Is his reputation for muscles, teeth, and little else, justified?
Burt Lancaster, José concludes, represents the best of America. His work is ripe for rediscovery, and offers rich insight on a constantly changing culture and industry.
Recorded on 19th May 2020.
Federico Fellini invites us to hang out with a group of unemployed, lazy twentysomethings in 1953's I vitelloni, one of his earliest films and an interesting portrait of life in a sleepy Italian town. For José, comparisons to his youth in a sleepy Spanish town abound; Mike finds links to British films that evoke similar feelings. I vitelloni is both culturally specific and universally relatable - every society has some version of the gang one grows up with, and the middle-class youngsters who think they rule the place.
We consider the motif of homosexuality - evoked in different ways by different characters, sometimes explicitly and sometimes only if we want to see it, but present throughout - and the theme of patriarchy, considering particularly the roles of women in the film, be they wives, mothers, or playthings, and ask what their agency is, if any - do they even believe they have any? Life in I vitelloni's seaside town is unconducive to personal progress, development, opportunity, and freedom, but where another story would express the frustrations felt by the constricted youth, here they harbour few ambitions.
I vitelloni is evocative and timeless - as coherent and understandable today as it was seventy years ago.
Recorded on 14th May 2020.
Stardom, beauty, the machinery of Hollywood, madness, age - 1978's Fedora sees Billy Wilder occupying much of the same thematic territory of his 1950 classic, Sunset Boulevard. William Holden's has-been film producer attends the funeral of Fedora, a reclusive former film star, and thinks back on the recent trip he took to Corfu, attempting to track her down and coax her out of retirement. What unravels is a mystery, a conspiracy, a twisted mother-daughter relationship, and another in Mubi's strand of "perfect failures".
Wilder's struggle to finance Fedora is apparent, José suggesting that in every part one can imagine a superior actor. Though that's perhaps scant defence of the tedious visual design - Dutch angles don't cost money, and the film is crying out for more visual expression than it offers. Mike explains his problem with the plot structure and particularly his dislike of "two weeks earlier" hooks, and we consider the way in which we're asked to believe in Fedora's incredible stardom while not really having it explained to us satisfactorily. And José takes particular issue with the casting of Michael York as himself, finding him a blank, while Mike is more content with it, but perhaps that's largely because whenever someone says "Michael York" it makes him laugh.
Despite the film's many problems, it remains an intriguing exploration of stardom, identity, the lengths to which people will go to support their own delusions. Mike suggests that Fedora and Sunset Boulevard share a low opinion of women, that their themes of self-obsession, fame and beauty are particularly aligned with their stars' gender. José describes Fedora's relationship to reality, in particular the ways in which it echoes Marlene Dietrich's extraordinary fame and subsequent withdrawal from the public eye, and how Wilder's experience and understanding of this and other inside stories informs the film.
And finally, Mike takes a moment to bring up two things he doesn't like about Sunset Boulevard, because he wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't take one look at a great masterpiece of cinema and explain what's rubbish about it.
Recorded on 6th May 2020.
Carole Lombard and Jack Benny lead chaos in 1942's To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch's classic black comedy set amongst a group of actors turned resistors in occupied Poland. Considered to be in bad taste at the time, it was, to say the least, a bold film to make, one that mocked the very real and active threat of the Nazis to their faces. It's also endlessly witty and truly hilarious, generous and kind. It's a treat.
We think about it in comparison to other satire, in particular that of Mel Brooks, who José argues has an aggression and contempt that Lubitsch avoids, while Mike suggests that their work shares an absolute unambiguity as to the targets they set and the messages they convey. But there's unquestionably a remarkable sensitivity of tone to To Be or Not to Be, as well as an effortlessly executed intelligence in plotting, with the love triangle of the opening leading cleverly, smoothly, and unpredictably, into the unmasking of a Gestapo spy.
José can't speak highly enough of Lubitsch, above whom there sits nobody in the pantheon of the great filmmakers. And Mike likes him too.
P.S. Corrections and clarifications: Mike begs your forgiveness for incorrectly claiming that Sid Caesar famously played a comedy Nazi on television in the 1950s. He in fact played a German general. A comedy German general.
Recorded on 29th April 2020.
A film many have heard of and few have seen, Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's infamous difficult second album. Six years after his eventual cult hit Donnie Darko, this sprawling, confusing mess of an end-of-days parable was released to thunderous bafflement and almost no box office. We dive in and find that perhaps all we needed was to give it thirteen years to breathe.
There's no defending much of the film's execution. Kelly's visuals are functional at best, almost never expressive, and rather obvious, there's an abundance of plot that feels at once over- and under-developed, and there's no emotional way in to significantly connect with any character. But Southland Tales is chock full of ideas and ambition, and there's much to respond positively to. José considers how its critique of American culture continues to resonate today; Mike suggests that alongside M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, it captures the state of mind of post 9/11, pre-financial crash, perpetually warring, deeply conservative and fearful America. Kelly may show little instinct for visual expression, but his ability to cast well and get the best out of his actors is remarkable, and for José, Justin Timberlake and Dwayne Johnson have never been better. And we consider the use of Revelations in the voiceover, and wonder where Seann William Scott has been for the last ten years.
For a Saturday night in, it's tough to recommend Southland Tales. As a sizzlingly ambitious attempt to combine just about every worry it was possible to have in mid-2000s America into a grand work of sci-fi satire, it's fascinating and worth your time. Its reach far exceeds its grasp, but that's so much more appealing than the other way round.
Recorded on 26th April 2020.
A prototypical screwball comedy, 1934's Twentieth Century sees John Barrymore delightfully chewing the scenery as a pompous theatre impresario who discovers and makes a star of Carole Lombard's lingerie model. Having separated after several successful years, the former power couple meet by chance on the luxury Twentieth Century train, and it all kicks off as schemes are put into action, conflict erupts, and some religious bloke keeps putting stickers that say "REPENT" on everything he sees.
Barrymore is sensational, sending theatrical types up and orating floridly and dramatically, while Lombard clashes with him spikily. We consider how well Twentieth Century fits into the screwball genre - the dialogue is snappy and witty, the situations farcical, the relationships barbed, although it's less of an even two-hander than you might expect, the focus heavily on Barrymore. Mike argues that the chemistry between the couple doesn't play as enjoyably as intended, and that the bits of business on the fringes, and the knowing weariness with which Barrymore's two assistants handle their jobs, are where the real joy lies. And José effusively compares Barrymore's ability to move between stage and screen to Laurence Olivier's, another actor renowned as the greatest of his day, but who appeared fussy and busy on film.
While it's no new discovery, Twentieth Century holding places in the National Film Registry and the history of film comedy, it's a new one for us, and a corker.
P.S. Corrections and clarifications: Burt Lancaster never performed a part written by the New Yorker film critic Terrence Rafferty. He did perform a part written by the British dramatist Terence Rattigan. José apologises profusely.
Recorded on 24th April 2020.
A 62-minute-long, 1940 B-movie whose director you haven't heard of and whose top-billed star has barely ten minutes of screen time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Stranger on the Third Floor is nothing remarkable, but its reputation precedes it: Here we behold, if the legends are true, the first film noir.
José, a lover of noir, both likes and dislikes this line. On the one hand, it enjoyably disrupts what is already a fairly shaky narrative of noir beginning practically overnight in 1941; on the other, noir is a term that encompasses many visual styles, stories, character types, associated genres and influences, and artistic movements like this develop gradually, not immediately. But this taxonomic discussion says nothing of Stranger on the Third Floor's quality.
And for a good fifteen minutes or so, that quality is not promising, but the film explodes into life upon the protagonist's descent into a hallucinatory nightmare brought on by guilt and fear. It's José's first time seeing the film, and immediately he proclaims its dream sequence as one of cinema's greatest. And throughout the film, before, during and after this central visual treat, there is conveyed a vivid sense of the difficulties of life in Depression-era America, alongside a severe critique of the absurdity of a justice system that can be relied upon to offer nothing of the sort. All of which is to say nothing of Peter Lorre, who imbues his titular stranger with both understandable threat and surprising empathy.
So, Stranger on the Third Floor, The First Film Noir, is rather more than an historical curio. It embodies stylistic and thematic developments that were taking place in American cinema of its era, though the question of what counts as first is best left to those who think it's even deserving of an answer, let alone possible to establish one. It's a film that is on its own terms deserving of your attention, and in between its B-movie cheapness and clunkiness, offers something truly great.
Recorded on 22nd April 2020.
We conclude our dalliance with Jean-Pierre Melville with 1970's Le Cercle rouge, a heist film with an impressive cast of Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. We discuss how genre conventions operate in the film - the shortcuts an understanding of genre provides allow details to make the difference, Mike suggesting that it all comes out through character relationships and quirks.
In discussing Le Cercle rouge, we think back on what we've learned about Melville's style, themes and interests. For Melville, emotional attachment is dangerous and makes one vulnerable; it's a rather bleak outlook, but José argues that his films aren't without their romantic aspects. Mike remarks upon the way in which Melville's style has been interpreted and appropriated by the filmmakers he influenced, noting that the vivacity with which, for instance, Quentin Tarantino effuses about Melville is not reflective of Melville's films themselves, which are slower and more pensive than you might be led to expect. To José, it's existentialist cinema through and through, and, naturally, he loves it.
Recorded on 10th April 2020.
Jean-Pierre Melville draws upon his experiences in the French Resistance for 1969's Army of Shadows, which depicts an ensemble including Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse working to disrupt the Nazi occupation of France, rescuing Resistance members from captivity, operating safehouses... and killing informants.
Army of Shadows' view of the Resistance is far from romantic, showing the ordinary people who comprise it being driven to extreme measures in the cause of remaining hidden and evading capture, and the threat of capture and death hanging over them at all times. We compare it to The Great Escape, a caper in which prisoners of war work towards a big victory - there's nothing of the sort in Army of Shadows, the Resistance only ever staying one step ahead of the Nazis pursuing them. Resistance itself is the victory, and it comes with costs.
We think about continuities between this film and Melville's other work. The isolation felt in Un flic and Le Doulos comes through here, the Resistance members needing to work together but constantly suspicious of one another, as anyone could turn informant; emotional connection is a danger, as it can be used as a thumbscrew. But the film depicts the courage of the Resistance, the inhumanity of the situations into which they're forced, and elicits a range of feelings simultaneously. It's a complex, intelligent, essential film.
Recorded on 9th April 2020.
We visit another Melville, 1963's Le Doulos, about a network of criminals searching for an informer in their midst. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays his thief with such assuredly French swagger that it's no wonder why Quentin Tarantino names this film as a significant influence, though we also pick up on the story's similarity to Reservoir Dogs, in particular the botched robbery and snitch mystery.
The film has clearly been preserved beautifully, the crispness of the images on Mubi's stream simply breathtaking. As with Un flic, we consider the characters' alienation, emphasised here through composition and framing, and their decisions, including the idea that all these men try to do the right thing by their particular code.
Despite looking for things to like, Mike is ultimately nonplussed and a little bored by Le Doulos, preferring, on reflection, Un flic, while José, as ever the spirit of sunshine, beams with praise for it. We can at least agree that it looks fabulous.
Recorded on 3rd April 2020.
Jean-Pierre Melville's final film, Un flic (A Cop), has a bleak feel, its characters isolated amongst harsh architecture and the neverending business of cops and robbers. Alain Delon's cop follows the trail of Richard Crenna's thief, whilst handling informants, other cases, and an occasional relationship with Catherine Deneuve.
It's a film in which feeling shows through small actions, glances, and behaviour. The cop has seen the worst of humanity and carries a weariness with him, but that just makes his capability for generous gestures more meaningful. Mike remarks upon the similarity between cop and thief, both going about their work with a sense of lifeless inertia. We also note the central heist sequence's clear influence on the climactic set-piece in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, comparing the ways in which the scenes work and what their intended effects may be, and José comments on the film's blue-tinged look, something that contributes greatly to its sense of melancholy.
Recorded on 1st April 2020.
Hollywood action in the Eighties was a world unto itself, and we look back on two specimens of one of the genre's icons, Arnold Schwarzenegger. One a delightful, over-the-top romp, the other a macho, moody sci-fi, we compare and contrast Commando and Predator.
We're in agreement that Predator is the better film, but that Commando offers the better time. José describes this era as his awakening to the fact that heterosexual men were checking out each others' bodies - Arnie and co. are put on display, made to flex their muscles in absurd ways, their bodies painted in glistening sweat, for the pleasure of a straight male audience. We discuss how Arnie's extraordinary body means entire films have to built around it: elsewhere cast as a pseudo-Greek hero and android killing machine, in Commando and Predator he's theoretically human, but still a G.I. Joe male fantasy inhabiting similarly oversized films. Similarly, his accent always needs at least a hint of acknowledgement - the films taking a line of dialogue here and there to reassure us, don't you worry, we also know he sounds odd.
We also think about the fact that these films have simply lasted. Commando in particular is not a very good film, but 35 years after its release it retains a loyal audience, and has to be considered a classic of a kind. Though dated and easy to critique in all sorts of ways, there are still pleasures in this cinema, and Arnie in particular.
Recorded on 30th March 2020.
A political parable, satire, thriller, high-concept actioner, horror, and Western all at once, 2019 Cannes Jury Prize winner Bacurau is a wild experience and well worth your time. Set in a tiny, remote village in a near-future Brazil, we're given a portrait of life within an open, tolerant community under the thumb of a distant but powerful mayor, and shortly after the funeral of one of the town's elders, things start going awry.
To say more would be to spoil the surprises, and we encourage you to check the film out knowing as little as possible. As a fable, it's a potent piece of work - themes of political abuses, the ownership and withholding of water conferring power, and the value of community and the knowledge of history are all made manifest as Bacurau straddles its genres and provides its thrills. It's a film that's as open to interpretation as it is clear about what it thinks - its clunkiness in this respect a positive for Mike while occasionally a little overegged for José. But quibbles here and there pale in significance to Bacurau's boldness and intelligence, and you should see it.
Recorded on 27th March 2020.
We may be living under lockdown conditions, but no virus can stop us, and to prove it we're taking on Steven Soderbergh's 2011 thriller Contagion, about a virus that rips through every country on Earth, the scientific work to stop it, and the social decay that it leaves in its wake. Suggested as a podcast by an irony-seeking Mike, it backfires as it actually just frightens him.
At least, for a while. We think about the film in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic currently upon us, of course, praising what we recognise in the film's imagined crisis, remarking upon the differences. Much of what it depicts feels very true to life, and it strongly evokes panic and a sense of uncertainty; on the other hand, the difference less than a decade makes is thrown into sharp relief with the film's essentially competent and well-intentioned government response to the disease, a far cry from the lies and bluster being spouted by certain American presidents today - something that would have been not only unimaginable but laughable at the time of the film's release. José notes that a high proportion of the public worry in our current outbreak comes down to its economic effects, which again, Contagion does not imagine as even a minor point.
It's a well-made film, tightly plotted and paced, juggling several plots and sets of characters, understanding keenly how and when to jump between them, and its staging, editing and cinematography bring to life the paranoia of living in a society in which any surface innocently touched by any stranger's hand could spread a deadly disease, and the fear and confusion engendered by a lack of trust in the government and loud countervailing voices. Contagion uses its characters and scenes as representative of ideas as much as, or more than, things in and of themselves, which Mike argues leaves it emotionally distant and overly simplistic - though there's plenty of room for debate, particularly over Matt Damon's performance.
All in all, Contagion is an impressive piece of thriller fiction whose successes and failures are both given oxygen in the light of very recent developments. If you watch it, be prepared to be made even more paranoid than you currently are... because the world we're living in now is even more insane.
Recorded on 24th March 2020.
A delicate, intelligent love story, Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire undulates with complex, interlocking themes and emotions. It's a film about looking: who looks, who is looked at, how one should be seen, for whom the gaze is intended and what the rules are. Héloïse, a young aristocrat, refuses to have her portrait painted for the approval of a Milanese nobleman; an artist named Marianne is commissioned to do just that, but in secret, forcing her to steal glances at her subject and, outwardly, act merely as her companion. The women's relationship quickly develops, and soon they are collaborating on the portrait to which Héloïse had hitherto objected.
Sciamma demonstrates an eye for beautiful, sensitive composition, and with cinematographer Claire Mathon creates some simply stunning imagery, evoking 18th and 19th century Romantic art; truly, this film understands what it means to paint with light. We consider the differences between the characters: one formerly resident in a convent, brought home to take over her sister's role to be betrothed; the other a skilled worker, whose life experience Héloïse is keen to probe - and this is to say nothing of Sophie, the maid, who forms friendships with both Héloïse and Marianne, and the drama of whose life experience surely outweighs theirs combined. We discuss how the boundaries between the three - particularly Héloïse and the two workers - are broken down; without the rule-keeping figure of Héloïse's mother present, the young women are able, to an extent, to reshape the world in which they live. But patriarchy overhangs the entire film, even with men physically absent throughout; the painting into which Marianne and Héloïse are investing their love is the very thing, intended for the Milanese suitor as it is, that will seal their fate to live separate lives.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an ambitious, confident, complex and beautiful film whose imagery soars on the cinema screen. See it.
Recorded on 3rd March 2020.
A legal drama about the biggest corruption scandal you've never heard of, Dark Waters tells the story of lawyer Robert Bilott's twenty year long fight to expose chemical manufacturer DuPont's decades of knowing and unapologetic poisoning of a town, a country, and the entire world. Visited by a West Virginian farmer named Wilbur Tennant, whose livestock are falling prey to unusual medical conditions and dying, Bilott - a corporate lawyer who works to help DuPont pollute within the law - files a lawsuit, and slowly begins to uncover the company's secrets.
For José, it's a film that fits neatly amongst director Todd Haynes' previous work, which often focuses on power relations and the struggles of the oppressed, sidelined or disenfranchised. For Mike, it might be a new Spotlight, another film about the exposure of vast, historical, institutional wrongdoing. But don't believe the trailer that makes it look all blood and thunder - Dark Waters, though compelling and dramatic, is a slow burner, methodical and careful, and with a scope that looks beyond the details of the law. The town of Parkersburg, WV is shown in portrait, with shots evocative of Depression-era photography, and Bilott is an interesting character, a man who appears uncomfortable within his own body, whose determination to uncover the truth grows alongside his paranoia that something bad will happen to him, and whose relationship with his wife is a constant that is reframed intriguingly in the film's final movement.
Dark Waters is a fascinating, intelligent, complex thriller that gives its themes room to express themselves and is full of details and moments that speak to entire inner lives and ways of thinking. Make sure you see it.
(Mike would also like to apologise to Bucky Bailey, one of DuPont's most unfortunate victims and perhaps the film's central emotional tentpole, for referring to him as Bucky Barnes, who is the guy from the Avengers films who sports a prosthetic arm and does nothing interesting.)
Recorded on 28th February 2020.
An assured debut feature from director Melina Matsoukas, Queen & Slim is a romantic, fugitive road movie with a state-of-the-nation feel. After an awkward first date, a traffic stop escalates out of hand, resulting in one dead police officer, shot in self defence, and two black civilians on the run. Their escape sees them take a tour through Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana and Florida, their public profile growing, their actions inspiring both admiration and dismay amongst those they encounter.
It's a confidently made film, evocative of a bygone era though set in the modern day, slow and tonally adept, with two wonderful performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith. We discuss whether it's a noir and Turner-Smith's unwitting femme fatale, the characters' changes of costume, the way in which a variety of music expresses different elements of black culture with the effect of unifying them, the details and suggestions that build a holistic, believable world, what effect the reveal of the characters' names has, and what significance faith might play.
Queen & Slim is a beautiful film that effortlessly expresses the struggles and oppressions of black Americans within a set of smoothly combined genres. It's a true original, and a great experience.
Recorded on 13th February 2020.
The latest winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's American Factory is a complex and brilliant examination of a clash of cultures and management styles and the diminishment of a class of workers having to grovel for jobs they cannot do without.
In 2014, the recently closed GM factory in Moraine, Ohio, was acquired and reopened by Fuyao Glass, a Chinese company; many of the former GM employees, often out of regular work since the closure in 2008, would occupy new jobs there. While the film depicts clashes between the Moraine locals and the Chinese employees flown in to supervise them, it also ensures that it doesn't accept any indulgence in xenophobia, instead showing employees of both nationalities spending leisure time together and getting along. The film is less interested in moderating the clash between the Chinese and American supervisors - a trip to a Chinese plant, intended to show the Americans how things should be done, with robotic employees, militaristic roll calls and company songs, long hours, hardly any days off, non-existent safety standards and a focus on quantity of production over quality, is met with raised eyebrows by all but one conspicuously enthusiastic visitor. That those unconvinced bosses are eventually replaced by more Chinese overseers is no surprise - nor is it a surprise that a bubbling movement to unionise the Moraine workers is suppressed by an appeasing extra couple of dollars of pay - that still keeps salaries at half of what they'd been at GM - and an expensive propaganda campaign that successfully scares most of the employees into voting against unionisation.
There's a vast amount going on in this concise and potent film, and Reichert and Bognar work magic to marshal a sprawling web of people, plots and themes, and to allow the workers to narrate their own story smoothly and with little outside help (just a few lines of superimposed text here and there). It's available on Netflix, and you should not miss out on it.
Recorded on 13th February 2020.
Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, a tale of two lighthouse keepers stranded during a storm, is a visual treat in black and white that stuns and engrosses us. A two-hander between Willem Dafoe's irascible boss and Robert Pattinson's secretive youngster, it invokes myth, gods, folk tales, the clash of male egos, compulsive psychosexuality, if not much, much more besides.
If its plot is simple, its story is complex, and we think our way through its characters' personalities, wants, needs, and psychologies. José asks if the film is gothic, and we discuss the boss's treatment of his assistant: is it just controlling, or abusive? Extraordinary imagery of mermaids, monsters, and gods suffuses the film with inescapable surreality and the turbulent minds of men overburdened with ego and sexual need. Eggers has an assured, confident sense of tone, layering the film with mood and atmosphere, making its remote island a pressure cooker.
The Lighthouse is a spectacular film, an audiovisual treat that you should not miss at the cinema. Its imagery is poetic, its characters complex - in its entirety, it is confusing but approachable, symbolic but not coded, allowing room for interpretation and emotional response. It's brilliant.
Recorded on 11th February 2020.
It's one of José's films of the year; it leaves Mike cold. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite depicts social inequality in South Korea through a lower-class family that cons its way into working for an upper-class family. We pick our way through the film's structure; its motif of staircases that delineate status and power relations; the way poverty carries with it an inescapable smell, intolerable to the upper class; the two families' experiences of nature and the desire for sunshine.
It builds on some aspects of horror, but cannot at all be considered one, either in genre or affect - though the fact that its trailers sold it as such might have something to do with Mike's frosty response. It's an allegorical thriller, every character standing in place of a class or group of people, and its construction is intelligent, thoughtful and tight. For José, it works on a visceral level, the mood and tone emphasising and combining with the structure and metaphor; for Mike, it's a flat experience, a clever essay with definite interpretations and little feeling.
But it's clearly touched a nerve, connecting with worldwide audiences. It speaks not just to conditions in South Korea but a global system of oppression and inequality under capitalism. We may not agree on what it makes us feel, but it's potent food for thought and offers much to discuss. Don't miss it.
Also in this episode, we take a look at the upcoming Oscars, which eager cinephiles will be able to watch yesterday.
Recorded on 9th February 2020.
Trying to build a portrait of patriarchal power and subjugation that shapes the lives of five women, Birds of Prey takes a solid enough foundation and executes it abysmally, lacking visual style, coherent storytelling, and really any imagination. It's the worst time José's endured at the cinema in a year; Mike heroically offers a couple of examples of moments he enjoyed - the flying sandwich - but there's no rescuing these damsels in distress.
Recorded on 7th February 2020.
Independent filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie team up with Adam Sandler for Uncut Gems, an energetic, evolving crime thriller set in Manhattan's Diamond District. By the time we meet Sandler's Jewish jeweller, Howard, he's already embedded within a web of competing interests, desires and debts, as well as a gambling addiction - and the tension only mounts as problems grow worse.
The Safdie brothers and Sandler are all Jewish New York natives, the writer-directors in particular growing up, in part, around the Diamond District, where their father worked. There's a specificity to the location and culture that the film captures beautifully, a richness to Howard's characterisation, and the world he inhabits, that feels authentically observed. Howard's need to take risks never allows the tension to settle - he can't help but invite further trouble upon himself, so neither does the film let us calm down for a second.
Uncut Gems is a complex, character-oriented, engrossing work of edge-of-your-seat genre entertainment, and a terrific follow-up to the Safdies' 2017 thriller Good Time, which we discuss a little bit (but not too much because José hasn't finished it yet). Both Good Time and Uncut Gems are available on Netflix, and well worth your time. The Safdie brothers might not just be good - they might be greats.
Recorded on 23rd January 2020.
The film that wants to make us feel bad for people who worked at Fox News, Bombshell casts former stars Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson as heroines fighting the revolting, crude, institutional sexism of their former place of work. It refuses to do so with any complexity, any suggestion that they were anything but victims - that they had all the opportunity to say no to the hideous deal they were offered, and that they were, too, key players in a propaganda machine, pumping poison into the world. It's a view of the world that, at best, has been simplified for popular consumption, relegating criticism of Fox News' politics, operations, and output to a laughably basic subplot involving a lesbian Democrat employee who explains the machinery of Fox's messaging.
Mike suggests that it sits alongside the work of Adam McKay, who, like Bombshell director Jay Roach, made his name in comedy, offering the term "satire-adjacent" in an attempt to understand this breed of film - McKay's Vice and The Big Short have a similar tone and basis in reality. Where we decried the lack of satire these days when discussing Jojo Rabbit, perhaps we've found where it's been relocated. And there are things about it he likes, this kind of sociopolitical talkie being up his street, though our highest praise is reserved for the performances, John Lithgow's explosive, sinister Roger Ailes, and Charlize Theron's unbelievable transformation into Megyn Kelly, in particular.
Recorded on 21st January 2020.
An event movie sold as much on its behind-the-scenes technical challenges as its story and genre, 1917 uses invisibly stitched long takes to convey the experiential fluidity of an overnight mission in World War I France, wherein two soldiers must hand deliver a message to the British front line to call off an offensive that will play into a German ambush. Mike is suspicious of films that market their filmmaking; José dislikes the work of director Sam Mendes.
So it's with some relief that 1917 really rather impresses us. It's a beautiful film, evocative of both the human cost of war and pastoral serenity of the landscape in which it takes place. Its symbolism, something José derides as overly simple and obvious in Mendes' work, here functions quite well (if similarly unsubtly); its supporting cast of British and Irish stars is used well, Mark Strong and Richard Madden in particular shining during their brief scenes. And we consider the film's similarities to Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, a similarly expensive war epic about avoiding disaster, rather than boasting of success.
Recorded on 12th January 2020.
José's seen it once and returns to its depths for a second time, alongside Mike, who knows nothing about it. Chinese writer-director Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey into Night, unrelated to Eugene O'Neill's play, tells a story that flashes between memories of a love lost long ago and present day reality, culminating in an hour-long single take that moves through an entire mining village.
It's a film that oozes feelings of loss and nostalgia, the protagonist's return to his hometown seeing him wander through dereliction and abandonment, where his life was once vital and exciting. The noirish flashbacks are sumptuously composed and lit, romantic and evocative; one sinks into those gorgeous images.
The long take that comprises the film's second half is less successful, an exercise in form that leaves longueurs and attracts too much attention to itself. But its relationship to the first half is intriguing, its symbolism readily apparent if difficult to interpret, and its technical accomplishment unquestioned. (We didn't see this version of it, but it's entirely in 3D, which we can only imagine heightens its fluid, magical tone.)
Despite José's criticisms, it's one of his films of the year, though for Mike its qualities don't offer enough to counterbalance a second half with which he really struggled. But it's certainly worth your time, and if it's showing near you, you should catch it.
Recorded on 11th January 2020.
Guy Ritchie returns to the guns 'n' geezers mine with The Gentlemen, a caper with a beautifully dressed and enjoyably playful cast. We discuss his stylish direction, ability to work with actors, the audiences that adore his work, how the film functions as fantasy, and its issues with being casually offensive.
Recorded on 1st January 2020.
Its intentions are good, but we have trouble with Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's comedy about a young boy in Nazi Germany, a fanatical member of the Hitler Youth, who discovers a Jewish girl being given safe harbour by his mother. Our reservations stem from the state of the world and culture in which the film has been made, in which fascism is resurgent and increasingly worth taking seriously.
We discuss comedy's ability to puncture that at which it takes aim, Mike arguing that we like to overstate its power, José lamenting cinema's unwillingness to take today's fascist figureheads on directly - by comparison, satirising Hitler and the Nazis is a safe choice. Mike criticises the film's superficiality, finding that its depiction of the Nazi regime is skin deep, merely built on signifiers with which we're familiar - there's no attempt here to explore Jojo's psychology, or how and why he's been taught what he has. José argues that the film makes its Nazis too likeable, too goofy; the film wants to offer us a message that people are ultimately good, and in so doing gives its villains the opportunity of redemption, which they tend to take. It's partially contextualised by the 1944 setting, the dying German war machine making sense of the cynicism in Sam Rockwell's Nazi officer; setting the film during the Nazi regime's strongest years would have been more interesting, and braver.
Despite all of this, Jojo Rabbit gets lots of laughs, and Waititi manages the tone well, the film making moves into some unexpectedly dark areas at times. But its successes never distract from the overall ideological problems we have.
Recorded on 1st January 2020.
José has been brushing up, recently rewatching the 1933, 1959 and 1994 adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's novel. Mike has neither seen any adaptations nor read the book, coming to the story entirely fresh. And so we get to grips with Greta Gerwig's wonderful, open-hearted, energetic version of Little Women.
José finds much to contrast between the versions, picking up in particular on the unusual dimensionality given to the male supporting characters here, whose roles have previously been thankless. Timothée Chalamet and Chris Cooper particularly impress, the former capturing Laurie's playful, generous spirit; the latter touchingly evoking Mr. Laurence's grief. Less successful is Meryl Streep's Aunt March, who slightly too mechanically reaches for the laughs for which she's designed.
The girls, though, are a triumph of energetic wildness, ambitions and realism. The scenes they share in their childhood home are well observed, wisely mixing all-American sentimentality you might expect with a disarming sororal combativeness you might not. If there's a bum note amongst them it's Emma Watson as Meg, who Mike argues never truly embodies the roles she plays, but Saoirse Ronan is miraculously transparent as Jo, and Florence Pugh gives Amy a burning, vital sense of frustration and fury at always being second best to her sisters. Their relationships make the film the success it is, and, Mike suggests, even when the film begins to wrap their stories up in some fairly convenient ways, so fond are we of them that it's hard not to be swept along.
Greta Gerwig has achieved magical things with Little Women, and you miss it at your peril.
Recorded on 30th December 2019.
The Star Wars saga ends - for the third time - with The Rise of Skywalker, a return to J. J. Abrams' whimsical ways, following Rian Johnson's creative and dramatic work in The Last Jedi. Disney and Abrams have clearly taken the vocal response of the franchise's self-appointed guardians seriously, overwriting everything we liked about Johnson's film, offering us mild, defanged plot developments and characterisations, but once we accept that, we find a lot of fun in this closing chapter's sense of adventure and melodrama.
It's clear from five minutes in, having been told three times that Rey's parents, revealed to be nobodies in The Last Jedi, are actually hiding a secret that makes them very important indeed, that The Rise of Skywalker intends to do away with everything that made the last film so interesting and challenging. It's a disappointment, but in declaring its intention to simply continue the soap opera and gallivant around the galaxy, the film needs to at least do a good job of that. And it does, José remarking upon how pleasurable it is to see a film of such high production values, and Mike finding that Abrams manages here to really capture the adventurous spirit of the original trilogy that he succeeded only in imitating in The Force Awakens, those core ideas of quests and gangs and brand new planets all working smoothly here. It's an arguably surprisingly beautiful film too, light and dark dramatically interacting in geometrically precise shots that emphasise scale and power. And that melodrama between Kylo and Rey that we so loved in The Last Jedi, returns and develops here, the bond between them creating shared, tangible, intimate spaces just for them.
On the negative side, not only does the sense of corporate damage control never go away in the film's refusal to make anything of The Last Jedi's developments, but weak, insulting attempts at inclusivity and representation also rankle, a gay kiss especially conspicuous for just how momentary it is, a shot of two extras crudely implanted within the film's celebratory denouement simply drawing attention to its own tokenism. José suggests that the return of Billy Dee Williams as Lando is a similarly insincere and lazy effort at racial representation, as his is a minor character in the original trilogy, undemanding of the send-off given here to Luke, Leia and Han, but as the only non-white character in Star Wars of any significance whatsoever, he's brought along for the ride. And underneath it all, a real character, a big part of the gang in Episodes VII and VIII, Rose, has her role reduced to almost nothing here, an obvious response to the truly vile behaviour of the fans towards actor Kelly Marie Tran.
It's a mixed bag overall, a film to watch with one eye earnest and one cynical, but we're thrilled with its action, adventure and spectacle, and its central melodrama is evocative and rewarding. A good conclusion to the saga... until Episode XII, of course.
Recorded on 23rd December 2019.
It made Mike so physically uncomfortable that he had to go into hiding. It caught José up, to his surprise as much as anyone else's, in its wildness and visual design. It has to be seen to be believed. It can only be Cats.
Recorded on 20th December 2019.
A beautifully observed, intelligently written and transparently played drama, Marriage Story shows the separation of two people with deep and ongoing love for each other, and how they change under the stress of their marriage breakup. Mike argues that it's an advert for therapy, the unread notes in which each partner describes what they love about the other, with which the film opens, returning structurally despite the descent into legal hell and gamesmanship. José remarks upon the generosity the film has towards its characters and the magic that Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver bring, and Mike picks up on the length of some scenes, scenes that move smoothly and in real time through evolving conversations.
Marriage Story is on Netflix now and worth your time.
Recorded on 4th December 2019.
Adam Driver and Annette Bening shine in writer-director Scott Z. Burns' historical drama The Report, about Senate staffer Daniel Jones and Senator Dianne Feinstein's work to investigate the CIA's use of torture after 9/11. Mike's been filling up on this stuff lately, quite by coincidence, watching old episodes of The Daily Show; José didn't even know what the film was about, and the difference in our responses is perhaps quite telling, the film not going out of its way to help its audience into its murky waters, leaving it up to them to pick up on what it's on about.
In that respect, it's a film that requires and respects its audience's attention and intelligence, though it could do more in dramatic terms to earn it. It's rather a dry affair, though not without its charms - in particular those of its lead actors, who captivate every second they're on screen. The story is told partially in flashback, depicting the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and the main plot covers the better part of a decade, shifting from initial questions to the depths of Jones' secretive study, to the fight he and Feinstein face to get it published - and Burns structures all of this well and narrates it admirably smoothly. Unfortunately, he's content to descend into bog-standard platitudes about the greatness of America being its desire to admit its own mistakes and rancid behaviour, without ever addressing the idea that behaving that way might be equally American.
We compare the film, as we so often do with films about institutional failure and corruption, to Spotlight, the story of the Boston Globe's exposure of child abuse in the Catholic Church, in particular the complexity of that film's investigation and apportioning of blame, Mike arguing that the Globe's realisation of its own part in the cover-up is a crucial and necessary complicating factor, and not something we see here, with the goodies of the Senate and the baddies of the CIA entirely separate - there's indictment of the people who pursued a programme of torture that was known to be useless, but only the barest, most superficial indictment of the culture that produced and allowed it.
Despite these issues, Mike remains a fan of the film, finding it a well-told story for the most part that does more than simply illustrate its historical context and the arguments therein, and José, who is less familiar with this stuff and has less of an interest in it, is also glad to have seen it, and our discussion was an enjoyable one. The Report is on Amazon Prime and worth a watch.
Recorded on 3rd December 2019.
A truly deserved biopic, Harriet tells the story of the escaped slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who served as part of the Underground Railroad, undertaking several journeys to liberate around 70 slaves, and later serving as in the Union Army during the American Civil War (this latter part of her life forming the film's coda, as its focus is her escape to Philadelphia and rescue missions).
Despite its obvious value, though, it's poorly told story, with a depiction of Tubman's devout religiousness and prophetic visions that serves to confuse more than express or inspire, and too little tension in what are really action scenes, too little sense of hardship in Tubman's escape, work, and life. We try to keep in mind that our relationship to Tubman's story is distanced, that its importance as a black narrative and feminist narrative is easy for us to be blind to when all we can see are flaws, but ultimately we find the film a let-down.
Recorded on 2nd December 2019.
A trip to the Mockingbird Cinema in the Custard Factory yields a massively hyped up and receptive audience of fat white blokes for Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Mike is one of them, and he's never been harder to pick out of a lineup, laughing like a drain at the fan service and antics. José isn't, and he was already a bit too old for Kevin Smith when he emerged in the 90s, but he has almost as good a time as everyone else there. The film is huge fun and creates a palpable sense of community, filled with friends and family, incorporating in-jokes and characters from throughout Smith's work - it's pure comfort food for its fans.
We think about Smith as a figure, his reputation as a writer who can barely direct, and what he takes pride in. And we look over his filmography, José thinking back on what made Chasing Amy radical in its day, and Mike suggesting that with Jersey Girl and Cop Out, Smith's reputation, and perhaps an external factor or two (remember Bennifer?) played a part in the hostile reception for two films he found perfectly acceptable and even charming.
He's an interesting figure, Kevin Smith, a director whose cinematic reputation is outshone by his stardom as an individual, something to which his mighty legion of podcasts and Q&As speaks - indeed, Reboot's UK screenings come with a bespoke post-credits Q&A, and Smith is accompanying the film around the US and Canada on its roadshow release - but his films have earned and maintained a devoted following for 25 years now, something to which the audience tonight can attest. Wherever Reboot is showing, it's worth checking out, because with an audience as up for it as ours was, it's a special event.
Recorded on 1st December 2019.
Luis Ospina, the influential Colombian filmmaker who died very recently, was last month the subject of an mini retrospective of his work by MUBI, who showed three of his films: Agarrando pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty (1977, co-directed by Carlos Mayolo), Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger (2008), and his final feature documentary, Todo comenzó por el fin/It All Started at the End (2015), and we're grateful to them for making these works available to us with subtitles. We begin by considering how such an influential filmmaker, not only in Colombia but across Latin America, remains so little known in Anglo-American film cultures. We talk about the 'Caliwood' group and how we're so used to talking about structures that we forget how individuals make a difference. A group of young friends with shared interests get together and share a house, turning it into studios, an art gallery, a publishing house and a cinema. This group happens to include, amongst others, Luis Ospina, Andrés Caicedo and Carlos Mayolo. We're shown how shared cinephilia leads to collaborative cultural production, one that's left an imprint, proven to be very influential and now become part of the cultural history of Colombia and Latin America.
In Todo comenzó por el fin/It All Started at the End we see how the friendships and shared interests of these irreverent, druggy, countercultural dissidents bore fruit and left a legacy - which is not to say that structures are not important (they wouldn't have been able to do so had they not been of a particular class, one with relatives who could afford to lend out empty houses). The film serves as an important reminder that individuals can make a difference and that collaboration is essential. Harold Innis' observation in Empire and Communications that colonised people need to be fully conversant with their colonisers' culture as well as their own is amply evident in the conjunction of the group's programming and their own production.
All three of Ospina's works are concerned with documentary, representation, ethics. In Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger, the Zelig-like mockumentary about an imaginary person, the form itself acts as a way of commenting on broad strands of cultural and political movements internationally that had an effect on the local and synthesises and evokes all of the virtues we admire: the playfulness, quirkiness, intelligence, the concern with politics and ethics but also fun, a pin-prick to pomposity. And we share admiration for the savage satire of Agarrando pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty, a statement against the exploitation of the poor, unfortunate and mentally ill on the streets of Cali, by filmmakers keen to sell their work, and the image of Colombia that goes along with it, to Europe.
José is in thrall to Ospina's work and the culture to which it speaks, and has boundless thoughts; and although Mike asks questions of the ethics at play in Agarrando pueblo/The Vampires of Poverty, even in a film so clearly well-intentioned and with such a valid point, and comments on weaknesses he perceives in the cinematic quality of Todo comenzó por el fin/It All Started at the End, finding it less expressive artistically than simply informative of a time, place and culture, he's glad to have spent this time exploring Ospina's work.
This episode has been released early (keen listeners will have noticed a jump from number 196 to 200), and that's to coincide with yesterday's homage for Luis Ospina, hosted by the Filmoteca de Catalunya, one we hope will be but the first of many to come.
Recorded on 4th December 2019.
Writer-director Rian Johnson's playful, knockabout whodunnit Knives Out has been receiving praise for its screenplay that we feel isn't quite warranted, and isn't much to look at either - but it's a lark, and one that carries some unexpected sociopolitical commentary. José argues that Johnson doesn't learn enough from the films upon which his pastiche is based, making too little of both the wonderful cast he's assembled and the wonderful sets he's had assembled for him, though the film isn't devoid of flair or structural neatness. Mike was with the film more or less all the way, though suggests that it won't play as well in the distracted environment of the home, the minutiae of the countless plot details easy to lose track of as one tries to make sense of them. So it's worth a watch, but it's neither as elegant nor as charming as we'd like.
Recorded on 1st December 2019.
Cars, business, and a big chummy Brummie combine in 1960s California as Ford sets itself the mission of beating the all-conquering Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, in a film that has not one but two boring titles: Ford v Ferrari in the USA, and Le Mans '66 in the UK. Mike had a good enough time to see it twice, even though it's directed by James Mangold, for whom he has little love; José, incredibly, even welled up at the end.
Although one might expect clashes between the egos of our heroes, the Texan car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Brummie racer Ken Miles (Christian Bale), their relationship is really one of friendship, common goals, and coping with the management at Ford, for whom Le Mans is about business opportunity and making their way into the increasingly deep pockets of the American teenager. José finds Ken's family life of particular emotional interest, the support he receives from his wife a pleasure and their arguments complex, though Mike isn't as complimentary, seeing the film as overall too slick for its own good, failing to generate real tension in the problems it depicts. This goes for the racing, too, for which he reserves some criticism, opining that while the races are good fun and entertaining larks, they don't convey the stresses or feeling of endurance as they should. But José, a man who cares not a jot for cars or racing, enjoyed the heck out of them, and perhaps that is an achievement all of its own.
The film offers some rather crude comic representations of Italians, the Ferrari pit crew running around like cartoons, which despite only really showing up twice do stick in the mind; and lightly poses the competition as a continuation of the Second World War, the Allies at Ford battling the Axis Power of Italy (at one point, Henry Ford II, played to a T by the great Tracy Letts, brags to Shelby about the role his factory played in building planes for the American war effort, telling him, "Go to war"). It's an American film about the greatness of America at the height of America's cultural standing in the world; as José describes it, their empire.
And plonked in the middle of this American myth-making is a sarcastic showoff from Sutton Coldfield, unable to keep his mouth shut except when he's got some tea in there. Mike responded with unbridled joy to the attention to detail shown to Ken's origins, not only in the broad, charming accent Bale employs, but also in the dialect he brings with him, talking of cheese cobs and using the phrase "round the Wrekin", something most of Britain probably has no clue about, let alone America. Peaky Blinders may have given Birmingham a platform in modern pop culture, particularly amongst Americans, but Mike enjoys Ken here much more, ecstatic that a $100m movie that's going down well with audiences features a Brummie as one of its heroes.
Le Mans '66 is an honest to god charm offensive of a film, with entertaining action, performances that do the well-written screenplay justice, and even an emotional sting in the tail. Get yourself to the cinema for it. It's bosting.
Recorded on 24th November 2019.
This year's Screening Rights Film Festival saw a great start with Permission, an Iranian film about women's rights, oppression, and male ego, based on the true story of Niloufar Ardalan, the captain of the Iranian women's futsal team whose husband barred her from leaving the country to play in an international final. After the film, José led a discussion with Riham Sheble and Dr. Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad in which the entire audience got involved.
It's an enormously interesting film and despite its severe subject matter, a lively, enjoyable watch. Baran Kosari is captivating as Afrooz, the captain, fighting as best she can the system that allows her husband, Yaser, to restrict her movement - which is made scarier by his absence for several scenes. The film cannot possibly be mistaken for suggesting that Yaser's actions can be justified, but gives him space to express his reasons for them, revealing the danger of a bruised male ego, especially one with the support of unjust laws that can be weaponised.
We also discuss Afrooz's relationship with her teammate and roommate, who stays in Iran with her out of choice, with respect to the ways in which writer-director Soheil Beiraghi uses code and ellipses to circumvent his country's censors. And Sahar Dolatshahi's team manager catches our eye, a powerful figure who enjoys her status among the football federation, and whose sanctimonious, matronly attitude reminds Mike of The Handmaid's Tale's Aunt Lydia.
A film we're very glad to have seen. Thank you to the Screening Rights Film Festival for putting the event together!
Recorded on 21st November 2019.
A three-and-a-half-hour epic in his signature genre, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman looks back on the life of a gangster, hitman, enforcer, and WWII veteran, who loses everything. There's a familiar tone to much of the film, Scorsese getting the gang back together - Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel are wonderful to see, but perhaps the most enjoyable performance comes from Joe Pesci, his Russ a calm, knowing presence, a characterisation that feels like a deliberate defiance of the volatility we remember so vividly from Tommy in Goodfellas. The film weaves a tapestry of power structures throughout 20th century New York, incorporating the mob, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and politicians, all tied together by the wild, paranoid, braggadocious figure of Jimmy Hoffa, played by a brilliant Al Pacino in his first ever collaboration with Scorsese.
Scorsese's use of digital technology to take years off his cast is a matter of debate between us. José thinks that the use of younger actors would have been beneficial, comparing it to De Niro's portrayal of Marlon Brando's character in The Godfather Part II; Mike arguing that the technology convinces, facilitates a smooth telling of the story, where, had different actors been used, he might have felt like he was waiting for the 'real story' to begin, and doesn't hamper the facial performances as it might have - though he agrees wholeheartedly that, in his mid-70s, Robert De Niro simply can't convincingly kick a baker as a man thirty or forty years his junior should be able to.
José asks whether Frank feels enough guilt about having to kill Jimmy, by this point a man who's been his friend for years. We agree that we think his emotional state is too opaque, though Mike suggests that he's also tamping down his feelings for the sake of getting on with a task he can't avoid. The feeling of loss and guilt that this event leads to, though, enormously affects the final half hour of the film, and for Mike it's a beautifully moving coda to a film that, while hugely enjoyable, often felt free of a clear destination - something José disagrees with, never wondering where it was going.
We also consider Scorsese's recent remarks on Marvel, suggesting that his perspective is a surprisingly ahistorical one, and that had he been making films in the 1950s he'd have had identical complaints about Westerns, for instance - the dominant genre of the time. But José takes time to agree with his aesthetic and artistic complaints, arguing that Marvel's films lack ambition, and Mike suggests that his issue really comes down to a level of dominance that is marginalising films of lower budgets and greater ambition. We also discuss the fact that Scorsese has made The Irishman for Netflix, hardly the home of a lover of the cinema, as their model is Internet-based and doesn't allow for wide theatrical releases, Mike suggesting this represents a conflict between Scorsese's words and actions; though José argues that, as limited as it is, the film has been given a theatrical release, and one would be stupid to turn down money if it gets one's film made, no matter the source.
But to bring it back to The Irishman, we had a terrific time and the film throughout is layered with great jokes, considered compositions, and brilliantly written, performed and directed set-piece scenes in which conversation is king, stakes are high, and power is in play. If you get a chance to see it during its brief theatrical window, do so.
Recorded on 15th November 2019.
Comparisons to Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies are inescapable in Alejandro Landes' captivating Monos, about a group of teenage soldiers, stationed on a Colombian mountaintop, whose relationships and leadership break down during a descent into the jungle.
We think about its central imagery, Mike arguing that one image above all speaks for the film as a whole, and its allegorical qualities, José considering the character of the American hostage and the impact of American foreign policy and cultural influence on these kids' mentalities and environment. Mike suggests that the engrossing experience of watching the film may outshine its thematic substance, but nonetheless we highly recommend it and urge you to see it at a cinema if you can.
Recorded on 13th November 2019.
Returning to Newcastle after shining his coruscating lens on the inhumanity of the benefits system in I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach now casts his eye on the gig economy and the exploitation of workers in Sorry We Missed You. A struggling dad and husband gets a job as a delivery driver, coerced into handling unfair responsibility and meeting impossible targets, with the stability of his family bearing the brunt of the stress.
José argues that Sorry We Missed You only tells us what we already know; Mike contends that its dramatisation makes it scarily real. We're in agreement that it's not especially interesting filmmaking, though, José suggesting that Loach doesn't trust images to convey what he wants. And José has never enjoyed his depiction of the working class, finding it unrealistic at best, with no joy or love available to his films' victims, though he agrees - with some relief! - that there is love in the central family here. Although there's a lot to criticise in his often mechanical filmmaking, we agree that Loach makes meaningful films with which he sincerely wants to make a difference, and that's admirable to say the least.
If nothing else, Sorry We Missed You inspired Mike to try and do one nice thing for a stranger upon leaving the cinema, and that must mean it's a work of genius. If, however, you are already someone who does nice things, then you may find it less inspiring, though it is in some respects vital. It won't do you any harm to wait until it's shown on telly though.
Recorded on 1st November 2019.
A horror film that everyone knew about when Mike was a teenager, but nobody seemed to have seen, we finally see 1998's Ring - or Ringu, to transliterate the Japanese title. It's been beautifully restored in 4K and we were keen to see what all the fuss was about.
And, truthfully, we're left still asking that. Its influence is obvious, Mike suggesting that alongside 1999's The Blair Witch Project it defined a new generation of horror cinema, but we don't find it all that creepy, let alone scary. We suggest a number of factors in its iconic status: its place in the West as a foreign curio, an oddity; its brilliant conceit, a videotape that gives you seven days to live after you watch it, giving it an urban myth quality, rather like the found footage form of The Blair Witch Project convincing people of that film's reality. And perhaps what was different and interesting about Ring at the time of its release has become commonplace enough to no longer appear so.
However, none of this is to say that we disliked the film, which would be a lie. It remains an intriguing and compelling mystery that makes excellent use of its central idea and creates some truly iconic imagery. We're glad to have finally seen it, and if you have any interest in horror, this 4K restoration gives you renewed reason to revisit, or visit for the first time, this foundational film.
Recorded on 31st October 2019.
Shot in black and white on a clockwork camera from the 1970s, the hand-development of its 16mm film resulting in scratches and unpredictable changes in exposure, and its soundtrack entirely post-synchronised, Mark Jenkin's Bait is audiovisually suffused with atmosphere and texture, and not a little dreamlike and weird to boot. It tells the story of Martin, a Cornish fisherman struggling to cope with the upheaval of both his region and his life specifically that results from an influx of middle-class settlers. He's sold his family's cottage to a family of outsiders, his brother now uses his fishing boat to take tourists on drunken stag parties, and Martin snarls and growls his way through dealing with these changes.
It's clear that we're meant to see Martin as a hero, but he's tilting at windmills - though perhaps that's WHY he's a hero - and José argues that the film is deeply conservative, asking, for instance, why it's so bad that Martin's brother adapts to his changing environment by taking tourists on trips. Mike argues that the family of newcomers is too caricatured, so keen is the film for us to see them as invaders who fuck everything up, and thinks about the film's parochialism in the wider context of Brexit - the unfriendliness to outsiders displayed here speaks to anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the UK; is there a difference between the way the Cornish in Bait feel and the way Brexiters throughout the country feel? Perhaps there's a tension between the relative power and privilege of the "invaders" and "invaded" that we don't resolve, but in overly simplistic terms we don't emerge from the film feeling entirely on its side.
Jenkin's cinematography and editing beautifully conveys what there is to love about Martin's way of life, concentrating on manual labour and his close-knit community. José suggests that the film looking the way it does makes it feel as though it's already an object from the past, with the romance, nostalgia and loss that goes along with it - just as it depicts the decline of its way of life. It also puts us in mind of Italian Neorealism, José bringing up Visconti's La terra trema, Mike thinking of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, and we're indebted to Mark Fuller for offering a perspective on Bait's place within a tradition of similarly claustrophobic coastal dramas, such as Gremillon's The Lighthouse Keepers, Epstein's Finis Terrae, Flaherty's Man of Aran, and Powell's Edge of the World. Mike also considers the film's visual and tonal similarity to Aronofsky's Pi, thinking about how effectively that film places the audience in the main character's headspace, and suggesting that the visual design here does the same.
Bait is a considerable film, one that speaks deeply to the loss of a certain way of life and the anger and resentment to which that leads. But the film doesn't appear keen for this resentment to be questioned, and we feel it needs to be.
Recorded on 20th October 2019.
Gemini Man lacks charm, wit, originality, intelligence, any real sense of understanding how to shoot action... but it's a technological showcase, and with 3D glasses on, sat in a cinema with a 60fps projector (120fps screenings, the film's native frame rate, are nigh-on impossible to come by), it provides a certain pleasure. We agree that the high frame rate, so widely criticised in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy - and along with the rest of the world, neither of us liked it at all - works surprisingly well here in Ang Lee's hands, and Mike argues that it's not only visually enjoyable but genuinely aesthetically valuable, picking up on shots that it noticeably contributes to and considering the way Lee uses stillness early on to help the audience adjust to its look and feel.
We can't see eye to eye on the film's other technological showpiece, a fully CGI Will Smith, motion captured but rendered as his 20-something-year-old self. Mike thinks it's remarkably convincing, truly evocative of the Fresh Prince-era Will Smith with which we're all familiar and, again, a visual treat, but José finds it a lifeless failure. That's a criticism, though, that can be made of the film as a whole, and we can't compliment the screenplay, direction or performances very much at all.
Without HFR 3D, Gemini Man really isn't worth your time to see. With it, it's surprisingly attractive, but that can't rescue the script.
Recorded on 17th October 2019.
It's enormously disappointing that Neither Wolf Nor Dog is as bad as it is, because its subject - Native American life in a society built upon a land that was taken from them, and the pain, grievances and stories that the displaced people carry with them - is massively, conspicuously underrepresented in US cinema and demands to be explored. Unfortunately, although the story on which it is based is true, the hackneyed device of a white man, Kent, who learns about someone different and with whom we're supposed to emotionally identify falls on its face, and the filmmaking is awful. When the film visits Wounded Knee and we hear Dan, the Lakota elder, expose his history of pain and loss, Kent's unearned tears destroy the scene.
Mike argues for the film's first act, suggesting that it sets up promising questions and themes, and has a slowness that invites the audience to contemplate these. Dan's interactions with Kent, knowingly using him to tell his stories, conflicts with his friend Grover's reaction, suspicious but willing to put his feelings aside to do what Dan wants, and his granddaughter Wenonah, hostile and concerned that her granddad might be taken advantage of. This is all inextricably tied to the history of white invaders to America and the treatment to which the natives have been subjected for generations... but the promise of how the film could develop is far preferable to how it does develop, uncritically, unimaginatively using tropes that illuminate nothing and relying on undramatised oral storytelling to express its themes.
José, on the other hand, hated the film from the start and wanted to leave long before the end. He argues that there's a self-importance to the filmmaker, Steven Lewis Simpson, on display, and Mike argues (with no proof of course) that Simpson edits his own Wikipedia page.
It's a shame to have to declare that Neither Wolf Nor Dog is terrible but there it is. For people on nodding terms at best with Native American history to emerge from it having learned nothing, having gleaned no insight into the life it depicts, is a fundamental failure on the film's part. A huge missed opportunity.
Recorded on 14th October 2019.
Neither of us has ever seen classic British thriller Don't Look Now before, though we're keenly aware of the esteem in which it is held. And it's fair to say that we're blown away by the expressive visual design and editing style, though Mike at first admits to a certain degree of nonplussedness - a film's reputation for greatness can often result in a dampened experience when it is finally encountered - but finds that the film quickly opens up as we discuss it.
Don't Look Now is about grief, and expresses it at a formal level. Donald Sutherland's character is unable to save his daughter from drowning at a young age, and thereafter, Mike argues, cannot prevent images of her death from flashing into his mind, just as they flash into the film with no warning. His wife, played by Julie Christie, handles her grief differently, and we discuss whether she does so more successfully than her husband - but if there's something on which we agree, it's that the film primarily conveys his point of view and experience of his grief rather than hers.
José considers the film's depiction of Venice, dilapidated, sparse, but still beautiful. We think about the film's place in the canon, its status as a great horror, comparing it to other British oddities such as Under the Skin and Kill List - is it even right to think of these as horror? And we try to get a handle on some of the motifs used, such as the supernatural element underpinning the husband's experiences, the red-hooded figure, the elderly sisters, a motif of doubling and replacement, and more, but often having to resort to the anodyne comfort of asserting that this is a film that would benefit from repeated viewing.
However, even after seeing it once, Don't Look Now captures our imagination and burns its wonderful, imaginative imagery into our minds. If you haven't seen it, this 4K restoration is doing the rounds as we speak, and it's how the film should be seen. It images are meaningful and considered. See it in a cinema and it'll get its hooks into you just as it's supposed to.
Recorded on 13th and 14th October 2019.
José reminisces about Judy Garland as a feature of his childhood, a constant presence on his family's television, and as a person who took on different significance to him as he grew up. Whether he admits it or not, he's been keen to see Judy since the trailers first appeared. Mike, predictably, neither knows much about her nor cares, although he has seen The Wizard of Oz about a thousand times.
The film's greatest pleasure is Renée Zellweger's performance, a pleasant surprise to José as he's never liked her very much. We agree that the stage numbers leave something to be desired - the production seems to create a disconnect between Zellweger's performance and singing, sounding artificial - but swoon at moments when it all comes together, particularly in the climactic rendition of Over the Rainbow. José suggests that this is when Zellweger most deviates from any of Garland's true performances, and perhaps that relative freedom from imitation is what gives her the space to connect to the song here.
In general terms, the film is none too exciting, shot effectively but inexpressively and ticking off the normal plot points of a star-on-the-decline biopic, with money and family worries, substance abuse problems, temper tantrums and assorted other clichés making appearances, and authentic as it may be, there's only so many times Judy can be late for a gig before the drama wears thin. Her relationship with her children is an emotional wrench, though, and the film builds to an effective ending, powered by that fantastic final number.
There's a subplot about Judy's encounter with a gay couple that recognises her importance to the gay community and contrasts her glitz and stardom with the inhumane oppression to which gay people were and are treated - homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK only two years prior to when the film is set. It's a plot strand that could fall on its face through cheesiness or clumsiness, particularly considering the couple's role in the final scene, but it arguably succeeds through periphrastic, sparing dialogue, and by tying everything back to Judy's songs. Everything comes back to those, ultimately, and despite some lacklustre direction here and there, it all comes together when it absolutely needs to.
Recorded on 10th October 2019.
A captivating performance from Matthias Schoenaerts as a long-time inmate in a Nevada prison gives The Mustang its heart and emotional centre. The story of an isolated man finding the ability to open up through a relationship he develops with a wild horse isn't going to win any awards for originality and is pretty one-note, but has its pleasures, and is an easy watch.
Writer-director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre calmly avoids asking obvious and important questions of the American prison system in favour of depicting the benefits of the horse training initiative - based on a real-life scheme that operates in a number of US states - and José suggests that her nationality has a part to play in this apparent lack of knowledge about the deep institutional issues involved, or at least her lack of interest in challenging them. The film indulges in cliché after cliché, but, for all its flaws and lack of imagination, Mike liked it, because that's what he's like, and we really can't emphasise enough how good Schoenaerts' central performance is.
Recorded on 9th October 2019.
In the mid-Seventies, Argentina was terrorised by the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), a far-right death squad that disappeared countless people, and it is under this regime of fear and death that Rojo is set - with 1976's military coup on the horizon. Disappearance is one of the film's major themes and gives it its central structure: Dario Grandinetti's Claudio, a lawyer, has an altercation with a rude young man in a restaurant and, though what follows is partially accidental, ends up leaving the man for dead in Argentina's vast desert.
It's the first act of disappearance in a film draped with them, disappearances that nobody speaks of, but everybody takes advantage of. Overt signals of the Triple A are absent here - the film shows us how daily life is affected, in a chilling atmosphere not of fear, but of acceptance. Friends are spoken of as having moved away. A house vacated by a family we never see is ransacked by otherwise well-to-do, middle-class neighbours, and presents a money-making opportunity. The culture isn't fought, it is adjusted to.
Though we find great depth to Rojo's thematic complexity, we find less joy in its cinematic technique. José isn't as critical as Mike, whose arse went to sleep through boredom, but despite an aesthetic that beautifully evokes the 1970s in every way, the film makes no real concessions to the audience, particularly lacking tension, which we feel there was ample opportunity for.
However, despite our criticisms, we recommend Rojo. It portrays a time and place rarely seen, and does so with intelligence and confidence. Its themes, of course, speak not just to mid-Seventies Argentina but keenly to today's increasingly right-wing societies in Europe and America, and in that light its themes of complicity and adaptation to quotidian far-right terrorism constitute a warning.
Recorded on 7th October 2019.
The Birmingham chapter of the Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society shows a few of their films every year at the mac, and this year sees them screen two shorts, Twice Two (1933) and County Hospital (1932), followed by their classic Western feature, Way Out West (1937). We discuss Laurel and Hardy's style, Mike comparing it favourably to cartoons and less favourably to the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and José remarks upon the joys of seeing a full audience of people aged 4 to 90 all laughing at these everlasting films.
Recorded on 6th October 2019.
It's as though we've seen two different films, with José bowled over by Joker's social commentary, Mike bored and annoyed by its perceived self-satisfaction - not to mention an audience that applauded at the end. Joaquin Phoenix's Joker is explored to be a product of an uncaring, broken society that reaps in him what it sows, in a 1981 Gotham City that is the New York City of the era in all but name. José argues that the film will become a bellwether of the time, depicting the anger of the oppressed and downtrodden - Mike suggests, though, that in demonising them and aligning them to villainy, it gives the right-wing what it wants, in a vision of antifa, the enemy it believes it faces.
We discuss issues of race and representation, Mike seeing similarities between some of the film's scenes and real-life historical crimes to which they may refer, and in observing racial components and changes to them, asks what the purpose may be, though, struggles to work towards an answer. And José remarks favourably upon everything aesthetic, including the way in which poverty is written into Phoenix's withered form, the expressiveness and grace of his movement, and the film's use of shallow focus.
There's a lot going on in Joker, both on its own terms and in the cultural conversations it has ignited, and it may be worth a second go.
Recorded on 4th October 2019.
Donald Trump's vision of Mexico as America's terrifying, criminal neighbour to the south finds a home in Rambo: Last Blood, a film in which a journey to Mexico is no less than a descent into Hell, and the comfort of the USA means a ranch, horses, sunsets, and a subterranean network of tunnels in which to viciously trap and slaughter Mexican rapists. You may be surprised to hear that we weren't that keen on it.
Considering Sylvester Stallone's age - a mighty 73 years old - Last Blood's action can't ask as much of him physically as did the Rambo films of old, but through the use of traps and ambushes, Stallone's limitations are smartly made irrelevant. But that's about as positive as we can get. This is a film that cost $50m, if the production budget figure on Box Office Mojo is to be believed, and if Stallone hasn't taken $40m of that for himself it's impossible to tell where it's been spent. This is cheap, nasty, acrid cinema, and it spurs José to look back on Stallone's career and decry it for not simply having too few hits but moreover representing a betrayal of what Stallone meant to immigrant kids and underdogs back when he broke out with Rocky in 1976.
Avoid Rambo: Last Blood like the self-mythologising, racist bile it is.
Recorded on 3rd October 2019.
Ideologically hideous and cinematically not even trying... we hate Downton Abbey. Hate it. But José especially so.
Recorded on 29th and 30th September 2019.
Francis Ford Coppola's classic 1979 war epic, once renovated already in 2001's Redux, now sees a second altered version, restored in 4K from the original negative, 40 years since it first came out - Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. And what an extraordinary film it remains. José has endless praise for the genius work of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro - this film defines painting with light - and in the cinema it visually dazzles, iconic, bold imagery in every frame. The scale of Coppola's production still amazes, particularly in those early scenes with Robert Duvall's manaical Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore orchestrating helicopters, napalm, infantry, smoke, music and surfers to insane, theatrical effect. And in its long fades between images, superimposing almost abstract compositions over one another, José feels the influence of the avant garde and marvels at what was possible in that era.
Marlon Brando's famous role as Kurtz at the end is shorter than José recalls, in part because the French plantation segment, not present in the theatrical cut, shortens it proportionally; in part because the film focuses on him as the target of Willard's mission from the start, giving him ample time to settle in our minds; but mostly because Kurtz is so iconic, Brando investing him with such gravity and Coppola shooting and editing him with such care and confidence, that he defines our lasting impression of the film. Even when we finally reach him, far along the Nùng river, he still takes as long as he wishes to emerge from the shadows.
Mike finds issue with the film's depiction of Vietnam, suggesting that in the film's determination to adhere to Heart of Darkness, the 1899 Joseph Conrad novella on which it is based, it presents an inaccurate and problematic view of Vietnam as uncivilised, its people savages - but is quick to accept that such inaccuracies are far from unique to Apocalypse Now, and José argues that the USA found it impossible to deal with its loss in Vietnam. Mike also queries Willard's motivations, asking what drives him and what his aim is, suggesting that alongside the psychological damage it wreaks, the film depicts an attractive aspect to war, a desire for it.
There's no question that Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece of cinema. On the small screen one can appreciate its beauty and madness - on the cinema screen, one feels it. If and when it comes around, you cannot miss it.
Recorded on 29th September 2019.
A film that jogs memories for Mike, as in the process of revisiting Fight Club he realises what an impact it had on him as a teenager. David Fincher's outrageously stylish and visceral story of a generation of dispossessed men finding purpose in violence has only increased in relevance in the twenty years since its release, drawing comparisons to incels and school shooters, but it also leads Mike to recall how it affected his interests and attitudes in his youth. José, who saw it on its release, was on the positive side of its mixed response and recalls trying to convince his friends of its greatness - and is proud to have been proven right in the years since, in which it rapidly became perhaps the defining cult hit.
Mike is surprised to discover a sexual dimension to it that he hadn't quite realised was there - obviously, Tyler and Marla's ceiling-shaking lovemaking sessions hadn't escaped his attention, but it wasn't until this screening that he saw Marla as desirable and human, rather than simply present and symbolic. She's weary but hopeful, fiery and alive but constantly flirting with death, and with the benefit of knowing the film's infamous twist, deeply sympathetic. Mike argues, too, for a strain of homoeroticism in the fighting and particularly in Brad Pitt's appearance - more than powerful and intimidating, he's attractive, the narrator's ideal self (though we don't, as José points out, see him topless and sweaty nearly as often as we might remember).
It's not without its problems. The question of exactly what it says, and indeed how deliberately it says it, is dependant perhaps on the viewer's mood and cultural context as much as anything. Fight Club wants to be thought of as a satire, that's clear, but of what - and is it as much of a satire as it thinks it is? Mike suggests that much of what drives this problematic area of debate is the effectiveness with which the film brings us into the narrator's mental state, conveying beautifully his attitudes, desires, repressions, regardless of whether we might think of them as positive or negative. Were the film more objective, more willing to offer judgement of its characters, these questions would be less troubling but the film would have none of its potency.
We agree that Fight Club is a considerable piece of work - José less enthusiastically, but it would be hard to be as turned on by it as Mike is. To have seen it on the big screen is a treat - every one of its compositions is electrifying, beautiful, considered and inventive - and the themes it explores have only grown in relevance since 1999. If it comes round, don't hesitate to buy front row tickets. If it doesn't, dig out the DVD, which you definitely own, and watch it again.
Recorded on 22nd September 2019.
The film that introduced Marlene Dietrich to America, Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel tells the tragic story of a man who gives up everything for love. Emil Jannings is delightfully pompous and uptight as Professor Rath, a schoolteacher charmingly disarmed by Dietrich's seductive cabaret star Lola Lola. The two marry, but unable to change and consumed by jealousy, Rath loses his status, dignity and the woman he loves.
Dietrich is captivating as Lola, wearing a seemingly permanent smirk of knowingness - much of the film's action takes place backstage, an environment she controls effortlessly, in which the fewer items of clothing she wears the more uncomfortable Rath grows. José notes a moment in which she ungraciously adjusts her underwear, and who cares who's watching - Mike remarks upon her legs, which at times are posed and filmed to take on a character all of their own. José considers the greatness of Dietrich's collaborations with von Sternberg, of which this was the first, and in particular the way he composes layered, complex imagery here.
We discuss the film's characterisation and morality - it's a tragedy, and to some extent its cabaret world is responsible for Rath's decline, but because of his inability to understand and adapt to his new life, rather than an inherent immorality to the setting. Lola, too, isn't simply some succubus; she may find Rath socially useful to marry, given his status as a professor, but moreover her affection for him is apparent. And we consider the film's two-part structure, how it mirrors itself through its two memorable tracking shots in the classroom, the clown character into whom Rath is transformed, and Rath's rooster-like crowing on his wedding day taking on a different significance at the film's climax.
The Blue Angel is ninety years old and remains as tragic and sexy as ever. Don't miss it if it's showing near you.
Recorded on 22nd September 2019.
We love Lulu Wang's comedy-drama The Farewell, about a Chinese family that knows their grandmother, Nai Nai, has cancer, but keeps it a secret from her. Awkwafina brings humour and sensitivity to the American-raised granddaughter who argues that her family is in the wrong, and although the film opens up questions of cultural differences, it's remarkably even-handed, refusing to judge or criticise any opinion. Zhao Shuzhen, playing Nai Nai, is delightfully warm and snappy, and shares wonderful chemistry with Awkwafina.
The Farewell is a gentle film that tells an engrossing story, and it's simply a pleasure to be in its world.
Recorded on 20th September 2019.
Ad Astra sees a withdrawn, isolated Brad Pitt take to the stars as Roy McBride, an astronaut in search of his father, and with him writer-director James Gray shows us stunning imagery and brings us brilliantly into McBride's suppressed mental state. José is head over heels in love with the film's epic feel, its exploration of universal human problems, the way in which it imagines a human race that, in spreading to and taming other planets and moons, brings its pre-existing problems with it, and the way in which Gray expresses McBride's inner turmoil through action. Mike is less keen, particularly arguing for the weakness of the film's first act, and asking questions of the film's gender theming, but finds much to love too.
Ad Astra is a vast, careful, $100m art movie, the likes of which only Christopher Nolan normally gets to make. It's very much worth your time. See it on the largest screen you can.
Recorded on 19th September 2019.
J-Lo runs the show and steals every scene in Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria's crime flick about a team of strippers who run a scam to steal from Wall Street traders and CEOs. Its style, energy and representational strategies impress us, it drew an audience to Cineworld that we aren't used to seeing, and we discuss how it fits into what we decide to call "state of the nation cinema", films that brazenly and deliberately depict, condemn and critique the institutions and power structures of modern America.
Recorded on 18th September 2019.
A gentle, somewhat meandering podcast to follow a gentle, somewhat meandering film. Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir talks of artistic development, the vigour of youth, life without money worries, and the complications of love, all through a soft camera and subtle performances. It's a film that refers to and respects art, that remembers the past fondly, and that leads José to explain the Portuguese concept of saudade.
Recorded on 17th September 2019.
Ne Zha, a Chinese animated film, holds the record for the biggest box office in a single market (having made over $700m in China), but Mike isn't that impressed with it, comparing it to the likes of Ice Age. José had a better time, though asks himself why he overlooks some of its more questionable elements, including a rather homophobic running joke that just doesn't go away. But there's a certain flair and thoughtfulness to some of its visual design and characterisation that we appreciate, and it gives us food for thought.
Discussing Ne Zha leads us into a conversation about British film culture as it relates to foreign language cinema. It's not impossible to see foreign language films in Birmingham - though Ne Zha making it to Cineworld, as opposed to the Electric or mac, is notable - but outside London, the kind of culture that European and South American countries have of showing films from other countries as a matter of course in the main cinemas just doesn't exist here. In going through our list of podcasts so far we see this reflected, a little over one eighth of our podcasts to date being about non-UK/US films, and a number of those thanks to MUBI, the streaming service, rather than cinema screenings. We can definitely do better, and intend to, but it is the case that foreign cinema culture in the UK barely exists.
Recorded on 16th September 2019.
Adapted from the 1944 novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, writer-director Christian Petzold's Transit behaves to some degree like Shakespeare in modern dress. The story follows a German man, Georg (Franz Rogowski), escaping facist-occupied Paris to Marseille, and there encountering other refugees, forging connections and affections with them, making arrangements at consulates for passage and visas to Mexico and the USA, all while rumour and hearsay about the spread of the occupation to the port city hangs over him. But with markers from nearly a century later - present-day vehicles in particular, although much of the clothing lives in an ageless world that bridges the years, and an ethnic component that makes more sense in today's world than the Forties - Petzold turns a historical narrative into a fable of creeping fascism and the refugee crisis of today. Indeed, the idea that Transit functions like modern-dress Shakespeare might make it sound terribly stilted and artificial, but the real power of Transit's transposition to the modern day is just how perfectly it works. Transit's world is deeply convincing.
Mike argues that part of the reason that this is the case is the film's focus on the refugees, and the details of day-to-day life in a city merely threatened by future occupation rather than currently undergoing it. The film's explicit visual symbols of occupation - stormtroopers lining up citizens against walls, dragging refugees from their families - do stand out, and are both necessary and necessarily rare. That the occupation looms is enough, for the most part - it's what it makes people do and feel that is the film's focus, and it doesn't need to build a Children of Men-style dystopia to explore that. The film is described on the poster, in rather an exciting quote from Indiewire, as "Casablanca as written by Kafka" - a glib line that we partially agree with. The Casablanca connection is clear, but the Kafka connection is inaccurate, the bureaucratic systems depicted in the Mexican and US consulates being ones that, while overwhelmed by vast numbers of refugees, aren't designed to confuse or dehumanise. Whatever ails Georg isn't Kafkaesque.
Georg, as José points out, is something of a cipher. We hear little of his story, know only one or two real details about him of any substance, but to the film's credit it's not something we ever question. His mental state, reasons for behaving as he does, are always clear, if, as Mike suggests, a little frustrating at one point. Through him, we are able to hear people's stories, those he encounters in queues and cafés keen to tell him who they are and why they're there. Being able to tell one's story and having it heard is a central theme to the film, as well as the ways in which we change or misremember our stories to our benefit - a slightly unreliable narrator occasionally describing things that differ in details from how we're shown them. Georg may not speak much, may not tell anyone his story during the course of the film, but the narration tells his story in the third person.
The narration, when it faithfully describes what we see, comes across to Mike as rather needless - showing and telling at the same time to pointless effect. Mentioning one scene in which the narration tells us that a number of refugees feel shame for standing by as a woman is violently separated from her family, he complains that the film should be able to convey this visually. José argues that underlining the point through narration is purposeful, bringing home that we in the present day should feel the same shame for standing by as refugees and immigrants have the same things done to them today. The narration changes a dramatisation into a call to action, and in so doing the film constantly asks us pointed ethical and moral questions of ourselves.
In short, Transit is a considerable film and unquestionably worth your time. We can't recommend it highly enough.
Recorded on 15th September 2019.
Following 2017's It, the characters are 27 years older, the events of the first film mere memories, and the effects are more thrilling than ever. But it leaves us feeling much the same as its predecessor - despite fantastic production values, wonderful monster design, and attempts to delve into interesting themes of trauma and the scars with which it leaves us, it's, well, kind of stupid really.
Recorded on 12th September 2019.
Considered by some to be his best film, Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious comes to the mac in a beautiful 4k restoration. We explore its sumptuous close-ups, complex characterisation and smart, effective editing, which elicited big responses from the audience, and José tells us about Ben Hecht, the film's screenwriter. We also have an argument about focus pulling.
On the blog, we've posted a number of clips and screenshots of moments and scenes to which we refer in the podcast: http://eavesdroppingatthemovies.com/2019/09/11/167-notorious/
Recorded on 8th September 2019.
It's probably fair to say that Pedro Almodóvar's films seem to be made specifically for José. It's in every detail: the locations, eras, sexuality, ways of life, attitudes, class, love of cinema and countless other aspects of Almodóvar's ouevre speak to José on a deep, intimate level. He's watched every one of his films time and time again, and he considers Pain and Glory, which he has already seen twice and plans to see again, a masterpiece. Mike doesn't have anything like such a specific relationship to Almodóvar, and indeed has only seen one other of his films, 2016's Julieta, which he liked very much - and indeed he likes Pain and Glory just as much... though not quite as much as José.
We discuss how Pain and Glory stands alone but might benefit from being seen in relation to Almodóvar's ouevre. Several of his regular collaborators appear, including Cecilia Roth, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano and Penélope Cruz; this film, as with The Law of Desire, Broken Embraces and Bad Education, is about a filmmaker; it makes use of art as an unconscious but pointed visual layering and underlying theme; images of characters writing on typewriters or computers show up - this is a film about, amongst other things, writing. Mike brings up the way chance events are used to drive the plot forward and thinks about how they're contextualised; José praises how fluid Almodóvar's storytelling is here, effortlessly bringing together disparate timelines and plot strands.
Is this autofiction, as the mother in the film accuses her filmmaker son of so often indulging in? José considers the appearance of Almodóvar's own mother in his previous films and how so many of his previous films are in fact about mothers (All About My Mother and Volver being the most obvious examples). We discuss the structure of the film, the movement from the relationship with an actor who's an addict to a previous relationship with an addict, through the performance of a confessional monologue titled Addiction, then a sexual awakening seen from a young boy's point of view. Representations of Spain in the 50s, memories of the past and a present setting fluidly intermingle. We also consider its themes of illness, ageing and loss, and how it's a film about cinematic expression, the revelation that half of the diegetic world is in fact a film within a film recontextualising half the story, similar to Bad Education but to different effect here.
It's a film on which as soon as we finished, José regretted not saying more: The references to Lucrecia Martel's La niña santa, the clear allusion to Fellini's 8½, the use of Rosalía to sing the song by the river, the section on films that feature water such as Splendor in the Grass and Niagara. He's only scratched the surface of a great film.
Recorded on 4th September 2019.
There's a remarkable female gaze in Animals, Sophie Hyde's adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth's novel, and a wonderful sense of insightful observation in the world occupied by and behaviours of the two friends whose stories it tells.
Mike, who'd been anticipating it keenly since seeing the trailer, feels a little shortchanged by the triteness of the larger themes on which the film builds and the relative lack of excitement in comparison to what the trailer conveyed. José shares a little of that feeling but is keen to express his pleasure at seeing a film so confidently and originally expressive of a female perspective, particularly in its sex scenes. And we both adore the stars, Alia Shawkat for her fabulously performative comic theatrics, and especially Holliday Grainger for her extraordinary, sensitive, soulful expression of a girl falling in and out of love and friendship and upset with her own failings.
Animals is a film that explodes with creativity and expressiveness in the details, but whose big picture leaves us wanting.
Recorded on 19th August 2019.
Mike has seen 2019's remake of The Lion King, and it sends him into a state of deep woe. José hasn't, and is glad Mike took the bullet for him.
Recorded on 19th August 2019.
Mike feared it might be the most tasteless film ever made. José doesn't look forward to Quentin Tarantino films. But we both came away from this fantastical reimagining of a near-mythological era of Hollywood history having had a great time. Tellingly, for a film that exceeds two and a half hours, we both felt the time fly by.
Tarantino's love for and expert knowledge of Hollywood and cinema informs all of his work, and arguably not that consequentially - he cribs shots, pastiches genres, and evokes styles and tones specific to cinema, but to debatable significant effect beyond the superficial. But in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (OUATIH for brevity's sake), the decision to bring this passion to the surface and tell a story directly about Hollywood results in Tarantino's most meaningful and personal film. What he values is brazenly displayed here, and, Mike suggests, isn't entirely pleasant to examine. He finds OUATIH initially troubling in this regard - with a day's reflection on it, he comes to see it as deeply conservative and protective of privilege. In digging this up, we discuss its sexual politics, the way it uses race, and the clash it represents between the old and the new in a rapidly changing 1969 Hollywood. Mike argues that, as in 2009's Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino's revisionism revealingly reflects his fantasy of what an ideal world would look like and contain, and in this case it's a little uneasy to stomach. He also takes issue with the way the Manson family are used, but not, as he feared, for reasons of taste - Charles Manson wasn't in Hollywood by chance, he wanted stardom, and for a film in which the desire for and loss of stardom are interests, to show no interest in drawing a thematic link here, instead only wanting to use the Manson family to rag on hippies, is more evidence of Tarantino's retrograde attitude.
The flip side to this coin is that the things Tarantino loves are wonderfully, warmly depicted. OUATIH is as much about television as it is cinema, if not more so, and Tarantino offers imagined and reimagined TV shows of many types in evoking in detail the time and place in which he grew up. To José, about the same age as Tarantino, there abound countless nostalgic pleasures; to Mike, disgustingly born 30 years too late, the film's enthusiasm and obvious knowledge about its setting rubs off easily. The film easily convinces you to love what it loves, be it silly, overblown action movies; cheesy, overblown TV acting; or Brad Pitt's Hawaiian shirt, which in one scene blows off.
Speaking of Pitt, José considers this his best performance, one in which he switches from evoking coolness and control to dumb and tripping balls. But for all the little touches and tone he brings to his character, Leonardo DiCaprio brings entirely different registers. His performance is a tour de force, his Rick, a declining Western star, constantly performing, even only to himself at times, and at every moment his emotions and thoughts are crystal clear, even under layer upon layer of performance. DiCaprio practically shapeshifts in sketches depicting Rick's old movies and television appearances, and offers a sympathetic portrait of a star unable to adapt to his changing environment. It's a rich, demanding role, and DiCaprio is spellbinding in meeting its challenge.
You'd be doing yourself a disservice missing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the cinema. It's an excited, passionate trip through a Hollywood fantasy, hilarious, light, and thoroughly enjoyable - though, like so many fantasies, its underbelly is dark.
Recorded on 18th and 19th August 2019.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. If there's a clunkier title out there, we'd like to see it. The first standalone film in the Fast & Furious series, and the first Mike's seen at all, while José gave up some years ago, after seeing the first two. But José liked the trailer, and coerced Mike into accompanying him, which means that Mike now gets to force José to do something he doesn't want to one day.
But, with expectations at an all-time low, Mike can confirm that he, in his words, "did not hate it". In fact, despite it being obvious trash, with an entire family of awful, lazy jokes - the extended metaphors and puerile insults that The Rock and Jason Statham trade are comedy sinkholes - there's quite a lot that charms us here. While Mike argues for the creativity and execution of the film's action, José expounds upon his fondness for its stars, on the one hand through the humour and enthusiasm of The Rock, who Mike (who writes these descriptions) refuses to call Dwayne Johnson; on the other, Statham's working class charm, which sets him apart from any other English star you'd care to name, all conspicuous products of privileged backgrounds and public schools, and none of whom can claim his level of box office power.
The film travels from one character's home to another, beginning in London and moving to Samoa, leading us to discuss the film's star vehicle nature - its stars are two of its producers, and indeed, there's much in it with regards to their images that is closely controlled and orchestrated, Mike noting in particular the manner in which Hobbs, The Rock's character, annoyingly laughs off Shaw's insults, as if to say, "I'm The Rock, I'm very likeable and can take jokes". But the move to Samoa in particular is one we enjoy, especially Hobbs' slipper-wielding, affectionate mother, and the way his family and friends act as a unit and support him despite his estrangement from them.
Though we happily expound upon the things we enjoyed about the film, which are several, it is far, far from valuable or unmissable. Mike notes the enthusiastic response from the audience we saw it with, a response that rendered him emotionally bleak at sharing a room with them. Hobbs & Shaw is very well-made, expensively-produced trash, and José, for one, wishes we'd all venerate trash a little less.
Recorded on 1st August 2019.
Cold Weather is a mumblecore crime thriller, if it is indeed possible to conceive of such a thing, which it must be, because Cold Weather is one. Gentle, leisurely, and with a close focus on character relationships and foibles, it's a pleasant and surprisingly engrossing film, more evidence of the reliability of MUBI's curation. Never has a brother-sister amateur detective duo been so laid back.
José has issues with the ending, Mike has an issue with the crime story, but neither takes issue with the film's strength: its characters' relationships. Whether between adversarial brother and sister, amicable exes, or newly bonding buddies, these are smartly observed and efficiently rendered, and the film relishes moments such as a familial debate over who gets to drive, and a detour in which a character hopes that taking up pipe smoking will allow him to think like Sherlock Holmes. With the exception of some self-consciously 'art filmy' shot choices, the film is well directed by Aaron Katz, who maintains a precise and agreeably unhurried tone throughout, and earns characterful performances from his cast. José also remarks upon the cinematography, some later scenes shot during dusk capturing Portland's natural light and industrial landscape beautifully.
It's the least interesting of the three films we've recently explored on MUBI (the other two being O Fantasma and Border), but this low-key indie is lovely to spend time with, and worth a glance.
Recorded on 31st July 2019.
The Matrix, the Wachowskis' groundbreaking, iconic sci-fi, is twenty years old this year, and we catch a one-off screening of its 4K restoration. Mike can't believe he's old enough for a film he watched as a kid to have a restoration, but this is the world we live in. Or is it?
Well, what an experience The Matrix remains. None of its pleasures have diminished with time, and with the benefit of the years that have passed since its initial release, we see it with fresh eyes. Mike looks at it as part of a late-90s cyberpunk/rave culture era that acts like a time capsule, comparing it to films such as eXistenZ, The Beach, and Johnny Mnemonic, films born of the same culture and dealing with similar philosophical themes, and asking why only The Matrix has stood the test of time. José notes how the film is a product of its time in terms of technology - landline phones are not only everywhere but have plot functions, the computers are large and clunky, the text they display neon green.
We remark upon the film's slow, noirish start, its willingness to flit between ideas and motifs, dropping them as quickly as it picks them up, and of course, the extraordinary action scenes, as thrilling today as they ever were. José considers the sustained, if not indeed increasing, appeal of Keanu Reeves, and the world's affection for him. Mike asks whether Neo and Trinity's love story really works, offering that he found the emotional core of the film to instead be the Oracle scene, and in particular the extraordinary warmth and humour that Gloria Foster brings to it. He also bangs on for a bit about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and assorted other shite. (He would also like to add here that his phone background has for years been an image of the Matrix's 'green rain', and he may, in fact, believe that he is the One.)
What an unadulterated thrill it was to see The Matrix again, on the big screen where it belongs, after so many years. It may be bizarre to think of it as an old film now, but time makes fools of us all, and it's a true great.
Recorded on 31st July 2019.
We're still with MUBI and grateful for the opportunity to see O Fantasma, directed by João Pedro Rodrigues: a film José had heard of and been encouraged to see by various friends, but hadn't quite come his way until now. He thought the film was only a few years old and could now kick himself for having waited twenty years to see it. José thinks it a masterpiece, Mike doesn't; though the film being clearly aimed at a gay male audience might help account for it, and it speaks to José deeply.
Following Sergio (Ricardo Meneses), a very handsome young garbageman in Lisbon, perpetually horny and on the hunt for sex, O Fantasma is feverish sex dream of a film, a reverie, that evokes the feeling of horniness, of being up for sex but having no one with whom to find release. What starts as a hunt eventually turns the hunter into the hunted. We discuss how the character of Sergio seems to have no filter and no fear. He lives in a homophobic culture fraught with danger but is free. The sexual situations seem to take on the form of a dare and, even in the most potentially dangerous encounters, Sergio's glance seems to say "I'm not afraid of you and it could get sexual if you want it to". We discuss how the film's story is structured differently to a conventional narrative: there is a conveyance of a certain kind of sexual dreamscape. The various episodes might not cohere in terms of plot but do come together in the film's conveyance of atmosphere and feeling.
We note how for an earlier generation this would have been an X-rated film due not only to its subject matter but to its explicitness. We also remark upon the film's real queer gaze that is also a gay male gaze; something worth distinguishing. We compare the film to the New French Extremity films of the era but also note that where they possessed had a harsh kind of crudeness, O Fantasma is very stylised. José finds the film unusual and beautiful, with extraordinary images that are really potent and poetic.
Sergio feels his desires in a culture in which he's allowed none of them. Yet this is a film that celebrates a full spectrum of desires, the freedom to desire and to act on one's desires. O Fantasma is a film that will confirm every homophobe's worst views of gay men - and that partly its strength. It's a film that is made in and asserts freedom. Sergio's gaze is radiant, subversive, and defiant.
If you're a gay man interested in film, this is unmissable.
Recorded on 30th July 2019.
Pickings are slim at the cinema at the moment, so it's MUBI to the rescue. We chose Border almost at random, our criteria being only something that looked interesting and would still be on rotation by the time we released the podcast. And what a fascinating film we picked.
Border is a Swedish art film that reeks of mud, pain and isolation, but with a sense of fantasy and irony that render it a curious, surprisingly light affair, despite some gruesome imagery and dark plot developments. It gives us a lot to talk about: the interstices of ideas of gender, place, what it is to be human, how we categorise ourselves, what makes us behave towards others as we do. The film takes a figure of fairy tale, fantasy, and horror, placing it in a contemporary setting. It supports all kinds of interesting interpretations: as a racial narrative, as a trans narrative, as an exploration of nature vs. nature, as a dramatisation of the fluidity of 'the self'. It opens up beautifully as we discuss it.
Recorded on 29th July 2019.
Following a break during which José has been exploring Argentina and Mike has been exploring John Grisham films, we reconvene with Toy Story 4, the latest in Pixar's iconic animated children's series. Mike's seen it once already and is keen to revisit it.
José asks questions of the film's messages, seeing the toys as faithful slaves, desperate for owners, and discarded once their value is exhausted. Mike argues for the characters' internal lives and the idea that they are parents or stewards of their children. We at least agree on the Key and Peele characters, thoughtless and lazy stereotypes of blackness, and Mike suggests that the irony that Key and Peele bring to their personas might be intended to make their characters easier to swallow. And their characters have the effect of rendering in sharp focus everything that is white about the film, José picking up on what he sees a tokenism in the few human non-white or mixed race characters present.
Toy Story 4 finally makes something of Bo Peep, turning her into an action heroine, and we discuss feminism in the film and, again, whether this is simply tokenistic or not. And an argument ensues about whether the word "homeless" is appropriate to use with regards to her life, and what we can and should make of Woody's fate.
And apart from all that, Mike laughed endlessly, and José laughed at Mike laughing endlessly! Despite there being much to pick apart, a great time was had by all in this charming, funny, and visually stunning film.
Recorded on 29th July 2019.
José returns from a week at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, just in time to see Venice crumble in Spider-Man: Far From Home, the latest injection of plot development to the Marvel series. It hits him in the gut and the film doesn't recover, José seeing a lack of respect and intelligence that colours the entire experience for him. Mike, on the other hand, doesn't particularly care for buildings, and finds a lot to like, including one of the more interesting villains Marvel has offered, one that self-referentially comments on image-making and the expanding chasm between what the public is shown and what is actually happening, and a setting - a school trip across Europe - that provides a way for the competing parts of Peter Parker's life to interfere dramatically.
There's much up for debate, our experiences differing severely. Two things we can agree on: it isn't particularly well shot, and Tom Holland's performance soars. Comme ci, comme ça, as they say in Europe.
Recorded on 3rd July 2019.
Following his critically acclaimed documentaries about Formula One legend Aryton Senna and troubled jazz singer Amy Winehouse, Asif Kapadia turns his inquisitive lens to Diego Maradona, arguably the greatest footballer of all time, and a man who moved rapidly from the slums of Buenos Aires to worldwide fame, winning the World Cup with Argentina and leading declining Italian club Napoli to two league championships. Kapadia's film beautifully and economically tells his story, making understandable and human the dark side that accompanies the success, including an illegitimate son, his infamous addiction to cocaine, and perhaps less well-known, his association with the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime syndicate.
Mike has never really "got" these kinds of documentaries, and José is more than happy to oblige him with his impressions of what they do, and in particular what this one does so well. It is not just about the man but about the times, places, people and cultures that were the environment of his life. Maradona is rendered deeply human as the film details the grip that not only the Camorra held on him but also his football team, Napoli's president refusing to sell him at his request, a capitalist demand for the value he holds, and then, when he is used up, this once-idolised, deified icon of Napoli is unceremoniously discarded, left to quietly slink away as his former worshippers turn on him - and all the while, the human cost to Maradona is incalculable, his extraordinary level of fame extraordinarily difficult to cope with, his descent into deeper drug dependence tragic and his punishment for beating Italy at the World Cup brutal. The film draws an important and poetic distinction between Diego and Maradona, as described by Fernando Signorini, his former fitness coach at Napoli: Diego is the youngster from the slum who loves to play, has insecurities and worries, and is, as Signorini says, "a wonderful boy"; Maradona is the star, the mask that cannot show any weakness, and an unpleasant counterpart to Diego - but without Maradona, Diego would still be in those slums. What the world has always seen is Maradona. What Kapadia shows us is Diego, hidden away, a victim of his own success, further and further buried but, nonetheless, always present.
We also talk a little about Amy, Kapadia's 2015 documentary, which Mike has watched recently as José's suggestion and truly loathed, finding it as exploitative and demon-feeding as the media frenzy it depicts and decries. José believes that Mike is too moralistic, but Mike disagrees, and that's where we leave it.
But! Diego Maradona. It's a truly great documentary, complex and rich, subtle and tragic, beautifully, smoothly edited, and featuring plenty of thrilling footage of one of the greatest footballers of all time doing the things that gave him that reputation. It's fantastic. Don't miss it.
Recorded on 20th June 2019.
A horror movie that cleverly inverts one or two tropes of the genre, we ultimately feel Ma is less than the sum of its parts, but worth a look nonetheless.
Director Tate Taylor is clearly very good with actors, and every performance here is pitched well, but he doesn't have such an aptitude for building tension or developing psychological creepiness. The writing doesn't help him - while Mike insists that the film's premise is full of potential, it's not built upon very successfully. But Octavia Spencer is brilliant as the central villain, eliciting laughs and jumps at will, and her Ma is an engrossing character, if a bit reliant on cliché.
José points out the film's concentration on women, male characters being secondary, and its interesting inversions of gender tropes, in particular a very male gaze: the objects of desire, men are disrobed and splayed out for Ma's pleasure, and the camera doesn't shy away from displaying them. Unfortunately, the film seems to have aimed for its 15 rating, sometimes appearing to edit around gore and explicit imagery rather than indulge in it, resulting in a somewhat disappointing feeling that it wants to be more graphic than it's willing to be, to its detriment. One can't shake the feeling that, for all Ma's boldness, there's still a more visually expressive, confident film in here, itching to get out.
So it's worth a look for the interesting way it deploys gender representation, and some wonderfully entertaining performances. Just don't be disappointed if you're a bit disappointed.
Recorded on 18th June 2019.
But for its astonishing visuals, we don't have much time for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a rather boring, incoherent film with an aspect that is at best lazy and at worst offensive. But it does look pretty! Wait, as Mike says, for its home media release, and capture yourself some lovely screenshots.
Mike's review of 2014's Godzilla: https://writingaboutfilm.com/2014/05/20/godzilla/
José's review of 2014's Godzilla: https://notesonfilm1.com/2014/05/18/godzilla-gareth-edwards-usa-2014/
Recorded on 3rd June 2019.
A musical biopic that understands its own music, that uses its songs not necessarily when they’re chronologically appropriate but when they fit emotionally and thematically, Rocketman beautifully and energetically tells the story of Elton John’s rise to and struggles with fame. Taron Egerton is notable for his work in the Kingsman films, but here he is given a true star role, imbuing his Elton with attitude, presence, and a bolshy walk. And, for the two of us in particular, it does us the great favour of giving us a new appreciation for the music, helping us realise that each of us has always taken both it and Elton’s cultural importance for granted.
The film is produced by Elton, functioning as a sort of autobiography, and although this justifiably raises questions of authenticity, honesty, filtering and bias, the film and man are so likeable, and the way in which it depicts his lowest points so open, the film completely sells its story and depiction of Elton’s character and those around him. (Though, as José describes, the coda in which we’re shown a modern, married, parental Elton, who is nothing like the one whose story we’ve just been told, does suggest that for all the authenticity we feel during the film, the message we’re left with is a somewhat disappointing, “anyway, that was a different Elton, I’m not him any more”.) Similarly, certain tropes common to gay stories, such as pining for a straight friend, being isolated emotionally, and being preyed upon by another, more confident, gay character – something for which we criticised Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – are here rendered convincing and understandable.
We fall in love with its style and storytelling strategy, the risks it takes in building slightly cheesy set-pieces, set-pieces that indeed reflect a certain amount of cheesiness present in Elton himself. The film impressively and confidently narrativises its music, flowing into songs, turning emotionally-charged conversations smoothly into musical numbers, liberal new arrangements allowing Elton’s entire family to share their loneliness in I Want Love and making Elton’s decision to enter therapy a moment of trumpet-worthy triumph in Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. José doesn’t go for the climactic moment with Elton’s childhood self, but Mike is with it completely, tearing up – before Elton could heal, before he could love, before he could fight all his addictions and fears and pain, he first needed to learn to love himself!
Rocketman is simply wonderful. It deeply understands its own music and freely reworks it to give it new life, teaching us to love and appreciate it anew. It’s lively, funny, imaginative, bold and entirely engrossing. Don’t miss it.
Recorded on 3rd June 2019.
Ridiculously, relentlessly, laugh-out-loud funny, we had a brilliant time in Booksmart. It's a last-day-before-graduation high school comedy about two girls determined to finally have some fun having been bookworms their entire lives. José loves the central relationship between the straight and lesbian best friends, Mike loves the empathy and openness the film shows towards every one of its characters, deliberately constructing them at first as high school archetypes so that it can go on to reveal their hidden depths.
Booksmart is a simply brilliant comedy with tons of heart and you will have a fantastic time. Don't miss it.
Recorded on 3rd June 2019.
First they killed Keanu Reeves' dog, and in revenge, he killed everyone, and it was brilliant. Then they had to make two sequels, and they couldn't come up with a very interesting story. But the action was still world class. Or was it?
Recorded on 19th May 2019.
For the first time, Eavesdropping at the Movies is talking about television... or is it? Game of Thrones spent eight years and countless millions of dollars in pursuit of cinematic production values, visual spectacle, and the world's unquestioning fealty and attention. Is it television? Is it film? Is it something in between? How can we even talk about it if we can't define our terms?
Well, after 73 episodes, HBO's epic, brutal, violent, sexy, melodramatic fantasy has finally reached its conclusion, and everybody's been watching. José's been watching it since it started. Mike's been watching it since last month. Did it end well? What made it interesting to watch? How did it change over the years? What of Podrick? All these questions and more might be answered in this spoilerific conversation.
Recorded on 20th May 2019.
A big one. The Marvel Cinematic Universe closes a chapter - kind of - with Endgame, a three-hour behemoth that concludes stories that have been told over 21 films in 11 years. It's elegiac, both of its characters' fates following the end of Infinity War, and of itself, offering a good deal of fan service to its vast, devoted audience, some members of which have grown up knowing nothing other than the MCU as the dominant mode of cinema. We take our time to discuss it in a two-part podcast.
The first part is, as usual, recorded upon our return from the cinema, the film still ringing in our ears. We saw it in a packed screening, the room filled with excited fans from whom the film elicited exactly the vocal and rich emotional responses that bring such occasions to life. Though three hours is a demanding duration by anyone's standards, and could certainly be seen to speak to a certain self-importance, the film makes very good use of its time, particularly in the opening hour, in which we are given copious time to understand the ways in which the world has changed following Thanos' fatal snap, and the remaining Avengers' responses to it all. We discuss whether the Russo brothers, the film's directors, offer much by way of creative visuals - to Mike, the film's visual core is simply about scale, while José remarks that some of the compositions appealingly evoke comic book panels. Mike brings up the way the MCU overall has to some degree always been about competition between Iron Man and Captain America, and how Endgame concludes that both in the story and metatextually, giving Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans respectively their own emotional moments.
The second half, recorded three days later, largely builds on a roundtable article in the New York Times, in which five of their pop culture writers discuss both Endgame itself and the MCU's impact on cinema culture over the last decade. (Read the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/movies/avengers-endgame-critics.html) It brings up a number of interesting subjects, particularly those that consider the MCU as a cinematic phenomenon rather than the specific content of the stories themselves.
So. It's a big film and a big podcast to go with it. We found it worthwhile to take our time to think over some of the cultural issues the MCU raises, and as for arguing about this character or that scene, well, sometimes it's fun to indulge.
Recorded on 28th April and 1st May 2019.
Despite a wonderful central performance from Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh, one that earned him an Oscar nomination, and some beautiful imagery, At Eternity's Gate leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It's a film with a contemptible view of the rural folk it depicts, some overly distracting visual design (particularly an effect that renders the bottom third of the frame out of focus for long periods of the film), banal talk of personal philosophy, and ultimately, no interesting perspective to offer on van Gogh.
Recorded on 26th April 2019.
Todos somos marineros (in English, We’re All Sailors) was partly inspired by a workshop in which a group of students spent eight hours discussing the opening line of The Merchant of Venice, and a news story about three Russian sailors left stranded in a Peruvian port due to the sudden bankruptcy of the company they worked for. Writer-director Miguel Ángel Moulet developed a story about just that predicament, a story in which two of the sailors are brothers attempting to find their place in the world, stranded in the coastal city of Chimbote, able neither to go home nor to establish a stable life in Peru, living in limbo, tentatively making connections with the locals.
Moulet is a graduate of EICTV, the Cuban film school, where José visits and spends a few days teaching every year, and this is how we come to bring this podcast to you, José having been screened Moulet's debut feature recently and keen to share it with us. We're far from the first to see it, the film being on the festival circuit and already having picked up a number of nominations and awards, including the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize at the Toulouse Latin America Film Festival. A screener was made available for us to watch, and we're so grateful that it was, as it's a beautiful, sensitive film.
That line from The Merchant of Venice reads: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad", and that simple thought informs the tone and themes of Moulet's entire film. Todos somos marineros is a story about isolation, displacement, loneliness, and a kind of all-encompassing, ethereal sadness. The central four characters pair up throughout the film - the two brothers, Tolya, the elder, who feels a degree of paternal responsibility towards his younger brother Vitya; the cafe owner and her delivery boy, Sonia and Tito, who function as a kind of surrogate mother and son; Tolya and Sonia, who are in a loving relationship, and Vitya and Tito, who grow close and whose relationship leads to the film's climax and quiet cliffhanger ending. These pairings are developed and expressed subtly, intelligently, and with heart.
The film makes significant use of long takes, both moving and still, and doesn't exactly discriminate between when they should and shouldn't be used. At their best, these shots allow the performances space to breathe, contribute to a delicate, slow pace, or help to convey a rich sense of the characters' environment; at their worst, they distract from or even obscure what the film is showing us. There's also use of a trope in which the film opens on a flashforward we'll return to later, one that effectively establishes a strong mood and mystery but which Mike argues is not purposefully used, and which detracts from the film's later scenes. (At least, that's his argument for why he didn't grasp what was going on in the film's final third.) On the other hand, there is simply gorgeous cinematography by Camilo Soratti, his camera capturing dense, diffuse natural light infusing the air over Chimbote with extraordinarily beautiful colour and texture. And, overall, Moulet's direction exhibits a strong control of tone, the film surging with the sense of sadness and loneliness so crucial to it.
There's more besides all of this to discuss, and we take our time to do so. Todos somos marineros is an imaginative, rich debut feature that is deservedly earning praise and winning prizes. There's no predicting if and when it will come to a cinema near you, but if you do get the opportunity to see it, we urge you to jump at it.
José spoke to Miguel Ángel Moulet recently, and their conversation (in Spanish) can be heard here: https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/04/21/in-conversation-with-miguel-angel-moulet/
Recorded on 18th April 2019.
The latest of Disney's CGI-driven remakes of its classic hand-drawn films, Dumbo features a rather cute elephant with too little screen time and two abysmal child actors with far too much. Tim Burton is on paper the ideal director to mine the circus setting for visual and situational surreality, splendour, and threat, and to a degree he does, but in comparison to the work that gave him his signature - Beetlejuice, the Batman films and Edward Scissorhands - Dumbo is milquetoast to say the least. It's a film of rote sentimentality and far too little humour, clumsily treading that weird Disney line of plagiarising its own classics in the name of reimagining them, and despite a flourish here and there, and the best efforts of Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito to inject their scenes with life - and the considerable cuteness of the cute little cute elephant - its emotional sterility and lack of imagination are summed up in the way it concludes by setting Keaton's mad futuristic circus entirely ablaze, a pointless climax, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But the elephant is quite cute.
Recorded on 16th April 2019.
Mirrors and doppelgangers and dual meanings and symmetries abound in Jordan Peele's Us, in which a family of four is terrorised one evening by a family of four identical copies. Like Get Out, Peele's 2017 debut, Us is hyper-aware of its genre's ability to make use of bold metaphor to offer coded commentary on social issues.
We find more room for a variety of interpretations in Us than in Get Out, and our conversation ranges from talk of race and its importance or lack thereof, consumer culture and materialism, cultural items and icons, including and especially Michael Jackson, someone who embodies duality better than perhaps anybody, the 1986 charity event Hands Across America and the competing ideas conveyed by its imagery, and far more. We also find the time to discuss and praise Lupita Nyong'o's incredible pair of central performances, creating two fully embodied characters, the technicality of her physical acting always perfectly evident but never distracting. She's extraordinary.
We have our problems with it, including its structure, lack of scares, and some imagery that we find lacking in meaning or clarity, and it's a less tight and cogent film than Get Out, which we ultimately agree is superior. But it's ambitious, intelligent, witty, original and rewarding. See it.
Recorded on 14th April 2019.
Jonah Hill's directorial debut is a small, charming hangout movie about LA skater culture in, as the title suggests, the mid-90s. For Mike - who sees comparisons with This is England and Skate Kitchen - it's somewhat unoriginal, if entertaining and engrossing, but José completely falls in love with it. It's certainly worth your time.
Links to things mentioned in the podcast:
Mike's piece on verticality in Phantom Thread - https://writingaboutfilm.com/2018/12/01/verticality-and-the-academy-ratio-in-phantom-thread/ Charlie Lyne's video essay on frames and containers - https://vimeo.com/219270731 Charlie Lyne's Twitter thread on vertical frames - https://twitter.com/charlielyne/status/1117079647370432513
Recorded on 14th April 2019.
José’s enjoyed three weeks in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and wants to return with a nice easy watch. Shazam! obliges. The latest DC movie follows a teenage orphan given the ability to transform into a thirty-something Action Man at the shout of a single word. It's light, colourful, a little corporate but what can you do? It's just what a jetlagged man needs.
Recorded on 7th April 2019.
We visit 1949's romantic drama The Passionate Friends, a favourite of previous podcast guest Celia, who describes it as "what would have happened if they'd had the affair in Brief Encounter". It offers a complex story of love and relationships, characters who want different things from their relationships and a love triangle that gradually shifts and changes over many years. Mary (Ann Todd) loves Steven (Trevor Howard), but refuses to marry him, wanting to belong only to herself, as she puts it; instead, she marries Howard (Claude Rains), a successful banker who gives her security, stability, social status and affection. Dramatic irony, shifting affections and a sensitivity to the subtleties of love and relationships create a fascinating and beautiful film.
There's a lot to discuss, including and especially the unconventional Howard - in any other film he would be an obstacle to the romantic couple's true love, but here, although he has villainous aspects, he is revealed to be as three dimensional a character and as deserving of respect and a happy ending as anybody else. It's the part he plays in the film's conclusion that makes Mike cry. We also talk about David Lean's direction, his use of visual layering, considered staging and occasional flourishes of editing emphasising the characters' emotional states and calmly and smartly conveying to the audience the right information at the right time.
It's not held in the esteem that Brief Encounter, a film with obvious parallels in many ways, is, and that's unfortunate, as it is deeply felt and quite beautiful. It appears to only be available on Blu-Ray in France (that's where Mike's copy had to come from, at any rate), but its loving restoration is worth seeking out.
Recorded on 15th March 2019.
A young girl from a tight-knit family in Norwich gets a shot at her dream, joining the WWE, the glamorous home of professional wrestling. Parental pride, sibling rivalry, and a lot of hard work ensues, as do great performances generating a lot of laughs. We're not that keen on some of the clichés - very little happens that you wouldn't expect, and some of the scenes take a long time to get there - but we like the male-female rivalry, the way Vince Vaughn and Nick Frost light up the screen, and of course, the fact that a big promotional corporate movie for Americans starts off in a tiny living room in Norwich.
Recorded on 14th March 2019.
A tweeny sci-fi based on a manga, Alita: Battle Angel tells the story of a young cyborg found on a scrapheap and given a new lease of life by a kindly doctor. She doesn't remember who is she or where she came from, but takes to the dystopian world around her, finding excitement and energy in it, quickly realising an aptitude for combat and inclination to explore, and developing a relationship with a young man who seeks escape to a floating city that promises a better life. Oh, and she's completely CGI in a live-action world.
Neither of us is too enthusiastic about the film, though José is far less interested in it than Mike, who finds things worth praising, particularly how Alita's attitude to her body can be read in terms of transgender experiences. But the world-building is weak, relying on simple tropes, and Mike decries the sequel set up, convinced that the story it's likely to tell could and should have been a part of this film. We vaguely agree that the action is enjoyable, José holding the reservation that he felt no connection to the characters, and Mike picks up on a tonal imbalance, suggesting that a film so clearly aimed at tweens should be less comfortable with swearing (something he also notes about Marvel, though to a lesser extent).
Mike is at pains to point out that despite acknowledging flaw after flaw, he had a good time. José has no time for such nuance, finding almost nothing in it he liked.
Recorded on 10th March 2019.
It's taken ten years but Marvel has finally branched out into films about heroes who aren't white guys. Following last year's Black Panther, Captain Marvel introduces Marvel's first female protagonist, Carol Danvers, a young woman caught up in conflicts between worlds and the mystery of who she is.
José is enraptured by the film's visual beauty, Mike by its cat. Its mid-90s setting is mined for tons of laughs, as is Samuel L. Jackson's lively, witty performance. Neither of us is too convinced by Brie Larson, sadly, who lacks the charisma to truly sell her role, but the cast and storytelling that surround her more than compensate. Quite apart from the very obvious gender dynamics at play, other intelligent, interesting themes are brilliantly interwoven into the plot, giving the film real substance and emotional punch. It's occasionally a little too transparently right-on, some moments of sisterhood rather unsubtle and even cringeworthy, but other scenes intended to inspire female empowerment truly soar.
It's an intelligent, spectacular film that we hugely enjoyed, and definitely recommend.
Recorded on 8th March 2019.
Remaking his own film, Hans Petter Moland brings us a revenge thriller, starring - who else? - Liam Neeson as a model citizen turned remorseless killer on the trail of those responsible for his son's murder. Sounds like typical Neeson fare, but Cold Pursuit leaps between dramatic and blackly comic tones with verve, and offers something much more interesting and original than you're likely to expect.
We find lots to like in it, including its magnificent lighting and compositions, interesting and welcome inclusion of a group of Native American characters, as well as a commentary on their relationship to the very whitest America there is (the film being set in a Colorado ski town), and some surprisingly tender moments between adults and children, and people in love.
We highly recommend it, it's a huge amount of fun!
Recorded on 3rd March 2019.
In response to José's excursion into the world of Michael Curtiz a few months ago, Mike has picked four films of his own to discuss, the first being writer-director Dennis Gansel's 2008 high school drama Die Welle (The Wave). Based on the true story of a 1967 social experiment, Die Welle follows one week in a high school in which, as an exercise intended to teach his pupils about the methods and dangers of fascism, a teacher creates a fascist movement, named The Wave, that rapidly spirals out of control.
Die Welle is first and foremost remarkable for convincingly depicting the seductive aspects of fascist movements, such as the shared symbols that engender group unity and, indeed, simply the positivity of being a member of a like-minded group. Mike compares it to Starship Troopers, claiming that it doesn't just argue its case but actually makes it work on its audience - rather than seeing why The Wave is appealing to the kids, you feel it too. José discusses what sets it apart from your typical high school movie and how an even greater focus on the kids, rather than the teacher, might have strengthened it.
The classroom scenes allow the film to develop its arguments about fascism through ersatz Socratic dialogues, the teacher's seminar-style classes allowing pupils to make competing points in quick succession, clashing with each other as they do so. But Mike points out that perhaps all is not what it seems: one student, for instance, goes unchallenged when she claims that high unemployment and social injustice are social conditions that favour dictatorship, but the world in which these children live bears few markers of such sociopolitical problems, yet they enthusiastically join and build their movement. Indeed, one motivation behind the experiment is the students' belief that Germany, having already experienced a fascist dictatorship, is immune from another. Perhaps, the film suggests, we aren't quite as clever and protected as we'd like to congratulate ourselves on being.
Aside from the film's central thesis, there are minor details in its world that pique our interest, José noticing the students' access to and expertise in the use of image editing and web design software; Mike picking up on the educated, liberated attitude to sex the characters display (it's hard to imagine an American high school movie treating sex with similar freedom and confidence). We remark upon how believable the characters are (with perhaps one exception) in their interactions and responses to the nascent movement.
Neither of us can claim that it's a perfect film - there's little in it that is visually expressive, and its mechanisms are too openly displayed, with some characters too clearly intended to represent ideas and serve plot functions. But Die Welle is an enormously engaging, intelligent, and rather bold exploration of the mechanisms and appeal of fascism that enthusiastically uses cinematic affect to convey its message that we may all be more susceptible to its dangers than we think.
Recorded on 3rd March 2019.
The film noir to end films noir, Billy Wilder's classic crime drama Double Indemnity made its way to The Electric in Birmingham for a one-off screening, where a packed cinema ensured a great atmosphere. Mike, as usual, hadn't seen it, while José is very familiar with it, even having taught it before.
Mike didn't entirely click with it, though he's able to appreciate much of what makes it a classic. Perhaps the stylistic and thematic elements that identify film noir are so perfectly employed by Double Indemnity that it leads to an ironic, detached mode of viewing - the genre, though it has existed since its inception, is strongly connected to its classical era of the Forties and Fifties, and has been parodied and pastiched more than most, burdening the film with unfair baggage to audiences not in that frame of mind. José, on the other hand, relishes the chance to see it with a paying, enthusiastic audience, finding that he notices different details and appreciates the film differently outside of an academic setting.
Unquestionable is the strength of Barbara Stanwyck's seductive performance as the femme fatale, her Phyllis Dietrichson the archetype of the dangerous woman who bewitches her doomed victim, in this case a chump played with distracting self-importance by Fred MacMurray. And every time Edward G. Robinson appears on screen he lights it up, capturing the audience, whether with the array of witty retorts and bon mots with which the script furnishes him, or dialogue as ostensibly dull as a recitation of an actuarial table for types of suicide.
With all of this in mind, Mike is sure that a second run at the film would help him appreciate it more. There's no doubting its place in cinema history, and that it continues to pack out cinemas with eager filmgoers is testament to that.
Recorded on 24th February 2019.
We return to Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk, his sumptuous romantic drama set in 1970s New York, for a deep dive, and take the opportunity to revisit his previous film, 2016's Best Picture winner Moonlight. It's an enriching conversation and we're glad we took the time to engage in it.
We begin with Moonlight, working through our responses to what we experienced differently since having seen it previously (Mike last saw it during its cinema release, while José has seen it a few times on more recent occasions). The film's final third is given serious thought, José in particular enjoying the opportunity to properly work through his longstanding problems with it, which amount to the film's fear of the sex in homosexuality, its conscious refusal to openly and honestly depict two gay men being intimate - the film denies them even a kiss at the very end - and the critical establishment's bad faith in refusing to engage with this particular point. It's great to have finally discussed this topic, particularly paying close attention to the final few shots, where the problems are condensed and made perfectly clear; as José says, it's an itch he's wanted to scratch for a long time.
Moving on to Beale Street, we re-engage with some points we brought up in our first podcast, such as the dissonance between the opening intertitle's invocation of drums and the soundtrack's absence of them, and the relative richness of the characters that surround Tish and Fonny to the central couple. And we draw out new observations and thoughts, in particular returning on a few occasions to the conversation between Fonny and Daniel, discussing the lighting that drops them into deep shadow, picking up just the lightest outlines of their features as if to expose their souls instead, and how shot selection, editing and the use of a rack focus develop the drama and bring the characters together but simultaneously isolate Daniel within his own traumatic experiences. Mike picks up on a motif of redness in their eyes, acknowledging that the reading he offers is always going to be a stretch but finding it meaningful nonetheless.
We discuss the use of photo montages to reach for the universality of experience that the title implies and we felt was an issue the first time around, José describing how they thematically focus the film on black male incarceration and the lived experience of black masculinity in the United States. Mike feels that it's a bit of a hangout movie, wanting to spend time with the characters and in their world, despite - perhaps because of? - the hardships they experience and discuss at times; certainly because of the romantic transparency, the care and love that characters show for each other, and the richness of their conversations. José finds fault with how the Latinx characters are lit and generally visually portrayed to less than their best, arguing that they were excluded from the visual romance that bathes the rest of the film.
And we see direct comparisons between Beale Street and Moonlight. Beale Street's sex scene is an obvious point of discussion with respect to Moonlight's ending, but we also find parallels in the elements that depict or imply betrayal between friends, Moonlight's hazing scene and Daniel's ostensible usefulness as an exculpatory witness for Fonny sharing complexities around whether the betrayals they depict are truly betrayals.
A hugely enriching discussion that we had great fun having, thanks to two intricate, beautiful, thought-provoking films.
Recorded on 21st February 2019.
It's Valentine's weekend and we take a romantic trip to The Electric Cinema to see It Happened One Night, Frank Capra's 1934 romantic comedy that is one of only three films to win all Big Five Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay). As usual, Mike hasn't seen it before, while José's seen it plenty. Does it hold up?
José talks of its democratic appeal, set largely in the American South during the lowest point of the Great Depression and showing people coming together despite hardship, lack of work and even fainting from hunger. We discuss the development of the relationship between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, including the wisdom of sharing a motel room with a man you just met, the propriety depicted (such as forgoing a lucrative reward, instead only claiming your expenses), and of course, the madness of Alan Hale's singing.
Recorded on 17th February 2019.
Achingly romantic and visually rapturous, If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins' adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel of the same name, utterly bowls Mike over, while José expresses some reservations about it, despite also finding it enormously impressive. A love story set in New York City in the late 60s/early 70s, the film follows Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) as they fall in love, begin to build a life together, but are threatened with its destruction by a racist cop and a false accusation of rape.
The title refers to a street in New Orleans that Baldwin, and subsequently Jenkins, use as a metaphor for the black experience across America, and arguably this is overambitious (if not simply impossible). The universality implied by the title is dissonant with what the film offers, which is much more personal and idiosyncratic. José points out the lack of anger in the film, anger that would be absolutely justified to express given both the general institutional racism the characters face in their place and time, and the specific instance of racist behaviour to which they are subjected: the rape accusation. Instead of fury, we see coping, survival, sadness, resistance and love, all communicated with an extraordinary depth of feeling and a camera that finds the beauty and subtlety in everyone's face. And ultimately this is wonderful, it's just that the title and opening intertitle that explains it somehow don't seem to quite understand their own story.
There's a huge amount we discuss, including the narration; the film's excursion to Puerto Rico and how its depiction of the experience of Latinx people might or might not offer an interesting comparison to its central interest, the African-American community; how Brian Tyree Henry shows up for a scene and steals the entire film; how the film aims for visual poetry; how Jenkins conveys rich sense of different people's lives and environments with just a few shots; and how the film chokes you up with its incredibly tactile depth of feeling that is sustained more or less throughout. We also bring up comparisons to Green Book, Get Out, and in particular, Moonlight, Jenkins' previous film - José has issues with how he copped out of giving his story of a gay black boy's difficulties growing up an honest ending, and takes issue with how viscerally one feels Tish's desire for Fonny due to the way he's shot, finding it even more disappointing than before that Jenkins didn't do the same in Moonlight.
It's a film we want to see again, infectious and emotionally rich, and if you don't see it in a cinema you're missing out. It's great.
Recorded on 8th February 2019.
It's already being portrayed as the film that will undeservedly win Best Picture for its cuddly, comfortable, comedy-drama version of American racism in the Sixties, but do we dissent from that view? Green Book tells the true story of a road trip through the Deep South shared by jazz pianist Doctor Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his Italian-American driver Tony (Viggo Mortensen).
Mike immediately seizes upon Tony's inconsistent characterisation, the film using other characters to describe him as deeply racist, but his actual interactions with Shirley consisting of essentially polite microaggressions rather than real malevolence and anger. José also takes issue with the revelation that Shirley is gay, Tony having no problem with it, saying that in his regular job as a bouncer he sees it all the time - the film makes no attempt to explain how he can be entirely understanding and accepting of sexuality while intolerant of skin colour. Mortensen, though, is very characterful, imbuing Tony with entertaining irreverence, and the love Tony displays for his wife, writing her letters every day, is very sweet.
Ali doesn't match Mortensen's level of performance, though he is perhaps asked less of, largely remaining aloof throughout the film. Again, we find problems in Shirley's characterisation. The film sets him up as a fish out of water, not just as a gay, black man in the Deep South, but also amongst other black people - it's a quirk too far to believe that he's never heard a Chubby Checker or Little Richard record. And the movements made in the film's final minutes to engineer a classic happy ending (at Christmas, no less) are as predictable and obvious as they come, but Mike is moved by the ending nonetheless, leaving the cinema with a smile on his face.
Despite the character issues, lack of subtlety (every aspect of the issues it depicts is explained in dialogue), weak visual storytelling (this film doesn't appear to actually know that it's being shown in cinemas, so fully does it lack any sense of cinematic nous or style), and project of delivering an unchallenging, white man's version of racism in which everyone can learn to get along without having to face any hard truths, we found things to like in Green Book, and recommend it as long as you keep your expectations low.
Recorded on 7th February 2019.
Concluding a trilogy two decades in the making, Glass brings together the characters of 2000's Unbreakable and 2016's Split in an unconventional superhero showdown. We both enjoyed it, though it's a bit of a trifle, but it's enjoyably oddball and features a particularly brilliant performance from James McAvoy. And we appreciate M. Night Shyamalan's direction, staging and camerawork, which, while occasionally a little stilted and 'filmmakery', for want of a better word, is thoughtful and always strives to create interesting and meaningful imagery.
The film feels significantly affected by the Marvel Cinematic Universe's influence on comic book movies and their public acceptance; there are things that Glass does, ways it behaves, that are difficult to imagine having made as much sense prior to that series. Indeed, this trilogy is a universe of sorts, with characters from different films being brought together in a shared world.
Recorded on 2nd February 2019.
Adam McKay brings the confrontational, fourth-wall-breaking style he employed in The Big Short to a story of lust for power, hidden agendas, opportunism, and as near as makes no difference a coup d'état of the American government, engineered from inside the White House. Christian Bale plays Dick Cheney as he transforms from a brainless layabout into the de facto President of the United States, operating with scary, virtually boundless power to do whatever he wishes. It's energetic, interesting, self-aware, and makes statements and accusations as bold as you're likely to see in mainstream cinema. But it's difficult to trust, says only what you'd like to hear, narrates where there are obvious opportunities to dramatise, and, fundamentally, fails to do what a biopic should: develop and convey an understanding of who its subject is and why. We weren't impressed with much more than the makeup, unfortunately - though it is brilliant makeup.
We also have a browse through the Oscar nominations, why not.
Recorded on 25th January 2019.
Gender-bending in turn-of-the-century France, with the true story of Colette, probably the most famous female writer in French history and author, although they were published under her husband's name, of the Claudine stories. With representational interests that give voice and presence to people and lifestyles one might not expect in a period film, and two very good central performances, one sensitive and complex, from Keira Knightley, and the other fabulously charming, Dominic West's, there are things we like. But our overall response is disappointed, the positives dulled by a poor script, some badly developed characters, and direction that allows no metaphor to pass unvocalised.
Mike considers it a potentially smart film destroyed by a pointless fear of its audience not getting it; José sees it as the middle-of-the-road cinema it is, for better and worse. It's worth a look in some respects, but we can't claim it's a good film.
Recorded on 17th January 2019.
A 1922 Swedish-Danish silent film in the form of a semi-dramatised lecture, we had absolutely no idea what to expect of Häxan, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. And what a great surprise it was, as we discover an extraordinary, perceptive, original, bold, witty piece of work that details the history of witchcraft, visualises medieval beliefs in wild set-pieces, and draws interesting parallels with modern-day institutionalisation of "hysterical" women.
The projection was out of this world, a 2K 2007 restoration by the Swedish Film Institute with unimaginable clarity, sharpness and contrast. It was unbelievable to look at. (Thanks to Holly Cooper for finding the technical details out for us.) And the film is full of images that benefit from the restoration; Bosch-esque dramatisations of Satanic seductions, a Witches' Sabbath, and unholy births of demonic creatures. It was the most expensive silent film to ever emerge from Scandinavia, and it shows. Though neither Mike nor José is an expert on horror, and indeed despite Häxan's fundamental differences from horror, in its imagery its possibly foundational influences on several subgenres of horror is palpable.
There's a remarkably sceptical, anti-clerical theme that runs throughout the film. While not strictly atheist, Häxan says clearly from the start it will discuss what folks in the Middle Ages believed without asking us to buy into it. Indeed, there's a frankly dismissive tone: "Of course, this is all nonsense", the film effectively says, "but let's learn about it anyway, shall we?" This set-up, while unexpected, arguably creates a lack of direction and drive until the final chapter, in which we are brought into the modern day (of 1921) and Christensen draws direct links between the superstitions of old and what real-life events, phenomena and afflictions they may have been responding to. And that would be interesting, but the film goes further, talking about this all as not just a difference in the understanding of the physical world between people of different eras, but as a continuum of oppression and abuse of women. Burning at the stake, Christensen says, has been replaced by the mild shower of the mental institution, but how much progress does that really represent? Women are now considered to be ill or troubled rather than in league with the Devil, but is the difference between murdering and imprisoning them really so great? Not only does it pose these insightful and powerful questions, it even proposes things as specific as institutional sexual abuse keeping women in an inescapable cycle of incarceration and continued abuse; assaulted by the very men charged with running the system that's supposed to protect them, they are left permanent victims, unable to plead their cases, for anything they say will be considered symptomatic of their hysteria, just as women on trial for witchcraft had no escape from torture and murder in a system that was ostensibly just.
We could go on. And in the podcast, we do. The 2007 SFI restoration we saw is available through Criterion, and you owe it to yourself to see it - it's available on DVD and digitally on Amazon and iTunes, though the Blu-Ray appears to be available only in North America, unfortunately. Brilliant film.
(P.S. José would like to apologise for saying silent films ran at 8 frames per second, when they actually had frame rates that varied from 16-24 fps and often changed due to being hand-cranked.)
Recorded on 17th January 2019.
A remarkably lean Jack Nicholson steals a man's identity in an attempt to leave his life behind in The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni's existentialist thriller from 1975. Though the film contains many of the raw ingredients of a Bond film or Graham Greene novel - a charismatic leading man, a beautiful European love interest, criminal activity, subterfuge and globetrotting - Antonioni cooks up a deeply atmospheric, contemplative work about identity, dispossession and escape.
In the four days between seeing the film at the BFI Southbank and recording the podcast, the film grew in José's estimation, while Mike was captivated by it immediately, commenting on the lucid, imaginative camerawork that brings past and present together in single takes and seems to give the camera a physical presence in the film's world, and considering the displacement of Nicholson's character, a man living between countries and cultures. José, having watched and written on a number of Antonioni's films back in June (links below), expounds on why he loves them and what he sees as the connective tissue of his oeuvre.
Mike describes Maria Schneider's unnamed companion character's similarities to the modern trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, José talks about the joy of seeing Spain in 1975, when he was but a wee nipper, and, of course, we give a few words to that penultimate shot, an extraordinary, brilliantly orchestrated long take that speaks of isolation and finality.
José’s posts on Antonioni:
L’Avventura - https://notesonfilm1.com/2015/05/04/lavventura-michelangelo-antonioni-italy-1960/
La signora senza camelie - https://notesonfilm1.com/2018/06/04/la-signora-senza-camelie-the-lady-without-camelias-michelangelo-antonioni-italy-1953/
La notte - https://notesonfilm1.com/2018/06/07/antonionis-la-notte-in-11-stills/
Blow-up - https://notesonfilm1.com/2018/06/08/antonionis-london-in-blow-up/
Cronaca di un amore - https://notesonfilm1.com/2018/06/11/cronaca-di-un-amore-the-story-of-a-love-affair/
Recorded on 16th January 2019.
Something a little different for us today, as we visit the Tate Modern to view Christian Marclay's 24 hour long video art installation, The Clock. It's a looping supercut of clips from film and television that involve clocks, watches, and people telling each other the time, synchronised to the real world. If you watch it at 8:10pm, it's 8:10pm in the film too. Supported by London's White Cube gallery, some 12,000 clips were assiduously located and assembled over three years by Marclay and his team of six researchers to create The Clock, and since its first exhibition in 2010 it's been popping up every now and again. We jumped at the chance to see it.
The Clock's scarcity, ambition, and strength of concept have arguably been partially responsible for its uniformly positive reception since 2010. We, however, find plenty to criticise, including a certain imperial flavour to the overwhelmingly Anglo-American choices of source films, not to mention the whiteness that pervades the entire project and lack of imagination displayed by its reluctance to explore outside the canon. If one of the ideas behind the piece is to draw commonalities between cultures and eras, as Mike suggests, then this is a failure not just to please our sensibilities but to achieve its own purpose. The few non-English language clips that do intermittently show up serve only to highlight their own absence.
There's also a discussion to be had about the piece's presentation. On the one hand, with the film housed in a vast, purpose-built room, entirely darkened, with sofas lined up in perfect geometric alignment, it's an unadulterated joy to let the time fly by, even when you know full well that you've been stood up for two hours because no seat is available and the artwork itself has been counting the minutes, mocking you. José decries the dismissive, contemptuous treatment cinema receives in art galleries, on which he has also recently written - https://notesonfilm1.com/2018/12/22/the-museums-disdain-for-cinema/ - but finds The Clock's presentation in this respect faultless. On the other, likely for the sake of a smooth viewing experience, the source clips have all been cropped (and in a few cases, stretched) to fit the same aspect ratio, a decision that we feel shows disrespect for the images and people behind them that far outweighs any benefit it has as to unifying them.
There are, though, ways in which Marclay manipulates the source material that we find valuable. Indeed, the entire piece assembles clips from thousands of films, and editing is what it's all about. When The Clock edits clips together along thematic lines, such as when we see people in different films, places, and eras all taking their seats for concerts and plays at the same time, and when it indulges in formal exercises, cutting together car doors slamming or people smoking, it qualitatively changes its source footage into something different, achieving interesting and sometimes simply swoony effects. At other times, a character in one film will pick up the phone and speak to a character in a different film (often in a different era), the piece using humorous juxtaposition to connect them. And the piece constantly edits and mixes its own soundtrack, using the source films as a basis and typically fading between them, again smoothing the viewing experience, and occasionally building a soundtrack that sits behind an entire section of clips, binding them and creating something new, such as the anticipation generated by Run Lola Run's soundtrack as the film chases down noon. It's at these times that Mike is most impressed, seeing a marked difference between when The Clock is a film and when it's a film project, finding that too often is it the latter. But those moments of filmmaking are quite fantastic.
The Clock is a singular work and one we'd urge anybody to see given the chance, but with room for significant and fair criticism. Keep an eye out for it.
Recorded on 16th January 2019.
Greek weirdo Yorgos Lanthimos, whose off-kilter thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer divided and provoked us a year ago, brings us The Favourite, a wild dramatisation of the power games surrounding Queen Anne's bedchamber in the early 18th century. It's his first feature on which neither he nor his usual partner Efthymis Filippou is credited as a writer, and that might account for its liveliness compared to his previous work, which tends to offer significant downtime in which the audience can ponder what it's seeing. The Favourite moves rapidly and fluidly, the shifting dynamics between Olivia Colman's Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz's Lady Marlborough, and Emma Stone's Abigail Hill constantly exciting, with their plans always subject to change depending on who knows what about others. And on top of the intrigue, it's really, really funny.
The Favourite offers us a brilliantly cast and even more brilliantly performing female trio, picking on a rare historical moment in which all the most important and influential people were women. (The men are all secondary, made physical jokes of, with their extravagant costumes and makeup outdoing the women's.) Sex is always on the table and made to mean different things to different people: to Marlborough and Abigail it's a tool to be used to manipulate and control the Queen, to whom it offers intimacy and emotional satisfaction she deeply craves and is allowed to feel she doesn't deserve. The film doesn't offer titillation, nor does it wish to shock or surprise with its depictions of sex or even the concept of the lesbian relationships. It's actually quite remarkable how the film so casually avoids making it superficial and gratuitous.
We take our time to appreciate the cinematography, extraordinary wide-angle and occasionally fisheye shots that render characters, particularly the Queen, tiny playthings in a ludicrously ostentatious doll's house. Mike remarks upon the way status is conferred by placing characters above and below each other and shooting at extreme angles to emphasise; José picks up on the costuming and its relationship to gender, mentioning in particular his admiration for Nicholas Hoult's self-effacing, generous performance as Robert Harley, impressed by his willingness to make himself a feminised figure of fun.
There's so much more we loved and we're effusive throughout the podcast. And again. It's a really, really, really, really, very very funny film indeed.
Recorded on 3rd January 2019.
Much to Mike's disdain - he throws tantrums about Netflix films - we settled in with a KFC to discuss Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, a semi-autobiographical film about the live-in housekeeper to an upper middle class Mexican family. Carefully composed and inflected with a neorealist aesthetic, it's been making countless year-end lists and is being touted as potentially Netflix's first Best Picture nominee at the Academy Awards, so Mike wasn't allowed to say no.
The film is remarkable for depicting modern-day indigenous Mexicans, people to whose existence many outside the Americas might not have ever given any thought. Yalitza Aparicio, Roma's star, is a non-professional actor of Mixtec and Triqui origin, and simply her appearance is interesting, let alone the film's use of Mixtec language (Mike gets this name wrong at first but don't hold it against him) and its development of the indigenous population as lower class workers. We consider the use of black-and-white imagery - José questioning what it brings to the film - and the ways in which the sound design and long panning shots attempt to place the viewer within the film's environments. Mike explains a prejudice he holds against "personal" films, and José considers Roma's place alongside Cuarón's previous work, and the melodrama of the birth scene.
Mediático, a film and media blog focused on Latin American, Latinx and Iberian media, took an immediate and deep interest in Roma and marshalled eight academics to each write a short essay on the film, and we refer to some of the points raised throughout the podcast. The dossier is well worth reading, will enrich your experience of the film, and can be found here: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2018/12/24/introduction-to-the-special-dossier-on-roma-alfonso-cuaron/
(The links to the essays are on the right hand side of the webpage.)
In addition, the dossier refers on several occasions to Richard Brody's review of the film in The New Yorker, in which he is critical of the lack of a voice given to the main character and finds the film asks more questions of the world it depicts than it answers. We refer to this, too, and you can read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfonso-cuarons-roma
As for us? We find areas of interest, things to both agree and disagree with, in all the articles we read. José was deeply riveted by Roma despite a reservation or two and continues to see Cuarón as a great director. Mike was less interested, admitting that had he been watching the film alone, he would likely have turned it off before the halfway point; an issue with watching things at home that isn't as pressing at the cinema (he wouldn't have walked out of a screening). But that's a tantrum for another day.
Recorded on 1st January 2019.
DC's search for a cinematic tone continues to lurch between monochrome gravity and Technicolor frivolity, James Wan's Aquaman firmly occupying the latter end of the spectrum. Although Mike has long been amused at how feeble is the concept of a superhero whose power is fish telepathy, the film has a good sense of humour about itself (even if some of the specific jokes are a little clunky) and hugely enjoyable freedom in its design, the giant seahorses a particular charm.
We discuss what's to like and dislike about the film's visual design and action, its message that violence is the least good solution to any problem, the welcome wisdom and calmness brought by Willem Dafoe and Dolph Lundgren (yes, really), and its adaptation of Arthurian legend and how it fits into a recent spate of films and television programmes fascinated with monarchy, bloodlines, divine rights and so on.
Jose is overall more reserved than Mike but still announces that he enjoyed himself, and the golden rule holds true: the key to happiness is low expectations.
Recorded on 29th December 2018.
Mary Poppins is back after a mere 54 years since the first film. The kids have grown up, life has grown difficult, and a magical undying supernatural flying nanny is precisely what they need.
What they don't need are new ideas. Mary Poppins Returns copies the structure and concepts of the first film almost to the point of parody, today's Disney operating in a world in which people apparently want low-effort, straight-up nostalgia (as their spate of CGI-laden remakes of their animated classics can confirm). However, the film has its charms, in time the songs may become memorable - one can rarely tell on first viewing - and children are sure to love it as previous generations loved the last.
Recorded on 29th December 2018.
It's colourful, friendly, packed full of visual energy and wit. It's also light and just a little forgettable, like a straight-to-video movie that's made it onto the big screen. But we had a good time and find lots to praise about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Recorded on 21st December 2018.
Rachels Weisz and McAdams soar in this delicate, passionate, complex drama of social pressures and forbidden love. Set in the North London Jewish community, Disobedience tells the story of two women whose love for each other is reignited when one returns home following her father's death.
Everything is rendered complex, nothing is simple. Weisz's anger at having been cast out of the community, McAdams' subjugation and repression into a way of life she doesn't desire, and Nivola's denial and ambition are all expressed deeply and combine in intelligent and subtle ways. José is spellbound by the depth of feeling from the very beginning; Mike feels the lack of context early on is disappointing, seeing the film's clichés rather than its originalities. And we share a certain reservation as to the film's visual qualities, Mike suggesting the Jewishness of the story is reflected in its understatement, but again there is complexity present in its aesthetic and we appreciate its coherence.
We also like the seriousness with which the film treats its setting, the lack of condescension with which it depicts Jewish ceremonies and customs, Mike in particular finding it exciting to see authentically represented all manner of occasions and nuances of English Judaism. And the synagogue's choir sings beautifully.
Though we don't agree on everything, we are deeply moved and find it an enriching film. It's very much worth your time.
Recorded on 13th December 2018.
A documentary in the hard-hitting, extraordinary revelations, true-story-you've-never-heard mode, Three Identical Strangers follows three identical triplets, separated at birth, discovering each others' existences at the age of 19. At first a joyous reunion, the story takes dark twists as the triplets and their families investigate the reasons behind their separation. That's all for your summary - we won't spoil the story for you!
Suffice it to say, we have severe reservations about the film, and in many respects. José is particularly unimpressed with the storytelling and weak focus - there are significant obstacles that the film has in understanding what happened to these men, obstacles that are no fault of its own; however, the things the film could investigate, such as their life experiences, it shows little interest in pursuing.
Mike, more forcefully, takes significant issue with the film's ethics and failure to build a convincing case for most of what it wants to argue. Some of what the film decries is already self-evidently bad, requiring no elaboration; in other aspects, the film seems to assume we'll all concur, doing the bare minimum to put across a point of view, expecting us to uncritically agree rather than arguing its case. And he finds it a deeply cynical and manipulative piece of work, accusing it of unethical behaviour just as it accuses some of its subjects.
As the conversation goes on, Mike takes against the film more and more, in what can surely be described as a hard-hitting and dramatic podcast worthy of many many awards.
Recorded on 12th December 2018.
A surprising, imaginative comedy full of dark twists and scathing observations, Sorry to Bother You fires us up. There's so much going on in it that we love. It builds a forceful critique of modern capitalism, drawing on black stereotypes, animal imagery, and factory cities to develop a thesis of 21st century capitalism as thinly veiled slave labour. Everything is available for commodification and absorption by the establishment; the system is able to tolerate dissent by co-opting it. But there is a vital resistance movement, embodied exceptionally by the coruscating Tessa Thompson, and though the film depicts a deeply unfair world in which power is entrenched, there is plenty of room for hope and joy, even through something as simple as a sigh when confronted with the latest absurdity.
The film is a kaleidoscope of ideas, always on its toes, always unpredictable, absolutely restless, and although we feel it lacks a certain visual finesse and overall coherence, the benefits of its madnesses far outweigh their costs.
Hugely recommended.
Recorded on 11th December 2018.
Flatpack's Silent Night series continues with a screening, at Birmingham Cathedral, of The Marvellous Mabel Normand, a programme of four silent comedy shorts from the BFI National Archive. Normand was the leading silent comedienne of her day but neither Mike nor José was familiar with her, and the programme provides a great introduction to her work, as not just a star but also a director.
We saw Mabel's Blunder (1914), which she directed, Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913), His Trysting Place (1914) and Should Men Walk Home? (1927). Each stars Normand, and alongside her are such names as Mack Sennett, Oliver Hardy, Eugene Pallette and one Charlie Chaplin.
José finds himself in thrall to Normand's magnetism and emotional openness, finding her incandescent with screen presence. The nuances she brings to her physical and facial performances, the way she types or jumps out of the way of an onrushing car, light up the screen and make her memorable.
Mike, it must be said, is less impressed, suggesting that she doesn't elevate some weak material as a better actor might, though that's not to say he sees nothing to appreciate about her performances. But what he takes away above all else is how seeing one Chaplin film amongst other silent shorts provides incontrovertible proof of his comedic genius, His Trysting Place a geyser of creativity and comic charm.
We also consider how key figures of silent comedy are remembered or not, particularly thinking of the disparity between Mack Sennett's importance and name recognition, and how Chaplin remains a worldwide icon perhaps to an extent comparable only to religious figures. José holds forth on the talents and career of Leo McCarey, director of Should Men Walk Home?, and we discuss the programme's newly commissioned score by The Meg Morley Trio, who performed it live during the screening.
Recorded on 8th December 2018.
Intriguing, calm, witty, touching. Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters, winner of the 2018 Palme d'Or, is a modern-day Oliver Twist with real depth of feeling and naturalistic charm. Deceptively simple, it asks big questions of its audience, questions about family, love, loneliness, and how to live a good life.
It's largely free of significant plot points - it begins with a very young girl, abused by her parents, being taken in by a motley crew of a family living on the poverty line, but from there takes an approach to story that is driven by character and situation. Everything is rendered complex - on the one hand, the young girl is taken in by a group of rescuers who care for her; on the other, they are kidnapping her. It would be true to say the aren't easy answers to be found, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's a harsh watch. It isn't. There's an impressive lightness of tone, the film refusing to wallow in victimhood, instead focusing on getting on, day to day. And it has a great sense of humour and keen eye for the romantic and emotionally open. It's truly moving.
Amongst our praise for the film, we find time to discuss the projection and atmosphere at The Electric, a cinema we're probably a little unkind to at times, and José orates on the relative lack of circulation of films such as these to a cinephile culture that does exist outside London and would gratefully receive more arthouse and foreign cinema.
Recorded on 4th December 2018.
We argue about a film that neither of us can possibly claim is good, but in which one of us found things to like. Hot on the heels of watching Errol Flynn's Technicolor classic a few weeks ago, we catch the latest telling of the Robin Hood folk tale, fittingly titled Robin Hood, a desaturated, guns and geezers-inflected version that transports us to a somewhat otherworldly, sci-fi-ish version of the medieval Midlands. Church and state are in cahoots, the poor are exploited - and it doesn't look like they have much left to exploit anyway - and with Sherwood Forest nowhere to be seen, the only green thing around is Robin of Loxley.
We can both agree that no matter the intention, the film is poorly directed, though José would decry it more than Mike, who tries to look beneath the incoherent camerawork and dull set pieces to find areas of interest, such as the tangible sense of growing revolution and the charming Black Hawk Down version of the Third Crusade, complete with shoulder-mounted arrow bazookas, why not. We have good and bad words to say about the performances in equal measure, Jamies Foxx and Dornan standing out but Ben Mendelsohn and star Taron Egerton failing to meet expectations set by their previous performances. And Tim Minchin, with the best will in the world, isn't an actor.
Mike takes issue with the film's conception of Robin; a character learning to become the hero is one thing, but simply being nudged and told by everyone around him how to do so makes for poor character development. Little John is so significant he's known here only as John, José speculating that as the biggest actor in the film, Jamie Foxx had the role improved at the expense of balance. We do find common ground in praising aspects of the world and visual design, but it's always with the caveat that the direction generally works better to obscure than exhibit it.
All this and more in an edition packed with disagreement. Arguments and quibbles aplenty!
Recorded on 3rd December 2018.
We're joined by Birmingham blogger Laura Creaven (www.constantlycurious.co.uk) for a discussion of our fourth Michael Curtiz film, the film noir Mildred Pierce. We're glad of her perspective, as this is a film all about women, their relationships and desires.
We discuss the film's flashback structure - though it helped the film get made in the Hays Code era, would the film be even stronger with a simple chronological plot? Class is everywhere too, motivating the mother-daughter conflict that's central to the film, and we consider America's class system and social mobility, and whether you could tell this story in Britain.
We look closely at Curtiz's use of shadows and mirrors to imply off-screen space and create meaningful, poetic images. And there's a lot to discuss in the construction of the characters, both male and female - we think about how masculine and feminine characteristics are deployed in both, and how roles are reversed.
Mike and Laura talk about how they each had differing attitudes to the framing device of showing the climax first, Mike wanting to know how the film would tie its plot up and Laura not caring very much. It reminds Mike of discussing Carmen Maria Machado's brilliant short story The Husband Stitch (free to read here: www.granta.com/the-husband-stitch) with previous podcast guest Celia, and finding a similar difference in the experience. Mildred Pierce is without question a film aimed at women, but as a film noir does the framing device work to capture their interest?
And indeed, how much is the film a noir? With shadows and murder and intrigue, it's inseparable from it, but there's a lightness to the image and combination with family drama that serves to adjust it. To José the film is unambiguously noir; to Mike and Laura, the noir elements invade an otherwise normal world in interesting ways.
Recorded on 27th November 2018.
José drags a somewhat recalcitrant Mike to the cinema for a second go at Widows, joined by Lee Kemp (@leekemp), a Birmingham-based filmmaker and founder of Vermillion Films. And wow, we cover a lot!
Mike and Lee both agree that some of the cinematic technique is distracting on the first viewing, whereas second time round, knowing what to expect, it's easier to appreciate the art of some shots and evaluate them more intimately. José simply luxuriates even more deeply than before in the visual splendour and tone. We agree that it's a heist film that isn't really about the heist, though what we then make of that - how clever we think that is - is up for debate. What isn't up for debate is the film's economy, both visually and in dialogue. It's so, so elegant and deliberate, and that all becomes clear as we compare things that struck us.
The film's use of the Church comes into focus - morality and God is almost never in question when it comes up, the film instead framing it in political, corporate and corrupt terms. The film equates the worlds of politics and gang crime, one white, the other black, a theme expressed through the two opposing political candidates and their associates.
We take time to consider the similarities and differences between the central female characters; how, for instance, the two black women are members of very different social classes. We praise how the film depicts how they deal with grief, the lack of connection they so desperately feel, and the way it affords each of them their scene to express it. Mike has, since the first podcast, watched the first Prime Suspect (written by Lynda La Plante, creator of the original Widows) and talks a little about it; José finds it interesting that an originally British television programme adapted in part by a British filmmaker should yield such a sharp commentary on American society.
We also consider wider questions of how to watch films critically. Mike goes on a brief rant about why the lack of seriousness with which media studies education is still taken has resulted in a world of Trump, Brexit, and fake news. Methods of analysis come in for scrutiny; we mention the video essay series Every Frame a Painting and discuss how one of its episodes in particular, the one on 2011's Drive, is or isn't a good example of textual analysis. We discuss the scene in which we see the protagonist's son's death; would we have watched it differently ten years ago, when it's set?
All this and even more in a discussion that's full to the brim. Mike is begrudgingly forced to concede that he misjudged the film the first time. José loves it even more than he thought he could. And many, many thanks to Lee for joining us. And check out War of Words, the UK battle rap documentary on which he worked as executive producer, now on iTunes!
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/war-of-words-battle-rap-in-the-uk/id1435149660
Recorded on 19th November 2018.
The second Fantastic Beasts film, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter spin-off series, has numerous pleasures, but makes it hard to appreciate them thanks to a pointlessly convoluted plot and unimaginative character goals. Jude Law stands out, bringing a calm control and gravity to Dumbledore, and Eddie Redmayne, while typically a little irritating, is cast well in the role of a near-autistic, nerdy zoologist who connects far better with animals than people. The question of who the film is aimed at is an interesting one - the animal designs and elements of performance are quite cartoony and broad, and the film as a whole is borne of a world-renowned children's fantasy series, but in this film alone two infants die, and there's almost no levity to be found anywhere. Certainly, as a middle child of a forthcoming five-part series (how!?), it's a bit of a holding pattern, interested primarily in making situations worse so as to provide the foundation for future triumphs.
Two of the film's love stories provide food for thought; one a bizarre love spell story that, upon the charm being broken, attempts to cast the enchantress - or as we think of her, rapist - as the victim; the other a subtle, quiet, but clear gay romance between Dumbledore and Johnny Depp's Grindelwald. We disagree on the film's visual qualities - Mike finds beauty in some shots but more or less everything fails to arouse José - and some of its attempts as charm and humour, but despite our deep, deep reservations about the storytelling and lack of interest in the characters or plot, somehow we're still keen to see the next one.
Recorded on 19th November 2018.
We continue our Michael Curtiz kick with Angels with Dirty Faces, a James Cagney gangster film with surprising subtleties. We consider Cagney's stardom and how he remains unique, the film's themes of hero worship and glorification of crime, and the interesting relationship between Cagney's gangster and Pat O'Brien's priest.
A film that's very much of its time but remains an interesting and entertaining watch.
Recorded on 19th November 2018.
One of the first three-strip Technicolor films, and an action adventure classic, we visit 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, featuring Errol Flynn at his dashing, cheeky peak. We get swept up in its excited use of colour, social conscience, pleasantly laddish tone and swashbuckling combat.
Mike sees some of the film at an ironic distance, particularly the action, which he finds charmingly amateur. But while some things might have significantly changed over the last eighty years, the connection to the characters and the film's sense of fun is intact. There's a discussion to be had over the film's messaging - José greatly appreciates the democratic tone to everything, the fairness with which Robin treats everybody and the grace with which he is able to accept defeat, while Mike suggests that his magnanimity would be more impactful if we were able to feel he were ever in true peril - but Flynn is simply so charming, so in control, and indeed, such a star, that the film can never sell it. Flynn conveys a certain superiority through masculinity, as José notes - he is a man among men.
The Robin Hood legend endures, this 1938 version only one of countless film adaptations, and we discuss why that might be. And there's always room to mock Americans who try to tell English stories and get things wrong. It's the joy of being English.
Recorded on 13th November 2018.
The road to banal and disappointingly homophobic biopics of rock legends is, as they say, paved with good intentions. The Queen story/Freddie Mercury biopic has been in the works since 2010, with creative differences amongst the filmmakers made public and Brian May and Roger Taylor apparently exercising tight control over how the story would be told. What they apparently wanted was sanitised, bowdlerised, pasteurised, inoffensive to the delicate sensibilities of an audience that would rather not look too closely at the sexuality of a gay icon. Which sounds absurd, but considering the old man sat near us in the cinema who audibly said, "oh dear", when Freddie was shown kissing a man... Jesus, they might have had a point.
José expresses his disappointment at seeing yet another gay story in which being gay leads to isolation and unhappiness. Freddie is lonely, surrounded by cats in a vast empty house, pining for a woman. His gay relationships are chaste and the one openly gay character, comfortable with who he is, is cast as a snake, a villain. Freddie's sexual drive bursts out of his music; are we supposed to believe he experienced no joy in being gay? Brian May - the character - is depicted as a particularly annoying pest, clean, perfect, and forever commenting on Freddie's lifestyle and behaviour as if to vet it; or perhaps as if to ensure the audience is comfortable. The more we think about it the more homophobic it is.
Our discussion of the film's attitude to and portrayal of Freddie's sexuality is central, but two other key aspects to his life also come under criticism - his music, and his death from AIDS. The latter is skated over almost entirely, sympathetically included right at the end to help you feel good about feeling bad for him. The music can't be hurt, of course, and it's a pleasure to hear banger after banger, but as Mike says, you may as well go home, read the Queen Wikipedia page and put on the Greatest Hits. What drives the band, what drives Freddie, aren't things the film appears to have even considered might be interesting questions. Things just... happen. In chronological order. Mainly.
Ultimately we ask ourselves who this film is for. We watch it at a distance, wondering why it is the way it is, not really involved in it until that final act in which Live Aid provides Freddie with the opportunity to make the entire world his own for twenty glorious minutes. And once we get there, everything else becomes insignificant for a while, because it all comes together, the music, the character, and the best parts of Rami Malek's performance - his physicality and stage presence - and we get to watch Queen for a while. (Or at least a very good tribute act.)
Recorded on 12th November 2018.
José falls in love with Widows, a portrait of life and survival in modern America in the skin of a heist film. Mike can see exactly why he should love it, but just doesn't click with it.
Based on Lynda La Plante's 1983 ITV series of the same name, Widows sees three women lose their criminal husbands in a heist gone wrong, and their attempt to complete their final job with the promise of a big payoff. The film draws parallels between urban gang violence and entrenched political dynasties, complicates the widows' grief with sex and intimacy, and constructs the potential payoff not as a cause of celebration but as a way out of bad situations. José finds the film a visual marvel, layered and expressive, but to Mike it's more a reminder of what he loved so deeply about You Were Never Really Here than great in its own right.
Recorded on 7th November 2018.
One of us has seen it countless times. The other has never seen it. Fortunately for José, Mike instantly falls in love with Casablanca.
In a way, the pressure was on for Mike to enjoy it, as it's considered one of the greatest films of all time, and its screenplay in particular held up as a shining example of the craft. And how effortless it is to enjoy it! José notes how rare it is in cinema to see a man suffer for love, as Rick does, and the film's romance is intense and unapologetic. We swoon over the elegance of Michael Curtiz's direction, the sheer beauty of the cinematography - nobody these days is shot like Ingrid Bergman is here - and the rich cast of characters, played by one of the all-time great supporting casts.
José considers how the refugee situation and politics depicted - that of a war-torn world relocating regular people to geographic and bureaucratic purgatory - haven't gone away, and Mike picks up on Madeleine Lebeau's Yvonne, a minor character whose story recapitulates Rick's in microcosm. The Marseillaise scene in particular gives us a lot to talk about. And so does much, much more.
It's a good film. Who knew?
Recorded on 30th October 2018.
Commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Peter Jackson was approached by 14-18 NOW and the Imperial War Museum to make use of their extensive archive of wartime footage. He responded to the call by performing significant alterations to it, including colourisation and conversion to 3D, hoping to present it afresh and help modern audiences feel closer to the war it documents. It's been a controversial project, surrounded by much commentary on its ethics, but after all the hype and chin-stroking, They Shall Not Grow Old - even the title of which has been edited to suit modern syntax - is finally here.
Those ethical questions occupy a good deal of our attention, justifiably so, but we find there's a good deal more to consider about the film too. Perhaps unusually for a First World War film, it eschews entirely any discussion of the political background to the war or criticism - even mention - of the top brass, instead focusing entirely on the experience, in quite general terms, of the British soldiers. Narrated entirely by some 114 different servicemen, their commentary drawn from BBC and IWM interviews, Jackson builds a portrait of a mindset of the salt-of-the-earth Tommy, keen to go to war at a tender age, open to new experience, happy to do as he's told and get on with his job under terrible, and terrifying, circumstances. It's a portrait that leaves out at least as much as it includes, and the question of how choices were made as to what footage and audio was included from the archives made available to Jackson is arguably more pressing, and certainly less clear, than that of why the footage was altered in the ways it was.
We grapple with all sort of these issues and touch on several more, particularly the traditional, unfair, untruthful, and insidious permission the film gives English audiences to believe we won the war without help - an issue that angers José, a Canadian, and rightly so. Mike also picks up on a couple of moments that struck him as of particular relevance in the age of Brexit, though that's also because it's a topic he can be relied upon to bring up at a moment's notice.
As to those pesky ethics, we come away, despite some fair criticisms, a little milquetoast on the subject. Mike has a bigger issue with the quality of the alterations than the justification, finding them genuinely unpleasant to look at for the most part, but suggests that the modifications have been so extensive that the footage has been transformed into something qualitatively different, that to take the film seriously as a document would be an act of madness. José, rather more simply, sees value in the work, pointing out how it allows us to pick out aspects of scenes, and particularly faces, more easily, and allowing a more visceral closeness to the environments depicted than we might otherwise have.
All in all, as long as the original black and white film remains extant and publicly available, and provided that, when used as teaching material, the conceptualisation and production of They Shall Not Grow Old is included as a matter for classroom discussion, we're not convinced that the film is a bad idea.
Below are links to a few blog entries and reviews we mentioned in the podcast, from Lawrence Napper and Pamela Hutchinson.
Lawrence Napper's first blog entry: https://atthepictures.photo.blog/2018/10/05/they-shall-not-grow-old/
Lawrence's second blog entry: https://atthepictures.photo.blog/2018/10/12/they-shall-not-grow-old-2-the-abject-archive-the-sacred-archive/
Lawrence's review on Iamhist: http://iamhist.net/2018/10/they_shall_not_grow_old/
Pamela Hutchinson's review on Silent London: https://silentlondon.co.uk/2018/10/16/lff-review-they-shall-not-grow-old-honours-veterans-but-not-the-archive/
Recorded on 30th October 2018.
We pick at flaw after flaw in a film we sincerely enjoyed! Drew Goddard's post-noir, post-Tarantino, post-Hitchcock thriller is an oddball, a delightfully playful collection of stories about secrets and regrets and temptations and damage. A fabulous ensemble cast is split up and paired off in all sorts of ways, histories are exposed, deception is currency, violence is brutal and shocking. And it all happens on one rainy night in a broken old motel in 1969.
We have few issues with Goddard's screenplay, which, but for the exception of one or two characters who we reckon could have been given a little more flesh, is creative, clever, witty, and energetic. But as a director, we find him lacking - as José phrases it, he has no instinct for cinema. It's a significant problem in a film that's building upon and pastiching entire genres and movements of cinema.
We go back and forth on some of the performances, though they're primarily good, and Jeff Bridges and Lewis Pullman in particular are just perfect. Mike appreciates that the film understands when to pull the rug out from under you and when not to. We agree that it's destined to become a cult success, the type of film you want to know if your friends have seen. And we like trifle.
Recorded on 14th October 2018.
A weird failure, as Mike puts it, we struggle a little bit to get a read on First Man, Damien Chazelle's biopic of Neil Armstrong. Not content to adopt a mainstream tone, not willing to go full art movie, it gets lost in the middle somehow. Mike sees Armstrong as incongruously passive in his own story, his - and, for that matter, everyone else's - drive for the Moon light, not believable, ultimately making the landing scene feel cheated, the film trying to convince you of the incredible achievement of the mission only at the last minute.
José finds aspects of the plot interesting, particularly the portrayal of marriage, but sees the use of the daughter as disjointed. Mike finds the film misunderstands Ryan Gosling's style - his minimalism requires rich surroundings off which to reflect, and with so little here, Armstrong comes across blank. We appreciate the physicality of the space sequences, shot almost entirely with close ups on interiors, though the extension of the shaky cam to the rest of the film is irritating.
A confusing film that we find misguided, and a glance at its opening weekend box office doesn't bode well. Claire Foy is very good though.
Recorded on 14th October 2018.
Hyped up, already very successful, and widely well-received, A Star Is Born earns strong reactions from us. To Mike it's at points truly reprehensible, to José simply a confused failure. Mike has never seen any of the previous versions - he tried and couldn't make it - while José finds writer/director/star Bradley Cooper's new remake unworthy to share their company. The novelty of seeing Lady Gaga unmasked soon wears off, her performance opaque and lacking in presence. We agree that Cooper is very good and truly a star, though with the opprobrium he receives from one half of us, he must have done something to Mike in a previous life.
We discuss and debate what we make of the film's characters - Mike finds them deeply unlikeable, toxically compatible, which isn't in itself a bad thing but for the fact that the film wants to render it romantic. (Cooper has a real problem with consent and personal space.) José finds their love difficult to believe in, particularly Gaga's for Cooper. Quite why she's so hot for him is barely even told, let alone shown.
Cooper's take on the music industry is out of date and simplistic, which is more than disappointing considering he was working with one of the biggest pop stars of the last decade. We each have our reasons for finding the suicide scene nonsensical. And Mike describes his problem with the film's ending.
A lot to talk about, most of it negative. See you again in between twenty and forty years for the next version.
Recorded on 8th October 2018.
You find us in contemplative mood, picking apart a film described by José as "genuinely puzzling" and Mike as "The House with a Doc in Its Walls". The Little Stranger builds light gothic horror around class and ambition in 1940s Warwickshire, a stately home providing the setting of the action and focus of Domhnall Gleeson's town doctor.
With some difficulty, we attempt to grasp the film's themes and intentions, never quite feeling we get the full measure of it. It doesn't help that it basks, to some extent, in ambiguity, and also that half the lines are mumbled so as to be rendered truly unintelligible. There are things we like, particularly its sure sense of era and class, and its rich production design, but we can't overall say we recommend it.
What we can recommend, though, is a visit to Evesham's Regal Cinema, where we saw the film. A multipurpose venue that hosts live shows as well as regular cinema screenings, it oozes charm and style. A leisurely Sunday drive amongst sunny A roads took us there, and what a lovely day was had by all. Even if the film was a bit disappointing.
Recorded on 7th October 2018.
With 99 podcasts under our belt at time of recording, we take the opportunity to look back and reflect. At Eavesdropping at the Movies we try to speak honestly about what we see and don't attach too much of a formula to our discussions. Our philosophy - yes, philosophy! - is to try to see films as unmolested by hype and expectation as we can, and to consider questions of aesthetics and individual experience as well as the likes of plot and performance.
So what do feel we've done well, what have we done badly or too little of? And are there films that, with hindsight - given that the podcast records our first impressions, by and large - we'd reevaluate now?
A slightly self-indulgent but hopefully frank look at a podcast we're ultimately very proud of but has room to improve. Happy 100th anniversary!
Recorded on 7th October 2018.
Venom utterly charms the pants off us, its bizarre knockabout body horror surprising us with a great sense of humour and unexpected variations on the idea of a dweeb made more masculine. From the trailer, Mike was worried about the broadness of Tom Hardy's accent - actually, it's tonally perfect as broadness is exactly what the film is going for in every respect, in the very best way.
Hardy is superb, giving his all to a role that demands physical dexterity and comic ability; the CGI bowls José over; the sense of Hardy's body being shared by another physical entity, rather than being merged with it, is tactile and interesting. Mike's also been watching the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy recently, in which Venom appears, and holds court on a trend in the villains he sees Venom as adhering to. And the dog is so funny.
Recorded on 7th October 2018.
A group of dancers parties the night away, but someone has spiked the sangria with LSD. There are extraordinarily long takes, sex, drugs, violence, and horror. Yes, it's a Gaspar Noé film.
Climax is a singular cinematic escape into a vision of Hell. Boy, there's a lot going on. We grapple with the film's themes of sex, violence, drugs, youth, dance, sexuality, nationality, culture, and whatever else we can remember of its insane 96 minutes. We discuss what we did and didn't like about the dancing - the pros and cons of the way it's shot - and what value there is in extraordinary cinematic violence in a world in which footage of horrific real-life violence is commonplace. We discuss the detail of Climax's cinematography and editing and the effects they have on our experiences, particularly shooting upside-down and inserting almost subconsciously brief flashes of black frames in otherwise normal cuts. We're reminded of Do the Right Thing, The Exterminating Angel, and Salò, and indeed Climax wears its influences on its sleeve. José reads it allegorically, finding reference to Europe, cultural power, and race, though so far adding it all up remains beyond us.
It fired Mike up enough to have a go at a guy who'd had his phone on during the cinema, but it enveloped José so completely that he didn't even notice the distraction. And Mike made a film like this once! As he puts it, "Not as good as this, probably, but a lot shorter." You can see that here if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjsQl7T7qMo
In short, Climax is certainly worth your time. There's so much going on and we'll be seeing it again when the mac screens it in November.
Recorded on 30th September 2018.
"From the darker side of director Paul Feig", as the ubiquitous advertising has it, and the film doesn't disappoint. A Simple Favor pairs Anna Kendrick with Blake Lively as the least compatible friends you can imagine, friends with dark secrets and desires. We find Feig a complete master of tone, able to control the film's descent into some very, very murky places without ever losing its ability to remain light and likeable. It's a quite an achievement.
We discuss the way the film makes the female characters prominent and diminishes the role of men, eschewing the typical noir hero role for Kendrick's Nancy Drew escapades, and the pleasure in seeing her character develop and assume control. The use of flashback is interesting and at some points quite brilliant, with important plot points being conveyed through subtle eyeline matches and just a few short shots recontextualising things we already know, or think we know. Mike finds the plot grows a little overcomplicated towards the end, and indeed predicted one or two developments - normally he prides himself on his gullibility - but these are nitpicks, at best, in a hugely entertaining film.
And it's a film noir played for laughs! José can't stress that enough.
Recorded on 24th September 2018.
We're disappointed with The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a children's horror fantasy that insults its audience's intelligence by assuming that this is the kind of simplistic shit kids love. We find some aspects of its design to enjoy but for the most part find it close to charm-free and not up to the standards of its stars - though Mike is keen to point out it's probably director Eli Roth's best film, which isn't saying much.
Recorded on 24th September 2018.
First of all, huge thanks to the Electric Cinema in Birmingham for not only screening a preview of irresistible hangout flick Skate Kitchen, but for hosting a Q&A with director Crystal Moselle and some of the cast - not professional actors, but girls who genuinely hang out and skate in New York City under the name "Skate Kitchen", and whose daily lives form the basis of the film. A chance meeting on a train led to Moselle shooting a short film with them and ultimately this feature. Moselle has been here before: her debut, The Wolfpack, also came about due to her curiosity about a group of people she came across in New York, but that was a documentary, and Skate Kitchen is narrative fiction.
Indeed, the narrative works to bring out the best of the setting and people, structuring the documentary aspects to avoid losing much focus while bringing out observations of these girls' lives that feel deeply authentic, pointed, and original. It follows a teenage skater with a rebellious streak becoming part of the Skate Kitchen collective, the changes to her life as she grows up away from home, and the inevitable conflicts between the girls and the boys who dominate the skate culture they want a part of.
We discuss the nuances in the film's construction of a divorced family in which both parents are nonetheless present, and in which the child is given agency over her relationships with them; the wholesomeness of the girls' interactions, particularly with one of their dads; the dimensionality of the boys, particularly in terms of sexual desire and their interactions with girls - and the way the girls' bodies are displayed not as passive, simply intended to look sexy, but as active and really, really fucking talented. Watching them skate is, just like watching the horse breaking in The Rider - also played by non-professional actors using their real-life skills - a pleasure in which the film allows us to indulge deeply.
Finally, Mike wants to apologise for the sound quality in this episode. He forgot to plug the mic in.
Recorded on 17th September 2018.
A heist movie for the twinkly wrinklies, with a nostalgic and homophobic angle we disliked. Based on the true story of the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary, King of Thieves features an all-star British cast and one joke: they're all old.
Mike is keen to give the film credit for its charm early on, as well as its sensitive depiction of the sense of loss felt by Michael Caine's recent widower. But the film is uninspiringly shot, incompetently and unwisely edited - it's absolute mayhem - and when it swaps its charm for aggression after the heist, it loses all interest. Ray Winstone comes in for particular criticism from José, and Mike explains why he found The Theory of Everything wanting.
Recorded on 17th September 2018.
A contemporary Western played by non-professional actors and based closely on their real lives, The Rider is both heartfelt and riddled with cliché. Brady is one of a group of young men in the American Midwest who ride bucking horses and bulls, risking severe injury and death, in what can be seen at once as both a vital act of keeping tradition alive and a tacit admission that the opportunities offered by America are dwindling and serve to keep people in their place. Mike also describes it as "a stupid sport".
José sees a kinship with American Animals in its portrayal of young American men with no sex lives or apparent interest in sex lives; Mike believes it's a film that will flatter those who like to pride themselves on seeing "quality" cinema. There are scenes of beauty, including those with a former rider profoundly injured and restricted to life in an assisted living facility - Brady's love for his friend, expressed throughout the film, is touching. And the horse wrangling is simply spectacular and worth it for its own sake.
A film with deep flaws, an indulgence in cliché, visual unoriginality, and too rosy a view on its subject matter, but nonetheless with flashes of beauty.
Recorded on 17th September 2018.
Cold War is Paweł Pawlikowski's follow up to the Academy Award winning Ida. We delighted in the Midlands Arts Centre’s fabulous projection system, which Mike says makes these beautifully lit and composed images "sing", allowing their poetry to resonate. The film is unashamedly a love story, framed in a 4:3 ratio that best frames faces and sharpens the focus on the feelings they express, in glistening black and white.
Cold War begins unusually in that the love each of the protagonists has for the other is never in doubt. The problem, the threat, the barrier, is how the geopolitics of the post-war period interrupt that love - the whole world is against them! We discuss the resonances of the film’s setting, the period 1949-1964, and the significance of the film moving back and forth from Paris and several Eastern Bloc countries; with settings in the Polish countryside, Warsaw, Berlin Yugoslavia, Zagreb and then back to Poland. Is part of the theme that in the Eastern Bloc they’re forced to prostitute their art whilst capitalist countries encourage the prostitution of the self?
José swoons over the sadness, sexiness and romance of the film. Mike draws attention to a certain sketchiness and notes that Tomasz Kot looks like he belongs in a Stella Artois ad whilst admiring his performance and that of Joanna Kulig as Zula. José loves it so much he wants to see it again to further explore the patterning of images and sounds. Mike feels he’s seen enough but is willing to go along, particularly since the film is unexpectedly short at only 85 minutes. It's certainly good, but precisely how good is Cold War is the question that overhangs the podcast.
Recorded on 16th September 2018.
An utterly charming, friendly rom-com set in and amongst the very wealthiest of the Singaporean elite, Crazy Rich Asians is also full of odd tensions and problematic complexities. In one sense a highly specifically Chinese story of a second-generation American immigrant's return to Asia and the conflict she experiences in negotiating her way into a world that finds her somewhat unwelcome; on the other a genre comedy that would feel no different were the characters all white. It's a friction that bubbles under everything, but the film is so light and likeable that it never spoils anything.
We find Michelle Yeoh's performance as the intimidating mother-in-law a delight, her character completely avoiding the one-dimensional dragon mom stereotype. On the other hand, there are stereotypes in which the film does indulge, though we disagree on how critical we should be of that. Thinking back to Searching, Mike feels that that film's joy of seeing ethnicity have no bearing at all on anything is not replicated here, as the film's insistence on themes of separation from one's background and identity come into conflict with its desire to be no different from any generic white rom-com. Jose doesn't find this an issue, instead sinking into the diasporic aura of the film. We discuss the film's occasional TV movie feel, its use of music, its depiction of class through accents, and the way the opening sets up a much darker, more subversive film than we get.
And above all, it's really, really funny.
Recorded on 16th September 2018.
An imperfect combination of documentary and dramatisation, American Animals gives us a lot to talk about. Its story of four college students embarking on a heist raises ideas of privilege, ambition and hope (or lack thereof), self-image, and above all, masculinity. In its self-conscious invocation of the kinds of films twenty-something white guys adore, such as Fight Club and Reservoir Dogs, American Animals builds a portrait of the modern young man with which Mike sympathises but which José cannot tolerate.
Neither of us finds the film without deep flaws, and indeed we could not claim to have really enjoyed it. But it is valuable and leads to a lively debate. We use the phrase "American masculinity" a lot without burdening ourselves with defining it, and Mike observes that all films with American in the title are full of themselves.
Recorded on 10th September 2018.
Jump scares, a spooky castle, ghosts, nuns, and a demon. What a recipe.
José decries the lack of internal logic. Mike embraces it. There's artistry in the visual and production design that the rest of the film doesn't live up to, but there's an audacity in the film's wackiness. Neither of us can recommend it, but we had loads of fun talking about it. Mike uses the word "creepy" about forty times.
Recorded on 9th September 2018.
You wait all day for a new type of film and then two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of Unfriended: Dark Web, which we discussed a few weeks ago, is Searching, another desktop film (as we're calling them). John Cho plays a father whose teenage daughter goes missing and conducts a search for her using her laptop and an old family PC.
It's formally a little different from Unfriended, and we consider that even more formal difference might have suited the story. But the form does allow the film to cleverly and subtly address themes of generational difference and familial disconnection, and the drama the film builds is deeply involving.
We also remark upon the film's surprisingly unique and welcome depiction of an Asian-American family, and Mike misremembers the origin of the term "woman in the fridge".
Recorded on 3rd September 2018.
We catch up on home media with an erotic thriller that, while it fails to titillate, offers a fascinating portrayal of totalitarianism, sexuality, control and ownership of the female body and the way power is expressed through it, revenge, and more. Jennifer Lawrence stars as a ballet dancer forced into working for the state as a honeypot, tasked with seducing Joel Edgerton's CIA operative for the purpose of smoking out his mole.
We are in agreement on the extravagant thrill of the opening, and the electifying darkness of the sex school's complex dynamics and brutal methods. Mike is less interested in what occurs when the action moves into the field, and holds out hope for an ambitious (and insane) conclusion; José, more realistic, expounds on why the film's developments should be interesting enough for Mike as they are. The plot grows convoluted, the visual design less expressive, but ultimately we love what Red Sparrow offers and wish we'd caught it when it was at the cinema.
Recorded on 29th August 2018.
Raunchy, vulgar, adult puppet comedy. You'd think it'd be right up our street. But The Happytime Murders is incompetent, embarrassing and infantile, with almost no comic instinct - the couple of moments that drew laughs from us did so primarily through sheer insistence and excess. Mike tries to reckon with what the difference is between the likes of this and something like Team America: World Police, which he likes but is superficially similar. José can't comprehend how simply bad the filmmaking is. A conversation about Melissa McCarthy ensues, with differing opinions on her talent, but her box office appeal is not in question - at least until now.
Recorded on 28th August 2018.
Quiet, meditative, sensitive, gradual. Not the first words that come to mind when considering 2014's vigilante thriller The Equalizer - though they do apply at times - but certainly descriptors of its sequel, which we loved. Denzel Washington's ex-spy, Robert McCall, who had managed to extricate himself from a life of state-sanctioned violence and murder, now works as a vigilante for hire, an avenger, conducts himself as a role model, mentor, and cheerleader for those whose lives with which he comes into contact.
We discuss The Equalizer 2's ethos of personal responsibility and self-improvement, and its meditative tone. José orates on his love of Denzel and his position as perhaps the most significant figure of black masculinity throughout the history of cinema. Mike adores Antoine Fuqua's aesthetic of long lenses, shallow focus and moody lighting; a visual sensibility that looks wonderful and intimidating on the big screen, but somehow makes small screens seem big too.
While it's certainly cut from the same cloth as the first film, The Equalizer 2 is more confident to bask in contemplation and even a kind of plotlessness, and it's not quite what you'd expect. We think it's great. Worth seeing while it's in cinemas.
Recorded on 28th August 2018.
It's Eavesdropping's first anniversary and we celebrate with a film Mike's been looking forward to seeing for almost a decade. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder was released at the tail end of the short-lived Fifties 3D craze, and has rarely been seen in that format (even at the time). But it rolls around every so often and this week came to the Electric, so we jumped at the chance to see it.
A dialogue-heavy chamber piece, Dial M for Murder might not seem the obvious choice for the spectacle of 3D, but it's for this reason that we find it interesting. José, who has seen it before in 3D, recalls his previous impressions of the importance of items - the keys, the handbag, the scissors - and how the stereoscopy relates to it. Mike, who wrote on 3D film at university and has defended it ever since, places Dial M for Murder in context, comparing it to both 3D of the time and today, suggesting how it was ahead of its time.
Away from the 3D, we find the film slight, a trifle, though enjoyable throughout and respectful of the audience - the film's methodical nature is lovely. We find some of the performances disappointing, and one in particular delightful. We're glad we saw it, even though José's spectacles were broken.
José's note on Dial M for Murder can be found here: https://notesonfilm1.com/2013/08/07/a-note-on-dial-m-for-murder/
Recorded on 23rd August 2018.
We breathlessly debate BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's comic drama based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. With limited time - Mike has to leave for work at some point and he'll only let himself be so late - we dig right in. Discussed is the film's point of view on culture and particularly cinema, arguing that a single film can wield the power to affect an entire nation; John David Washington's performance, the influences we can see in it, and whether a more charismatic star might have been beneficial; our attitudes to Lee's pamphleteering and the pros and cons of propagandistic cinema; the film's direct address of Trump's America and its tragic, somewhat surprising ending; and more.
We question whether the film's comic treatment of David Duke, head of the KKK, carefully undercuts our delight in mocking him or dangerously indulges it. Duke is rendered a figure of fun in some notable and hilarious scenes, but the film ensures we recognise that he has never gone away. And Mike is particularly affected by Adam Driver's character, a Jew in name only who, through being threatened by the KKK and confronted by Ron, is forced to reckon with his identity and the fact that it's been easy for him to ignore it for most of his life. (The Howard Jacobson article he references is linked here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/07/howard-jacobson-jews-know-what-antisemitism-is-and-what-it-isnt-to-invent-it-would-be-a-sacrilege)
As we acknowledge in the podcast, we unfortunately missed the first few minutes of the film, which is only one reason we want to see it again. Mike is bursting with thoughts and can't get them all out; Jose vacillates on the film's artistic value, though not its cultural value. There's much, much more to consider in BlacKkKlansman than we were able to in this podcast and we shall return to it.
Recorded on 20th August 2018.
It's been out for four weeks and finally we decide to grapple with Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Mike has just recently caught up with the first film, a jukebox musical that José disliked, and both are disappointed with the sequel's lack of instinct as to what makes a musical actually work. Mike points out some elements of story structure he found original, and Jose is impressed with how the film juggles its vast cast of characters, but they disagree on Cher. (Spoiler: José really loves Cher.)
Neither comes away really having enjoyed the film, though neither is really the target audience either. But there's fun to be had in critiquing it!
Recorded on 19th August 2018.
José finds a lot to remark upon in The Darkest Minds that Mike didn't see, helping him appreciate it more. It's a story of a society broken down by fear of children and a group of young survivors negotiating their own development and making their way towards liberation. It is representationally interesting, the central character a young black girl through whose eyes the film is filtered.
Depictions of children being rounded up into concentration camps disturbingly echoes the actions of ICE under the Trump administration, not to mention countless other examples of segregation and incarceration of peoples throughout history. The central theme of a young woman making herself invisible in order to satisfy others and smooth her path through life is worked through intelligently and tragically.
It's visually uninspiring, and lacks charm and flair, but The Darkest Minds is an interesting and heartfelt teen movie for an increasingly enlightened young audience.
Recorded on 15th August 2018.
Designed entirely to simulate the desktop interface of a Macbook, Unfriended: Dark Web enthusiastically adapts modern fears of surveillance and digital stalking to the horror genre (drawing on the style of 2014's Unfriended, to which this is a sequel). It's a stylistic achievement that never once feels unconvincing, even if the route the plot takes is far from unpredictable.
We discuss the way the film hides its most graphic elements and is able to create tension and horror from the very opposite, and the wonderful evocation of distracted attention, with the main character jumping between Skype, Spotify, Facebook and more, that remarkably never becomes overwhelming or incomprehensible. Some of the performances aren't the best, and we each found the film uninvolving at different points and for different reasons, but generally speaking we enjoyed the film's experiment and found it interesting.
We also discuss the two producers, each of whose names caught our eyes, and how Dark Web fits in to the current cinema programme.
Recorded on 14th August 2018.
Big shark, big Cockney, big fun. We dive into The Meg, a film we can all agree should have been called Chomp. It's definitely trashy, though precisely how trashy is an area of disagreement. For José, it's a bad movie. For Mike, it's a good bad movie.
Recorded on 12th August 2018.
Low-budget, unexceptionally made, and absolutely vital. The First Purge takes the story of the Purge series back to the beginning, with a poor community composed of people of colour being savagely experimented upon for political purposes. Mike slightly had to drag José to see it, as it was showing only in single late-night screenings, but both were glad he did, as it's perhaps the most direct and powerful critique of white hegemony that popular cinema has offered in recent memory.
We examine the imagery of the deliberate terrorisation of black communities in the USA. It draws on real-life attacks on black churches, Ku Klux Klan members wielding guns in pick-up trucks, and the resurgence of Nazis - one image of a blackface mask being removed to reveal an Aryan stereotype is particularly poetic. Mike finds that the film protects the white audience from their own complicity in the inequality portrayed, but it's only a nuance, and as José says, we should be so lucky to have such flaws in most films! And José explains why films of this sort come along so rarely. (It's not about risk. It's about power.)
There's simply so much food for thought and we urge you to see it.
Recorded on 4th August 2018.
The sequel to 2015's Ant-Man maintains that film's lightness of tone, happily comic sensibility, and fabulously enjoyable visual effects. So often today we take exceptional effects work for granted but the conceptualisation and realisation of the images in Ant-Man and the Wasp make you notice, make you remark upon them. We had a great time.
We find room for nitpicks, of course, with José expressing irritation with Ant-Man's malfunctioning suit and Mike finding the quantum realm too vague to provide real jeopardy, but our quibbles are minor. It's a lovely film, it got big laughs from the audience, and even gasps at one notable point. You should see it!
Recorded on 2nd August 2018.
A mega bumper double podcast today, as we see Mission: Impossible - Fallout twice and incorporate both discussions into one episode. Long story short, we had tons of fun both times and you should see it.
We both adore the visual storytelling and the elegance of the action. We fawn over gripping sequences which evoke silent cinema. We discuss in depth the idea of Ethan Hunt as a moral character, something that the film places front and centre throughout, giving him choices to make and emphasising the protection of innocents and self-sacrifice. José doesn't quite buy it but Mike does his best to talk him round.
Neither of us is quite sold on the concept of the villain - he's not enough of an idealist - but Cavill's performance unquestionably elevates him and he's a constant delight to watch. To José, he's the new Errol Flynn. Mike focuses on two implausible scenes to compare and contrast, exploring why he believed in one but not the other. José describes how the action scenes develop like good jokes, with ideas building on top of each other in logical ways. And we go off on a tangent about Idris Elba for some reason.
Recorded on 29th and 31st July 2018.
We are joined by Celia Nicholls, another former Warwick student, for a discussion of Paul Schrader's First Reformed, a careful drama following a Protestant minster's personal crises and relationships with his parishioners and community. Comparisons with Robert Bresson, informed by Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film, are drawn; we consider how trite or meaningful we find the film's moral questions; and we pick apart the film's flat aesthetic and occasional flights of fancy.
Recorded on 25th July 2018.
A tight yet sprawling high-concept thriller, Hotel Artemis features glorious performances from Jodie Foster and the wonderful cast that surrounds her, surprising pathos and a beautifully built world. José expounds upon his love for Foster and explores the details of her performance here; Mike discusses what makes the world-building so effective and elegant. We'd have liked to have seen stronger, more expressive visual storytelling - there's so much potential in this single sanctuary hidden within an unforgiving world - but, well, nobody's perfect.
Recorded on 24th July 2018.
The Rock is the action star of the moment and despite Skyscraper's lacklustre title, we enjoy his latest vehicle a lot. It's mechanical, predictable, corporate, obvious, and not even shot and edited that well, but we don't really care. It features a gem of a setting, a great central performance from an enormously likeable star, depicts disability in a remarkably sensitive way, generates decent threat and tension despite obvious flaws in how it does so, is wholesome as hell, and Mike wants The Rock to be his dad.
Recorded on 23rd July 2018.
After a fourteen-year wait, the Incredibles are back! We discuss how well the comedy is directed, how full of ideas the action is, and our love of Edna Mode and the mad baby. José finds food for thought in the conceptualisation of the antagonist, while Mike makes sure the animation, somehow so often overlooked in animated films, is given its due. And we discuss the imbalance in the treatment of the two main characters, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl.
Recorded on 23rd July 2018.
We only thought of it in this way after we finished the podcast, but Sicario 2 is the best movie for watching on a plane we've ever seen. It's pacey, entertaining, catchy, and entirely insubstantial. José discusses some issues he has with the film, including how many Mexicans it's happy to kill while keeping every American alive, and the lack of tension in scenes that are crying out for it - Mike agrees with everything José says and knows he should have a problem with this stuff but just doesn't. We agree that it's a joy to see so much of Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin, and when they share the screen there's a special feeling, but the conscience that Emily Blunt brought to the first film is perhaps lacking here.
It doesn't live up to the first Sicario - and really, how could it - but it's good, rough, dark fun.
Recorded on 2nd July 2018.
We go deep on Hereditary, occult/folk horror, and indeed horror in a wider perspective with guest contributor and horror guru (Mike's words) Dr. Matt Denny from the University of Warwick, a film scholar with a particular interest in precisely the milieu Hereditary occupies. (He's also a former student of José's who was an undergrad alongside Mike, so it's not all down to his credentials.) He brings an insightful and informed perspective to the film, picking up the baton where Mike and José dropped it in the previous podcast, and running off with it.
We consider what the occult subgenre is, what makes such stories interesting and where Hereditary in particular digresses from them, and the effects that has. Matt offers a historical perspective on the treatment of women in horror and how the film puts forth a muddled version of that, and the influence of Kubrick (in particular The Shining) on the film. We consider Mike's dislike of how the film hides information or clues behind codes, and Matt suggests that this is really just a function of how this type of film works - and indeed how the occult works. And is it reasonable that Mike associates the occult film with British cinema in particular?
All this and more in a fascinating discussion.
Recorded on 2nd July 2018.
Perhaps we lack the specific horror fundamentals that would open Hereditary up to us, but we find it a muddled, almost adolescent film - a particular disappointment given it's also an engrossing family drama with a brilliant central performance from Toni Collette. Our conversation includes considerations of the compositions and props, including repeated imagery of miniature models of the family's home, and complaints that it feels as though we're deliberately being withheld a clear explanation of what the hell is going on by a writer-director who's keen to seem smarter than us. In its cruel and brutal treatment and imagery of women, José finds the film misogynist, which reminds Mike of It Follows, which he found misogynist. And José spends a few moments decrying The Exorcist, why not.
Everything we discuss is a significant plot spoiler as the film operates in revelation and surprise, so make sure you either know or don't care what happens before listening.
Recorded on 24th June 2018.
Jurassic World returns with The Orphanage and A Monster Calls director J. A. Bayona in charge, transforming the colourful knockabout thrills of the previous instalment into a volcano disaster-cum-Gothic horror film. We both love the heightened drama of the mansion half of the film and how Bayona finds new life in what has, over the last 25 years, somehow become somewhat stale imagery of reanimated dinosaurs. José adores the casting of Geraldine Chaplin and Mike finds the reduced importance of love stories a positive thing. And seeing businessmen get killed is always fun. Cracking movie. Hugely enjoyable.
Recorded on 22nd June 2018.
The all-female reboot of the Ocean's franchise sees Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett leading a team of women to infiltrate and rob the Met Gala. We discuss how the heist failed to meet our expectations, the weak integration of Ocean's personal motivation, and the underwhelming displays of glamour, but we find things to like, including Anne Hathaway's performance in particular and how the film depicts the characters eating. But ultimately we're left with the question: If a woman can't get the job directing a film like this, just what is she allowed to direct?
Recorded on 21st June 2018.
A classic returns to cinemas for its 50th anniversary and we receive it in rather a muted fashion. José's never seen it on the big screen and Mike's never seen it at all, so it's an interesting experience for both, but both come away with reservations.
Much of the discussion revolves around context. 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released in 1968 and our repeated use of the phrase "of its time" becomes a coded criticism as much as an honest descriptor - the film simply doesn't work today as well, or in the same ways, as it did half a century ago. We discuss its editing, novelty value, depiction of the future and technology and more, perhaps unfortunately but probably unavoidably never being able to escape the historical lens. It's true to say that we're both very glad we took the opportunity to see it, but both left feeling that while its influence is even more tangible than one could imagine and its legacy is not in question, its greatness is today a touch overstated.
Recorded on June 3rd 2018.
We find much to mull over in Solo, which José finds the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back and Mike finds overlong and depressingly dull. Our discussions take in the merits and flaws of the film's visual design, its relationship to the saga's history and fans, Ron Howard's earnestness, the way the film builds a lawless world to develop and reconfigure Han Solo, and how on Earth an $84m opening weekend is considered a flop. One thing's for sure: Rush is a great film.
Recorded on 28th May 2018.
Charlize Theron stars in Tully, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's fourth collaboration as director and screenwriter, as a mother of two with a third on the way, heavily put upon and struggling financially and personally, who hires a nanny to help her out at night. We find room for both praise and criticism, José in particular singling out Reitman's direction for his ire and Mike disappointed in the film's ultimate treatment of its central female friendship, but keen to discuss its portrayal of stress and mental illness.
Recorded on 13th May 2018.
We turn once again to curated streaming service MUBI for João Moreira Salles' essay film, In the Intense Now, which combines archival news footage with home and amateur film to explore brief but fiery sociopolitical moments with a first-person, personal tint. It looks at four events: May 68 in France, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the March of the One Hundred Thousand in Brazil, all of which took place in 1968, as well as the beginnings of China's Cultural Revolution, entirely through tourist footage shot by the director's mother of her holiday there in 1966.
The film is deeply thought-provoking and complex. We discuss the feelings with which it left us, its contrast of cultures and movements across different countries and classes, how its search for understanding of its era is preferable to and more accessible than simple nostalgia, its disappointed examination of how business found ways to insert itself into the counter-culture in order to commodify and sell it, and the way that May 68 lives in cultural memory in a way the film claims is unjustified. A major theme of the film, as the title evokes, is the fleeting nature of some of these uprisings (particularly May 68, its primary focus), and there's a significant contrast between the positive way this period of revolution is remembered and the contemporaneous state of mind as the movements ended. The film is more melancholy than you might expect.
We also discuss Salles' use of direct textual analysis of the images he shows, in his narration drawing specific attention to camera movement, editing and framing. He keenly provides his own interpretation of the images and in so doing not only deepens our understanding of them, but also indirectly encourages the audience to apply the same scrutiny to the images of today. It's a film that provides insight into and tools for evaluating images to viewers that may never have considered it important or even possible. We also discuss the movements of today that the film evokes for us, including Occupy Wall Street and the Parkland protests, and the similarities and differences between them and those of 1968.
We don't entirely believe that it's perfect - by which Mike means he thinks it's too long and self-indulgent towards the end - but it's a fascinating and rich film, deserving of your time.
Recorded on 23rd May 2018.
This week we go arthouse and discuss Xavier Legrand’s first feature, Custody (Jusqu’à la garde), though 'arthouse' perhaps only in the sense that it’s subtitled. In some ways, the film is shot in a realist style, halfway between British kitchen sink drama and the Dardennes' more leisurely, microscopic style. The film revolves around a couple in the process of divorce battling for custody of their young son. The boy wants to stay with his mother. Has he been coached? Is his mind being poisoned against his father?
We discuss how the first section is basically an exposition of the law where the father is surrounded by women, how the film initially orchestrates the audience’s sympathy around the father, and how this changes as the film unfolds. Is the film a critique of male privilege? Why is it so unpleasant so watch? Is it material that television handles better? What’s the point of putting an audience through this type of experience? We both adore Denis Ménochet as the father but really praise the whole cast. José loved it; Mike did not. The conversation as to why this is so occupies much of the second half of the podcast.
Recorded on 13th May 2018.
Jose has been obsessed with 120 BPM and was very keen to hear what Mike, who is much younger and not gay, thought of it. Is his obsession due to purely personal reasons – the film seems to reflect a part of his youth – or is the film actually as good as he thinks it is? Is it a niche film or does it have meanings and feelings to communicate to a broader audience? Is the movie really great or is it just something Jose's particularly vulnerable to weeping at the mere thought of?
We talk about it in relation to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, currently on at the Young Vic in London. We also discuss the film as ‘director-as-editor’ filmmaking. We agree that despite the film's length - almost the same as Infinity War! - there's not a moment we'd cut. We discuss the opening sequences, all meetings, political actions, and introductions of characters; we agree that the sex scene in the hospital is one of the best ever filmed. Sex and desire in the film is always on the table and we discuss how it takes on different meanings. We also touch on film form but always only as a way of understanding what the film shows in a historical context.
Luckily for Jose, Mike liked it and was not sorry he'd bullied him into seeing it.
Recorded on 30th April 2018.
The first part of Marvel's ending to the unendable story wallops us with two and a half hours of punching and planets. Mike is even more gullible than usual. Jose stays cynical and rightly so. The film leads to discussions on whether we can actually find themes in it, the leaps of faith necessary to buy into it, the way in which we can't help but buy into the story logic in the way we talk about it, and the nature of even trying to talk about corporate assets this enormous. It all gets quite meta. Jose mentions the state of modern America again. We bring up Call Me by Your Name somehow.
Recorded on 29th April 2018.
One of the stupidest films we've seen for a long time, but was it fun? We discuss its lazy and crass writing, the treatment of its female star, its lack of balance between entertainment and boredom, missed opportunities, and just how many people we think died.
Recorded on 23rd April 2018.
A boxing film that opens with its climactic fight and develops drama in its aftermath. We find Journeyman disappointingly contradictory - a showcase of performance, writing, and observation, executed with no cinematic nous or flair. Paddy Considine lacks credibility as a world champion boxer, but captures beautifully the impotent rage and misery of such a star physically and mentally diminished. His road to recovery is a clever and interesting twist on the typical boxing film formula of training for a life-changing fight, executed too sappily and casually.
A film we like but don't admire.
Recorded on 8th April 2018.
A young adult romance with a twist, Love, Simon gives gay teens a high school movie with a decent budget and aimed at a wide audience. We both have mixed feelings on it, but find it a well-meaning and substantially positive film. We discuss some shortcuts it takes - the use of a queeny character to render Simon more acceptable, the setting in upper middle class suburbia making Simon's sexuality the only issue in his life, a certain generic formulaicity - and ideas the film depicts as simple that could and should be more complex, including conversations we'd like to have seen Simon have with his best friend and the aforementioned queen. Not to mention the rather flat aesthetics.
It's a discussion that does almost nothing but pick out flaws but nonetheless finds that the breadth of the film's intended audience mitigates them and its goodness of heart shines through. Worth a watch!
Recorded on 6th April 2018.
Jose can't handle the bad costumes, pap morality, and smug tone. Mike considers the age of the intended audience a mitigating factor but largely agrees. A Wrinkle in Time inclusively opens the big-budget Hollywood fantasy film to new audiences, but while we agree on the positivity of that aim, we find the film flawed and overly simple.
The film invites comparison with The Wizard of Oz, but as Jose demonstrates, it's a comparison in which it comes off far worse. Mike fondly remembers the Macaulay Culkin film The Pagemaster and recommends people watch that instead.
Recorded on 2nd April 2018.
A Quiet Place is a deceptively simple horror film that finds a surprising degree of variety in its premise: the planet is overrun with monsters that cannot see but hunt by sound. We marvel at its creativity and technique, and indeed, the way it silenced the audience. We talk over its performances, its ending, the way it manipulates and moves characters to generate threatening situations, the intelligence of its editing in moving between storylines, and the shortcuts it takes with its internal logic in order to keep the story moving. We also mull over a potential for a sequel and decry one plot decision in particular.
But fundamentally, we urge everyone to see it. It silenced a full cinema, and that was quite remarkable.
Recorded on 2nd April 2018.
A low-budget psychological thriller, Unsane is a less involving film than its subject matter and star deserve. Claire Foy is extraordinarily powerful as a paranoid prisoner of mental trauma inflicted on her by a stalker and bureaucratic malfeasance, distressed, knowing, sarcastic, resistant. The film fails her in other areas but is an intriguing experiment nonetheless, and we find much to discuss, including its cinematography, relationship to termite art, and potential audiences.
Recorded on 1st April 2018.
Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs is a stop-motion story of the utmost beauty and wit. We discuss its cinematography, compositions, lightness of touch, allegorical relationship to reality, and place in Anderson's body of work. We also reserve particular praise for Bryan Cranston's vocal performance and Alexandre Desplat's score.
Recorded on 1st April 2018.
Ready Player One is a strange beast, crammed full of energy and references on the one hand, amounting to nothing on the other. Jose dislikes it. Mike kind of likes it. To say it's flawed is understating it, but there are interesting ideas to probe. Who is the film aimed at? How does it have its cake and eat it? Is it making interesting decisions, mistakes, or both simultaneously? What can we make of a film that references other work not as Easter eggs but as the very cloth from which it's cut?
Mike wishes it was more cutting, more biting, about the ideas it raises and the nerds it seeks to please. Jose just wants it to end.
Also: It was shot in Birmingham! Mike even went to go and see it during filming just one road over from his flat. What he saw was a couple of cars driving, once, and almost nothing else of note. He would never admit that though. As far as he's concerned, he is best mates with Steven Spielberg.
Recorded on 1st April 2018.
Alex Garland's curious sci-fi adventure comes to UK cinemas - for one single evening. A theatrical release in the US that Paramount feared wouldn't make money elsewhere, it's on Netflix worldwide, but we waited for the special event to see it properly. And it was worth it, its stunning visual design singing on the big screen.
But what did we make of the rest of it? Has it stayed with us? Does it cohere? What would we have liked to have seen more of, what surprised us, what did it do well? No matter what we make of the details, it's certainly deserving of a second look, and now we can be grateful rather than rueful that Netflix gives us that opportunity.
Also, Mike bangs on for a bit about Ex Machina, Life, Anomalisa, and The Beach, because he can.
Recorded on 30th March 2018.
Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here tells a story of vigilante justice with a tapestry of elliptical editing and interwoven flashbacks. We consider its themes, the deliberate way it depicts or conceals violence, the effect of trauma on its protagonist and his need for human connection. It's a complex, almost ergodic film, that requires attention, rewards visual literacy, and yields great pleasures. We love it.
We also praise Amazon Studios for respecting the theatrical release window, and round off by discussing the recent Oscars.
Recorded on 11th March 2018.
We finally get around to seeing the one Best Picture nominee we were missing, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird. It's been highly praised, but has the hype hurt it? We discuss its female-centric twists on coming-of-age teen movies, the mother-daughter relationship, its attitude to sex, and the Everyman Cinema in Birmingham, which we visit for the first time.
Recorded on 27th February 2018.
We try out Mubi, a curated streaming service that gives you 30 films at any one time, and only 30 days in which to watch them. Our choice is Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, a 1970s Italian satire on police corruption and the politics of power. It leads to discussions on its expressive imagery, its topsy-turvy plot, sexual kinks, peccadillos, and lifestyles, the performance of power and authority, and male jealousy and rage.
Recorded on 26th February 2018.
The story of Tonya Harding raises all manner of issues for us to delve into. I, Tonya is a film about class, domestic abuse, celebrity, opportunity, achievement. We examine its visual design and use of competing aspect ratios, its use of direct address to camera, and the conceptualisation of the working class characters and mother-daughter relationship. Mike believes it insists upon Tonya Harding's fame too heavily, not aware of how she's only really remembered in the USA. Jose finds its portrayal of working class people uncomfortable. An energetic discussion.
Recorded on 25th February 2018.
Mike's brother Stephen joins us to discuss Phantom Thread in further detail. We look at the power struggle between Alma and Cyril, the visual verticality that contributes to an Academy ratio feel, the film's relationship to fairytales, the way the score augments the images, and whether the dresses are actually any good and why.
Recorded on 24th February 2018.
Guillermo del Toro's gorgeous, bizarre monster romance is one of the films dominating the awards conversation, but what do we make of it? We discuss its characterisation, its performances, its cinematography, its relationship with the classic cinema and fairytales from which it builds. We use the word "beautiful" about two hundred times.
Recorded on 21st February 2018.
Jose's been away for a week, and while we've been apart we've each seen Black Panther. You join us after our second screening, in the midst of an already feverish conversation taking place online and amongst friends. So much to discuss! How does the film build compelling conflict between the characters, what are the nuances of its commentary on racism, colonialism and masculinity, what were our shared experiences with the audiences, what did we draw out of its costume and character design - and is it really really really obviously the best Marvel film?
Recorded on 20th February 2018.
Eavesdropping takes a look at the nominations for the upcoming Oscars and chews the fat on what we like, what we don't like, what's been left out, and what will win. Plus Mike gives a brief rundown of four films from 2017 he liked but feels have been forgotten, and never got a chance to talk about because we hadn't been doing the podcast at the time.
Recorded on 7th February 2018.
Finally, we sink our teeth into Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson's highly-anticipated romantic period drama. The performances, aesthetics, direction and so much more are simply enthralling and give us much to discuss. We consider Daniel Day-Lewis's style and how likeable he is in this, Anderson's mastery of tone and ability to lighten with unexpected humour what could be a rather dry film, the beauty of his cinematography, the range of female characters and some aspects of their portrayal, the way in which the work of an artist is depicted, and more. Jose is simply beside himself with the film's beauty, and Mike questions its flirtations with cliché so often that he becomes a cliché himself.
It's clear that there's more to discover than one viewing can reveal, so we look forward to seeing the film again and talking on it more.
Recorded on 7th February 2018.
Mike doesn't believe that Liam Neeson is a normal person with real problems, and wants him to do proper acting again. Jose admires the film's social conscience and visual flair. It's The Commuter, a film that exceeds the low expectations set by its dull title. We discuss its portrayal of society through the characters on the train, how much we like its premise, and where it stands in the cheapish high-concept B-movie canon.
Recorded on 2nd February 2018.
Mike is in a tailspin of grief. José likes Matt Damon and little else. It's Downsizing, a film that looked good in the trailers. Ostensibly a light satire on middle class life and aspiration, it leads us into discussions of its attempt to weave several themes together, its lack of humour, the way it constructs its worlds, whether its use of stereotypes drifts into offensiveness, and most importantly, how unbelievably tedious it is.
Mike reminisces about the few movies he saw at the cinema that inspired him enough to leave the film for a bit to play on his phone, or just leave. And Sideways is rubbish too.
Recorded on 1st February 2018.
José revisits Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino's romantic Bildungsroman, and re-evaluates it, both seeing some flaws where he initially hadn't and also continuing to appreciate it in ways he had. It's Mike's first time seeing it, and he appreciates it from a distance but is primarily consumed with rage at his own lack of any type of this fun during his teenage years. And to make matters worse, José tests him on his knowledge of Judaism, revealing him to be a fraud of a Jew.
Recorded on 28th January 2018.
Feeling he gave it short shrift the first time, Mike's keen to revisit Three Billboards, and drags José along for the ride. With the clumsy handling of race issues clouding the film less, we pick up on listener feedback that leads us into ruminations on Frances McDormand's Mildred, particularly her defiance of the misogynist society in which she lives and zealous attitude towards collective responsibility, and whether the character arc of Sam Rockwell's Dixon truly is a redemptive one.
We also double down on our criticism of the film's use of derogatory terms, Mike's been reading about Flannery O'Connor on Wikipedia, and we consider what would have been gained and lost had the film been written and directed by the Coens.
Recorded on 26th January 2018.
(Mind out for spoilers, we don't do a good job of warning of them here. After the plot synopsis at the beginning, expect spoilers throughout.)
Pixar's extraordinarily vivid, rich Coco tells the story of a young Mexican boy who dreams of life as a musician, stranded in the Land of the Dead. Themes of sacrifice for family, liberation and expression through music, remembrance and commemoration of loved ones and more are explored, and a culture that is typically ignored or stereotyped - or walled off if a certain someone has his way - is allowed to explode onto the cinema screen. It's as warm, funny, and imaginative as anything you'll see all year, and we adore it.
José is reminded of his dear abuelita. Mike cries.
Recorded on 23rd January 2018.
Spielberg. Streep. Hanks. Nixon. A political thriller that adopts some clichés and slightly sidesteps some expectations, The Post is a historical drama that follows the internal conflict at the Washington Post during the Pentagon Papers scandal. We find plenty to talk about in its parallels with the Trump White House and the current President's attacks on the news media; its careful but stilted style; its relationship to the 70s cinema it evokes; its central figure of a woman out of place in a world of men; and the balance between its nationalistic boosterism of the US Constitution and American exceptionalism on the one hand, and on the other, its surprisingly direct denunciation of the powers that be in Washington. You can literally hear Mike learning about the Nixon era, live!
Also discussed: Mike loves Bridge of Spies, José doesn't love Bridge of Spies, Mike thinks Spotlight is uniquely brilliant, José espouses his theory on Meryl Streep's stardom, and old people are pricks.
Recorded on 22nd January 2018.
An extraordinary, near-Shakespearian meditation on misdirected rage, guilt and grief, deeply marred by clumsy lunging into a loud theme of racism and a strong sense that the film neither knows nor especially cares about the culture it's portraying. Frances McDormand excels as the bullish, bellicose, foul-mouthed mother, but the film suffers as it shifts its focus to Sam Rockwell's stereotypical racist hick. The central premise is brilliant; its treatment is ultimately uneven, and although there are elements we absolutely adore, we can't get its lurches between tones out of our heads. Rewarding to watch, though, and it would benefit from a second viewing.
Recorded on 18th January 2018.
A chamber piece about history which evokes a combination of Rembrandt and an old photograph. We discuss how Joe Wright might be getting short shrift as a director and the excellence of the performances: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn and Lily James are all marvellous. We discuss how the film is not the life of Churchill but a few defining weeks in his life, and how it depicts the political side of the chaos in Nolan’s Dunkirk.
Mike highlights how the cemeteries of Belgium and northern France tell a very different story from the official one in relation to Britain’s ‘going it alone’ in the two World Wars, and declares that one scene of clearly fabricated fantasy undermines any notion of historical verisimilitude. We discuss how the film’s emotional manipulations are cheap but how one finds oneself responding to the film’s jingoism. We are in agreement that Nigel Farage wants to be Oldman’s man-of-the-people Churchill – the entire film is rather Brexity.
José would really like to see a film that focuses on the relationship between Clemmie and Winston, played of course by Scott Thomas and Oldman, and there’s a wonderful volume of letters full of sketches of kitties and piggies called Speaking For Themselves that he wishes someone would draw on for a film. (He didn’t say that in the podcast but he wants to make it known here.)
Recorded on 18th January 2018.
Boy oh boy, there's a lot to talk about, and the word of the day is denial. Specifically, Mike's unspoken, subcutaneous, existential denial that 1995's Jumanji is crucially meaningful to him, because how else can you explain the tension in the air as he grapples with the simple question, "Do you recommend the new Jumanji?" Ironic, really. The new Jumanji depicts characters who are forced to confront harsh truths about themselves, and in doing so forces Mike to confront the fact that he can talk about Jumanji for an hour with very little prompting.
And that new Jumanji provides a surprising amount of food for thought. We discuss how the film uses and satirises videogames, how much it made us laugh, the Jonas Brothers, Mike being a sucker for a happy ending as usual and José rolling his eyes, the stereotypes from which the central characters are built, how the film has its sexist cake and eats it, the ways the stars play off each other and suit their roles, aspects of performance, the muddled nature of the world and fundamental change in the characters' relationship to it, how much harder it is to play videogames than it is to watch films, moviegoers' over-investment in films from decades past, and last year's Power Rangers movie.
And it's a name-heavy edition of the podcast, with Jose getting names wrong left, right, and centre, and a final, authoritative correction of our pronunciation of Jia Zhangke's name. (Thanks to Sam and Jessy Stafford for their contributions.)
Recorded on 16th January 2018.
We visit a French-Algerian political thriller from 1969. It also happens to be a bona fide classic that won a ton of awards, enjoyed great popularity, and even succeeded in markets where it was subtitled or dubbed. Neither of us has seen it before; both of us are glad our first encounter with it was on a cinema screen.
We discuss its relevance to society today - the reason the mac is screening it, no doubt - the precision and economy of its editing and storytelling, its control of information, its title, its geographical setting, its surprising sense of humour, and indeed something we both found left rather a bad taste in the mouth. We also run down the eleven films from 1969 that outperformed it at the US box office, and José learns about The Stewardesses.
Recorded on 14th January 2018.
Mike's brother corrects our pronunciation of director Jia Zhangke's name, helping us settle into a discussion of his ambitious, deeply moving tale of friendship and loss that spans two and a half decades. We talk about motifs of keys and coats, themes of capitalism and home, the changing aspect ratios and clarity of the image, the documentary feel to its portrayal of Fenyang and the way of life there, and much more besides. We admire almost everything and still can't get Go West out of our heads.
Recorded on 11th January 2018.
Ai Weiwei brings displaced peoples from across the world together in his documentary on the global refugee crisis. We discuss their plight, the film's use of poetry, Weiwei's imagery, and the countless ways in which he humanises people who are insulted, ignored, used as bargaining chips, and condemned to lives of confinement with no end in sight.
Recorded on 9th January 2018.
Michael Haneke's precise, layered Happy End takes on - what else? - the bourgeoisie, and sees Eavesdropping welcome 2018 and iTunes availability at last! Opening with praise for the extraordinary image quality provided by the mac's 4K projector, we consider the film's surprising comic sensibility, its observation of different social strata, how our expectations shaped our experiences of what we saw (or didn't see), Haneke's careful craft and subtle subversions of cinematic conventions, and his continued exploration of violence as a central theme.
And, finally, in a revelation to rival Psycho and The Sixth Sense, we nervously admit that we enjoyed the film as one would enjoy a Hollywood comedy or a trip to the zoo. Even now it's tough to come to terms with that. Perhaps that is Haneke's greatest achievement and truest subversion. We never before knew that he wanted us to have a good time.
Recorded on 7th January 2018.
Eavesdropping celebrates the New Year with a snappy, sharp crime flick about the world of underground, high-stakes poker. We discuss the material's weakness, our different takes on Molly's character, the film's descent into schmaltz, daddy issues, Sorkin's directorial mediocrity, the audience's response to his dialogue, and the way Star Wars is dominating every bloody screen in every bloody cinema. At the end José makes Mike choke on his own laughter.
Recorded on 1st January 2018.
José likes Zac Efron for once, but little else. Mike is an ITV snob and just wants the film to be more Communist. Listen in to find out how The Greatest Showman rounded out our 2017.
Recorded on 27th December 2017.
José and Mike return to a galaxy far, far away, in search of new perspectives and thoughts on The Last Jedi. Mike in particular has been itching to talk more about it since he feels he was unfairly lukewarm the first time. We ruminate on what makes Star Wars feel different to other sci-fi; how films feel tighter and shorter on second viewing; Han's dice; confusion on the resistance cruiser; why we still disagree about Mark Hamill's performance; whether a Jedi can survive in space; and the differences between the First Order and the Empire, and Hux's construction as a figure of fun.
And in a shocking climax, José claims that Mike doesn't know anything about love.
Recorded on 21st December 2017.
It's beautiful to look at. It's populated with rich characters. Adam Driver is filmed as a Byronic hero, desperately romantic and at his sexiest. Matt Moore joins us for this discussion and points to how the film focuses on female characters and interestingly alters the focus of the series. We discuss how the film represents a shift from an aristocratic focus on blood and destiny to a more democratic purview on social change everyone, of whatever race or ethnicity, can engage in. Mike came out of the film gleefully playing with a lightsaber only to sit down and slash through what he saw as the film's weaker points, though he points out how Rian Johnson is the right director for the film and how, in spite of its faults, it truly does feel like a Star Wars film.
Recorded on 17th December 2017.
Our patient, deliberate conversation closely mirrors the feeling of The Red Turtle, Studio Ghibli's wordless, Oscar-nominated fable. We consider aesthetics, allegory, gender representation and subversion of genre amongst other issues this strange, delicate film raises. Also discussed are the experiences of cinema screenings and home viewing, and José finds time to get in another swipe at The Disaster Artist.
Recorded on 14th December 2017.
Cinema's biggest in-joke is dramatised in James Franco's fan project about the worst film ever made. We discuss the mean-spirited nature of finding films so bad they're good, the lack of direction in The Disaster Artist, the quality of Franco's central performance, and why we find the film so self-indulgent.
Recorded on 11th December 2017.
We begin with an embarrassing admission from Mike and some reminiscences of stars past from José before discussing Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, a biopic of Gloria Grahame's relationship with a younger man, which features two towering performances and not very much else. For once, Mike doesn't believe it's his terrible cruelty that prevents him from crying in a film - but what, then, is it?
Also - thoughts on The Electric in Birmingham, the UK's oldest working cinema. Why don't we discuss it more? It's independent, it's notable, it should be an art house. We finally get around to it.
Recorded on 3rd December 2017.
Paddington returns to cinemas with a whimsical puff of upper middle class smoke from a lovely old warm cosy steam train. How nice. Mike wasn't really looking forward to this.
So. Did he make it through Paddington 2? What do we make of the vision of Britain it constructs? How does its action outperform Justice League's? Is it fair to think of it as just Wes Anderson but somehow even more revoltingly cutesy? Is there anything wrong with outrageous accents? Isn't Hugh Grant great, honestly?
Recorded on 26th November 2017.
Sean Baker's The Florida Project incites ruminations on the representation of underclasses in cinema; the emergence of a new American neorealism; clichés of slice-of-life and childhood films; what audiences owe to films that are truly reaching, even beyond their grasp; why a man who can cry at Toy Story can't open himself up to stories of genuine human pain; and how revolting the colour lilac is.
Recorded on 22nd November 2017.
We visit Sidney Lumet's classic version of Murder on the Orient Express to compare and contrast with Kenneth Branagh's. Which performances do we prefer, what do we make of the differences in style and tone? José, with Poirot-esque precision, interrogates Mike, because it's his first time seeing the 1974 film, and indeed it turns out that Mike is the real murderer.
Recorded on 12th November 2017.
Innocence meets experience. Mike doesn't know whodunnit; José remembers the 1974 adaptation fondly. Mike wants to talk plot; José wants to talk cast. Mike is enthusiastic about the film's Poirot-centric approach; José is less keen. Although we approach it from different angles and don't always see eye-to-eye, we find a great deal of food for thought in Kenneth Branagh's film of Agatha Christie's classic novel.
Recorded on 12th November 2017.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer becomes a kind of litmus test for our morality. Mike finds Barry Keoghan's vengeful teen hateful; to José, he's a hero. This is a film that, under discussion, opens you up more than you are able to open it up.
Recorded on 2nd November 2017.
Jigsaw's back after a seven year absence, with new traps and twists and torture. One of us is very excited about this. The other has never seen a Saw film.
Recorded on 30th October 2017.
A new thing from Marvel. Is it better than the average thing from Marvel? The seats certainly moved, we can say that much, and that is an acceptable substitute for character and plot.
Recorded on 25th October 2017.
Sally Potter's all-too-brief comedy drama polarises us, which makes a nice change to the agreements we've been having recently. Is it smug or knowing? Is its range of incongruous acting styles engaging or distancing? Who knows. But Sally Potter is very very very important in British cinema and feminism and queer representation, says José, who then has the nerve to criticise The Party for having its right-on cake and eating it.
Includes a reminiscence of seeing a man stand up in a screening of I, Daniel Blake and a magic trick where Mike convinces José he has an extraordinary memory.
Recorded on 22nd October 2017.
How does Armando Iannucci's newest political satire fit in to his work over the last decade? Isn't it a joy to see Michael Palin? How did we ignore how beautifully crafted Jeffrey Tambor's performance is? How can we single out any one performance?
We take our time admiring this daring, witty and surprising farce. It's Animal Farm on speed.
Recorded on 22nd October 2017.
A film one of us was looking forward to enormously. A Scandinoir thriller coated with dense snow. But did it leave us cold?
Recorded on 17th October 2017.
We couldn't stay away. And with a second viewing, time to percolate, and responses from friends informing us, Eavesdropping once again delves into Blade Runner 2049.
What to make of the film's representation of women? How does the film use names? Why did Mike have a little weep at the end this time? Do gay women have cottages? Does the film function as a story about slavery? What about criticisms of its lack of diversity in casting?
Why do people think this film is dull? Is it the film's fault? Television's? Humanity's? Why don't we care to engage visually any more?
Most importantly, what do the bees mean?
Recorded on 10th October 2017.
Blade Runner 2049 is something else. You simply must see it on the biggest screen you can find. Do not listen to us if you care about the film because we go heavy on the spoilers. (We always go heavy on the spoilers, but this film is good so it actually matters.)
Mike isn't very good in this one but José more than makes up for him so it's okay.
Recorded on 6th October 2017.
With a weary sigh, we get to Flatliners. Ellen Page, James Norton, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev and Kiersey Clemons expand their minds and run around shitting themselves in fear.
Questions abound: Why did they call this Flatliners when the obviously correct title is Hot Doctors? Was Kiefer Sutherland wasted? Is it wise to be wasted while appearing in a film? In precisely how many millions of ways is the film inconsistent? Just how stupid and blind is its attitude towards the very real problems it presents? Does it make sense as a horror flick? Are Mike and Jose too obsessed with the cast's attractiveness? Are we perverts? Most importantly, who's hotter: the ginger guy or the hot girl?
All this and Catholic guilt too.
Recorded on 1st October 2017.
Eavesdropping at the Movies manages to make it all the way through this film in one go. Congratulate us.
Recorded on 1st October 2017.
The story of the rivalry between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe at the 1980 Wimbledon Championships, discussed by Jose Arroyo and Michael Glass. One a hotheaded youngster, fuelled by anger and unable to keep his temper in check. The other an elder statesman, cool and calm, analytical and detached. And then there's Borg and McEnroe.
Recorded on 24th September 2017.
What is It? Is It any good? Is It scary? How much of It did Mike watch through his fingers? Why would he agree to see It in LieMAX? Was he right about the bit with the sink? (Spoiler: He has googled it and discovered that he was wrong.)
Recorded on 17th September 2017.
What is Darren Aronofsky's latest fever dream all about? Is the negative audience response fair? How good is Jennifer Lawrence, seriously you guys?
Recorded on 17th September 2017.
Why Detroit is the best film currently on release. Is John Boyega a star? Does Kathryn Bigelow get the respect she deserves? Is race the political unconscious of American cinema? Why hasn’t a great film on such a timely subject found an audience?
Recorded on 28th August 2017.
Is it possible for a film about drug smuggling, weapon dealing, CIA-sponsored militias and getting ludicrously rich to be in any way immoral? Find out as we tolerate American Made so you don't have to.
Recorded on 28th August 2017.
Can an action film that goes through Coventry be any good? Is it important that action scenes are funny? Is Gary Oldman a whore? All valuable questions. All answered in our chat about The Hitman's Bodyguard. I think.
Recorded on 23rd August 2017.
Stephen King's The Dark Tower is a lovely big fresh movie hoping to become a lovely big lucrative franchise. Does it have what it takes? Can we possibly agree on Idris Elba? Is Matthew McConaughey showing his chest off or keeping his shirt on more than usual? What of 4DX, the silly thing where the seats move and poke you and blow air in your ears? And who has better eyebrows than Cara Delevingne?
Recorded on 21st August 2017.