This Is Not A Film Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jesse Furgurson
Cinephiles Jesse F. and Nick B. hold forth (primarily) on the films that make their hearts go a-flutterin'. From these two young men with a yen for the sublime, the austere, and the esoteric, a kind of Smith & Dale of the arthouse cinema podcasting circuit, listeners can expect a funky admixture of deep analyses, nifty factoids, runaway digressions, tenuous comparisons, screwball tangents, deranged anti-jokes, and sporadic bouts of maudlin self-pity. And if you find Jesse's logorrhea hard to take, there are also good songs that sometimes play.
In this installment, Nick and Jesse discuss Edward Yang's final masterpiece Yi Yi: A One and a Two, the Taiwanese New Wave, long-form cinema, and various other topics.
idea map:
Nick reads a purplish takedown of Melville's Pierre--Yi Yi--Edward Yang--the Taiwanese New Wave--Tsai Ming-liang (slapstick misery)--Hou Hsiao-hsien--awful R1 DVD transfers--Takashi Miike (robot penis monster; Visitor Q is not an ideal snuggletime choice)--back to Yang (other Yang joints)--NJ and Mr. Ota--faux-objectivity--hypothetical Yang Yang spinoff franchise--"a good note to end on"--3 1/2 stars (what you on, bro-rardinelli?)--soap opera?--Magnolia--Margaret--Yi Yi's unpromising start--Yang Yang revisited--symphonic narrative--a fist-shake at Paul Haggis --distance--Don Delillo tangent ("...to the extent that things can be tied together in our meaningless media-saturated universe haunted by death.")--Cosmopolis--Andy the tech guy's musical taste--Yi Yi's Bob Dylan motif--put A Brighter Summer Day out, Criterion! (but not before Out 1, which is never going to play in Maryland, ever)--Celine and Julie Go Boating gave Nick long, long legs--long movies (how only movies about superheroes get a pass now for being 3 hours long; the Soviet War & Peace; Berlin Alexanderplatz; Satantango (someday))--lonely roads
Featured sonics: "Moonlight Sonata," Ludwig Van Beethoven "Mr. Tambourine Man," The Byrds "Mr. Tambourine Man," Bob Dylan "Lonely Highway," The Magnetic Fields
An especially sprawling (read: indulgent) installment centered primarily on William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968) and Terrence Malick's To The Wonder (2013).
idea map:
the blue smoke story--how Nick painted with his own blood one time--description of the objects on a tabletop--Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (backstory+synopsis+etymology)--antecedents+affinities--L'Amour Fou--Take 2 1/2 (where's Take 2? Take 3?)--having a nice podchasm--a meta-analysis of This Is Not A Film Podcast so far--irresistible Blue Velvet reference--our weird incest fixation--Nick's reading Faulkner (manhorsedemons+Benjy's lost balls)--Robinson Crusoe en Français (mangoatlove)--the strangeness of seemingly overfamiliar classic literature--Melville, esp. Pierre (also: POLA X)--back to Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (but we were there the whole time!)--Jonathan the highly attractive sound guy--the sacred (or at least the cerebral) and the profane--Elliott on the primal scene ("implanted in your brain very early by catching LA Law on TV when you're teething"; "homosexuamum")--Greaves the horndog--pinning down the chronology of the shoot--Greaves in Putney Swope--Jesse sings the Face Off commercial--exeunt Elliott--the surprising ease of casually watching the entirety of Histoire(s) Du Cinema with your significant other--she loses, finds a flower--To The Wonder--Malick's evolution--Jesse's first Malick experience (w/The New World)--all that's new in TTW--the remarkable cleanliness of your average grocery store--nipples--Rooney Mara and why Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would be amazing if it had no story--the roots of Malick's voiceovers and why they're not as scoffworthy as his dissenters find them--if it looks like a screensaver/commercial, that's on you, lady--"he's just selling you how amazing everything is"--repetition--Hong Sang-soo--crazy zooms--flows, prancing, dancing--Ben Affleck is an axiom--Malick should channel Zoolander more--blank, pretty rooms--The Big Whathaveyou and the smaller whathaveyous--Winter Light, Bergman, bourgeois Swedes, SCTV--To the Wonder, everybody--watching Malick on a TV--big name actors and cognitive dissonance--Malick goes international, experimental--"Would that we all saw as Terrence Malick sees, the world would be a much better place. It would be a much bigger place. It would be full of light and laughter, and not self-satisfied mediocrities whingeing in movie [theater] lobbies about how the beginning of the universe looked kind of like a fucking screensaver."--one big open space, houses with no doors--editing between continents--digital video--what Bill Greaves and Terrence Malick have in common--but Colin Farrell IS an osprey--jazzy openness--hi, Mom--it's going to storm in Disney World
Special guest star: Elliott Shugoll, cinephile and electric dream wizard
featured sonics: "In A Silent Way," Miles Davis clips from Symbiopsychotaxiplasm "Ah Sunflower, Weary of Time," The Fugs
In this second installment, Nick and Jesse air their feelings about Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, and Jesse attempts somewhat diffusely to capture the subtle and ineffable majesty of Michael Mann's Miami Vice (not the show). A loose, not strictly chronological map of ideas thrown about:
a cold reading of a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle--Spring Breakers--Harmony Korine--academics vs. mainstream critics--cultural hierarchies--teenage girls vs. Spring Breakers--would Pauline Kael like Spring Breakers? and why may she have walked out* of Celine and Julie Go Boating, the best movie of all ever?--(also: a not terribly thought-through attempt to link Spring Breakers and C+JGB)--marketing vs. actuality--dreamy druggy flows--who da fug is Sophie?--Miami Vice--digital filmmaking--present tenseness--INLAND EMPIRE--Gaspar Noe in a cowboy hat--the monumental and painful stupidity of Enter the Void and why Jesse has seen it so many times--Claire Denis and the cinematic redemption of disposable music--The New World--Malick, Cavell, Emerson--the future is a hubcap--Mannspeak--Sophie revisited--Gummo 4ever--a dedication
*Jesse realized after the fact that the only source locatable for the Kael story he tells is an awful Armond White diss of C+JGB, so one might want to take it with several mounds of salt.
Soundtrack: "The Opera House," Olivia Tremor Control "Lights," Ellie Goulding "Encore," Jay-Z and Linkin Park "One of These Mornings," Patti LaBelle via Moby "Jesse," Scott Walker "Freak," LFO "Stranded in Time," The United States of America
In which two undergraduate cinephiles at a smallish liberal arts college in southern Maryland who have never recorded a podcast before make a somewhat clumsy and alcohol-abetted stab at one.
Hear: -an anecdote about the sad end of a clinically depressed caveman -the origins of their joint venture This Is Not A Film Club and much whingeing about said venture's legal complications and recent decline in attendance -why Nagisa Oshima and cannabis are generally not sound bedfellows, Charlotte Rampling/monkey movie possibly notwithstanding -a preview of sorts of an upcoming film project, All My Little Words -about alleys, and what is up them -a proclamation about the ineluctable greatness of cinematic Jeans -a discussion of that night's viewing, Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel, which detours into a survey of the very uneven terrain that is mumblecore
soundtrack: "Deeper Into Movies," Yo La Tengo "Beneath the Surface," The GZA "Gideon's Bible," John Cale "Is That Lovin' In Your Heart," The Lovelites