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No but he can turn into Billy Barty

They spelled the actress' name wrong on this poster

I live in Japan and if you show people a picture of a vampire and ask what it is you'll get the response "It's a Dracula." I don't even think this is isolated to people that don't speak English. I'm sure you can go on the street show a picture of a vampire to people in North America and get "Dracula" as a reply. While not as a great level as the 'Frankenstein vs Frankenstein's Monster' debate (on a side note in Son of Frankenstein this is actually addressed by Frankenstein's son saying that people even took to calling it by his father's name and that's okay because he too was a 'son' thus taking the family name) it is not helped by films like this and Blacula and Bunnicula that make people think the generic term for vampire is "Dracula". That said "Rock-pire" is not as catchy as Rockula. Though he only really has one rock song. They could have easily called him "Hiphopula"

Motion pictures can be called many things - movies, films, flicks - but how many can be truly called “Art?” We watched:

I legit laughed so hard at his transformation. It was so stupid and perfect and punctuated with that fart sound. The other part that I thought was genuinely funny was his reflection having different voices in the funhouse mirrors.

This might be an unpopular opinion but I have to wonder if a film is only good after repeat viewings is it that good of a film? Now, the clarify there are plenty of films that get better on repeat viewings because you pick up things you first missed, details that you forgot, etc. However you usually are rewatching it and getting those things because you enjoyed or were interested by the movie on the first viewing. A lot of people seemed to not like this movie at all or been bored by it on first viewing then they read something or heard something and when they go back a second time and it is better because they are getting those things now. If it truly was a "top 100" movie shouldn't your first viewing leave you wanting to see it again or at least with a sense of "that was good." To see something and have no reaction to it but then do research and then appreciate it seems like a failing on the part of the movie to me. It shouldn't only be enjoyable if the audience has prior knowledge going in. I'm going to jump the gun here a bit and use next weeks movie as an example. Unforgiven works as a character piece if you have no idea who Clint Eastwood is. Yet in many way it is playing on who he is and his history and the genre itself. If you get that you'll probably enjoy the movie more but because the story is so character driven that a layman to Westerns or Eastwood I think would have an enjoyable first viewing. I could be wrong. For me the movie was beautiful. The way the exteriors were shot and some of the shot compositions are of course iconic and influential. However, the other half of the movie is on cheap sets on sound stages and look it too. It's jarring. The story itself is a bit of a hot mess. You have a young girl turn into an older girl and yet all the other actors look the same yet we have to be told "It's been five years" because they don't show us any signs of time actually passing. So for me a lot of this negative things offset the good things. While I get why it was influential I don't think that is reason enough alone to put it on the list.

This is a great question. Especially, when you consider there’s a whole scene at the beginning where his mom complains that she can’t see her reflection. I mean, there’s a throw away line that it has something to do with the curse, but how exactly? And considering Mirror Ralph breaks free at the end, does that mean he’s Ralph’s twin brother or has his reflection been granted full autonomy?

Also can the mirror alter ego also turn into a farty bat?

So, what is his reflection? Vampires can't normally be seen in a mirror and reflections don't have different personalities, talk back to you or dress differently. So, is his reflection a different dimension?

I think one of my favourite parts of the whole movie might be that fact that turning into a bat retains Hulk transformation rules that you will always retain some sort of pant or underwear regardless of size difference when changing back and forth.

Also fun fact. Some people may remember that there was an "In The Heat of the Night" television series in the late 80s/early 90s that served as a sequel to this film. However, this movie actually had two sequels. First was a film called "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!" from 1970 and then a year later a sequel to that was released called "The Organization". I had the misfortune of actually being able to find They Call Me Mister Tibbs and watching it and if you didn't like In the Heat of the Night than find this movie and watch it. It'll make you like the movie a whole lot more. Basically Virgil Tibbs is now a San Francisco homicide detective with a wife and two kids. The movie is filmed on cheap sound stages for the most part with flat lighting. There is no sense of mystery or intrigue to the murder mystery and no hidden messages about racism to be had. I guess this is due to San Francisco being more liberal I suppose. The whole movie is pretty boring except for a scene in which Virgil Tibbs who is trying to connect with his son pours him a glass of whisky and makes him smoke a cigar because he hit his sister. He's got to teach him what it means to be a man you see. Did I mention the kid is like eight or ten?

I wish I could have got on the boards sooner with this one. Busy holidays and all. Anyway, what struck me as very odd is for people of my generation in my part of the world growing up (Western Canada) the novel that the film was based on was required reading in either grade 8 or 9. We read this book in English class and I remember being excited because I thought we'd get to watch the movie at the end like we did the year prior with the The Outsiders. However, our teacher was dead set against this. She felt the film detracted too much from the book and it blurred some of the lines of the books themes on racism. Now it's been a good twenty years or so I don't remember the finer details of the novel so much but I remembered enough of the general story that I felt I never had to watch the movie. So I watched it for the first time and I really enjoyed it. I think it works great as a sheep in wolves clothing. The movie is about racism but it is also very much a police procedural that sneaks in its message instead of putting it front and center. Now this could be to the detriment of the movie but again we have to think about the context that this movie was being made it. Like Paul and Amy mentioned they had to prove that a black lead movie could make its money back just to get money to make this movie. If it was coming with a more direct message who knows if it would have ever got made. Still this movie was taking chances socially that it maybe wasn't talking artistically. That said there is nothing wrong with the movie. Every aspect of the film from acting, writing, to directing is perfectly done. It maybe not be trying to break the story telling structures or visual styles or acting methods because just making it was a challenge in itself. On top of that, it holds up today. For all that I say keep it on the list.

I relistened to this episode today and I love Jason’s description of Paul googling Mario Lopez’s chest hair as like a “a character in a movie who is trying to hack a system.” I work in publishing. That is the kind of detail I like! Jason, if you want to write a book, call me.

Scott seems happiest when the plug intro themes are around 15 seconds in length. Listening to a closing theme 3x that length every week might cause him to go insane.

I honestly think it was a statement on the way black people were referred to when they were slaves. We talked a lot about it in my photo history class when I was in college because even photographers used their craft for racism in those days to "prove" that black people were animals built for work. The minute all that shit went down I was like what the fuuuuck and then suddenly it hit me and I was like fuck this is actually brilliant.

I haven't seen a lot of the Oscar-bait films but I have a hard time seeing what could top Beale Street.

Having now seen If Beale Street Could Talk, please know it's definitely in my top 10.

And here are Barack Obama’s fav movies of 2018: Annihilation Black Panther BlacKkKlansman Blindspotting Burning The Death of Stalin Eighth Grade If Beale Street Could Talk Leave No Trace Minding the Gap The Rider Roma Shoplifters Support the Girls Won’t You Be My Neighbor

“Two Rode Together” isn’t a great movie, but it is an interesting companion/response to the Searchers. The focus is on the difficulty (and perhaps even the impossibility) of re-integration of captives back into white society, so it may satisfy people who feel Natalie Wood’s return is oversimplified. However, it’s an inherently pessimistic and unsatisfying film, anchored by Jimmy Stewart in one of his oft-overlooked unrepentant asshole roles. I think of it as one of Ford’s late “half-woke” films (Sergeant Rutledge, Cheynne Autumn) in which he is earnestly trying to take apart myths of the West from the perspectives of Native Americans and minorities, but he’s hamstrung by the conservatism of the studio system and the biases of the time as well as his own. The saddest example of this is how “Cheyenne Autumn” went from Ford’s original conception of a docu-realist narrative starring non-professional native actors to a bloated 60s Hollywood epic half-focused on white soldiers chasing the Cheyenne and half Sal Mineo and Ricardo Montalban in brownface. Anyway, I agree that The Searchers is good but underwhelming, particulary on first watch. It’s easy to get lost and frustrated in the meandering plot and miss the coherence of the themes and images, or fail to appreciate how easily the film switches from drama into action or suspense (and a little more abruptly in and out of comedy). It helps that since first watching this over a decade ago I’ve seen far more Ford films and become somewhat inoculated to his humor. One of the big problems with lists like the AFI is how they flatten genres and filmographies. It’s a pity that people write off Westerns or Ford or Wayne because this one overhyped classic doesn’t work for them (I did when I first saw this). It also makes films like this and High Noon seem especially unique, when really plenty of Westerns were similarly ambitious and complex. There’s as much complexity regarding different versions of masculinity in Stagecoach as there is in the Searchers (though admittedly, not much complexity with the treatment of Natives). There’s more darkness in Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur or Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome. For better Ford, I’d highly recommend Fort Apache, which fictionalizes Custer and moves the action of Little Big Horn to Arizona, and is a much earlier, and in my opinion far sharper, take down of how Native Americans were mistreated and how the narrative around that was misshapen.

John Ford actually made a spiritual sequel about captives "rescued" from Indians who didn't want to return to white civilization, "Two Rode Together". However, it was a failure and he regarded it as one of his worst movies. I would think that Stagecoach is the prototypical western, while The Searchers is an attempt to add some complexity to the genre. I agree that the originally scripted ending would have been significantly better than the one we got, where it's just "surprise, he doesn't kill her".

Yea, those undercurrents are what I was wrestling with -- I get they are there and maybe give the simple story a bit more depth, but I just don't think they change it enough for me in the end.

Looking back over my personal ranking (I add each film after a rewatch but before i listen to the podcast) it's clear to myself why some films are at the top, and why some are at the bottom. That middle part gets really messy, and this film found its way into the middle. Interestingly, I couldn't find any place for it except next to Bonnie and Clyde. In The Heat gets the edge, however, from my personal reaction to the movie, and it was a very emotional viewing experience. That's all I want to say about that. Without that emotional resonance, however, I doubt I would have placed the film so high. While watching it, I wondered if it could have been the True Detective of its day. Well, the first season I mean. That also speaks to how cinematic our television series are these days. Having no Simpsons' reference? I took to TVtropes.org which usually has a section that lists any homages, etc. There weren't any, although they do name a whole trope They Call Me Mister Tibbs. They also had some interesting trivia that didn't come up in the podcast, although without any references cited I'm not sure how to vet the information. for example, the site claims Endicott was supposed to be a sympathetic character in the novel, but was changed for the sceenplay, and similarly in the novel Tibbs was a polite and non-confrontational character. Another tidbit was that Steiger didn't want to have to chew gum all the time, but grew to like the way it helped him act. Anyway, the TvTropes page is here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/InTheHeatOfTheNight It also pointed out something I didn't notice at the time, the "Feet-first Introduction," where the audience doesn't see Tibbs fully until ten minutes into the film. I wonder if this is important thematically or just a dramatic choice by the director. And maybe it happened off screen, but I sure hope Tibbs called his mother.

Here was my issue: According to Letterboxd, I watched this movie for the first time last year. and aside from a vague outline and the famous line, I had forgotten almost everything about it. Granted, I've seen a ton of movies since then, but still, I generally have a good memory for these types of things. If I've seen it (or read it) I can almost always give you - if not beat for beat - a pretty good description of the plot. For this, nothing. "There's a murder in a Southern town and Poitier gets roped into it after being falsely accused" is probably the best I could do. I couldn't have told you who got murdered, why, or who did it. That's not to say that I think the movie isn't fantastic. The performances are top notch and it grabs you as you're watching it, but I don't know...how many times should I have to watch it for it to become memorable? Shouldn't the "best" movies stick with you? Anyway, I dropped my initial Letterboxd star rating from 5 to 4 1/2 stars. Not a lot, but it bothered me I couldn't remember anything about it. That being said, I still think it belongs on the list. I even think it deserves to be pretty high, but "low" high, if you know what I mean

It's a better police procedural that's ostensibly about racism than Zootopia. I get your criticism and agree to an extent. But I loved this movie when I saw it. I wouldn't necessarily say it's just a product of its time since it's themes are still pretty relevant today (and aged significantly better than Poitier's other movie this year about racism Guess Who's Coming To Dinner). I don't have any more to add since I haven't seen this in well over a decade and specifics are pretty much lost.

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