Cronopio

I agree, it's much better. And it's not a Judd Hirsh movie, it's a Sidney Lumet film. I was a 12 year old boy once, and I have a 12 year old boy now, and I still don't think it's canon.

I've tried with this film, I really have. I resisted the urge to leave the movie theater on its original run and stuck it out to the end. I tried on video a couple of times as well, but it's a door that doesn't open for me. As far as cultural relevance goes, sure, it became a thing, but is this a film canon, or a marketing canon? I'm curious to hear the discussion.

I feel like the examples you give are perfect illustrations of workmanlike, classic, staging and directing. The train sequence is effective, but is comprised mostly of banal medium shots, two shots and wide shots, and some pretty conventional tracking shots that simply follow the action. The most creative use of camera is the long-lens they throw on it to make the train look larger and closer to the children than it is as they run away from it - but even this last choice is a simple technical way to solve the problem of making the train seem more menacing and keeping the actors away from it. If anything, it's the editing that makes the scene work. In every moment, the camera is in an obvious but useful place to capture the action, but that's all it does. It's competent, to be sure, but compare it to how someone like Spielberg would film something like this (okay, maybe that' an unfail comparison). In this sense, Rob Reiner grew a lot by the time he made Princess Bride and Misery.

This is a fine movie, craftsmanlike in execution but with no real artistry or any kind of inspiration in its use of the camera. Everything is fine, and results in an enjoyable, safe film with no real bite to it. Soft no from me.

That's what I'm saying.

Not so fast, Boots. If you do a google image search for Bowie Labyrinth Costume Museum, in some results you don't see the bulge at all, and in others you see it but it appears that the mannequin was fitted with the codpiece or sculpted to match Bowie's mass. It's inconclusive.

It's a great film that feels deranged, but is really a very meticulously controlled work of art.

Dude, just ask him. The other day I asked why there were so many 80's movies (about 25%) and he gave a pretty straightforward answer.

It's off-center - who wear a codpiece off-center? No one. You push your dick to the side and, as my wife reminded me, in the tailoring trade it's called "dressing left" or "dressing right."

Yeah, it didn't make it in, then again it isn't the kind of overlooked 1980's cult genre movie The Canon loves, is it?

Definitely - I forgot about Daisies!

The Blade Runner episode because they didn't like the film and Devin still tried to make a case for it. And Working Girl, because I enjoyed both Amy's arguments in favor of the film and Devin's attacks on the ideology that the film is defending.

Fair enough. When are we doing Conan the Barbarian?

Is it just me, or is there a big tendency toward 1980's movies on this podcast? It seems like more than 25% of the films discussed on the show are from that decade. What does this mean?

Totally. In this case I voted yes because I think it's a great film, but sometimes I've been more self-indulgent.

I'm voting yes on this, and not a lukewarm, limp, soft yes. A hard yes. An enthusiastic yes. I love this movie for its artifice, which the film uses to examine the limits of escapism. When I watch it I think of that scene in "Sullivan's Travels" (a superior film, obviously) where the prisoners are watching the movie - a romanticized reverie about the entrancing power of the movies, and I think about "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and it's exposé of the tawdriness of the artifice of filmmaking - and I find Pennies from Heaven sitting right in the middle of the abyss between escapism and misery. (It's not alone, "One From the Heart," that other stylized killer of musicals is sitting right there with it.) I'm also all in with Gordon Willis's cinematography - his most underrated work - which channels Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, the glamour of old Hollywood and the rough imagery of the great depression. Ultimately, I think it's a unique and interesting film, and sometimes I find an interesting film preferable to a conventionally good one.

I love Dennis Potter's concoctions of fantasy and dark realities, like The Singing Detective, and the Hollywood version of "Pennies from Heaven" has always been an unsung masterpiece for me. I've loved both Devyn and Amy's indulgence picks, and I hope Amy has the ability to bring in some ringers to vote for it.

I had an awkward encounter with Paul McCartney at a restaurant in New York a few weeks ago (he was cool, the awkwardness was all mine), and afterward I told my wife "I didn't really know what to say to him." And she says, "what could you say to him? 'You're my fourth favorite Beatle?'"

For me this film is fun, absurd, energetic, influential, it captures the cultural moment, and it is very cinematic. Easy yes.

I voted YES for Re Animator as well - I was just commenting on the amount of votes when Devin called in his troops to support Re Animator, compared to this week.

It looks like all the Re-Animator ringers and the PT Anderson fans have moved on to warmer climates.

Complaining about the train stuff in this movie is a little like complaining that there's too much spaceship stuff in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Keaton's achievement, his tour the force, is precisely how well he sustains the relentless and comprehensive train action. The whole thing about Annabelle shaming Johnnie for not being in uniform is historically accurate in that southern women shamed men into enlisting by appealing to their manhood - and single women would declare that they would only date and marry men who joined the army. If a woman like Annabelle is "a monster" as stated in the podcast, she had plenty of company, and if anything, this scene shows that Keaton did his research. This was pretty typical in past wars. Only ten years before The General was made, during World War I in England, women would hand white feathers to men who were not at the front, in order to disgrace and humiliate them. And the scene is very representative of the economy of narrative characteristic of the silent era, where they had to get the exposition and character motivations done quickly - and often without subtlety - in the titles of "dialogue" scenes. In any case, the scene sets up the gag that made me fall in love with the film, where Keaton sits on the cranks of the locomotive, and when it starts moving he stays there, oblivious, going up and down, enraptured by his own melancholy. I agree with Devin about "Sherlock Jr." but this was an easy yes for me.

For me, "Boogie Nights" is the wildly entertaining work of a young filmmaker who is in the process of discovering who he is, and it carries the DNA of many other films and filmmakers, whereas "There Will Be Blood" is a unique and controlled work of art by a filmmaker who has fully found his voice. So I went with "There Will Be Blood."

That's as good a reason as any

I feel like I wasted my vote for trashy but artsy 1980's B-movies that punch above their weight on "They Live", so this is a tough one for me because I feel the style and visuals of Re-Animator hold up better, and what elevates genre movies if not style? A film like "Working Girl" - with a well-honed script, an immediately recognizable and familiar milieu, and certified movie stars can afford to sit back and let the screenplay and the actors do the heavy lifting (and it very shrewdly does just that), but a low budget grindhouse movie like Re-Animator has to dig deeper into the art of movie-making to sell us on the reality of what we are seeing, so when it's executed with such panache its like catnip to us film geeks. There's an artistry behind the gore that elevates it beyond disgust. But I think Amy has a point about the genre-heavy canon, and there are, for example, more straight-up genre movies than foreign art movies in The Canon right now (Battle Royale and Oldboy fit comfortably in both categories), and listening to this episode, and thinking of "They Live" I was reminded of Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies" in which she argues that film is a lower art form when she writes that "Movies took their impetus not from desiccated European high culture, but from the pee show, the Wild West Show, the comic strip - from what was coarse and common" - and then says that to make films "respectable" is to kill them. From this perspective, hell yeah, Re-Animator!!! I'm probably going to vote yes, but that being said, I'm ready for some Antonioni, or some Renoir, a little of the art-house rather than the grindhouse, Devin, please. We promise to listen.