LindsayNelson

Congratulations on 400 episodes! HDTGM is balm for my ears these days--it's what I listen to when the world is just too dark and I need to wrap myself in the soothing sounds of Jason saying WHAT IS HAPPENING?!! and June giving sleazy directors a much-deserved takedown for constantly ogling young actresses with the camera. And Paul reading those second opinions with SO much gravitas. My biggest bummer these days is that I've finally made it all the way through the entire Stitcher catalog (I got a Stitcher Premium subscription just so I could listen to certain back episodes) and I have to wait a whole two weeks for every new episode. Paul and June, I live in Tokyo! Recommendations for your December trip: Afuri for ramen, Akasaka Umaya for charcoal-grilled yakitori, Sushi Zanmai for affordable & high-quality sushi, the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt for a drink with a view (go before 8 pm to avoid the $20 music charge), Team Lab: Borderless for kid-friendly awesomeness, Spa La Qua for an all-day hot spring chill-out (also kid-friendly, just be aware that tattoos aren't allowed, though they're usually okay as long as you cover them). Hit me up on Twitter @NewsfromNihon if you want more recommendations!

Loved this episode and this film, but yeah, definitely agree that the racism needs to be addressed, especially in light of how influential so many of the movie's images and characterizations were (not in a good way). King Kong's depiction of indigenous people as "savages" threatening white women and the connection of Kong with the image of African-American men as beasts who were hell bent on stealing white women cast a pretty long shadow (King Kong wasn't the first movie to do this, but I'd say it's one of the more memorable examples). There are a lot of great books / articles on this subject & one of my favorites is Fatima Tobing Rony's The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, which has a section on King Kong. Watching the movie also brought back memories of this Vogue cover and all the controversy it caused at the time. King Kong has a long historical reach.

Wow...mind blown! I totally didn't see this but yeah, it absolutely makes sense. (Or it could just be that romance tended to be super stilted and awkward in 1930s films. Or it could be both.)

I haven't seen Shawshank (I know, I know, I'll get to it, something about every human on the planet telling me "You have to watch this!" made me pretty resistant). But just listening to this episode and some of the clips that were pulled, I realized that the 90s were chock full of Soft Piano Dramas. Other examples that come to mind are Field of Dreams (which I know technically came out in 1989), American Beauty, A River Runs Through It, and Forrest Gump, and they're basically movies with multiple scenes where people (usually men) speak very softly about something very serious, and in the background we hear soft piano music. SPD's also usually have lovely cinematography, plenty of pretty shots of sunsets and grand vistas, very pleasant-looking actors, and a general lack of risk-taking. This TOTALLY worked for me in the 90s (I cried a lot more easily back then, but I definitely cried at the four movies I just mentioned, and I'm sure I would have cried at Shawshank if I'd seen it back then). Anyway, now that I've thought of that genre I can't stop thinking of movies that fit into it. And I think it was mostly successful back then, but now it just feels dated (or wonderfully nostalgic, if you're a Shawshank fan). Definitely Oscar bait-y, too.

Thank you for a wonderful episode and a fascinating interview. Just have to take issue with one thing as a fellow Texan, though: the idea that they never get Texas right in films. I'm always on the lookout for movies that do interesting things with a Texas setting, and I think there are plenty. (Shameless plug: I wrote about it here for The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2017/05/lone-star-cinema/ TL;DR I talk about how "movie Texas" has started to blur with "real Texas" in my head, to the point where I have more memories of Texas landscapes from movies like The Searchers (which wasn't even filmed in Texas) than actual memories of my own life there. Also the way that I think certain movies (No Country for Old Men, Hell or High Water) get Texas *beautifully* right, particularly its big emptiness, occasional sense of menace, and the fact that plenty of smaller towns feel like they haven't changed at all in seventy years.)

I've seen this film twice and this episode definitely made me realize that I need to see it on the big screen someday (if they play Christopher Nolan's restored version in an Tokyo theaters any time soon I'll check it out). I loved Paul & Amy's discussion of how 2001 is one of the first space movies to imagine interstellar travel as mundane. The focus on details like the floating pen, the gravity shoes, the hairnet that the flight attendant wears to keep her hair from floating all over the place, the synthetic-looking food. I feel like this is a dramatic departure from a lot of the pulpy / shiny scif-fi movies of the fifties, where characters spent a lot of time using goofy-sounding language and staring in awe at everything they saw. And just like everything else in 2001, that whole "space is just a job" vibe would carry over really effectively into movies like Alien. One other thing: I love the way that silence works in this film. Specifically the way that dead silence in space (in contrast to a lot of other space movies that make lots of noise) intensifies this feeling of loneliness and isolation, driving home the idea that you are really, completely on your own.

1) I love a movie that knows with every fiber of its being that it's a MOVIE. I love the fact that the backdrops of the Emerald City and the witch's castle were so obviously paintings, that everyone's costumes looked very costume-y, and that the whole thing seemed to be stuffed with as much movie-ness as possible (musical numbers, a good-vs.-evil storyline, a sentimental ending). 2) I think my lifelong love of horror movies might have begun with The Wizard of Oz, because it is legit TERRIFYING at times. I mainly remember the scene where the witch tells Dorothy that she has only an hourglass worth of time to live, and then her friends desperately axing the door to get her out. Ah, the days when children's movies threatened their main characters with ACTUAL DEATH. (Also agree with previous posters that it's hard to watch the film now without seeing it as yet another example of the horrific abuse inflicted on movie stars, though.) 3) "And you, and you...and you were there!" I was trying to think of examples of other movies where the main character essentially dreams a fantasy world that's populated with different versions of people / things from her real life. A few film versions of Alice in Wonderland do this, Labyrinth does it...it's always made those stories just a little creepier for me, because the characters are familiar, but they're not familiar, you're home, but you're not really home... (PS I love Candyland too.)

My main memory regarding Legends of the Fall was that it was one of the first movies that I actively, specifically disliked. I saw it when I was 18, and it was one of the first times I can remember rolling my eyes a lot at a movie. Mainly I just could not understand the appeal of Brad Pitt--I thought his character was 30% moody glowering and 70% narcissistic asshole, and I didn't get why everyone swooned over him (both romantically and platonically). But I'm fairly sure that if I had seen the movie just a few years earlier I would have wept and lusted and just let it wash over me like the wave of big skies and big emotions that it was. (I have a vivid memory of weeping repeatedly during Far and Away and loving it SO MUCH, and it came out just two years before Legends of the Fall.) It's wild how quickly your tastes can shift in your mid-to-late teen years. So yeah, that's a no for me.

Loving this podcast so far! This episode made me realize that I need to revisit Citizen Kane--I only saw it once in college, and like many movies that I saw in college and watched again 10-15 years later I'm guessing it'd be a very different experience seeing it now. I'd agree that Citizen Kane is by far the most influential English-language movie ever made, but I wonder if that makes it the best. Judging by AFI's criteria (critical recognition, cultural impact, etc.), it makes sense to call it the best, but sometimes it seems like a lot of the praise for Citizen Kane is based on how influential it was, not necessarily how good it was. Is influential the same as good? Maybe sometimes? That said, totally agree that Citizen Kane isn't just a piece of film history and a collection of important firsts, it's also a genuinely entertaining and moving film. (Though my grad school colleagues always groaned on the first day of the semester when at least a few freshmen would say Citizen Kane was their favorite film, because...greatly doubt that was true.)