chaplinatemyshoe

Nothing makes me feel quite as old as hearing people call Jeremy Irons a poor man's Rickman. Irons was arguably the best actor working for a stretch in the late 80s/early 90s before he burnt out.

He was genuinely great in Hail, Caesar! and pretty good in Stoker and Blue Jasmine. I mean, if anyone wants to know why comedic directors would cast him as a young Han Solo, they need to see him in Hail, Caesar!

Bumping this recommendation. This movie is amazing. It's Southern Gothic transported to the northeast by way of kinda gross swingers.

I mean...subjectively you're right. But objectively, we're talking about my opinion which is also subjective. I think the first Hobbit film is the best of those six. I like the cast, the stakes, the scope, the storytelling techniques more than anything in the LOTR trilogy. And then it sort of just becomes lesser LOTR as that trilogy goes on. But it's all the elements I disliked about the original trilogy sneaking in that bored me about the Hobbit movies. I'm just not a Tolkein fan. Don't like his vision. Don't like his view of the world. Don't like how sexless everything is. But I get that others do like him and his work, in this case adapted to the screen, and I try my best to appreciate what's there for me to like about those movies. And frankly, there's not a big gap between The Hobbit and LOTR for me, personally. I know it's popular to hate on The Hobbit because it feels dated, but honestly, LOTR feels dated as fuck to me to now. Its view of the world feels pretty goddamn basic.

I'm voting Fellowship. These movies aren't really my thing. I tolerate them more than I do enjoy them. But I think Fellowship did a really good job of tapping into the cultural dread that permeated everything in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don't think it's a mistake that the franchise caught on when it did, and I'm kind of skeptical the franchise would have been met with the same larger fan fare or critical acclaim in almost any other time (as witnessed by the way everyone shrugged off The Hobbit which is in many ways equal to LOTR in quality of storytelling, scope, acting, etc). So as a cultural artifact of a specific time and place, I vote Fellowship. Because let's be real, the 900 endings in ROTK are completely intolerable unless you're emotionally invested in every single storyline. It is fan service of the highest wankery order.

Yeah. My personal Canon is really different from the show's. Listening the podcast is more just an excuse to revisit movies worth watching then seeing all the great conversation the movie spurs, both in the podcast and on the forum.

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I remember when I had my first beer too.

Skillset is good. What MTV has going on in their podcast network in general is pretty good. Really dig the mix of talent they have working over there.

Glad to see them finally do a Dreamcatcher episode. So much in this movie to riff on, you could probably do two episodes on it alone. Plus, the Blake Harris piece on this one could be pretty goddamn beautiful. Now excuse me while I go to my memory warehouse to prepare for the coming glory of this episode.

I'm cool with a guest host format if Amy wants to keep doing the show. I think that probably makes the most sense while Devin sorts through whatever is going on in his personal life and they can make a more formal decision about his departure. Either way, I really enjoy listening to Amy talk about movies, so I'm cool listening to the show reformatted around just her.

Cannibal Holocaust is a Mondo film. Mondo films had been around since the early 60s. If anything, the movie was at the tail end of that genre's run. So the whole argument for the movie being ahead of the curve on the found footage thing is really hollow to me.

If you guys want a decent Lonesome Rhodes 1:1, he already won the presidency 36 years ago. Trump and Palin are just pale comparisons.

So I voted no. The movie is not quite in my sweet spot enough to put it over the top into the Canon. That said, I enjoyed the re-watch, and I have to say this might have been the first time the discussion almost pushed my vote the other direction. You all made a lot of really great points and it was fun to hear you guys break the movie down in the context of the evil kid genre. I kind of wish this had been a versus episode with Mommie Dearest. While I like evil kid movies too, I think there's a ton of problematic projection going on in a lot of movies where adults are ascribing grown up motivations to kids whose brains really aren't developed enough to totally get what they're doing. And you see a lot of shitty abusive parents project their own anxieties upon what their kids are doing and use that as an excuse to inflict emotional and physical abuse. And I think Mommie Dearest serves as a similarly camp contrast to the evil kid story and provides an easy breezy point of comparison to something like The Bad Seed. All that is to say, I bet Joan Crawford really loved the fuck out of The Bad Seed.

Maybe...but last year was sort of an asterisk year because Fury Road would have probably easily have won if they hadn't put it up in a versus earlier in the year. Plus, Creed vs. Chi-raq...not sure what Devin and Amy were thinking in general. Both movies were fine, but it felt like they were both reaching a little bit with those choices. It's certainly possible, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where people are looking back on 2015 years from now and choosing those movies as defining the cinematic year.

Bump this idea until it happens. It's too good to pass up.

I disagree. Most of the shit we consider great now is considered great OUTSIDE of the context from which it was initially critiqued. Vertigo and Citizen Kane weren't really considered seminal works of cinematic genius by the vast majority of critics when they first came out. It was the reappraisal of both films on their own terms that subsequently created a push to re-evaluate. And then people started to study them in depth and really begin to appreciate them on their historical merit. But that both of those movies have been deemed important and influential is kind of revisionist to begin with since neither movie had much cultural or commercial impact upon its release. It was academics and fans of cinema who imbued those films with their value after the fact. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the historical argument doesn't work because a smart critic or academic can pretty much bend any movie to be more important in its context even if it was largely unremarkable in the actual context it was birthed from initially. And so I don't find most historical arguments to be particularly compelling. If I'm interested in a movie's history, I will likely seek it out from multiple sources. If I'm not, it's probably because I didn't find the movie compelling enough to put in the Canon to begin with. You see what I'm trying to get at here?

The Elmore Leonard adaptations starring Michael Keaton playing the same character face off extravaganza! I love both of these movies and think it would be awesome and mean to make us have to choose. Beyond that, Leonard's birthday is coming up on the 11th of October, so it's an appropriate time of year to be featuring movies based on his work.

Bonnie & Clyde would dominate. I think you'd have to go with something like Bonnie & Clyde vs. Badlands.

They could cast Stephen Lang as Picard and some annoying kid I'll want him to beat up as Wesley.

I get that. And I'm not saying I would include it into the Canon because I consider it great or important. I would include it because I like it a lot and make people I like a lot watch it to understand my taste. And my taste is IV > VI > II. And that's not set in stone because I don't have to choose to save only one. I like all three and if any of them went up for a vote, I would vote it in. The lamest part of any argument Devin or Amy try to make for a movie's inclusion in the Canon (and I think Devin tends to make this argument WAY more than Amy) is when they try to attach objective historical merit to a movie. That shit's lame. I like subjectivity. I like people who can articulate their weird taste. As for the Shakespearean dialogue Plummer quotes, that's more about his character and not the story. He's making references and quotes that make sense to Chang in the moment. It's a character tic/quirk not a thematic arch. It's the same with Khan in Trek. I think sometimes people get so bogged down in what the villain is up to that they miss the obvious deal of what's going on with the characters we're generally intended to be relating to. But yeah, I get The Undiscovered Country has cheesy dialogue, but outside of The Voyage Home, it's hard to think of a Trek movie that has dialogue that snaps anyway. I've never really watched Trek movies or tv shows for the exact words characters say.

Chi-Raq and Cannibal Holocaust are the obvious knock out candidates in my book.

So General Chang gets a pass for me on the Shakespeare quoting front specifically because Christopher Plummer is arguably the greatest living Shakespearean actor who wasn't born in Britain. And my understanding is that Plummer had a lot of input into that character's development, look and dialogue. My guess is that if you hung out with Plummer, he would be quoting a ton of Shakespeare and Shaw at you because he's performed in a ton of Shakespeare and Shaw plays in Canada for decades. As for what I love about the movie, it's partially because of my age. I'm 32. It's the one I got to see in the theatre as a kid. The others, I first saw as a kid and then got the great opportunity to see on the big screen as an adult who was lucky enough to live in cities where such a thing was plausible (I first saw Khan back to back with Search for Spock at a double feature). But I also really love that the movie takes on something you don't see a lot of in movies: old people being bigots and having to change. Plus, it's clear everyone in the cast is fully engaged, likes the script and is really going for it. They have good material to work with, it's their last shot and I think they nail it.

One of the reasons I really like those Trek movies is that they all deal pretty openly with aging. In Khan, it's about leaving your last semblance of youth and entering middle age and dealing with mortality. In Voyage Home, it's about gaining that second wind and realizing just cause you're older doesn't mean you don't have a shit ton left to contribute. And Undiscovered Country, you have a group of bigoted old people having to change the way they think about people they thought as being lesser in order for progress to occur. It's just hard to think of many sci-fi movies that actively incorporate the aging of its cast in its storytelling as effectively as Trek managed to. Most franchises stop working as actors grow old because movie studios don't really want to deal with aging out their IP. They want it to go on forever so they can keep making that money. As for the Picard thing, that's on Roddenberry. He wanted a French character and fought against Stewart's casting. I'm sure keeping the character's name and background was a compromise. But hey, at least we got Stewart and not that swarthy Midwesterner Roddenberry wanted.

So I grew up watching TNG and being into Star Trek movies (not necessarily the show as much as a kid). But I also grew up in a humanities family, and I kind of get where Amy's coming from being supremely unimpressed with Trek's literary references. Trek has always suffered from a bit of a high school reading list syndrome. That is to say, it's always felt like the writers of Trek were the kind of guys who read pretty much every piece of sci-fi and fantasy they could lay their hands on but their general knowledge of the popular literary canon was pretty much limited to whatever was assigned to them in their high school or first year college curriculum. So you get a lot of real basic classic works (although TNG had a deep cut Epic of Gilgamesh reference so kudos for that) that they lean REAL heavily on as if to say "hey look, this is serious stuff to be taken seriously, serious minded people who don't think sci-fi is serious" when they should probably be referencing guys like Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs if they're being honest with what inspired them to begin with. But then I also think Amy largely misinterprets the movie as being about revenge when it is pretty explicitly about mortality. It's not about Kirk vs Khan, but Kirk vs time. You get older. You have regrets. Your kids become strangers, and then your friends start dying. Even the conflict with Khan, which doesn't seem all that applicable to every day life on the face of it (most of us don't have arch enemies waiting in the shadows), reflects the way past actions can blindside you with their consequences way on down the line. And I think the movie is really kind of smart about exploring all these things in a way that most sci-fi adventure films really aren't because it's not often we get a honest to god middle aged person as a protagonist in that genre. I'm a soft yes on this one. I love Trek. I would put three Trek films in my personal canon, and this would be one of them. And my stance has always been to vote on the personal level for this thing. So I vote a soft yes (only soft because I like IV and VI a little more if I'm being honest).