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Bullets of Fire
50 Plays1 year ago
Warner and Paramount classics on 4k, Looney Tunes returns to Blu-ray, a big bucket of Star Trek and Superman and more… only on DigiGods!
DigiGods Podcast, 06/13/23 (M4a) — 53.6 MB
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In this episode, the Gods discuss:
- All Eyes Off Me (DVD)
- All-Star Superman (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- A Bag of Marbles (DVD)
- Being Thunder (DVD)
- Blondie - The Complete 1957 Television Series (Blu-ray)
- Blood-Red Ox (DVD)
- Border Incident (Blu-ray)
- Branded to Kill (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Camille (Blu-ray)
- Cheers: The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
- Chess Story (DVD)
- Clash By Night (Blu-ray)
- Confessions of a Nazis Spy (Blu-ray)
- Cool Hand Luke (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Crank (Best Buy Exclusive) (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Creed III (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
- Deep Impact (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Everything Went Fine (Blu-ray)
- The Fisher King (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Flamingo Road (Blu-ray)
- Flashdance 40th Anniversary 4k UHD (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Full Time (DVD)
- Go On – The Complete Series (DVD)
- Goliath (DVD)
- Goodbye Mr. Chips (Blu-ray)
- The Haunting of Julia (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Highway One (DVD)
- His Dark Materials: The Complete Third Season (Blu-ray)
- House of 1000 Corpses 20th Anniversary Steelbook (Best Buy Exclusive) (Blu-ray)
- I'll Cry Tomorrow (Blu-ray)
- Indochine (Blu-ray)
- Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsmen, Part One (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Knock at the Cabin (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Leonor Will Never Die (Blu-ray)
- Like Me (DVD)
- A Lion is in the Streets (Blu-ray)
- The Long Long Trailer (Blu-ray)
- Looney Tunes Collector's Choice Volume 1 (Blu-ray)
- Lovers Lane (Blu-ray)
- The Maltese Falcon (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Max Fleischer’s Superman 1941-1943 (Blu-ray)
- Miami Vice (Blu-ray)
- Moonlighting Wives / The Naked Fog (Joseph W. Sarno Retrospective Series) (Blu-ray)
- NCIS Hawaii: Season One (Blu-ray)
- Neptune's Daughter (Blu-ray)
- One Way Passage (Blu-ray)
- Our Dancing Daughters (Blu-ray)
- Petite Maman (Blu-ray)
- Primal: The Complete Second Season (Blu-ray)
- The Quiet Girl (DVD)
- Rancho Notorious (Blu-ray)
- Rebel Without a Cause (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Return to Seoul (Blu-ray)
- Safe in Hell (Blu-ray)
- The Seventh Seal (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Shazam! Fury of the Gods (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Small Axe (Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Red White and Blue, Alex Wheatle) (Blu-ray)
- South Park: The Complete Twenty-Fifth Season (Blu-ray)
- Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season Three (Blu-ray)
- Star Trek: The Next Generation 4-Movie Collection (Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis) (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Storm Warning (Blu-ray)
- The Strawberry Blond (Blu-ray)
- Superman 1978 – 1987 5-Film Collection (Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, Superman III, and Superman IV) (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Targets (Blu-ray)
- Triangle of Sadness (4k UHD Blu-ray)
- Walker: Season Two (Blu-ray)
- Wife vs. Secretary (Blu-ray)
- Wings o
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Transcript
Trips and Travels
00:00:24
Speaker
And we are back after a substantial layoff, done a lot of traveling. Tim, you were just back home. How was that? Back home in St. Louis, very nice humidity, just getting going there. Hey, it's the Midwest.
00:00:40
Speaker
You know, what are you gonna do midwest in the summertime? My mom yesterday was already here It's kind of overcast and been cloudy a little bit drizzly for a few days High temperatures may be topping out in the coastal areas where you are over there 60 70s where I am Maybe 75 in st. Louis 98 degrees a hundred percent. Holy cow, really that hot already. Oh, wow Yeah, you're not not not even summer yet, but whatever that's what that's that's what it was a lot of fun My mom's 80th birthday. So hey mom
00:01:10
Speaker
Fantastic. Congratulations, mom. That's pretty great. That's great stuff. We were just in New York and it was the most beautiful weather. I didn't want to come back because it's better than California. It was fantastic. We had a three hour long meeting in Central Park and people were playing and jogging and just the picnicking and it was amazing. It was sunny and beautiful. It really is a wonderful time in New York right now. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, and we were also in Europe some weeks ago during spring break, and I can't believe we were talking about last spring break, and I was able to pick up some 4Ks that are not available here, which made me very happy, including the Elephant Man. Oh. And what else did I get there on 4K? I got them sitting around here somewhere.
00:02:07
Speaker
Hold on, let's see. Elephant Man was gorgeous. Black and white. The Elephant Man and oh gosh. I can't even remember the rest of them, but I jumped all over them. It was a bunch of great 4Ks. I'm like, we don't have those yet. So the Elephant Man was the big one for me.
Hollywood Legends
00:02:30
Speaker
Let's go through some of the old bits. Norman Reynolds died. Norman Reynolds, the famous Spielberg affiliated production designer, Empire of the Sun and many other great things. They don't kind of make them like that anymore. They're all CG people now. Norman Reynolds actually built stuff.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 1934. Norman, just really, one of the old school guys, Raiders, all that kind of stuff. I mean, it's what he built stuff. It's funny, we used to talk about this all the time. Frankly, there was that moment, because you and I are from that, you know, era two, you know, not as old as Norman here, but we're from that era of where we grew up watching films that were made by guys like Norman.
00:03:13
Speaker
And so those are our movies, right? It's just interesting because Raiders is back, as you know, or we'll be here in a second. And the first Raiders is one of Norman's. And you watch that movie and you see all that stuff in that movie that's actually stuff. That boulder rolling down that thing. All stuff, all stuff. And I haven't seen the new movie, but I'm kind of thinking there's not going to be any stuff in that movie.
00:03:40
Speaker
No. I'm thinking there's going to be no stuff in that movie at all. It's stuff that comes out of a computer. Yeah. Yeah. And then speaking of Spielberg, we also lost Bill Butler, who was nearly, who was over, was he over a hundred years old? Yeah, Bill Butler. Yeah, he was 101. He was 101. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1921.
00:04:02
Speaker
Bill. Crazy, yeah. He, you know, I mean, Jaws, the conversation. One flow of the cuckoo's nest. He kind of defined the 70s in many respects.
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah. And again, one of these guys who, you know, worked his whole entire life, career in actual film, every format of actual film, and had to understand all of that. And I got to think, you know, some of that's going to go away, dude. I mean, Katz in film school today, I suppose classes where they work with actual film, who are electives.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, i'm thinking i mean i mean i mean i'm thinking right i mean why would you have why would it be just the thing that you're doing in film school day studying cinematography of course if you're in film school today studying cinematography why would you touch film other than as an elective but it's what he did the whole damn time.
00:05:03
Speaker
Grease. He shot Grease. I mean, you know, as far as I'm concerned, if you if you shot Jaws and Grease is done. But I mean, I'm just looking at the rest of his films. I mean, deliverance. Yeah. The rain just did second unit on The Godfather. You know, it's just unreal. It's unbelievable.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and all kinds of films too, you know, not just genre films, dramas where people were just sitting and talking, you know, horror movies. Yeah, he did hot shots in 1991. Yeah. You know, he did the original child's play. I mean, really all across the board, you know, it's really amazing. And Rocky III, one of my favorite Rockies, I mean, has my favorite montage in it.
00:05:51
Speaker
Oh boy. Stripes. Legendary guy. Anaconda. Gosh, right? Yeah. Anaconda. Good heavens. Anyway. And then we also lost Harry Belafonte, who I know is near and dear to you and a legendary figure socially, cinematically.
00:06:11
Speaker
Um, you know, the, the pride of the Caribbean to many people, uh, talk about Harry man and what, what he meant. I mean, he just, that's a, that's a guy who I think some dwelt in, unfortunately in the shadow of Sidney Poitier for far too long, even though they were good friends, but he was kind of seen as, you know, both of them Caribbean, both of them coming up at a time when it was, it was difficult for black actors. And, and I think he was, he was kind of pigeonholed under that umbrella, but he did his own
00:06:41
Speaker
thing. Talk about that. He did. He did. And that's the most important thing. Harry was honored by the Academy a couple of years ago, and I had a chance to chit chat with him then, as well as a very, very, very long time ago in a junket for a film that he did with John Travolta, a Destiny End film. What was the name of that film? It'll pop in my head.
00:07:02
Speaker
in a second, that white man's burden, white man's burden. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. 1995 or so. So, you know, actually bumped into him a few times. And Harry would have said what would say often said that he didn't feel that he was in Sydney's shadow at all. Indeed, very often, the films that Sydney did and received accolades for were films that they came to Harry with and he turned out.
00:07:26
Speaker
and did not regret. Turned down the rules of the field. Turned them down. I could not figure out why that brother was out there singing songs with those German nuns. I couldn't figure it out. But Sidney figured it out. So while they were on the same path in terms of what they were
00:07:46
Speaker
to do with their careers. He took different routes to do it, but sometimes sometimes they crossed over. Bucking the preacher, 1970. I know. Harry and Sidney Sidney ostensibly directing that film, although I think Joe Sargent directed most of that movie. But whatever. Sidney Portier's directorial would be him, them and Harry Belafonte. And what's funny is their characters in their film. So it'll reflect them. Harry playing that loud mouth asshole preacher.
00:08:14
Speaker
Is Sydney playing this upright guy, a wagon trail guy, gonna lead his people out west? It's literally them, but they're both doing the exact same thing in that movie. That movie didn't get a lot of love back in the day, but you gotta return to that movie and see it. It's prescient.
00:08:32
Speaker
It's on Criterion now and it deserves to be. It is a landmark and milestone film for sure. Harry deeply missed, but what a full life, really a very, very full life. You can't say that he was taken before his time. He made the most of every second. Speaking of Jim Brown recently, I know we all got very mixed feelings about Jim who
00:08:57
Speaker
Who has an ugly history with women but who also is an undeniable seminal figure because he was the first athlete to figure out that when you retired as an athlete you could start as an actor and so many others followed in his footsteps Fred Williamson you know
00:09:16
Speaker
Jumped right into that and then became a producer on top of that but williamson did it was jim brown did it first rosie greer um you know we can i mean some frickin mike tyson is in a is in a movie of french movie this week you know there's so many athletes who who who made that jump but jim brown did it first.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah. In a certain way, you can connect that move to Arnold Schwarzenegger from bodybuilder to actor and all kinds of folks. Without Jim Brown, there is no Schwarzenegger. There is no Schwarzenegger. Hell, our good buddy Sherman Augustus played with the San Diego Chargers and the Vikings in the 80s and late 80s. And because of what Jim Brown had done 20 years ago, knew
00:10:04
Speaker
that he could make that transition. All you had to do was be good at it. It's funny we talk about Jim Brown. To be honest, I have no trouble talking about Jim Brown at all. His whole career, his whole life, everything he did, even the nutty, wacky crap that he did with women in his life. Jim Brown's a man born in 1936.
00:10:22
Speaker
That's a long time ago. And he was a man who was Gullah Geechee. Jim Brown was from them islands off South Carolina. The interesting thing about the folks who grew up off those islands South Carolina is that they grew up in a fairly isolated community where much of the machinations of the United States at that time, race and racial divides and issues like that did not affect them because there weren't no white people around.
00:10:52
Speaker
It's just plain and simple. So Jim Brown grew up with a sort of manly dynamic and attitude that one might associate with figures like John Wayne and John Ford, folks like that who
00:11:07
Speaker
who simply just never had around him the sort of notion that he needed to be sub serving it to anybody any of this whole entire life that way sometimes to his detriment. But this is the thing that i'll say about jim brown jim brown took responsibility for everyday gum stupid thing that he did it was funny you go to jim brown say jim.
00:11:29
Speaker
They say you threw a lady off the balcony. Well, I did throw off the balcony and I probably should have done that, but I did. And I should probably take the punishment for that. Well, you know, Jim, we're going to go ahead and punish you for that. And he would go ahead and take his punishment for it. You didn't see Jim, you know, sort of whining and any of that stuff. He just took the hit for what he did. And then he tried to be better.
00:11:56
Speaker
And his interviews are, are really, really very interesting. I mean, he is, he's one of those guys who, I mean, look, I've interviewed Fred Williamson. Yeah. And it's very clear that Fred Williamson learned two lessons from Jim Brown. Because I think they played together, didn't they? They played opposite each other at the time. Yeah. Little time overlap. Yeah.
00:12:16
Speaker
Yeah and what he learned from Jim Brown number one was never lie in an interview always be transparent because if you lie in an interview the press person is gonna see right through you gonna know you're feeding him a line. But the other thing he learned from Jim Brown was
00:12:33
Speaker
Do it with some grace. Yeah. Cause Jim didn't always do it with grace. Jim would just kind of lay it out there. It'd sometimes be like a shock. It like somebody throwing, throwing a dagger in your face. Holy cow. Did he really just say that? And Fred is just, you know, Fred comes with the props. Fred comes with the cigar.
00:12:49
Speaker
he dresses the part he just he knows how to you know he Fred Fred is just smooth as silk and and interviewing Fred you know every line is like a drop of honey and with Jim every line was like you know it was it was like a shuriken it was like a throwing star and
00:13:07
Speaker
Fred was Uptown, Jim was downtown. Yeah, there you go. That's the way of putting it. That's what that was. But Uptown learned how to roll from downtown. Yeah, exactly. The other thing I want to say about Jim Brown is in terms of being an athlete, a movie star, an athlete who engaged himself in activism, sometimes we forget about that. Jim Brown proceeds just about everybody there, save Paul Robeson.
00:13:34
Speaker
save Paul Robeson. You got Paul Robeson, and then you got Jim Brown. You just got to go far enough back to understand that Jim Brown from day one, even in college, was already engaged in the activism that we sort of think about. And sometimes that gets lost in the midst of all those other things that we just spoke about. But that's probably okay. But I remember Jim Brown was always there.
00:14:01
Speaker
And lastly, your hometown girl, Tina Turner. That was a shock. I mean, I know she was 83 or whatever it was, but I think, look, I reviewed that Tina Turner doc on Film Week last year.
00:14:17
Speaker
and it's just filled with interviews with her fresh interviews from last year and she looked as spry and as alert and as healthy as ever and living in switzerland and and just you know uh eating well and she just looked great and i came out of that thinking of girls gonna be around for we got a good we got have at least another decade with tina she's she's just
00:14:40
Speaker
And so I didn't see this coming. But I know for St. Louis, I know she means something special. Well, we call her Anna Mae Bullock over there. My mama went to high school with Tina Turner. My mama and all her sisters went to high school with Tina Turner and her sisters.
00:14:55
Speaker
My mother, when Tina Turner was a little girl, 13, 14 years old, was Tina's hairdresser in Nutbush, Tennessee. All of these people are from Tennessee, and they all more or less saw the immigrated up to St. Louis from the South during that period, late 50s, early 60s, late to the late 60s. And Tina would have been a junior when my mother was a freshman. And my mother does the most dead-on Tina Turner impersonation
00:15:23
Speaker
And I'm like, mom, if you could sing like that, damn it. What the hell are you doing over here? Anyway, it was it was so that's a thing. And Tina was always great. She was always a hometown girl, thus that record Nutbush, Tennessee. And her whole entire story back in 90, I guess it was two or three. What's love got to do with it? That movie about her life with Angela Bassett playing Tina Turner was just this astounding thing, Lawrence Fishburne playing Ike Turner.
00:15:53
Speaker
was just this astounding thing. It helped in the even further relaunching of her career, which had already been relaunched in the middle 80s. Of course, she had that iconic role in Thunderdome. One of the few movies from that era where that song, we don't need another hero, was almost as big as the movie.
00:16:20
Speaker
And you know, it's not, it's not even, that's not even my favorite song from the movie. My favorite song is the one that they play over the opening titles, which I'm gonna, I think we might, we might play that on our out music today. You know, shoot bullets of fire, you know, one of the living, that, that, that is just an amazing song because it, it, the, the credits are just kind of moving in over that song and it starts so softly. And just like Proud Mary, it just, it builds and it, and then it hits this incredible,
00:16:50
Speaker
You know crescendo. It's just it's a great way to get you into the movie and then you come out and there's that aerial shot and Bruce Spence is in his little this little His little helicopter deal. I mean, it's a it's a great way to start the movie and you basically start the movie with Tina It's her voice if not her her face But auntie entity is still for a lot of people the best villain of any Mad Max movie
00:17:13
Speaker
Love it. And I have a hard time really denying that because if I think back to, okay, you know, between, you know, the toe cutter and, uh, uh, and, and, uh, you know, great humongous right off to, you know, last and fury road. Um, I mean, you know, these are all kind of psychotic male post-apocalyptic
00:17:40
Speaker
You know villains and auntie entity is very different in that world and Tina gave her this interesting dimension. She is not a typical villain. She's running this town and she has a certain charisma to her and she's likable when you first see her. You don't you don't sort of root for her to get her head torn off. She is. This is what she is. She's a villain who is not villainous.
00:18:07
Speaker
Hey man, I'm she says it in her dialogue. I built this out of nothing. That's right answered. I built this all you're going to come in here and tell no, but you know what? Raggedy man. Raggedy man.
00:18:25
Speaker
I'm gonna watch that again tonight. I'm gonna watch that again tonight. I'm surprised that she didn't look for more acting roles after that because she could have had her pick.
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, you know, a lot of pressure there. And she got a little typecast. I think same thing happened with Diana Ross. I mean, Diana Ross after Lady sings to Woos. Well, and you know, look for both of them. Their first love is singing.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, and we have to remember that not everybody wants to be a movie
Media and Technology Nostalgia
00:19:01
Speaker
star. Some people are okay being pop stars and rock stars. And, you know, I guess, you know, it's you have to look at maybe some of the actors who have who moonlight occasionally on the stage.
00:19:13
Speaker
They're okay being actors. It's a little sad both ways because look, we both know them. We've both seen them. Madonna always wanted to be a movie star, never could, never made it. Johnny Depp always wanted to be a rock star and he bought it, he bought it, he paid for it, but you're not a rock star, Johnny. It's a little sad because you are both literally the best at what you do, but you're not satisfied because you want that other thing.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good point. I found my little stack of 4Ks from from Europe. So I got City of Lost Children on 4K, which makes me very, very happy.
00:19:49
Speaker
And I got Elephant Man, obviously. I got Ron, Akira Kurosawa's Ron. All of these are like Kanaploose, that's why you go. I got Jeremy Nall, which is the Claude Barry adaptation of the Amelzola. That is never gonna get released here in any form whatsoever, certainly not 4K. But this one makes me very, very happy.
00:20:09
Speaker
And then lastly i picked up a an incredible four k of joseph lozies the servant guard sarah miles james fox absolutely tremendous and that's a creepy film.
00:20:22
Speaker
don't want to stay in a place where they chuck balls at your head. So, it's a movie I've seen way too many times. All right, let's get, well, first of all, quick, let's do a little bit of Hollywood chitchat about the, first of all, Netflix, not sending out any more discs. Got any feelings about that? Well, personally, to be honest, during that Netflix disc period,
00:20:48
Speaker
I probably only had 20 discs ever, you know, I just wasn't it never. I think blockbuster still existed, of course. So I would find myself wanting to see a movie, and I would just go up to blockbuster and get it now Bridget, my wife, my late wife, she was a Netflix movie, she had a list.
00:21:07
Speaker
And she didn't even know what movies were on the list. She just put them on the list and they would come and I would go to the mailbox and there'd be these movies. So I guess I was using the Netflix nailing service, but being a lazy bastard and not actually using it there. So when I heard that it was going away, it literally did not affect me at all. But I do know that there were a lot of people ridiculously nostalgic about getting those discs in the mail.
00:21:30
Speaker
Well, we got an email from Phil Vater or Vater, I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name, longtime listener, and he said, he was asking, you know, about rental options and he said, I've been meaning to send this note for some time now, but now that Netflix has announced that disc rental will cease,
00:21:51
Speaker
I needed to send my note. He says, I know you've addressed this topic on the podcast, the endangerment of discs being available as time goes on. I also wondering if you see discs going away generally and what the options are of the dilemma. Here's why I'm requesting ideas from you regarding alternative decent disc rental services or how I can get a good handle on access to titles.
00:22:13
Speaker
So I would say I don't see discs going away ever, frankly, because streaming discontinues things and people like to own stuff. There's always going to be a market for them, but first of all, you have no idea how many DVD players are still out there in the world. It's an unbelievable number of DVD players. You have no idea how many people are out there who don't have cable and don't have streaming.
00:22:35
Speaker
who are still watching with rabbit ears regular broadcast television and not paying for it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, there are it's it's real. So there are millions. You did write about about about the in you and I are the exact right age to know this as a fact. Yeah, our vinyl collections.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, we some of us some people gave up and what are they doing now recollecting their vinyl? That's right. And then there's what you never gave them up and had the good sense to hold on to them in the first place. And we have these extremely people want stuff to I have my VHS and I have three functional VH VHS players. When the internet goes down, you can't watch streaming, but I can still pull out a disk.
00:23:21
Speaker
And when the internet is throttled, I, you know, you can't get your full resolution. I can still put a 4k in and watch the best picture there is. So there you go. As for disc rental options, um, I got some that I sent to Philip and I'm going to name them right now. There's game fly.com, which mostly rents video games, but they also rent movies. Uh, so, you know, you create a queue and you can do all that. And there's movie only plan. It's about nine bucks a month.
00:23:45
Speaker
They've, you know, they don't have a ton of movies, but they have movies. So Gamefly.com. There's also Redbox. Redbox is, you know, stuck around and somehow made that business model work. There is a 3D Blu-ray rental at www.store-3d-blurayrental.com. Not the easiest URL, but it's worth checking out.
00:24:12
Speaker
blog.scarecrow.com will take you to the scarecrow rent by mail system from scarecrow video, which is kind of a, you know, they're Seattle based. It's a rent by mail program. It's a little bit clunky, but they've got a ton of titles, 145,000 titles. So, you know, you should be able to find something there. And then lastly,
00:24:38
Speaker
Your library, your local library. Everybody's local library has Blu-rays and DVDs and 4Ks that you can rent. And what's available obviously depends on the librarian and what they're choosing. But they have a job to do and their job is to make sure that they stock a lot of great books and music and movies. And the librarians, all that stuff, love it.
00:25:03
Speaker
So you'll find it at the library. If you have a good library system, you live in a good city, or even a good county library system, you'll find that stuff.
Industry Challenges and Strikes
00:25:10
Speaker
Let's talk about the strike right now. What's your vibe with the strike? Because I've been trying to keep up. I keep meaning to go down and join some of my friends on the line in front of the old 20th Century Fox lot, but I haven't gotten down to do it yet. But your vibe.
00:25:25
Speaker
Well, look, this strike, I think, will probably become strikes over the course of the next several days. You know the FAG and the directors have deadlines. I think June the 30th or something like that is at least one of them. Negotiations are already underway there. And I'm taking this from people that I'm talking to, like you, who are self-like on the inside a little bit.
00:25:53
Speaker
That anything would resolve before SAG goes out, I just don't think it's possible. I just don't think it's possible because all of the same things are at issue. And one thing builds on another thing. You feel like you're going to have writers and actors striking at the same time? At least there will be some overlap. It's never happened before.
00:26:12
Speaker
Never because of the way of the order in which these things happen for a whole bunch of reasons. And then of course the directors too. Directors are a little bit different. They do have a contract. There are some things that issue. They're not quite the same. I don't know how much leverage. They want some of the same concessions.
00:26:33
Speaker
And if they give it, if they give up the data to the directors, they're gonna have to give it up to the writers and the actors and that takes away a big, and you know, AI, the issues with AI are relevant, you know, substantially to writers, but also to directors too. And actors, and actors, and actors. Sherman and I was just talking about this yesterday, voices and whatnot, not to mention. You want to, you want to control, I mean, in the age of AI and deepfake,
00:27:00
Speaker
Actors are now terrified that they may not get to control their voices and their likenesses forever. I mean, you heard you had that Joe wrote that AI replicating Joe Rogan's voice. That is terrifying. I've been playing around with myself for a whole bunch of reasons. So much for voice print identification.
00:27:16
Speaker
Oh, and the thing of it is, it will only get better. So for instance, Sherman, you know, made this movie, our homie Sherman Augustus over on Strange Things made this movie, needed to do some ADR, right? And this is all stuff you get paid for, by the way, as an actor coming back and doing ADR and replacing lines, all kinds of stuff. It's all working, income generating stuff and work for you to go and do. But you know, they hit them up and they said, we're good. And you know why they were good?
00:27:45
Speaker
AI, because they have an entire catalog of Sherman, you know, he's in the whole frickin movies. So you know, and all they do is feed the AI his voice. And the more of it they feed, the better it gets. So when it came time for them to, you know, the ADR, they just told the AI and they got clean passages of Sherman saying two, three words, a sentence, right? And see, if you do that, you need to pay the actor as if they came in to do it to do it.
00:28:13
Speaker
which is one of the things the actors will be fighting for when their contract comes in. You and I are both writers, so this matters to us. I'm technically in the writers' guild. I haven't paid my writers' guild dues in over 25 years because I don't know. But once was in the guild. All of that. For us, the scripts that you and I have written over the years and that have gone into the world in one way or another, some of them have been made or whatever,
00:28:42
Speaker
That becomes a part of the great AI pool, right? And all of that AI out there looking at movies that you and I have written, some of them made, some of them, that AI is taking stories, you know what I mean? And then writing, so we got these buddies in Atlanta. And these are guys who was talking about hiring a screenwriter to write the script. They have these concepts or whatever. They feed the concepts into the AI. And the AI are spitting out scripts for these guys.
00:29:11
Speaker
Now, to my mind, these scripts are terrible. But they'll get better. But they'll still be terrible. But these guys, rather than pay a sag screenwriter the proper rates, you know, to write a script, what they're doing is paying... I said sag, I meant WJ, writers' skill. What they're doing is paying writers' skill writers to script doctor the scripts.
00:29:37
Speaker
right? So they still get a script script doctored by a real writer, a writer skill writer, but they only got it, but they only have to pay a script doctor's fee much letter less than the what you would pay a writer to, you know, originally write an original script, right? I just, I'm getting down in the weeds now, but you but you but you see, well, those are, I do. And and, you know, these are all issues, it's going to take a bit to to detangle them. How long do you think? What's your gut tell you about how long the strikes gonna last?
00:30:05
Speaker
I think top of fall, I think to September is what I think that's my goal. I mean, what are you thinking? What are you hearing? Well, I mean, I talked to a lot of people who have some insight into it and they say the sides are so far apart that even if we started to get close today, literally today, if we started to find points of agreement,
00:30:26
Speaker
Just in terms of how long it takes to negotiate those points into the legal language that then is drafted by attorneys and put into a document which they then have to vet.
00:30:40
Speaker
Even if we start getting close today, that process cannot be concluded before August. Just in terms of the logistics of the doing of it. You actually have to put this stuff into the legalese and attorneys have to go over it and people have to vote on it. That process alone, just in terms of the time that it consumes,
00:31:04
Speaker
cannot be completed before August. So, that's why I'm beginning, you know, when people told me, oh, yeah, not before September or October. Now I realize why. And so, yeah, I'm kind of feeling like end of September, beginning of October,
00:31:19
Speaker
looks like probably the right time frame. I don't think they want this to drag on into award season. These companies have too much to lose in terms of relationships and money and the holiday season. If it drags on into award season, now you are putting next year's summer movie slate at risk. Because those movies, a lot of those movies are shot
00:31:48
Speaker
But, you know, they may need some rewriting if actors are not available for ADR, that kind of stuff. Now you're making it very, very hard for them in the long term. You're putting at risk what may be the first normal movie year for the box office since pre-pandemic, right? I mean, next year was supposed to be the right year. And Hollywood suspended all of its COVID guidelines like two weeks before the strike started.
00:32:15
Speaker
So we're still in this force majeure period, right? It hasn't been normal for over three years. So everyone is eager for a normal year again, a normal $10 billion box office year with summer movies. And if you drag this out too long, it wipes out next year as well. Yeah. It's a whole other write off. So I do feel like companies that are obsessed with quarterly earnings are not going to want to let it go past October. They just can't. They can't.
00:32:42
Speaker
One of the things that the writers are doing now, literally as we speak, is they've started to take the focus and push it toward executives. They're out there now talking about executive compensation. Mostly they talk about their compensation, this AI and all this kind of stuff, but now they're drawing the very direct comparison to executive compensations, which I gotta tell you, dude, are obscene. And this is why, because I never care about how much money anybody makes. I'm all for making as much money as you can if you earned it.
00:33:11
Speaker
If you earned it, I'm going to get all these executives and I'm talking about across the board. Now, I don't see anybody who's earned a nickel that they've made, let alone the multi hundreds of millions of dollars that they'd made. If you make me a billion dollars, I'll gladly pay you 100 million. You lost me $8 billion. What the fuck am I going to give you $163 million for?
00:33:34
Speaker
So the one that really really stings and let's be honest netflix is where most of the sticking points are netflix in their buyout model their non residual model re is the one that everybody has been really bitter about because nobody knows how successful stuff is on netflix and however successful it is long term nobody gets a piece of it cuz they're all there the rights are all bought out so that's gonna change all of that is gonna change and netflix doesn't have a backstop.
00:34:00
Speaker
all the other studios there backstop by multinationals they have they put movies in the theaters amazon sell stuff online apple sells computers all these other companies have other businesses netflix does not streaming is all they are there billions and billions and billions of dollars in debt they have never turned a profitable quarter ever.
00:34:19
Speaker
their stock price keeps going up based on expectations of future profitability and based on that, last year Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings each took a $50 million bonus. Now that's $100 million in the pockets of two men who don't make movies, who don't make TV shows and whose company has never turned a profit
00:34:47
Speaker
And the writers are struggling to pay their mortgages.
00:34:53
Speaker
It's awfully, awfully tough for them to justify that. It really is. It's very, very tough. So they have to understand that they are the face of this strike. And people are going to want them to eat some crow. You can't justify it morally, but nobody gives a shit about morals. So you can't justify it to stockholders. I own some Netflix. Not a lot. I got a little. And so I feel like I can say,
00:35:20
Speaker
I'm a little pissy about all of that. And you'll multiply me by how everybody's stockholders are. Well, real quickly, just a couple of things before we finally get into the DVDs and Blu-rays. VCI Classics has now launched a streaming app.
00:35:37
Speaker
And they did this last december it is not available on apple tv yet but that's gonna be coming this year but it is on roku so you know keep an eye out for that vci classics is gonna is gonna jump into the streaming market it's a crowded market right now it's getting even more crowded.
00:35:55
Speaker
People don't have money for all these services, but VCI has a great library. I think they'll find a place and some followers. We also had some inquiries, notably from Mario Mendez, longtime listener, wanting to know what happened to our online show, still working on it. A lot of things in the works. As everybody knows, I've got this feature thing that we're pushing as well. We had a lot of balls in the air, but we're going to get them all together at some point.
00:36:25
Speaker
Thanks for asking. Thanks for asking.
Film Reviews and Critiques
00:36:27
Speaker
That means we penetrated a little bit. Appreciate it. Yes. And then I had a little correction on my recollection, my David Bowie recollection. We came from Ally, long time listener. Said, begging your pardon, but must get clarification. You say Bowie was with Iman at the Greystoke screening. Greystoke was released in 1984.
00:36:49
Speaker
And I don't think Bowie met Iman until a blind date in 1990, and they married in 92. So yes, my recollection, I'm sure, was merging things. He goes on to say, he was dating and engaged to a Melissa something, one of Tony Basil's dancers during the 1987 Glass Spider Tour. I love Bowie fanatics. They know his stuff. I love it. Well, she was Melissa, a tall sister with a long neck and amazing legs.
00:37:16
Speaker
Well, I can see how you get that. Bowie was with somebody and in my mind it was in mine because that's just who Bowie was always with. Somebody else, somebody else. Anyway, he goes on to say, don't mess with a Bowie fanatics. Seen him nine times.
00:37:33
Speaker
I love it, nine times. Well, I hope he has, well, there are two Bowie documentaries now, right? The one from before he passed. I gotta look those, I gotta look those up. I'm sure we've talked about them on the show, those two, those two Bowie, those two Bowie documentaries, gotta have them.
00:37:52
Speaker
All right, well, let's jump in. Let's start with the 4K stuff. Let's start with the 4K stuff. First, right off the top, Star Trek Next Generation 4 movie collection, 4K. This is all the Next Generation stuff in one little thick keep case. Star Trek Generations, Star Trek First Contact, Star Trek Insurrection, and Star Trek Nemesis.
00:38:13
Speaker
You know the card and a riker in the gang and jordy and warf and all of them that movie gave us party you didn't give us time hardy but the young time hardy young time hardy and you know there's a there's some interesting michael and denise okuda text commentary stuff in here some featurettes four-part featurette on brent spiner and data
00:38:36
Speaker
and you know other little fan service stuff it's all fine it's not an amazing collection of extras but again you know you're getting it because you wanna watch these movies in four k do they look good they look really good but ultimately you know how do these movies hold up is my question and i got some thoughts but you first.
00:38:57
Speaker
Well first of all these movies are great but you have to be a fan, you have to love it, you have to love next gen, the series and all that kind of stuff and then it becomes necessary. For me they're necessary but they're not necessary in the way that the first set of original Star Trek films are necessary, particularly say Wrath of Khan. There's no equivalent.
00:39:16
Speaker
to Wrath of Khan in this movie, Nemesis comes close. Nemesis comes close. It does. One thing I do like about these movies is that they bleed over into the balance of the Star Trek next-gen stuff Picard mostly, rather nicely, references and stuff like that, back through First Contact and Insurrection and even Generations.
00:39:39
Speaker
that if you're a Picard fan, the next generation of Picard fan, I like those little touchstones there. So not a great set of movies in-gen, no Wrath of Khan here. But you know, I'm a fan of all this stuff, dude, so yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
Well, I'll say I like Generations because Shatner's in it and you get to see Shatner and Picard together and Shatner's on a horse and it's a whole dumb thing of mine. I just, anytime Shatner's hamming it up, I do enjoy it. So I like that. First Contact, I'm not a huge fan of. I think it kind of screws up the storytelling. However, I'm a fan of one part of First Contact.
00:40:20
Speaker
and it's a part where they're all crawling through some kind of a tube. And Alfre Woodard is kind of looking where she's going and she turns out of the tube, she keeps crawling down this air duct or whatever it is. And then our good friend Dean, my good friend Dean Heyman Mason from film school, who was employed as an extra on that film, Dean makes the most of his close up right behind her. He shoots his profile right in the camera,
00:40:48
Speaker
it is a beautiful thing i still laugh at it to this day i absolutely love it go dean yeah uh no that's it that's just my favorite part of that movie it's i i don't care about the rest of the movie i just enjoyed dean crawling crawling on on alfred woodard's uh heels uh insurrection i think it's a terrible film i just think it's absolutely horrible i can't it's unwatchable and then uh nemesis i think is pretty good nemesis is pretty good
00:41:14
Speaker
You know, Tom Hardy is as strong in that movie. He registered with me, you know, playing the sort of clone of whatever the hell he is of John Luke over there. And again, all of that is going to be called back to, you know, here 30, 25, 30 years later, which I think is all kind of neato. So there you go.
00:41:32
Speaker
We also have the haunting of julia on four k you know i mean it's a you know but gosh what do you wanna say about this it. It's not a great film but it is become kind of a.
00:41:48
Speaker
kind of a cult-y film, 1977, you know, a horror film very much of its, a supernatural horror film very, very much of its moment, trying to take Mia Farrow and make her replicate the Rosemary's Baby thing. Keir Delay is, you know, appropriately creepy in it as well and trying to work a little 2001 stuff out of it.
00:42:14
Speaker
On Balance, I don't know if it really holds up that much, but it's also coming on the heels of The Exorcist. It's trying to keep the whole Omen Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby thing in play at the late time of 1977 when those movies are going away and Halloween and Friday the 13th and Slasher films are coming in. As a transitional film, I think it's got some credibility.
00:42:42
Speaker
And you look, Mia still has that little short haircut that she had been wearing, you know, whatever, however long it had been, 10 years, 8 years, 8 years before. She's a bit sexy in this movie though. Tom Conte, young Tom Conte in the movie. But it's just weird sort of crossover movie you're watching this movie. And it's a contemporary movie, you know, 1977, but you feel like you're watching a movie that was made
00:43:03
Speaker
10 years earlier. As you say, when at that time in 77, dude, it's Jason, it's, you know, running around doing all that stuff. This is kind of like not the thing anymore. Richard, Richard Locraine. Yeah. We've also we also got a 4k steel book, Best Buy exclusive for crank with Jason Statham. Not a fan of this movie, but it's on 4k. A lot of people are this movie just the whole point of this is that it's a mile a minute movie real time.
00:43:33
Speaker
intense action, highly stylized. It's a little bit of a gimmick that this kind of hyper adrenalized action film based on a guy who's got to save his life and he only has so much time to do it, all this junk. But for people who are into that, then you run out to Best Buy and grab yourself the Crank Steel book. M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin. I don't know. Did you see this and did you think you have any opinion about it?
00:44:01
Speaker
Well, look, to me, these last few M. Night movies, including this one, have been better than that chunk of work right after his whole... When he was trying to keep... Yeah, I agree. These are all smaller in scale. They have very centralized, very old, I think is another one there. To that extent, I'm like, yeah, these are as effective as any of them. Once I stopped
00:44:28
Speaker
looking for some big gigantic M. Night, Sixth Sensey, the Villages, the blah blah blah kind of thing, and just let M. Night make his little movies that are about the little things that they're about. They fit. They're just fine. They work just fine.
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's a central dilemma here, which I won't give away, but there's a really interesting existential dilemma, which is something that people always bring up in conversation. You know, it's one of those horrible what ifs. And so he's, what he's doing is he's taking that horrible what if that he's usually hypothetical and trying to frame it in a very realistic sense, like it could really, what if it really happened?
00:45:05
Speaker
And to that degree, I think there's some, you know, some interesting stuff in here. I like the cast. I don't think the movie is great. Dave Batista, I just think is one of the most underrated actors talking about people who go from being one thing to another, from being an athlete to an actor, you know, Jim Brown trajectory. Dave Batista, there's another one.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, you can play that drama. He can play that. He can play empathy and vulnerability, despite the size and all that kind of stuff. I like M. Night at the scale, better than at the scale of whatever big, gigantic crap he's doing.
00:45:39
Speaker
I agree. We also have Deep Impact. There were a couple of these at the time. I forget what the other one was. Armageddon was the other one. I forgot about it. Anyway, I thought Mimi Leader did a much better job with this. She never really went on to have the big Hollywood
00:45:55
Speaker
action career that she deserved. She was coming out of TV, doing a lot of stuff like China Beach. And she created a lot of that style, you know, Mimi. We forget that that's ER. She was the one that said, let's get these cameras moving, man. And let's do these long runs of dialogue. She took Clooney over to the, what was that movie they did together? The Peacemaker. That's right. Peacemaker. Great chase scene. My gosh, that car chase scene. That is tremendous. Long thing. It was great. And Mimi had to end in this.
00:46:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a lot of really good stuff in this. Morgan Freeman, T. Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Blair Underwood, Maximilian Schell even shows up. No, there's a lot of great stuff in this movie. I think it's still a little bit on the Hollywood obnoxious side, a little overblown with the CG and whatnot, but you know what? Mamie's a really good director, and gosh, I wish she would come out of her TV moment again and get back to features, but maybe she doesn't want it.
00:46:53
Speaker
Well, you could stay at home with TV. There was this, and it was Armageddon, so this, Mimi, this is Bruce Joel Rubin, blah, blah, blah. And Armageddon over there is Mike Bay and whoever. JJ, I think JJ was one of the writers on Armageddon, I think. JJ, maybe Tony Gilroy. And you were either an, this is both 98, so you were either an Armageddon person, or you were a deep impasse.
00:47:18
Speaker
That's right. That's true. That's true. You know, we would have these little, you know, battles impact was a more serious movie, if you can say, you know, a movie about it. Yeah, it's a serious movie. And then they made it was this cheese. Yeah, yeah, you know, and then they did the same thing with movies to Mars a couple of years later. That's right. That's that. So I'm sure we'll talk about those soon.
00:47:40
Speaker
Little Superhero Action on the DC side Justice League and RWBY Superheroes and Huntsman Part 1. This is utterly silly crossover between Justice League and RWBY. But you know it's it's all in the service of branding so they have a little bit of fun with this.
00:47:59
Speaker
very strange animated quasi anime fusion concept in this dc animated movie and it's a cliffhanger so there's more common you know i couldn't get into it but i guess you know for the for the core fan base they'll absolutely go nuts on four k it is very very impressive i'll say that they really get turned it up when they do four k on the dc animated stuff they really really bring out all the animation it's just super super crisp the contrast is great,
00:48:27
Speaker
The blacks are really dark and rich. And, you know, it does kind of give it a better comic sheen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of great young voices, too. One of the things I like about this series is that you hear all these great voices and their young voices because the characters are so young and they're not movie stars. They're voice actors. I just really would kind of like when we were growing up, you know, and all those great voice actors were out there doing stuff.
00:48:53
Speaker
Very often when you move a notch up to the stuff that's going to be theatrically released or it's, you know, whatever, you start getting all these movie star voices, you know, taking over these roles. But these folks, these are great voice actors and I love what they do.
00:49:08
Speaker
So let's talk about Shazam, Fury of the Gods for a second, because one of the bright spots for DC in the pre-David Zasloff pre-Discovery merger era was that first Shazam movie. The Snyder-verse was kind of falling on its face. They were messing that up very badly. No fault of Snyder's. We have to give them credit. You know, that was just the
00:49:29
Speaker
the joss ween and all that stuff it was just it was you know so wonder woman what what did well but the rest kind of flopped and she came out was really fun and did well and it was a surprising success and i think everybody had really high hopes that this one despite black adam being a big stinker
00:49:47
Speaker
I think everybody kind of felt like, no, but people will run out. And you know what? They didn't. And it kind of flopped. Was it the Black Adam impact on this? Did that just kind of steal some of the thunder, so to speak? Or was this movie just not good enough? Or are people sick of this?
00:50:06
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, a little bit of all of it, but at the top of it, these movies aren't good. Black Adam at the top of it wasn't good. It was not a good movie. And at the top of it, this is not a particularly good movie. And the one before that, so you pack all of these, quote unquote, superheroes. This is another one that's just packed full superhero.
00:50:29
Speaker
into a movie and you wrap them in a whole bunch of special effects and have them doing whatever special effects stuff that they're doing and whatever almost arbitrary. Sometimes these storylines are almost arbitrary.
00:50:45
Speaker
Because what we're really doing is servicing these characters, the movie stars playing these characters and the crap that they have to do. And audiences aren't dumb. We can see all of that. And by the way, you and I were entertained in Superman, original Superman, Chris Reeve, 1976, whenever the heck it was right there. The only superhero in that movie was Superman.
00:51:12
Speaker
Lex Luthor wasn't even a superhero. Ned Baney was out there. One movie, one superhero in the whole movie. And we loved it. So why? The notion is you got to have 10,000 superheroes and super villains. Superman was the only dude that could fly in the movie. Only one we needed. And he was fine.
00:51:32
Speaker
So I'm gonna make a real interesting pivot here. You know, Superman and Lex Luthor, at least in the comics, were childhood friends turned nemeses.
00:51:43
Speaker
And that's sort of the same story of Adonis Creed and Damien that is depicted in Creed 3. So let's pivot from Superman to Creed 3, and it's very Superman and Lex Luthor-esque storyline. Because now we got Michael B. Jordan taking over as director and still a star, taking the reins from Ryan Coogler. Jonathan Major's showing up like,
00:52:09
Speaker
you know, with a body that James, even Michael B. Jordan's. Did we need this movie? You and I have had this conversation. So did we need Creed 3? Need a complicated... Is it a solid movie that definitely establishes itself as legit in the long Rocky canon? Creed 3, but you know, we're really talking about something that goes way, way back here. And there has to be
00:52:39
Speaker
stones all the way through, which there are. This movie continues and that's one of the things I like the most about it. It has a deep recognition of the entire legacy of what's going on. This is what I like about this movie.
00:52:57
Speaker
And I like this movie. And of course, this movie came out before all the shenanigans with what's his name and all that kind of stuff. So when I watched this movie, I kind of got it clean and pure. What I like about this movie is that it's not about boxing at all. But despite all the fights, it's a whole bunch of fights in this movie. But this movie has nothing to do with boxing and nothing to do with fights. This is a brotherly love story. This is about a man being deeply, deeply hurt.
00:53:26
Speaker
This dude hurt him emotionally. This is about emotional hurt. It's going to manifest itself and play itself out in a whole bunch of fight in this ring. And this is about guilt. He's like, oh my God, I let my boy down. I let him down. I did.
00:53:44
Speaker
And you know what I always say about sports movies. When you watch a sports movie and the team that you're rooting for or the person that you're supposed to root for loses and you don't care,
00:53:59
Speaker
Yeah, that movie was not about the sports. You know, Rocky loses that first fight in that movie. You don't care. Matter of fact, it's a better movie because he loses. And this movie is the same kind of thing. You know, you don't you don't care who's going to win. What you want are for these guys to work it out. And the whole chunk of this movie that's about brothers working it out, that all that stuff in the barbershop, you know, all that stuff with these guys, you know, I'm like, these guys don't I keep wanting to say,
00:54:28
Speaker
Can't you see you're in love? He wanted to say to you guys, cut it out. Work it out, boys. Work it out. And they do. So that's what I think about this movie. It's not about us. Michael B. Jordan can direct. That's the other big revelation here. And I would like to see what he does when he's not putting himself in the movie. I think give Michael B. Jordan
00:54:51
Speaker
a job with where he can just be behind the camera the whole time. I think he's definitely earned that too. Let's pivot back to Superman because also we now have the five film Superman collection 1978 to 87 on 4K with Blu-ray and digital code as well. So you can movies anywhere this thing to your heart's content and I intend to. Here's what's included, Superman movie, which Tim was just praising.
00:55:18
Speaker
1978. Superman II from 1980, which I think we all remember was supposed to be the film of the summer and then Raiders came out like a week or two later and blew it out of the water. The Superman II Richard Donner cut, which yes, is superior. Superman III, what the hell were they thinking? Richard probably got a million bucks.
00:55:45
Speaker
That I know for sure. But even he was disappointed in that they really only wanted him to play it for the comedy. Yeah. Because Richard Pryor was a very good dramatic actor. Richard Pryor, some kind of hero with that Vietnam movie he made. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and a few other movies. What was it? Straight time? Straight time. Paul Schrader. Yeah. Great role. And
00:56:08
Speaker
And Lady Sinks rules. Richard was a very good, dramatic actor. And he knew it wasn't Shakespeare. But he thought that they would give him something to do. But they really, literally, there was no script. They would just have him vamp. But he took the million bucks. So what the hell?
00:56:27
Speaker
Yeah well and then Superman for the quest for peace which nearly killed superhero movies entirely that that just was a mess a complete and total mess but nonetheless it is the you know Christopher Reeve is is remembered very fondly for this part these the movies he made this is every cut
00:56:46
Speaker
every movie that he made on four k and loads of special features can't even get into they have done really a beautiful job or brothers always does beautiful job restoring it the colors just sparkle the sound is beautiful the john williams music in the first film.
00:57:04
Speaker
has never sounded more beautiful. It really, really, really just sings. So, you know, Superman fans, go for it. Grab that sucker and enjoy it. We also have Flashdance on 4K, finally. My gosh, 40th anniversary. It's been 40 years since Flashdance. Tim, what a feeling. Man, look, that movie, it's just, I just loved it. We went to see that movie in 83.
00:57:31
Speaker
before we came to LA. So, you know, we were still not part of the Hollywood community. So for us, it was just this movie, and it was Adrian Lane, and of course, Jennifer Beale. It was just this wonderful, wonderful movie. And one of the things I think it does is it proves that, you know, before he went bananas, Joe Osterhaus could actually write.
00:57:51
Speaker
Yeah. He was a pretty good writer. I, I, I, here's, here's what's funny. And this is kind of my, my Top Gun trajectory because, you know, I hated the original Top Gun. I worked at the theater at the time. I was there. I heard that damn thing. I saw that damn thing every day over and over and over and over. I just thought, what a stupid movie. Why are these people cheering? And I loved it last summer. I loved it.
00:58:12
Speaker
Flashdance, when I first saw it, I just thought, this is the dumbest movie I've ever seen. I love this movie today. It's pure nostalgia. This came out while I was working at the theaters, right? And I look back and I don't think we realized how good we had it. First of all, let me just say, on 4K, unbelievable. The famous dance with the water and the silhouette and the whole thing, which is the cover, by the way, of the 4K.
00:58:36
Speaker
That has never looked so crisp. If you're watching that on a proper TV set that really will just bring out all the richness of 4K, you won't believe it. Turn the lights out, it'll just blow your mind. But I'll say this, I look back on that era of Paramount movies.
00:58:51
Speaker
And this kind of represents it. You had Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe and Bruckheimer and Simpson and Eisner and Katzenberg. All of these people at the same time, at the same studio, who would go on to make other studios very, very wealthy when they finally broke up. But that was an unbelievable core of people. An incredible core of people.
00:59:12
Speaker
These were all people who were willing at that period, they are anyway, to let movies abandon any sense of reality at all. There was nothing real about this movie at all. Jennifer Beale was a welder at this place that was backlit and neon all the time, day or night. Such a preposterous idea. Jennifer Beales is a welder. Just stop.
00:59:36
Speaker
I'll just stop. That off-the-shoulder sweatshirt thing, that became an actual clothing, actual thing. That was from the speech, and it penetrated the whole society. Every girl in Southern California started wearing that, and you know what? God bless them for it.
00:59:59
Speaker
Thank you. Kids breakdancing on those cardboard boxes, right? Which is a thing, and I'm sure that it's on the special features on that 4K. It's all on there, some kind of stuff on there. He'll talk about how they were out and they saw these kids and they shot them. And that goes in the movie. And the next thing you know, kids all over America,
01:00:28
Speaker
are spinning on cardboard boxes on their heads because of that moment in this movie. So anyway, yeah, it's one of those moments. I forgot to mention this earlier. There's also another DC animated 4K. It's all-star Superman, which is OK. It's a Lex Luthor thing. Superman's dying, and the Luthor is going to rule the universe. And of course, it all
01:00:55
Speaker
Resolves perfectly fine. This is not great, but I guess for Superman completists, you can probably suck it up. You know, Ed Asner and voice talent here is really the only thing that I found sort of entertaining and amusing.
01:01:12
Speaker
Um, we also, the ones, the opposite of what I was talking about before, because you got Anthony LaPaglia, you got Christina Hendrix, you got Linda Cardellini, you got all these movie stars, you know, if Francis Conroy, you know, I mean, all these movie stars. And I don't know, I just, I find that ridiculously distracting when I, so rather than just voice actors just knocking it out. I don't know. Just whatever. It's a bug up my ass.
01:01:40
Speaker
And as part of the Warner Bros. 100th anniversary celebration, and Disney is also having a 100th celebration, although remember Disney, it's not the 100th anniversary of the studio, it is the 100th anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse, which is what they trace their lineage to. But for Warner Bros., this is legitimately 1923.
01:01:59
Speaker
twenty twenty three that is a legit one hundredth anniversary uh uh celebration and they're releasing a lot of old classics on the four k i got three right here uh cool hand luke the multis falcon and rebel without a cause all three i would recommend they all come with the movies anywhere code they all come with a reasonable amount of special features um you know commentary on uh rebel without a cause is particularly good it's by uh douglas
01:02:26
Speaker
Rathgeb, who wrote The Making of Rebel Without a Cause, and it's got some, you know, the Blu-ray also has some behind the scenes things and a lovely, lovely memoir involving Dennis Hopper. The Maltese Falcon has a ton of stuff, most of which we've already seen before, including commentary by Bogart biographer Eric Lax.
01:02:46
Speaker
And then there are a few things on Cool Hand Luke, you know, commentary by Eric Lax as well, who also has written a Newman biography. But on balance, I think
TV Show Legacies
01:02:59
Speaker
all three of these films represent exactly the kind of film that we associate with Warner Brothers. And that's the point I wanted to make and see if you agree.
01:03:06
Speaker
Cuz mom you know multis falcons it's that tough guy thing that they started with but but all the way straight up to the present day with clint eastwood who's been a part of warner brothers history for for fifty years now.
01:03:19
Speaker
Warner Brothers is, let's admit it, it is a studio that has a very male profile. And they were not a studio that made necessarily women's pictures. When they did, it was Bette Davis. And Bette Davis is not exactly anybody's idea of, you know, a quintessential woman. It wasn't like these melodramas. That was for Columbia and some other studios. But Warner Brothers can film noir, if you think Warner Brothers can film noir.
01:03:44
Speaker
And Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman in his day and James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause, they sort of represent exactly what Warner Brothers has always been, which is a studio that explores the many facets of conflicted masculinity. And so I think this is an interesting trio of films to release all of these from, you know, different eras, but all kind of living in the same space. Your thoughts?
01:04:08
Speaker
No, I agree completely. Complicated films with complicated leads, not exactly anti-heroes per se, you know, Kool-Aid and Luke and all of that kind of stuff, but films with leading male characters who were difficult to like and not always right. And I kind of like that about both of these films. And you're right, they're just absolutely gorgeous.
01:04:39
Speaker
Uh, let's get into some, some TV stuff right now. Got a whole bunch of TV here. Uh, the two that I want to just mention right off the top of the bat, uh, complete series collection on Blu-ray for Cheers, which has been long, long awaited. I'm thrilled that it's finally here.
01:04:56
Speaker
And a lovely Mill Creek complete series Blu-ray set for Dawson's Creek, which weirdly enough is like this really old series now. Like James Van Der Beek is now in the news looking like a really old guy and being really pissy about the possibility of not having any presidential debates. And I saw that clip on social media and I thought,
01:05:21
Speaker
weren't you just a kid like five minutes ago in Dawson's Creek? It was a very strange thing. Oh, you know, what's interesting about Dawson's Creek is that all those kids made it, you know, they're all right. No, no, they're all very successful actors right out there in the world. And what they do know me a little bit Katie Mary Tom Cruise for a second there, but you know, got ourselves together. But
01:05:44
Speaker
All of these kids made it, and they were kids when I encountered it. I watched Dawson's Creek the entire series. I've seen every one of those. I was a big fan, but they all made it. Talk about Dawson's Creek for a second. What was it about that show? Because Michelle Williams, if I was going to pick somebody to come out of that show with a head of steam and become a super movie star, I would have picked Katie Holmes, and I would not have said Michelle Williams will become one of our great actresses. But she has. It's really interesting.
01:06:10
Speaker
Well, you know, while Katie still, you know, perfect. So so that show at the time, and I would have been I think in 1998, I would have been about I would have been about I was I was in my in my middle 30s or something like that. So watching that show, all those kids were younger than me. It did a couple of things that I thought was really great. Excellent writing about actual storylines. It struck me as real.
01:06:37
Speaker
Really great, dramatic, professional story-making and film-making. It had a cinematic sort of dynamic, which was interesting because Dawson was like this kid who was hooked on Steven Spielberg movies. I'm not going to take people into the entire thing, but that was the thing. So there were all these sort of references. This is Kevin Williamson. And then all of these kids, Michelle and Joshua and Katie and James in particular,
01:07:01
Speaker
just could act their asses off. These were not the kids of the sitcoms and or quote unquote dramatic shows that you and I grew up watching the Partridge family, the Brady Bunch, you know, with these sort of terrible scripts and terrible acting and terrible filmmaking of shows that you still love to the story. They know this was like, wow, this is like, this is like real dramatic television that happens to be about these teenagers.
01:07:29
Speaker
And a lot of good stuff on there is interviews and commentaries and some really, really wonderful stuff. It is a more landmark seminal show than I think a lot of people want to give it to people. The music, I forgot to mention the music. Every one of those shows had contemporary music and of course broke some contemporary artists of the day. Every single one of them, that music, them and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they were all doing it.
01:07:56
Speaker
And Cheers, I just can't say enough about this. You know, this show still hasn't cast a long shadow, not just because it's one of the great all-time sitcoms. But Cheers, let's remember, it didn't just spawn Frasier. There's a new Frasier series. So Cheers still has a spinoff on the air that's starting again. And I think that may be the longest time one character has been on television.
01:08:25
Speaker
ever. I might be wrong, but Frasier, you know, played by Kelsey Grammer is just, he's not going away. What a great show this was. Loved to Kirstie Alley, the late Kirstie Alley, who stepped into a very awkward situation here, a show that was literally defined in its first several seasons by the Sam and Diane on again, off again romance of opposites. I mean, it was built around that relationship. And when Shelley Long left,
01:08:52
Speaker
A lot of people said the show's over. You can't, you can't, that's the central tension of the show. You cannot, all those great sporting characters, you can't, you can't do it. You can replace Coach with Woody, but you can't replace Diane. And son of a gun, they brought in Kirstie Alley, and it was a whole new show. And then they brought in Frasier and Lilith, and they found a way to use that bar to manufacture more than just that original
01:09:19
Speaker
premise. And I think I think that's a credit to the writers and the directors and just all the magic that they wrote on this incredible show. Yeah, man. James Burroughs, Glennon, Glennon, less Charles over there. Sam and Diane became a phrase that you could, you know, reference us all of their Sam and Diane. I saw that. I used it in reviews. I used in reviews where I said I can't even remember what movie I was reviewing, but I said, boy, you know, the movie depicts this couple as being more on again, off again, then, well, Sam and Diane.
01:09:47
Speaker
I don't even remember what the movie was, but I remember I made that reference. And of all the people, again, lots of great talent, you know, you came from and out of and all that. But if you told me, you know, the one who's going to actually gone to become a legit Hollywood movie star and will remain so for the next 30 years is going to be Woody
01:10:09
Speaker
You know, the goofy bartender who replaced Michelle Williams. I'm like, get out of here. That guy's going to become a big man. But he just walked right into becoming a major, legit Hollywood movie star, leading man, villain, you know, capable character actor. And who would have thought? Who would have thought?
01:10:31
Speaker
Couple of complete series here from very different eras. We've got the complete series of Go On with Matthew Perry. It's a complete series because it just didn't last very long. It's 22 episodes, but it's an okay show. I think it was a little bit of a misfire, but it's a good thing to watch for Matthew Perry fans. He's good in it. The rest of the show just isn't very good.
01:10:52
Speaker
And the original 1957 television series Blondie from Classic Flix, FLIX, they've just released the two-disc set with 26 episodes of this very strange live-action adaptation of the comic strip, which in hindsight, have you ever seen this? Have you ever seen any of these? Because I haven't seen these ever.
01:11:17
Speaker
Maybe it was on because you're a little older than I am. So this may have still been there for you, but it wasn't there for me. Oh, yeah. And look, I got I got to be I got to be square with you. Blondie, who played Blondie? What was her name? What was written? Yeah, played Blondie. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, gorgeous. With the dude, I had a thing for that chick.
01:11:43
Speaker
Because I'm like, if that's the one- Penny Singleton. Penny Singleton. That was a little bit later on. Were they both Arthur Lake as Dagwood? I'm definitely thinking of Penny Singleton. Yes, they've changed Blondie's, but Penny Singleton Blondie, oh my God. She was gorgeous and had a better body than Marilyn Monroe.
01:12:10
Speaker
Uh, you know, with baby dumpling around those. Yeah, those were on all the time when I was, when I was a kid, I watched them all the time. Yeah. It's such a peculiar. I mean, if you don't know the comic strip, you kind of miss a lot of the jokes because it really is riffing on it. How Roach Studios tried to, you know, legitimize themselves for television or the early stage television with this. And I mean, it's a, it's a really fascinating artifact. I don't know that it, it, it dates terribly well, but it's got a lot. If you know the comic strip, there's a lot of really funny stuff in it.
01:12:40
Speaker
Yeah and you still a thing today i guess right it's still in like two thousand newspapers is what the the press stuff was telling me what even in the car just look that stuff you look up go look up you'll see what i mean it's a it's very interesting the way that stuff is out of shape.
01:12:57
Speaker
And we got some individual season stuff here on Blu-ray, uh, got South Park and it's 25th season still killing it. I don't know how those guys keep doing it. I would be exhausted. It's just the turnaround there. You know, Mark used to talk about how they, they turn those an episode around in like a week and a half.
01:13:13
Speaker
I mean, I don't know how you even do that with an animated show, but that's how they stay on the news cycle. We got the third season of His Dark Materials from HBO, which I never really got into, but I know a lot of people love this. I watched that, I watched that, yeah.
01:13:30
Speaker
Not heavy on the extras, but that is definitely out there on Blu-ray. Primal, the complete second season. Totally insane animation, a little bit anime-inflected, but I kind of get it. It could skew completely young.
01:13:54
Speaker
But it doesn't, it doesn't really, it still skews a little bit, you know, grown up and it's good animation. It's really good animation. It's won a bunch of Emmys and you know, so check that out. It's better that it's like Masters of the Universe for adults. Maybe a better way of putting it.
01:14:11
Speaker
NCIS Hawaii season one. Let's talk about this for just a second. NCIS is doing what all the other acronym shows have done, which is just venture from city to city, whether it's CSI or Law and Order or, you know, what's the other one? Oh my god, Vegas? Are they in Vegas? No. Yeah.
01:14:31
Speaker
Anyway, NCIS finally says, you know, let's go steal some thunder from Magnum and Hawaii Five-O. Does it work? I don't know. I guess it's a beautiful cast. It's very, you know, very CW looking cast, but
01:14:49
Speaker
Yeah you know i mean it makes sense you know you have pearl harbor is a backdrop and it's never really been a backdrop for tv show. Outside of world war two so beautiful people take their clothes off occasionally and do the white thing love the white setting.
01:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, man. Look, bruh, that's a mess of pretty cops. That's a whole lot of pretty cops in one place. So I'm not sure, but hey, roll with it. And magnum on magnum. Okay, fine. You know, because that's what we're doing. But I'm like, really seriously? Now, the other thing is, the original Y-5-0, you're the one that you and I grew up with. What I liked about that show is I bought all of those cops.
01:15:33
Speaker
every single one of them, a bottle of Danno, a bottle of Baltimore. Every one of them. Every one of them. This is a lot of pretty cops, but whatever.
01:15:42
Speaker
Walker made it to season two. I always thought it was very bizarre that they wanted to resurrect Walker without Chuck Norris because the whole point of the show was that Chuck came with all this real cheesy baggage and it was more about Chuck Norris than some guy named Walker. So you replace Chuck, what's the point? But they're into a season two. I guess somebody watches this show. I don't really get it.
01:16:07
Speaker
Jared Podolecki or whatever his name is. He's fine, pretty face, but it still feels like, you know, Magnum PI and a cowboy hat. It's a family drama. Walker, Texas Ranger, you know the one that we watched, at the end of the day, it was a cop, you know, thing. There'll be some crazy bad guy doing something. And him and Travis, trickle trickle, whatever his name is, who is his, and I always liked it. The brother wore the white hat and Walker wore the black hat.
01:16:36
Speaker
I'm like, I'm like, that's cool. And they would roll out and they would catch the bad guy. You know, if this is a family drama and there's all kinds of stuff that's going on at the house and at the ranch and stuff with the dad, the mom and the, I'm like, I don't think I ever met Walker's mom in the hell of the show. I mean, I'm pretty sure his mom was never in an episode of that show, but you know, she's in this show.
01:16:58
Speaker
Yeah. And then Yellowstone season five, which has a which has a very, very judicious sticker on the packaging that says includes the first eight episodes of season five. You know, I mean, the whole Yellowstone thing I have I have been trying to sort of get into it from the beginning. And all of our friends who love the show, they're they're ridiculing me for not
01:17:24
Speaker
you
Character Analysis in Shows
01:17:25
Speaker
know buying the the whole thing i'm like it but it's dynasty on the prairie i don't you know like that's the whole point alright fair enough but you but there you go again you and i come from the world of dallas the original dallas and dynasty dude flamingo road i mean the originals
01:17:43
Speaker
You know, not the CW stuff. Falcon Crest. Falcon Crest. I'm like, you guys, you guys, you guys are kidding. Are you kidding me? Dude, we have JR, the original JR. This is all funny to me. But, you know, I will say that this about, about that, about this show, everybody wears a black hat in this show. I'm like, seriously, everybody is. I'm like, okay, they're laying it right there out there for you. Everybody wears a black hat.
01:18:10
Speaker
Yeah. And then lastly, Star Trek Lower Decks Season 3, you know, the other Star Trek animated show is like a sitcom and whatnot. I mean, you got to tell me what people see in this. I know a lot of people love this. Our friend Luke Thompson loves this. Yeah.
01:18:28
Speaker
I don't know. It's like, it's just, it's, I don't know. What's the point of this? I don't know. All the guys with red shirts. Look, it's for the same crowd because I don't really watch this so much. Other than just go familiarize myself, Lordex indeed, that are still watching and still love that South Park that we just talked about a second ago, 25 years. Now look,
01:18:52
Speaker
I appreciated me some good South Park for, I don't know, a decade or so, 12 years and whatever. But after a while there, but I still got people who watched.
01:19:05
Speaker
25 years worth of South Park have not missed any of it. I can't. I can't do this. There's some things I can let go. I can let go. And this was one I was. We do we do film week. So we have to we have to cram, you know, like I mean, I don't know what you're I know. I know a little bit how you handled the film week roster. I always tell myself, oh, I've got two weeks to, you know, kind of ease myself. And then I will find myself on a Friday night
01:19:31
Speaker
before we have to take the following thursday literally six nights and i say i guess if i watch one or two movies and night i'll make it and then sunday night rolls around and i'm like three days to watch like nine movies so i wanna basically watching movies from about eight pm until two in the morning every single night for like three or four straight nights that's how i do it and it's not healthy.
01:19:55
Speaker
Yeah,
Collectibles and Releases
01:19:56
Speaker
it's a thing and that happens to me a lot. Sometimes, though, I will try to get out in front of the game, you know, and just in particular, if we get the list loaded and you look, you can go, you know what's going to be, and then you get out in front of the game and you reach out and you get a few of these things. And in a good two weeks ahead of time, I will have watched
01:20:18
Speaker
three, four, maybe even five of themselves. You're so much less procrastinating than I am. This is why that's bad, because by the time we get to show day, I can't remember. I'm like, Tim, on this week's show, literally, there was something I watched on Monday and by Thursday, I was sitting there staring at the title, trying my best to remember what it was about.
01:20:44
Speaker
It might be better just to put them all together real nice and neat. Peak behind the curtain. I want
Celebrity Anecdotes
01:20:51
Speaker
to mention a couple of steel books real quickly. There's also a Best Buy exclusive of House of 1000 Corpses, the 20th anniversary edition of the Rob Zombie film, which is maybe the only decent thing he's ever directed. Can you believe it's been 20 years since that
01:21:04
Speaker
Oh, that is just, I did the, I did the, I did the junket for that movie, the whole damn fact. No, I cannot believe that. That's, that's, hey, Karen, black, you know. Just nutty. And we also have Michael Mann's Miami Vice in a new unrated director's edition on Blu-ray from Mill Creek, a nice steel book. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, we hope Jamie Foxx is recovering well from his recent health scare. Seems to be he's back on social media, so we're sending him all
01:21:34
Speaker
of our best. Well, he's the community guy for you. I mean, he's, I mean, he's a celebrity for us, but for you, he's the guy in the community. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, his daughter, his daughter is about four years older than mine. So we were all at the elementary school together for a couple of years.
01:21:50
Speaker
And he even guest assistant coached my daughter's basketball team at one point. Tremendous guy, just a really awesome guy. And Colin Farrell, who I adore, I've never met, but he's now an Oscar nominee.
01:22:06
Speaker
so it's a little weird watching these guys in Miami Vice play these parts that were originated by two other guys on TV, but the movies, it's very different from the TV show. Michael Mann wanted to revisit it and reinvent it and I think he did it reasonably well given all the constraints at the time.
01:22:25
Speaker
Also we have a couple of animated things on blu-ray to make quick mention of Looney Tunes collectors choice volume one part of the warner archive collection they're putting out some of these looney tunes that were previously on dvd. And now they're out there gonna be doing a series of seems making the looney tunes collectors choice series.
01:22:44
Speaker
So, a lot of these are out now on Blu-ray. Some of these are really, really quite memorable. Stooge for a Mouse is a really, really great classic. Dog on Cats is a classic. What's Brewin' Brewin' is very memorable. And one of my favorites is the one right at the top, Beanstalk Bunny. I absolutely adore Beanstalk Bunny. So, some great Looney Tunes in that first volume.
01:23:09
Speaker
And then a really interesting thing here, Max Fleischer's Superman, 17 theatrical shorts from 1941 to 43 from DC, part of the 100th anniversary celebration, including a new featurette that's all about Fleischer's Superman, the animation. A little bit of a controversy with this, that they restored this
01:23:29
Speaker
without grain. They did a restoration of this and a digital version of it that is, it's interesting because normally we'd object to that if they do it with something like the Maltese Falcon. You want the grain, you want to feel the film. The argument here is that if we strip the grain out, we're more faithful to the artwork and that you want to replicate these animated efforts
01:23:52
Speaker
more closely approximate the Fleischer artwork than the filmic quality of projecting that artwork on an old 1930s, 40s era movie screen. I'm not sure I totally buy it. I kind of wish they had given us both, but at the same time, you've never seen the Fleischer artwork look so good and so pristine. So I've got to give it some
01:24:17
Speaker
for that. The notion being that the artwork, which would, of course, not had any grain at all, had grain added to it by the transfer process way back then. So the thing that we were watching was not the intended thing. It was just a necessary artifact of the process. Precisely. But if the process had been better, then the image would have approximated this, not that at the time. Yeah. Precisely.
01:24:46
Speaker
And as long as we're talking about Warner, let me let me roll through here. We have because we've been off offline for a few weeks. So a lot of Warner archive collection titles have come out. Wonderful old classic Warner Brothers movies, all of them worth mentioning. I'm going to go through these as quickly as I can and highlight some of the ones that are really, really worth checking out this clash by night, which is really
01:25:11
Speaker
quite wonderful in hindsight, a forgotten Marilyn Monroe performance, along with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan, Paul Douglas, really kind of a good, one of the better Hollywood efforts from Fritz Long.
01:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, right based on the the Clifford Odette's play. Yeah, it's it's a it's a good Fritz Long film that everybody kind of forgets about a little bit. Ricardo Montalban has never been better young Ricardo Montalban looking unbelievable in border incident, which is a which is really quite along with George Murphy, kind of a surprising movie for its era when you look at it through a current day
01:25:53
Speaker
prison. Anthony Mann directed this, you know, it's dealing with the, you know, conflict at the Mexican American border. And given, you know, what's happening today, you look at this and you kind of go, man, this is, this is kind of, you know, if it's not a movie ahead of its time, it certainly reflects that the times haven't changed. So that's, that is well worth watching. But Ricardo Montalban is just amazing.
01:26:17
Speaker
James Cagney in A Lion is in the Streets, one of his great powerhouse performances for a guy that short to look this big on screen is just unbelievable. Raul Walsh directed this. Really a pretty great movie. Even on that poster, the great Barbara Hale would go on the Perry Mason. Even on that poster, he looks gigantic.
01:26:42
Speaker
It's a powerhouse performance. It really is. Storm Warning is also a pretty great movie, one of those great dramatic parts by Ginger Rogers. I heard some really interesting Ginger Rogers stories over the weekend. I'll tell you after the show. It's stuff I shouldn't be sharing on the show, but really some really interesting stuff. Anyway, this is one of those movies that she made when she would go off and say, hey, I'm not just a dancer. She's in this with- It's a heavy movie, man.
01:27:10
Speaker
Some character actor named Ronald Reagan, I've never heard of. Dora's Day. They're all really good in this. This is a movie about the Klan. I know, it's a tough movie. This chick goes down and your sister's there to this guy in the Klan. It's a murder and a whole thing, dude. This was heavy duty stuff to be talking about in 1950. It's a noir, it's a crime movie, but with an almost entirely white cast.
01:27:40
Speaker
It's a little weird to have a Klan movie in which there are no actual black people, but nonetheless, I'm grateful for it. It was a risk at the time. This is when we're talking about the films that Warner Brothers made, what we're talking about earlier. This is that toughness that is so identified with the brand. It's that precisely.
01:28:03
Speaker
a movie called safe in hell which is a pre code kind of semi noir it's a little it's a it's a little rough and a little raw as pre code films were but stylistically as well in nineteen thirty one you know you can you can tell that there's you know they're getting the sound in the picture.
01:28:23
Speaker
working for this new technology. But, you know, it was originally made first national vitaphone picture now in the Warner Brothers Library. And it's a good little gritty, you know, crime film directed by William Wellman. And, you know, it's a nice thing to add to the library. Well, again, this is the content that would be even rough today, you know, hookers and shoots and rape and all that stuff and
01:28:53
Speaker
and 31, and yeah, very good, very, very raw. William Powell and Kay Francis in one-way passage. William Powell is just always absolutely delightful, and this is just a classic William Powell quasi-thin man performance. And while we're checking out, it has a couple of vintage Lux Radio Theater broadcasts on it that, you know, it just gives it a little bit more of that period sheen, if you love William Powell.
01:29:20
Speaker
And then lastly, this is the one that I really, really love. Another Raoul Walsh film. Strawberry Blonde with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland and some young punk named Rita Hayworth in the sporting part. No, this is a terrific film. This is really an awful lot of fun. And it's all that stuff that you associate with classic Hollywood movies. It's funny. It's romantic.
01:29:45
Speaker
You know it's just got a wonderful wonderful script that's very very clever and it's got some great kind of farcical little twists and it read a hayworth is not a star in this movie it's a supporting part but you look at her and you just go holy cow you're amazing you're literally showing up.
01:30:02
Speaker
Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney. Like, now you see how stardom is born. You show up on that movie with some big stars, and you steal those scenes from them, and you just, you tip your hat and you go, you knock it out of the park, girl. A lot of fun faces pop up in this movie. George Reeves, gonna be Superman. George Tobias, he was, you played the husband across the street.
01:30:26
Speaker
and just all kinds of her banana. Just a lot of great faces. Now we love seeing them pop up in these movies, you know, where you just weren't thinking about them at the time, but now you see him, you're like, oh, look, it's Alan Hale. Alan Hale has to skip her from Gilman's Island. He's in this movie. All kinds of neat stuff.
01:30:44
Speaker
Marlene Dietrich Arthur Kennedy and Mel Ferrer in Rancho Notorious, another Fritz Long film, a more famous Fritz Long film, really very, very good. Susan Hayward in the wonderful I'll Cry Tomorrow. Susan Hayward, kind of a little bit forgotten today, but delivered so many really, really great performances. This was an MGM film originally.
01:31:07
Speaker
directed by Daniel Mann, the other man, not related to Anthony Mann. But yeah, Susan Hayward, you know, just a terrific melodramatic actress at the time. Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore and Robert Taylor in Camille. I mean, you know, it's...
01:31:23
Speaker
Greta Garbo and Camille, I'm sorry. That doesn't need to be even given any further recommendation. It's just right there. And it also includes the 1921 silent version with Rudolf Valentino and Alan Azimova. And Alan Azimova totally forgotten today. But it's nice you get both versions of Camille and one directed by George Kuker and
01:31:48
Speaker
You know, that's the one that we all remember, the Greta Garbo film. Gotta have that if you're a Garbo fan. Joan Crawford in Flamingo Road, who just talked about the Flamingo Road TV series with the, oh gosh, why am I drawing a blank now? Morgan Fairchild. Morgan Fairchild.
01:32:09
Speaker
Yeah. So, which is very loosely adapted from this, but it's still kind of cool if you know the TV series with Morgan Fairchild and you watch this, you go, oh, I see the DNA. That's pretty cool. They kind of did it. Yeah, I get it. John Crawford is great. Michael Curtiz directed this one.
01:32:30
Speaker
Just a few more here. Lucy and Desi in the long, long trailer, which was made fun of at the time. Huh? Just watched that the other day on like PCM, one of the places where it runs all the time. It was gorgeous. This is so good looking, right? It's like the most amazingly rich Technicolor. It's almost like they felt like, you know what, everyone's been watching these people on TV in black and white for so long. Let's make up for lost time and just like quintuple the color in this movie.
01:32:57
Speaker
It's really kind of amazing. Yeah, they really overdid the color, but what a fun slapsticky movie. Vincent Minnelli had his best. Vincent Minnelli had his best. Yeah, right. I mean, people just don't realize that this movie even exists. It's really a super, super fun movie. And yeah, they got Minnelli to direct it. You can't go wrong.
01:33:19
Speaker
Joan Crawford again in Our Dancing Daughters. This is also a very, very early Joan Crawford performance. It's a silent film. 28, 28, 1928. Yeah, 1928. Right on the cusp of moving to sound. And Joan Crawford, bigger star in the sound era than in the silent era. One of those who made the transition because
01:33:45
Speaker
It just favored her, but really very, very interesting if you only know Joan Crawford from her sound films. This one is worth checking out just for its historical value. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy, what a trio that is, in Wife vs. Secretary. This has been out on DVD a million times, and it's finally out on Blu-ray, James Stewart in a supporting performance, really a very, very fun kind of
01:34:14
Speaker
It's not
Film and Historical Context
01:34:15
Speaker
a screwball comedy. It's kind of a screwball romance, but it's very, very fun. And they're all really wonderful. The title, why first? Today. I know. It's not even a reference that makes any sense. Certainly, you can't, because, but that was the thing all through, you know, sitcoms and everything. It was the secretary. Oh, you're secretary. It's all just not even, you can't even do it.
01:34:37
Speaker
Yeah. We've got Edward G. Robinson, In Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which that title leaves nothing to the imagination. I wonder what this movie's about. Anyway, no, this was one of the first really great propaganda films that was made during World War II. Well, 1939, technically before World War II. Before the US entry to it, yeah.
01:35:06
Speaker
It was made right before war broke out, but war was inevitable. Everyone knew it was coming. Warner Brothers just figured we're just going to get in on this and fire the first salvo. It was right there on the cusp and it's benefited over the years ever since.
01:35:28
Speaker
Apparently it really was quite volatile that at the time a lot of screenings were very heated during the period because we forget there's a lot even before war broke out a lot of people in the west supported hitler they thought he had like found the magic formula yeah.
01:35:43
Speaker
Yeah, Mr. Lindbergh, Mr. Lindbergh, Mr. Ford, Mr. Ford, a whole lot. In the UK as well. I mean, that's the, one of my favorite, my favorite Merchant Ivory film, Remains of the Day is very much about the, you know, that's the character that
01:35:59
Speaker
Fox plays in that movie is that one of those English aristocrats who wanted to try to bridge, you know, bring Mr. Hitler to and his ideas to the UK. I mean, it's a scary time when you look back on it. And Neptune's daughter is just a delight. Red Skelton and Esther Williams. This is one of those great MGM Esther Williams vehicles. It's a whole lot of fun. You know, it's
01:36:27
Speaker
One that is near and dear to me, obviously, because it dovetails with the, you know, Busby Berkeley. So I, you know, can't help but sort of appreciate what's going on here. Anything with Xavier Kugat in it is alright with me. Oh yeah, for sure.
01:36:46
Speaker
And then the last of the Warner Archive titles here is Robert Donot's Oscar-winning performance in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, along with Greer Garson. Just, you know, they remade this as a musical with Peter O'Toole, which I am not as disdainful of as a lot of people, but I still think this original performance by Robert Donot is so unbelievably wonderful. He won Best Actor
Cinematic Releases and Reviews
01:37:10
Speaker
in 1939, ahead of so many others. Jimmy Stewart in
01:37:15
Speaker
Mr. Smith goes to Washington ahead of Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. I mean, he beat an incredible field and very deservedly so as this beloved teacher in this wonderful, wonderful British boarding school melodrama. And I still think Goodbye Mr. Chips is a fantastic classic and one of the best films of 1939.
01:37:36
Speaker
fandom of great teacher movies that goes on this day and includes all kinds of wonderful movies that begins with Goodbye, Mystery Chips. Yeah. Let's hit some of the criterion titles.
01:37:52
Speaker
And the Arrow titles as well, there's one main Arrow title here, Lovers Lane, one of those slasher films from the slasher film era about, you know,
01:38:09
Speaker
an urban legend known as The Hook. Do you ever see this? It's the one from 99, that John Stephen Ward film. I remember this movie. Yeah, it's John Ward. It's kind of a late stage slasher film that has apparently gained a reputation. I barely was aware of it at the time, but clearly it's enough of a thing that Arrow wanted to bring it back.
01:38:37
Speaker
Your opinion, is it deserving of its resurrected reputation? Well, I remember this film from the day. Young Anna Faris is in this film, if I'm not mistaken. And it was one that was... So if it's a legacy of that, yeah, that was a good movie.
01:39:00
Speaker
Alright, so let's roll through some of these criterion titles. First off is a film that won our LA film critics best film a few years ago, but was not eligible for Oscars. For a whole bunch of dumb reasons, it was considered a TV miniseries, but it was devoted to us as a series of actual films, individual films, and we treated it as a single work, which I think you have to.
01:39:23
Speaker
But it is five films by Steve McQueen, Small Acts, which is a chronicle of the lives and experiences of families and people with roots in the West Indies who are in the UK in the 70s and 80s.
01:39:43
Speaker
And it's a really interesting thing. It's not, you know, Steve McQueen wanted to do was to explore a particular UK culture, which is not, you know, you can you can break it down. It's kind of like here in the US, you know, there's and you will be the first person to certainly correct me and everybody else on this. It's not like everyone in the United States who's black is monolithic.
01:40:03
Speaker
There are people from West Africa, there are people from East Africa, there are people who come from long-standing indigenous populations in the South, in places like New Orleans, those in the North with more New England, those who are part of the Great Migration, those who are Caribbean. I mean, these are a lot of different populations.
01:40:22
Speaker
And in the UK, those who are from the West Indies are very different from those who have their roots in Africa and elsewhere. And it's a really specific population and their experience of the 70s and 80s is unique. And these five films, I would call a stone cold masterpiece. It's hard enough to make one film as an artist. All five of these films are amazing.
01:40:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'll let you go. Yeah, Steve directing all five episodes, a few different writers and what's what was really interesting in watching these films is that while they're about these very particular black communities in London from like the late 60s stretching through the
01:41:05
Speaker
through the early 80s, depending on which episode you're watching. There are references in every single one of them that I found as an African American, you know, born in the early 60s here in the United States, totally familiar, totally familiar, all of them, sometimes literally familiar, the music. If not, if not that, the clothes, the tone, the style. They're all very interesting.
01:41:31
Speaker
Some of them are better than others, but they start at such a high level. I particularly liked the one that sat at that house party, you know, with that music. Lovers Rock. Lovers Rock. That's beautiful. So good. The one about the young boy who becomes a police officer and his father. Red, white, and blue. Red, white, and blue. So good.
01:41:53
Speaker
Another powerful, powerful one. It's so young. All of them. And while they're all very individuals, they are of a one. So you should simply watch the entire series. Yeah. You know, you don't have to watch it all in one sitting. But yeah, it's really, really, absolutely incredible. John Boyega in red, white, and blue.
01:42:14
Speaker
is so, so good. It's the best thing he's ever done. And it's such a deeply affecting story because it deals particularly that one with all of these conflicts, the conflict between education and public service, between the native born, which is what he is, and the immigrant, which is his parents. The conflict between obviously, you know, I mean, and this isn't giving anything away, but he could go on to a very successful career
01:42:41
Speaker
in education and instead he becomes a police officer because he wants to serve the community and he realizes that there are that there are there's there are racists on the police force who have been rough with the community and but it gets into conflicts within the community within the family. Like there's so much drama in that story and it's just beautifully shot. You know, McQueen was not my favorite director when he first started.
01:43:02
Speaker
He felt like one of those pretentious Peter Greenaway former painters who comes to the movies and tries to do something, tries to reinvent the wheel. Like I think of hunger and that shot of the guy who's mopping the floor, which is like four minutes long. And I'm like, it's four minutes shot of a guy mopping a floor. What are you doing? Why are you doing this to me? You're killing me here.
01:43:21
Speaker
But then he became a storyteller right and then he started understand he's not even he can be a painter when he's painting but when you're making a movie you're not a painter your storyteller and he now finds you know ways of shooting some of these scenes where he can he finds the place to put the camera and doesn't move it. Let's the whole scene transpire in front of the camera without an edit in the most beautifully framed and staged and blocked.
01:43:44
Speaker
way possible. He really has become a very, very skilled filmmaker. And I just think this is one of the I can't say enough about it. Yeah, he learned how to let the image serve the story. You know, that that that that thing, you know, a few of them had to do that Julian, Julian snobble had to butterfly and put you Yeah, the diving bell in the butterfly. But yes, Steve McQueen. Anyway, this is a good series. Yeah.
01:44:12
Speaker
So, we also have a bunch of Criterians on 4K. Here's what's on 4K from Criterion. Wings of Desire, freakin' Vym Vanders, who's movie, just another movie of his, won an award at Cannes just this last week. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, freaking unbelievable, because it's looked terrible on what they've had on Criterion Channel for a while. And The Fisher King,
01:44:34
Speaker
Oh my gosh, Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges for Terry Gilliam. And then lastly, Reuben Ostlin's new film that just came out this last year was nominated for a ton of Oscars, including Best Picture, and also won the Palme d'Or, Triangle of Sadness. So let me just first start by saying, because maybe you like triangles. I don't know if you and I have even talked about this movie.
01:44:53
Speaker
This movie to me is like a really unfunny version of The Love Boat that becomes an even less funny version of Gilligan's Island. I truly don't like this film. I respect Ostland as a director. I get it. He's won two Palmdores, the square one. I didn't like the square either. I don't like this film at all. I don't know what people see in it, but maybe you do. You tell me, what's the deal with Triangle of Sadness?
01:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, nothing because I don't like it either. But it's also obvious to me. And is it funny? Okay, I giggle. But it's like giggling at somebody slipping on a banana. So, you know, all the crap that happens on the boat with all the food and all this kind of stuff like that. And here's the thing, you know,
01:45:34
Speaker
At the center of all of this, it's a sort of disdain for a certain kind of people. So whether we call them, whether it's the super rich or the super beautiful or the super whatever it is that you take it and you just take it and they have disdain for them and all that they have and all that they do. Here's the thing.
01:45:53
Speaker
I don't have any disdain for the super rich. I don't have any sustain for the ridiculously beautiful. I don't have any disdain for anybody in and of themselves itself. Nothing about anybody, now, there's a given kind of behavior that almost anybody can engage in that I would have disdain for, but nothing about you being rich or about you being pretty is ever going to matter to me.
01:46:20
Speaker
And which is what these films, all of them, even that one look up, it does. It confuses that. And I'm like, you want me to say that rich people are bad. I know lots of rich people, they aren't bad. But these rich people are assholes. But assholes are assholes, whether they have any money or not. And that's what these movies don't seem to get right. I don't know if that makes any sense.
01:46:49
Speaker
It makes sense. And then for the others, I will just say that the 4K transfers of these combo sets of Seven Seal, Fisher King, and Wings of Desire are superlative. You got to get them upgraded by any means necessary. And especially Wings of Desire, I just want to say I moderated an event with VIM vendors some years ago. My wife has worked on a number of VIM vendors films. She was the post-production supervisor on one of us, a social club. So she's been very close to VIM over the years.
01:47:14
Speaker
When we were at the 50th anniversary Cannes Film Festival, that was for, what was it, End of Violence. So we went to the 50th anniversary palm presentation because we were at the big red carpet for End of Violence. So I have a certain affection for Vim. Been on the set of several of his films here, including, what was the one that they shot downtown?
01:47:37
Speaker
Gosh, I can't even remember the name of it, the hotel movie. Million Dollar Hotel, Million Dollar Hotel. Was it the wrap party for that? Gosh, I've been all over Vince's life, that's really weird. Still, I remember Jeremy Davies dancing up a storm at that wrap party. But anyway, Wings of Desire, when I did the moderation thing, Henri Alacan, the cinematographer for this film, who is one of the greats of all-time international cinema, all the way back to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.
01:48:03
Speaker
did all of those effects in camera. So when those wings are dissolving and disappearing and all this stuff is happening, there is no post-production special effects work happening in Wings of Desire. Olicon did that in real time in camera. That is old school hardcore. Just know that when you watch the film.
01:48:21
Speaker
Yeah. The last three criterions we got here, Sage and Suzuki's Branded to Kill is also on 4K. I forgot to mention that in the others. That's also available right now in a big Suzuki series on Criterion Channel. This is one of those great, groovy, quasi-Japanese new wave slash Japsploitation films from 1967, a really great era. Everything was groovy and cool.
01:48:47
Speaker
Tarantino rips on a lot of this in Kill Bill, which is also now going to be coming out in 4K soon. This movie is one of the earliest criterions released. That's why it's number 38. And it's now in 4K and it's so cool looking. The color is so cool. And then Targets, Bogdanovich's film, which was mentioned in our documentary Schlock, The Secret History of American Movies, the first film to really
01:49:15
Speaker
Talk about, um, spree killers and snipers and that whole horrible social phenomenon. A really interesting problem that he solved with Boris Karloff and how he used an old Corman movie to justify getting Corman to actually
01:49:31
Speaker
pay for funding this one. A lot of great stuff in here. There's an interview with Richard Linkladder, an audio commentary from 2003 with Bogdanovich. This deserves to be on 4K. It's not on 4K. It's Blu-ray, but we'll live with it for now. It's wonderful to see targets get the criterion treatment. Celine Siamis Petita Mamal from about two years ago, kind of a big deal with Lafka, didn't really win any awards, but a lot of people love this film.
01:49:59
Speaker
I really, it's great. It's like just barely 70 minutes long. Um, really kind of, you know, it's such a, such a fascinating thing. This, this weird little mother daughter relationship, time bending thing that she does. And I don't want to give too much away, but it's a really, it's a very sweet, simple, but incredibly original film. Um, you know,
01:50:28
Speaker
I don't know, tell what your thoughts. Oh, it was just absolutely beautiful, wonderfully done. Again, you don't want to give a whole lot away, but it gives you a sense of how things could be in more than one way. And this
Cultural and International Cinema
01:50:44
Speaker
is how it might feel in this way, but if it was like this, it might feel like this. And the film never really lets you know which one of these things is actually true.
01:50:58
Speaker
We got some LGBT titles. Tim, I don't know if, did you have a chance to cover any of these? Yeah, yeah. There's several of these, like me, for instance. Yeah. I kind of like that. El Cantor, I think it is. It's funny, we talked about Dawson's Creek earlier. This has a whole lot in common with Dawson's Creek. It's just about this kid who's in school, gets kicked out, he's working for this photographer, and they have this sort of intense relationship and he's kind of
01:51:25
Speaker
You know has a crush on his friend. It's just this very gentle very sweet little movie with a whole lot of great Performances that I that I quite enjoyed I got a chance to check out One highway one
01:51:41
Speaker
But I don't know if there are anything on any of these, so chime in. There's no extras. No extras. You're crazy, yeah. Anyway, Highway 1's pretty good. It's about the New Year's Eve party, almost all of it takes place in the same place. Jacqueline Bethany and a couple of great performances there.
01:52:01
Speaker
from some lovely young folks. And I also checked out Blood Red Ox, which is just a straight-up South American rainforest film with a whole lot of mystical stuff going on behind the scenes, which is interesting because the film was really more about that than it is anything else, which was pretty good. And then there's this beautiful one called Dean Thunder, which is set
01:52:30
Speaker
And the Native American community up around Rhode Island, and it's just beautiful. But it's set in this community where there are these, a couple of kids, a queer kid, a straight kid, and this sort of transgender kid in this Native American community and all of this stuff that's sort of going on. Look, you wouldn't think to combine all of these things, but it's like it references
01:52:57
Speaker
And I just, I thought it was just perfectly lovely, perfectly lovely. We attend all of these ceremonies where they're wearing this Native American dress, and just bright and beautiful stuff. It's really just sort of lovely, lovely. Stephanie Lattimore there in this film, and she's sort of like at the center of all of it. She's the young person who's there, so check that one out. It's a documentary. All right. And let's see what else we've got here. We got some foreign films.
01:53:27
Speaker
We should probably get to The Quiet Girl is on DVD that was nominated for an Oscar just this past year, the first ever Irish film that is in the Irish language. And it's funny, I was at a press event for this and everyone kept asking the director and the people there because they're like
01:53:46
Speaker
what's so what is the name of the Irish language? Is it like Gaelic? Or is there? They're hoping that some name like Gil Thrall could tell or some Gaelic sounding thing. And everyone kept saying like, what's what do you call the Irish language? Like this? What's spoken in this film? What do we what do you call it? And there was always a beat. And then the answer was always Irish.
01:54:07
Speaker
That's it. It's the Irish language. That's what it's called. It's Irish. It's simpler than you would expect. It's what it's called. It's what we are called. It's what the place is called. It's all it's all the one thing. I love this movie. It was so sweet. And the title was so correct. Correct. Quiet girl. And she goes to the family. She sent, shipped off her. She has just, you know, goofy, these goofy parents and they ship her off to live.
01:54:31
Speaker
you know, with her old, and it's about how her family becomes sort of stabilized, her sense of family becomes stabilized living with this old couple. And it's just beautiful. There's almost nothing that happens in this movie, you know? It's a wonderful, it's like a slice of a sliver of life.
01:54:56
Speaker
I think it's really, it's very, very just intimate, incredibly nicely observed. And it, you know, that's the thing about movies is that there's an assumption that when you're telling a story, that you need to have a certain breadth. You need to start in a certain place and end in a certain place. And you only have 100 minutes, 120 minutes, maybe 150 minutes on the outside to make that journey. And when you do that, there are certain things that you just don't have time to observe along the way.
01:55:23
Speaker
And the nice thing about calm buried who who wrote directed this is that he just decided you know what i'm just not going to step that far back i'm going to get in really very detailed finally observed and i'm going to just. Make a whole movie about a much more simple and quiet and intimate trajectory than what would normally be considered an acceptable feature film and it's so refreshing it really is.
01:55:51
Speaker
I just wish it was on Blu-ray. I wish they'd have done a Blu-ray of it, but I'll take the DVD. The Oscar-winning Indochine is also out, finally, on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Classics. Regis Varnier never got nominated again, but still a very epic director, makes a lot of big movies, has made a lot of big movies in France. Anyway, Indochine, big melodrama, you know, Catherine Deneuve and
01:56:20
Speaker
Um, the other actor whose name is escaping. Thank you. Um, along with, you know, uh, Lynn Dunfam and, uh, Jean Yann, all takes place during the French Indochinese period. And Catherine de Nerve is the owner of this, you know, very successful rubber plantation. And then it gets into the, you know, the, uh,
01:56:43
Speaker
communist uprising, which turns into the end of Chinese war, which of course turns into the American Vietnam, but a tremendous movie, really a tremendous movie. And it's very interesting too, a little story about how it became the Oscar winner. There are always arguments in countries like France, which have very established film industries, which movie you're going to submit for consideration in the, what was then best foreign language is now the best international film.
01:57:07
Speaker
And at the time this year, because I remember I had lived in France just shortly before, there was a huge debate over whether or not it would be Indochine, which they considered the more commercial and international choice.
01:57:22
Speaker
or All the Mornings of the World, Toulais Martin de Mont, starring Gerard de Pardier, which is all about this very obscure quasi-like cello instrument, which is almost extinct now, almost no one uses it, I forget the exact name of it. It's like the violoncello or something like that. And it's a string instrument that very few pieces are performed anymore. And this movie is about
01:57:50
Speaker
That instrument and the drama that goes on with a master of it and all this stuff. Anyway, beautiful period film. But the soundtrack for that film, which is all of this Baroque string music, was like a number one album seller in France that year. And so a lot of people in the French film industry thought, oh, we got to submit this one. And the sensible people said, you realize this movie is popular with no one but people in France.
01:58:12
Speaker
It is so parochial. I get it that everyone in France loves this movie, but the Oscars will not love this movie. The Oscars will, however, love Indochine because it predicts the American quagmire in Vietnam. They'll connect to it in a more global sense. They prevailed, and sure enough, it won the Oscar. So, you know, that's the story of Indochine. It's a very, very interesting story. Let's see, Goliath by Frederic Tellier. Did you see Goliath?
01:58:39
Speaker
Can I see Goliath? Which one are we talking about? So Goliath by Frederick Tellier, a really, really tough cop story about this, about a schoolteacher whose husband is poisoned by pesticides, and it turns into kind of an anti chemical. Anyway, it's
01:59:06
Speaker
It's kind of what was that one that Julia Roberts made back in the day with where she's, you know, and and they're poisoning the water. It's Sharon Brock. Yeah. So it's like if you had Aaron Brockovich, but with just a a a grittier edge to it and it's like a much more, you know, I mean, it just it it's.
01:59:33
Speaker
It's almost like somewhere between an Aaron Brockovich and, how do I even put it? It's just a really interesting film. I mean, it's a little bit of a police thriller, but it's a little bit of an environmental thriller at the same time, if that makes sense. So it kind of splits the difference between the two. It was screened at the French Film Festival in the UK. I wish it had been screened at our Kolkawa, which is no longer called Kolkawa, but anyway.
02:00:00
Speaker
It's a really good film. Goliath, worth checking out. Gilles Lelouch, who I love as an actor, is just tremendous in it as well. Really, really a tough, tough good film. Oh, Leonore Will Never Die. Leonore Will Never Die. This is by Martica Ramirez Escobar.
02:00:18
Speaker
And it is a completely crazy comedy this is from music box films and it's a TV on a head this is funny it's the it's a Filipino comedy.
02:00:34
Speaker
And, you know, the Filipino industry is very, very small. But yeah, go ahead. If she's this filmmaker, she gets this TV that falls on her head. It's extremely hysterically funny. And she becomes this action hero. But she's like this old lady. And that's what makes it that's what makes it absolutely hysterical. So anyway, yeah, that was that was very, very good. Sometimes these Filipino comedies are really, really just very sharp.
02:01:02
Speaker
I got another one here by a filmmaker named Hadas Ben-Arroya, which is All Eyes Off Me. And this is an Israeli film from Film Movement, comes with a really, really great little short film on here called Daddy's Girl by Lena Hudson. Really, really terrific, which is an American film.
02:01:21
Speaker
American short film that won the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. So the short film, I would almost say, is reason enough to pick this up. It's terrific. Daddy's Girl is really, really good. But no, as an Israeli film, All Eyes Off Me is one of those great little gritty Israeli
02:01:42
Speaker
youth movies that deals with some of the tougher parts of Israeli culture that they may not necessarily want exported. There are unwanted pregnancies in Israel too. I know nobody wants to sort of admit that, but that happens there. All those things happen there. You have kids and young people who are getting themselves into trouble and life situations that
02:02:08
Speaker
that they do everywhere else too. And, you know, the awkwardness of those relationships, that's kind of the center of this. You've got, you know, all of that, all those awkward things and all of the sexual politics that go along with that are a part of Israeli culture as well. So all eyes off me is also well worth checking out.
02:02:31
Speaker
Let's see. Everything went fine. I'm going to make a mention of this because it's Cohen and I'm fond of everybody at Cohen, but also because it has Sophie Marceau in it. And she's ageless. Francois Ozone, who we always love, directed Sophie Marceau and Charlotte Rampling and André Du Soleil in this really, really fascinating movie. I love the movie. It's a beautiful movie.
02:02:56
Speaker
It's, you know, Ozone just never stops making great movies and he makes so many of them. I mean, it's just a family reconciliation drama, but everyone in it is just on their game, just so on their game. I mean, your thoughts.
02:03:11
Speaker
Well, this is one of those old guy who's a great guy and he has a 85 years old and he has a stroke and he has his daughter who's bananas about him and he wants her to help him finish it all and she's struggling with all of that. It's just a sort of beautiful movie and it sort of works through all of this through this excellent, excellent set of performances by just everybody.
02:03:37
Speaker
here. And it's sweet, and it's moving, and it doesn't particularly land on any answers. It's just a really, really neat movie. Charlotte Rampling's in it, and Sophie Marceau, as you say, and it's really, really good. Great performance by, what's his name? Andre, who plays the father? Dostoye? Dostoye. Dostoye. Wonderful. Yeah.
02:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. Let's see if I've got any others that I want to make mention of real fast, because we're getting close to time here. Just a few.
02:04:11
Speaker
quickly here. Philip Stossel's chess story, which is based on a novel by Stefan Zweig. This is also from film movement and takes place in Vienna in that tempestuous late 30s moment just before World War II when the Nazis have already executed the Anschluss and they've absorbed Austria and it is now under complete and total Nazi occupation and
02:04:36
Speaker
control, and it stars Oliver Masucci as a doctor who's about to just run, and he wants no more part of it, but then before he can get to America, you know, like they do in the end of The Sound of Music, right? He can't get out of the country, so he's arrested by the Gestapo. And he has knowledge that they want, and so now you get into this really interesting
02:05:06
Speaker
battle where they try to squeeze him in solitary confinement for everything that they can and he saves himself from the horror of that moment through chess and it's it's such a fascinating look not at chess but at how
02:05:29
Speaker
how people can find strategies for keeping themselves sane in insane moments and circumstances. It's really very, very well done. It's really very, very interesting. And, you know, Philip Stolzel is quite an accomplished filmmaker. So great cast, terrific production value, good. And it also has a bonus short film by Christophe Daniel and Mark Schmidaimi called Der Tunnel.
02:05:56
Speaker
meaning the tunnel in case you didn't know that. Interesting, interesting thing takes place on a train and through a train tunnel. Anyway, chess story on DVD, not on Blu-ray, worth checking out. And the Joseph Sarno Retrospect series from Film Movement Classics has a new double feature on it, moonlighting wives and the naked fog. Sarno, kind of an artsy exploitation figure.
02:06:22
Speaker
These are not great movies, but they are kind of salacious, but they're salacious and erotic in a very artful way, or at least a way that believes that it's artful. So this is strictly for fans of Sarno and his particular body of work, but Moonlighting Wives and the Naked Fong. Joe Santos. I love Joe. Joe is in a lot of Rockford files. He pops up with these movies.
02:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. Some interesting cast surprises there. I'll do these last three here. Eric Gravel made a movie called Full Time, which stars Laura Calamis as a single mother who is, and this is a thing in these French independent films, the travails of single moms and working moms. There are a number of these movies. It's almost like a sub-genre. Anyway,
02:07:19
Speaker
She's got this unbelievably horrible situation where she has to work and drop the kids off and do all of this stuff every single day. The film is really anxiety inducing. She's trying to get a new job. She's working at this food establishment, but she's trained for a better job. She's interviewing with corporations.
02:07:38
Speaker
but she has to somehow conform her kids schedule to the demands of the job is you gotta travel miss yes run back and pick up just gotta call her buddy who's pick my kids up i'm not gonna be back in time i just missed the train is all of this kind of anxiety inducing. Juggling every ball you can possibly imagine it's really really kind of just a grueling movie watch but.
02:07:57
Speaker
It's it's bracing and her performance law column me is amazing in this performance because somehow she just you know considering that they shot this thing you know when you shoot a movie. It's a pretty casually gather all right take one take two and then you have to bring the anxiety in the moment of the take.
02:08:16
Speaker
So that when it all edits together, it's seamless anxiety. So when you realize the extent of her performance, I mean, she must have just gone on the treadmill for like five minutes before every take because she never stops panting. It's a really, really good movie. Time is what it's called.
02:08:35
Speaker
And then Return to Seoul. This got a lot of love during our LAFCA voting as well. Were you a fan of this? I was a fan of the movies about this young woman who does exactly that. She was adopted out during that period when a lot of that was happening from South Korea, both of the Koreas, but certainly South Korea, to here in the United States and to families in Paris. So you would have these Korean children adopted out to these
02:09:03
Speaker
French parents, and she has this opportunity to return to Seoul, to go to Seoul for the first time since she was a baby actually, and happens to meet, isn't interested in meeting, but happens to meet
02:09:17
Speaker
her birth parents. And then this film, this film unfolds. And it's very interesting film, very powerful, very emotional. And it was a couple of really great performances, but particularly from Park Jim. They're really all really, really great. It's a very, very moving and interesting film because it becomes a film that you do not think that it sets out to be.
02:09:44
Speaker
It just sort of happens the way it sort of happens. It's very interesting. I liked it too. I liked it too. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time we were voting. It's one of those things that had to kind of grow on me. But anyway, yeah, it's out on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Classics. And then lastly, only on Blu-ray, also from Film Movement, but quite good.
02:10:10
Speaker
is another French film called A Bag of Marbles by Christian Dugay. Also, based on a novel, I also wish this was on Blu-ray because it has just absolutely beautiful period production value. Another World War II era thing. We're never going to run out of World War II era stories. But it takes place during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
02:10:33
Speaker
And it's one of these wonderful movies about how the innocence of childhood and the resilience of children can kind of survive under inclement conditions, not playing chess, not learning from chess, but just the strength of children, which we often underestimate. And this little 10-year-old kid who doesn't
02:10:56
Speaker
He, little 10-year-old Jewish kid, here's the premise here is that he, well, I won't say it. The bag of marbles is significant. I won't say what the bag of marbles represents and what goes on with it. But the bag of marbles is both a real story device and then also a symbol. And it's quite beautiful about how this family, how this precipitates this family's attempt to
02:11:21
Speaker
to escape and flee and get to what then is the area of Vichy France, which is the free zone of France that was still overseen by the Nazis, but was given a limited degree of self-rule and autonomy. Anyway, it's based on an autobiography by Joseph Jaffo, and it's really, it's a beautiful, beautiful movie. Deserves to be on Blu-ray. Please put this out on Blu-ray. Bag of
Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise
02:11:49
Speaker
marbles, I'm sure we'll get it at some point.
02:11:51
Speaker
Alright, with that, let's bring the show to a close. I'll try not to wait so many weeks until the next one. We had to get in the world. We had to get in the world and do some stuff. A lot of stuff. Still got a lot of stuff going on. More than I can possibly count. You got anything planned for the early part of the summer?
02:12:10
Speaker
Not a whole lot. May roam around back and forth. My niece is in New York, so I might go to where you just came from to visit with her. But, you know, kind of going to check out these big summer movies and see what's what. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? How's it feeling out there to you?
02:12:27
Speaker
Well, here's what's feeling to me. Funny, we talked about this on Film Week this week. You know, what are we looking at with the summer movies? You know, I think a lot of stuff is going to do well. I don't think anything is going to do as well as they think it will. Obviously, people are looking at Elemental from Pixar, they're looking at The Flash, those open on the same day. They're, you know, they're looking at a number of things that the Indiana Jones film, I don't think
02:12:53
Speaker
any of that is going to perform like people are thinking it will. But I'll tell you what I do think it will. Thinking or hoping. I think people are hoping. I think they're hoping that those movies will perform on blockbuster level like like previous films have. I don't think this summer is there yet. I don't think audiences are there yet. I don't I don't think the movies necessarily will warrant it. I think people are you know, the Spider-Man movie is going to open big.
02:13:21
Speaker
But I think people are a little fatigued with a lot of these things. But you know what last year taught me was there's one thing people are not fatigued with. And that is Mr. Tom Cruise. And for that reason, I think the next Mission Impossible, which is the first of a two part kind of concluding chapter to the Mission Impossible films.
02:13:40
Speaker
I think that thing is gonna blow the doors off of everything else this year. I have watched those trailers. I can't get enough of them. They get me so excited. And, you know, he rode a motorcycle off a cliff, bro. He rode a motorcycle off a cliff. That's not CGI. That's Tom Cruise sitting around going, what have I not done in my career yet? I'm 60. What's on my bucket list? I know. I'll ride a motorcycle off a cliff.
02:14:06
Speaker
You know, that's that's a little crazy. But you know, I do think that that what they have planned in that film is something amazing. And if you read that story, which I think was in the Atlantic.
02:14:19
Speaker
about how the pandemic, remember Tom Cruise lost his mind while on set shooting this thing, yelling at everybody, you know, wear your masks and you know, we're good. Because everybody was kind of getting down on him for being kind of, well, look, he's the producer of a movie which was budgeted at like $200 million and wound up costing about $300 million. And all of that money is on his shoulders. And the insurance company is all over this.
02:14:47
Speaker
Everybody has something riding on this. You gotta understand, that's not a prima donna star losing his mind. That is a responsible producer insisting that people be professional and not put that production at risk for everyone else. And he quite rightly raised the point. This movie needs to happen. It can't get shut down.
02:15:08
Speaker
because not because of me, not because I need all this money, but because all of these people here, these electricians and these gaffers and these grips, these are working class people who need this movie to happen during the pandemic to be able to pay their mortgages. That's a good man. That's a responsible filmmaker. And for that reason, I have every hope that this movie over budget and over schedule as it was all over the globe, I think it's going to blow up and it deserves to. I'm rooting for it.
02:15:37
Speaker
I'm rooting for it, too. Look, he's the CEO of what I like to call one of the industries of Hollywood. We think of Hollywood as an industry. Hollywood is an industry. But within the Hollywood industry, there are industries, and these industries of Hollywood include that Mr. Impossible friend, you know, a 20, 25 year old. There are whole companies that come and go in less than 25 years. You know, nobody buys a blackberry anymore.
02:16:04
Speaker
But there are industries of Hollywood, that fast and furious set of films, just to argue, that have done exactly what you said and thunking generally at the top of these industries of Hollywood, is a CEO. And Tom Cruise is one of those CEOs. Yep, indeed. Absolutely indeed. All right. With that, we are done. And we will catch you guys on the next show.
02:19:58
Speaker
you