This article previously featured in The Tribune Weekend section on March 24.
You know that feeling when you come out
of a cinema and you are absolutely bursting to know what others
thought about the movie? This week's podcasts all look at shows
focusing on film – both good and bad.
"...infantile, crass, adolescent, stupid, chauvinistic twaddle..." Well, I liked it.
Kermode and Mayo's Film Review
Mark Kermode is the best film reviewer
working today – and his regular BBC show with Simon Mayo is always
a treat. What makes it so good are two things – first, the
unvarnished nature of the reviews, Kermode particularly never holds
back; and second, the sound of two people who really know their stuff
but can also venture beyond that range to chat and have good fun.
Kermode is the reviewer who described Entourage as a “foul,
soul-sucking, horrible vacuum of vile emptiness” or who dismissed
Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 as “a petrified
forest of woodenness”. Even when he's attacking films you like –
such as Sucker Punch which I loved – you can't get mad when he
rants about it being “boring, ploddingly put together, infantile,
crass, adolescent, stupid, chauvinistic twaddle”. Would that all
filmmakers were as passionate as he about the things they produce.
If you're going to ponder why the movie Brazil is named as it is, you might take the time to find out what director Terry Gilliam has to say - he said it was inspired by the grim greyness of Port Talbot, where iron ore dust covers everything, and he had this image of a little grey man in a grey world listening to escapist music such as the song of the title, Brazil.
Battleship Pretension
This podcast really irked me. Hosted by
Tyler Smith and David Bax, Battleship Pretension is part film review
website and part film podcast – and it is the podcast that really
irritated. The show sometimes runs through various films, picking out
films you may have missed or focusing on a particular artist. The
latest show looks at titles of films – and as a podcast, it's
really flimsy. First of all, it takes a good 20 minutes or so to get
round to the actual subject.
Now Smith and Bax are pleasant hosts, so
that's no big deal, but when we get to the meat, it seems there's
been nothing in the way of research done and it's just the two of
them listing off the titles they liked. They start with Legend, and
it takes quite a while for them to make clear that they're talking
about the recent Tom Hardy movie about London gangsters the Kray
twins, and not the 1980s Tom Cruise fantasy flick. Then they spin
through the movie names they really liked – one favourite
apparently being The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which it's true
is a great title, and a great movie, but the chap saying he loves the
title was never moved enough by it to actually watch the film, which
means that as something to entice the viewer in, it completely failed
to do the job. They also ponder why certain films were named as they
are, musing for example why Brazil is called what it is... as if that
question hasn't been answered by Terry Gilliam in some of his many
interviews about that movie. In the end, the show amounts to little
more than a Beavis and Butthead-esque scene of two guys muttering to
each other “cool name” without any attempt to get deeper than
that.
Website:
http://battleshippretension.com/
There has been a remake of Fail Safe, with George Clooney, but that is essentially a love note to the stark, brutal original, an exercise of terror in minimalism, starring Henry Fonda as the president faced with the worst decisions in history and yet bringing with it a haunted nobility.
The Canon
Far, far better – in fact, I would
say essential listening for film fans, is The Canon. Film critics
Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson pick out a movie each week and analyse
it in scorching detail before deciding whether or not the movie
belongs in the canon of great films to live on for all time. Just
looking at the list of movies covered by the episodes is to see
greatness – recent shows include the likes of Oldboy, Broadcast
News, Working Girl, O Brother Where Art Thou and much more. The
latest show focuses on one of my favourite movies – Fail Safe, a
grim slice of Cold War paranoia directed by Sidney Lumet and starring
Henry Fonda as a haunted US President faced with the worst of
decisions. The obvious comparison – which the hosts note – is to
the absurdity of Dr Strangelove, and they carefully point out how
Fail Safe covers a lot of the same issues as Strangelove, it does so
in a very sober, realistic world where reasonable people try to make
sensible decisions, but it still ends up in nuclear disaster. The
hosts really know their stuff, and argue fiercely for what they
believe. Do they add Fail Safe to the canon? That, I won't spoil.
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