BP Movie Journal 8/11/16

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6 Responses

  1. Juhani Kenttä says:

    Oh wow, I just heard about Under the Sun of Satan for the first time yesterday and it sounded immensely interesting to me.

    On another note, I listened to your guys 52th episode yesterday because I felt like revisiting that after watching Videodrome again. When Tyler said “that [Facebook page] seems to be catching on a great deal more than our MySpace”, I almost felt like I was watching Back to the Future. But of course in true BttF fashion it would have been the other way around.

  2. Juhani Kenttä says:

    Oh God, I just wrote 52th on my last comment. Let it be known that I do know how to write 52nd, Finnish though I might be.

  3. Marko says:

    The phrase “big world destroying Macguffin”, just brought to mind the image of a city being under attack by a giant Maltese Falcon.

  4. David says:

    David, I saw Return of the Living Dead II, but not the first one, and I kind of got the same vibe from it that you did from #1. That it is doing some comedy, and is being horror, is evident, but doesn’t really make much of an impact. What I remember most is that it directly parodied the Thriller video, which was both funny and eyeroll-obvious at the same time, and that James Karen and his counterpart reappear, as humans, and they undergo the same story arc they did in the first one, occasionally commenting about how familiar it all seemed. So in movie 2 James Karen referenced movie 1.

  5. Wood's Hole Oceanographic says:

    You fellers have a keen eye for genre and the phases that cinema goes through. How many years do you think it will be before you can look back at America’s obsession with superheroes, in comics and movies, and begin to judge it as the weird mass psychosis it seems to be. God knows the old world has its artistic troughs and blind spots but one would hope America could find something more interesting to consume it.

  6. David says:

    Since you asked, I’ll share about the commentaries. I didn’t go for them initially because of the particular film sets. I love Lord of the Rings, but have no use for the basically incomplete theatrical cuts. I love two ALIEN movies, and actively dislike the other two. I’m okay with horror, and it was an almost perfect set except for what’s Child’s Play doing there and where is Nightmare on Elm Street. Those weren’t drawbacks, it’s just that they didn’t trigger my completist impulse. Also I was still discovering you guys as those came out. By the time you offered the year end “Everything so far for 30 bucks,” I did know your voices enough for that and the discount to be well worth a little risk. I’ve listened to all of those sets except Alien 4, and Child’s Play and whatever follows it, mainly because I keep forgetting I didn’t get to them.

    You asked about slap-happiness. It’s fine! When humor comes in naturally because you’re movie fans who happen to be funny (that’s true of both you two and your guests) it’s great. I’m interested in movies, and who doesn’t like to smile?

    When there’s a deliberate, more concerted effort to change the focus from talking about the movie to using the situation to just fuel comedy, it occasionally gets kind of frustrating. There is often someone, or some topic, that has been on a roll with interestingness, and then a perceived need for a new comic tone almost combats it, and sometimes derails it. Since the movie keeps playing, a nice thread then just gets lost. It’s a completely understandable phenomenon, because when comedians come into a place, they generally try to bring some of their atmosphere to the room right away. I imagine they do it at the very least because it’s just expected. They’re being accommodating regarding what people always seem to want them to do. I am just guessing there.

    Maybe that’s the real drawback for me, not humor, but the 30-40 minute swap-off, the room reset. Part of it is that I know what I’m missing. Josh Fadem can be funny, and that’s great, but once he gets really into the movie talk and it seems like he’s no longer concerned about ‘being on stage’, so to speak, he’s fascinating as hell. He’s able to bring a lot of applicable film history that it seems like he’s just absorbed over time. I hate to lose that. He’s one of your best guests at embodying a lack of recency bias too, which is really refreshing. I think your comedy oriented guests enjoy engaging in film talk as much as they do having to run a room for a while, and for my part, that’s what I love the most. They’re funny anyway. But even with just film people, not those who are also known for comedy, coming in at the hour mark, they still have to orient themselves, or be brought into the current topic.

    So I’m really glad you watched documentaries for the zombies thing, Tyler, because it means you’ll have good stuff to share, and my knowledge of the zombie genre is probably pretty pedestrian, but to be honest, I expect to be bothered every now and then as the room rises back up to a quips level, just when people were already in the mode of being both funny and film-interesting. My hope for these was that the film talk would be essential, and the comedy natural, because of who’s there. When comedy becomes essential, the film talk sometimes just gets eaten.

    Look, this is your thing, and you do it your way because of reasons, and I don’t need to know those. You’re the ones making or losing the money, and you’re the ones who have to run it. Would I rather each of your sets of guests just see a whole film together, and be more able to stay in the film talk zone? Sure, but I also don’t have 5 extra mics and a sound board to send you, so it’s dismissively easy for me to armchair direct. It’s true that for this reason, and because I only really like Batman Returns, I haven’t yet gotten the newer commentaries. On the other hand, it’s probably the first perfect set of films from my perspective, so I’ll probably grab these zombie ones, but you asked, and I honestly think that something like this happened for me with each film, the sense of waiting for things to turn back to the movie, so I’m passing that perspective on, for whatever it’s worth.

    Take care, guys.

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