Patreon update #50: Requiem for a Dream (+ The Blue Rose Magazine in 2018, The Green Book, A Charlie Brown Christmas/It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, Sherilyn Fenn in Twin Peaks season 3, who is Red? & more) and preview of Mary Shelley review

Christmastime is (almost) here with the first of two archive pieces paying tribute to the holiday. This one doubles up a couple Charlie Brown Christmas specials, one from the sixties and one from the nineties, to find out what they tell us about changes in both pop culture and Peanuts canon across the years. I also reflect on Requiem for a Dream over the span of nearly two decades to revisit the early millennium's zeitgeist, much as I did with The Social Network last week. To continue this running theme of cinematic historiography, yesterday's biweekly preview explores how a Mary Shelley biopic straddles the eras of Reason and Romance (which bleed together more than we sometimes remember).

For "Twin Peaks Reflections" I survey a great year of issues for The Blue Rose magazine (including an amazing interview with Sheryl Lee), other topics include The Green Book and Richard Ojeda, and as always there's a ton of compelling listener feedback on Twin Peaks (this week perhaps a bit more than usual).

Stay tuned for one more podcast in a couple days, my last of the year before I take a revamped approach in 2019.

Mary Shelley, 2017, dir. Haifaa al-Mansour (December "See the Future" Preview #1 - 2nd tier reward)

Episode 49: Requiem for a Dream (+ The Blue Rose Magazine in 2018, The Green Book, A Charlie Brown Christmas/It's Christmastime Again Charlie Brown, Sherilyn Fenn in season 3, who is Red? & more)

Line-up for Episode 49

INTRO

WEEKLY UPDATE/Patreon: 2nd tier biweekly preview - Mary Shelley

TWIN PEAKS REFLECTIONS: The Blue Rose Magazine in 2018

FILM IN FOCUS: Requiem for a Dream

OTHER TOPICS: The Green Book, Conspiracy Theory, Richard Ojeda, podcast recommendation

LISTENER FEEDBACK: The Owl Cave ring and Annie's nurse, Sherilyn Fenn in season 3, did Lynch care about the Audrey/Cooper romance?, who is Red?, is Audrey dead?, "Mike is the man" & Halloween

OPENING THE ARCHIVE: A Charlie Brown Christmas & It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown

OUTRO

BECOME A PATRON

That Total Film 1964 - 1966 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 16

The sixteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 16: That Total Film"

That Total Film

The films in today's chapter form an entity thrilling, melancholy, beautiful, and tragic - the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. When asked to write about Fists in the Pocket forty years later, Jean-Pierre Gorin noted ruefully, "every scene ... with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in." Oh, you can see that all over the place today, in a chapter that - not accidentally - finds itself exactly halfway through the series, to the point where the closing clip is even divided in two, to be concluded tomorrow.

Good Grief and Merry Christmas

A Visual Tribute to A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Part 3 of 3 visual tributes - Merry Christmas!

A Charlie Brown Christmas & It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown!

Admittedly, it isn't exactly "Christmastime again." Not even if you count all twelve days (I think they start after, not before, the 25th, right?). I had originally hoped to get this post in under the Yuletide gun but eventually let the festive dancing of Fred and Ginger (that's a Christmas-sounding name, isn't it?) suffice as my last official post of the year. But as I like to review new additions to my home DVD collection, I only put my thoughts on the Charlie Brown twofer (which I bought on the eve of Christmas Eve) on the backburner, instead of in the trash. Now that The Dancing Image is sputtering back to life after a long holiday-inspired break, the time has come to put pen to paper, so to speak. If Charlie Brown's original Christmas is your thing (and it is for all of us) check out these three good write-ups on the 1965 TV special: Screen Savour's historical, Filmicability's personal, and Bright Lights After Dark's religio-cultural. As for myself, what fascinated me most about my new DVD was the contrast between the classic '65 special and the rather paltry "sequel", which was aired in 1992.

The differences between the two films are not only aesthetic and thematic but cultural-historical, personal (as far as Charles Schulz is concerned), and even musical. First, the music. Vince Guaraldi is credited with the score for both holiday specials, but the '92 music was recorded and arranged by David Benoit, whose taste seems to run more in the smooth jazz direction. Whereas Guaraldi's original soundtrack (which may be both the best original soundtrack and best Christmas album of all time) was spare, melancholy, lightly joyful, and quietly warm, Benoit ladles on the sax styling and keyboard backdrop and the result is more akin to a jaunt through the shopping mall, muzak playing on the sound system, than it is to hovering around the stage in a beat-up little jazz club in a small, sleeping city on the eve of Christmas (the effect of the original).