The Patreon episode intended for last month will be released in four parts.
These links will be updated as the episodes are published in mid-December...
Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (capsules on Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, The Swimmer, Dr. Strangelove, Dog Day Afternoon, The Muppet Movie, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Witches, Heat, The Blair Witch Project, Edward Scissorhands, Election, Groundhog Day, Total Recall, Dick Tracy, archive reading of To Kill a Mockingbird + feedback/media/work updates & more)
(readings of Breathless, The Wild Bunch, Cleo From 5 to 7, Before the Revolution, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Loves of a Blonde, Primary, 4 Days in November, Dear Brigitte, The Trip, Greetings & the Olympics + 60s/00s crossover w/ The Life & Death of Peter Sellers)
Southland Tales w/ guest Andrew Cook (w/ his feedback & my capsule on 300 + capsules on No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, A History of Violence, Brokeback Mountain, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Darjeeling Limited, The Dark Knight, Gangs of New York, 500 Days of Summer, The Ring, Donnie Darko, The Box & archive reading of my reflections on the decade)
(readings of 25th Hour, Inland Empire, earlier reviews of The Dark Knight & 500 Days of Summer, You Can Count on Me, Funny Ha Ha, Thirteen, The World, Iraq in Fragments, The Story of Marie and Julien, The Girlfriend Experience & the Olympics)
Introducing the episodes
As we spread out from August's focus on the eighties, moving into earlier and later decades in each direction, we reach two eras forty years apart. Yet they make the perfect pairing in my mind, in part because I was obsessed with the sixties during the zeroes, a time I experienced firsthand and which shaped my perceptions of the world for better or worse. In a way, these decades are a natural fit at least from the American perspective: both haunted by national traumas (Kennedy's assassination and 9/11), both dogged by quagmire wars of choice (Vietnam and Iraq in particular), both racked by technological transformations which troubled as well as enticed (inward for the age of the iPhone, outward for the epoch of the moonshot). But while the sixties gave birth to a vibrant youth counterculture and political resistance, the zeroes often felt like a dead zone to those of us living through it. This was part of my hunger for sixties media; I sought work which excavated and explored the turbulence that I could feel under the surface in the cold, sterile, repressed Bush era but which somehow always remained locked off. These were periods of deep societal alienation which expressed that alienation in very different ways.
With all that in mind what better film to focus on than Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, the sprawling, notorious follow-up to his cult classic Donnie Darko (which I discuss more briefly in this podcast, along with its own deep if different zeroes zeitgeist connections)? Set in an alternate version of 2008 but shot in 2006, it imagines an America whose War of Terror tremors have caught up with a culture that just wanted to go shopping - transforming the country into a manic police state with an active resistance and wild sci-fi developments emerging virtually overnight. Ambivalent after my first viewing years ago, I invited Andrew Cook as a return guest (after our Eyes Wide Shut episode); he's a big Kelly fan who knows the film inside and out which made for an interesting dynamic as I tried to wrap my head around it. This is one of the longest film in focus podcast segments I've ever recorded, running over an hour as we dig into both the film and the era it depicts...and re-invents as something else (perhaps the Trump era to come). This also makes for an offbeat but appropriate pairing with my sixties film in focus, the very different avant-garde apocalypse of Weekend. Here Jean-Luc Godard reaches the apotheosis and negation of his radical sprint through the decade, anticipating the chaos of May '68 months ahead of time. The selection, in which I wrestle with a film that converted me to Godard when I first saw it but which I had more trouble with this time, is one more tribute to the legendary director who passed away in September (I also focused on his eighties film Hail Mary in a previous episode).
Elsewhere, Andrew's contributions continue when I read his in-depth feedback (alongside my own short reflection) on Zack Snyder's 300, an iconic, and much more popular, film by another of his favorite directors. In capsule form, I run through a number of memorable zeroes films alongside a smaller selection of sixties classics, wrap up my viewings of the nineties (alongside a pair of quite different seventies classics), and offer updates on my recent intake and output in several mediums. Most notably, in addition to a couple archive pieces that I wanted to center and share on their own - a meditation on the power and limitation of To Kill a Mockingbird and a broad polemic expressing my frustration with the state of American culture in the Bush era - I'm also gathering a number of pieces focused on each decade into two public archive episodes, offering a survey not just of zeroes and sixties cinema, but my own perception of them at various points.
As noted in the introduction to this podcast, I am planning to wrap up this podcast approach - combining updates with film reviews and other topics in a main montly episode - after reaching #100 in February. Though there's still much content to come in those months, I can't think of a better way to begin my ending than with this particular episode(s).
Meanwhile, I've continued chugging along with my advance character studies every month - although I need to pick up the pace if I want to have the necessary backlog ready at year's end for a 2023 public debut. November's trio includes one of the third season's scummiest characters alongside one of its most heroic. Unlock these pieces for $1/month to learn more...
(become a patron to discover their identities)
And Patreon also housed my $5/month tier reward, the second part of my discussion with the director of The People's Joker (as discussed in last week's cross-post). Southland Tales comes up again too!
Podcast Line-Ups for...
