Let's Finally Watch This

It's 2004. Teen movies exploded as a genre in the 1980s and have continued largely unabated since. With Mean Girls , comedian Tina Fey helps bring forth a teen movie that resonates with its viewers, both reflecting high school girl culture and critiquing it. The plot follows previously homeschooled Cady Heron's involvement in the popular girl clique "The Plastics," her slow transformation into a P...

It's 1994. The top-grossing film is The Lion King , but right after that is Forrest Gump . Gump, played by Tom Hanks, wins audiences with his memorable phrases ("Life is like a box of chocolates"), his optimistic outlook, and his "right place, right time" escapades through American history. It's a comedy, a drama, and a movie that left its mark on culture. What Forrest Gump offers casual movie fan...

It's 1984. A glance at the year's top ten grossing movies shows we're deep into the blockbuster era. Director James Cameron makes his mark on science fiction with The Terminator , an action-thriller that combines the relentless threat of a horror movie with a time travel backstory--and it captured the culture's imagination. It's a film that even if you haven't seen it, you know about Skynet, the T...

It's 1974. It's the height of New Hollywood, and Chinatown , directed by Roman Polanski, is a quintessential example of the darker subject matter and bleak outlook often associated with the movement. Considered one of the greatest movies of all time, this neo-noir crime drama follows private investigator J. J. Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, as he digs into a world of government corruption, murd...

It's 1964. The Golden Age of Hollywood is over, and New Hollywood is about to begin, an era known for anti-heroes, changing morality, and less traditional plots. At the same time, the spaghetti western emerges, ushered in with A Fistful of Dollars , starring Clint Eastwood as the "man with no name" and directed by Sergio Leone. This is a different type of western, a grittier, less black-and-white...

It's 1954. The American occupation of Japan had ended a few years before, and Japanese cinema is beginning to make an impression on the world scene. Released the same year as the original Godzilla , Seven Samurai is an essential classic from director Akira Kurosawa. Poverty-stricken farmers threatened with bandits decide to hire samurai to protect their village. This seemingly simple plot begins a...

It's 1944. The Second World War is still raging, and the two top grossing films are musicals. However, Double Indemnity , directed by Billy Wilder, is a different sort of film, a seminal example of film noir. It begins with insurance salesman Henry Neff confessing to a murder, and it follows his involvement with unhappy wife Phyllis Dietrichson and their plan to kill her husband and collect the in...

It's 1934. It Happened One Night , a film nobody thought would do particularly well, sneaks in just before the Hays Code is enforced. The movie, directed by Frank Capra, follows pampered heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) as she tries to escape her controlling father and join her fiancé. She meets with ex-reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) on the bus to New York. Hijinks ensue, and love blo...

It's 1924. Buster Keaton, one of the cinematic greats of this era, is at the height of his career. Called "The Great Stone Face" due to his distinctive stoical expression, Keaton's films include dangerous physical stunts and impeccable comedic timing. Sherlock Jr. is no exception. Keaton plays a movie projectionist who hopes to become a great detective as he tries to untangle mysteries and win the...

It's 1914. Out of Italy comes what many classify as the first film epic. In this silent film, the girl Cabiria survives an eruption from Etna, is kidnapped by pirates, nearly offered to the god Moloch, and spends years as a servant. Meanwhile, Roman soldier Fulvius Axilla and his Samson-like servant Maciste cross paths with Cabiria and their destinies are entwined as Rome wars against Carthage and...

It's 1904. French director Georges Méliès is at the height of his career, creating fantastic, creative movies in the early days of cinema. Like his earlier A Trip to the Moon, this film is about a fantastic voyage, but as the Institute of Incoherent Geography visits mountain villagers, the surface of the sun, and monster-infested oceans, it is in some ways a more frantic and adventurous movie. Wha...

It's time to wrap up another season of Let's Finally Watch This . We start by making a few corrections, filling in a few gaps in this season's discussion of film exhibition, and discussing how film continues to change up to the present. But, then, the heart of the episode--our Ranking of Essentialness for this season's movies! We also share our personal favorites from the season. Thanks for joinin...

It's 2013. The top-grossing film of the year is Disney's Frozen , but that's not the only important fairy-tale based animated film released this year. In Japan, Studio Ghibli released The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, a beautiful, compelling retelling of the Japanese folk tale, "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter." It's a film that lets us experience Japanese history, Japanese animation, and the creativ...

It's 2003--and it's the holidays. Many of our standard Christmas movies were released in the 1940s, but since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of Christmas movies, creating a number of new holiday classics. Among those is Elf , directed by Jon Favreau, a movie nearly everyone has seen, except for Let's Finally Watch This co-host Timothy Deal. What Elf offers casual movie fans who have always...

It's 1993. Multiplexes have arrived, and there are plenty of movies to show— Jurassic Park, Tombstone, Schindler's List , the original Super Mario Bros. movie.... Okay, not all are great, but it was a time of the blockbuster. In the middle of this comes Sleepless in Seattle , an iconic romantic comedy with the now-classic pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. What Sleepless in Seattle offers casual m...

It's 1983. The blockbuster age has started, and the top-grossing movie of the year is The Return of the Jedi . However, another pivotal space movie is also released this year, The Right Stuff , a film examining the early years of the space race. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe , The Right Stuff follows the journey of the Mercury Seven as they undergo grueling trials and first-of-their-kind flights....

It's 1973. We're in the middle of the New Hollywood era, when movies tended to be more uncoventional and often darker. However, some movies are still all-around fun . The Sting , an Academy Award-winning caper movie featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, dives into the underworld of the 1930s with effortless skill. Two con men attempt to take revenge on a crime boss by swindling him out of his...

It's 1963. We're crossing the Atlantic to visit Italy, a preeminent filmmaking country. In the 1950s-60s, Italian film was largely known for Commedia all’Italiana (“Comedy in the Italian way”), spaghetti Westerns (westerns made in Italy), and Post-Neorealism (a movement moving past realism to explore existential themes). Famed Italian director Frederico Fellini pushes past this last in his critica...

It's 1953. We're in the middle of the Golden Age of Hollywood; we're also in the pinnacle decades of the western, a truly American plot. Westerns have been around almost as long as movies (see The Great Train Robbery ) . Shane is an essential and quinessential example of the genre. It tells the story of homesteaders in an isolated Wyoming valley defending their land from land-hungry ranchers, with...

It's 1943. World War 2 is raging, and nearly all the movies are war-related in some way. Into this comes a story of evil visiting idyllic small-town America. The director is the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock; and the movie, Shadow of a Doubt , is not as flashy or as well-known as some of his others, but it is a compact, character-driven story. Hitchcock himself said several times that it wa...

It's 1933. It's the Depression, and audiences want movies that don't sugarcoat the truth, but they want escapism too. That means it's time for a new type of musical. Hollywood released more than 100 musical films only three years earlier in 1930, but by 1933, they had largely disappeared as a genre. Choreographer Busby Berkeley helped revive them with several films, including this episode's movie,...

It's 1923. The building blocks of classic Hollywood are coming together and the people are enjoying silent movies in their movie palaces in the years following the Great War. Director Cecil B. DeMille, known for the biblical epic 1956 movie The Ten Commandments , releases a movie with the same title in this year. What this first The Ten Commandments offers casual movie fans who have always meant t...

It’s 1913. The movie industry is starting to move from the East Coast out west, and nickelodeons are a growing staple of American society. Out of those burgeoning years of the movie industry and newly minted movie stars come Mabel Normand, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and the Keystone Cops, all of whom are involved in this episode's short, Mabel's New Hero. What  Mabel's New Hero  offers cas...

Welcome to season 2 of Let's Finally Watch This, a podcast for casual movie fans who have always meant to watch classic movies. Once again we're traveling through the century, highlighting one movie from each decade from 1903 to 2013. In each episode, we'll highlight what's going on film history, how the chosen film affected future movies, and, of course, whether the movie itself is actually worth...

It's the end of Season 1. It's been a trip. Now it's time to look back at the constants and changes that accompanied a century of film. We'll also give our own Ranking of Essentialness for this season's movies. We've enjoyed this trip through cinema history, and we hope you've enjoyed this initial season of Let's FInally Watch This as well. See you next year!