There's Sometimes a Buggy

Welcome to our brand-new movie podcast! In this episode, Elise Moore and David Fiore ramble on about their respective lives cinematic and present impressionistic lists of their characteristic enthusiasms. Last, but not least, we sketch out the shape of 'casts to come. Among the topics covered here:  our not being a David Lynch podcast, RCA Videodiscs, Canadians watching New England PBS stations, X...

In the second half of our Dorothy Arzner marathon, we cover the remaining entries in the recent TIFF retrospective ( Christopher Strong , Merrily We Go To Hell , and Dance, Girl, Dance ), along with a pair of items we scrounged up on our own ( Nana and Craig's Wife ). Dance, Girl, Dance is justifiably considered the director's summative work, gathering all of Arzner's countervailing preoccupations...

Inspired by TIFF Lightbox's Winter 2019 Dorothy Arzner retrospective, Elise and Dave dive into a lengthy discussion of this absurdly neglected auteur's career and context. On leg one of the journey, we examine WORKING GIRLS (1931), THE WILD PARTY (1929) and THE BRIDE WORE RED (1937), zeroing in on the director's penchant for dichotomously paired protagonists (Judith Wood/Dorothy Hall; Clara Bow/Sh...

Happy holidays from Elise and Dave! This year's X-Mas offering was inspired by Elise's new piece in  The Threepenny Review   and by Dave's lifelong obsession with New England Transcendentalism.  See you in 2019!

Join Elise Moore and David Fiore as they gear up for David Lynch's imminent return to the Pacific Northwest with an extended discussion of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me . We'll be covering every episode of the show's much-anticipated third season, and we're more excited than ever after our most recent viewing of the director's divisive prequel/coda. Powered by Sheryl Lee's galvanizing performance,...

Finally, the long-promised amnesia episode! If you haven't forgotten. (BOOM! Amnesia joke right away.) Elise and Dave look at Canadian cult film Archangel (1990) (the one not with Daniel Craig in it) by Guy Maddin and one of its sources, another amnesiac soldier film, Mervyn LeRoy's classical Hollywood melodrama Random Harvest (1942). We make our case for why amnesia movies in general, and these t...

Returning to you after the most re-recordings since our PRIMER episode plus technical difficulties with the computer, Dave and Elise take on a movie that gets better when you think about it, TRIANGLE (2009) and one that gets worse with thought, TIME LAPSE (2014). Elise gets excited about fan theories about Triangle; Dave is unimpressed. But Elise and Dave agree, re: TIME LAPSE, that you shouldn't...

Dave and Elise examine an unlikely cinematic duo, Our Town (1940), Sam Wood's adaptation of Thornton Wilder's experimental Pulitzer-winning play about turn-of-the-19th-century American small town life, death, time, and family, and Synecdoche, New York ( 2008), Charlie Kaufman's experimental movie about a theatre director in a small American city (Philip Seymour Hoffman), death, time, and family. W...

Elise and Dave try to philosophically and narratively untangle two precog movies more-or-less based on Philip K. Dick tales, Minority Report (2002) directed by Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, and Next (2007), starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Lee Tamahori. We discuss how Minority Report has been politically castrated (i.e. de-Dicked) for the sake of Spielberg feel-goodism, and debate how mu...

It's an episode of complicated plots. Dave and Elise struggle to understand the plot and world of Toni Dove's visually and formally inventive sci-fi noir SPECTROPIA (2006), and admire the plot of John Dahl's forgotten UNFORGETTABLE (1996). Elise explains why Ray Liotta is androgynous. Dave defends John Dahl's directorial distinctiveness. Anti-capitalist 1930s toasters anachronistically quote DETOU...

Elise decides Alan Moore is the problem with Zack Snyder's WATCHMEN, defends BATMAN V SUPERMAN as "Romantic art." Dave shouts about Kant, explains how both Snyder and Moore get superheroes wrong, while inveighing against some guy named Alex Ross. And much, much more in this epic discussion of a couple of movies they didn't really like, that don't have much to do with time travel, for your mental d...

"I want to drive a truck straight through her head": it's the Valentine's Day episode at AKoD! Where we're taking a look at a couple of under-appreciated movies about couples getting a second chance at happiness through a strange twist of fate, starring women struggling with unfortunate of-the-moment haircuts, three names, and trying to get credit for being able to both act and sing. We admire the...

David and Elise contemplate the sweater chauvinism of Bing Crosby, the charms of William Bendix, whether or not women on the internet ogling Gene Kelly's butt is categorically different from objectionable objectification, the timeline of Scottish witch trials, and the pros and cons of purity-obsessed utopias that don't allow people to go to university in this episode devoted to two time-travel Tec...

Dave and Elise go on a most excellent adventure... that's right, it's BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), paired with Terry Gilliam's TIME BANDITS (1981), two comedic tours through history. But do these films have anything interesting to say about history? How about modern life? Why does everyone have it in for Napoleon? Why would Joan of Arc want to lead a jazzercise class? Why is Sean Con...

  In our second holiday 'cast, we look at a couple of movies influenced by the classic tales/tellings of last year's episode. First, SCROOGED (1988) gives a Reagan-era spin to the Dickens standard, and also prepares Bill Murray for GROUNDHOG DAY (a great time-travel comedy that we've already 'casted about). Then, THE FAMILY MAN (2000) stars a shockingly subdued Nicholas Cage in a movie that nods t...

Elise and Dave consider a narratively complex alternate reality extravaganza, MR. NOBODY (2009), and a time travel movie with a complex, A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP (2011). Each film offers a different answer to the question: are we doomed by our radical freedom of choice or our radical lack of it? Elise gets out the knives. Dave soft-pedals frantically. In the feedback section, we take David O. Selzni...

Elise and Dave look at two late-90s, low-budget, little-known indies, the high- concept/single-gag (depending on your point of view) MAN OF THE CENTURY (1999) and the ahead-of-its time (linearly speaking) THE STICKY FINGERS OF TIME (1997). Frank Gorshin's presence in the former film occasions autobiographical digressions about your hosts' abortive adventures in screenwriting. Dave inexplicably neg...

Dave and Elise are assigned to guide you through the "bloody-minded impenetrability" (in the words of THE SCI-FI FREAK SITE) of obscure, no-budget British TV cult show SAPPHIRE AND STEEL (1979-82), about the strangest time police possibly in the history of the concept. In "Assignment 1," sometimes known as "Escape Through a Crack in Time," a cozy, isolated bourgeois household is invaded by the hor...

Dave and Elise concentrate on one movie, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014), in this episode, in order to leave time for grappling with mixed feelings about the cinematic legacy of superhero comics. We even went back to the original texts (Uncanny X-Men #141 and #142), just to get into the proper spirit of this thing. Then it's on to Bryan Singer's opus. Is Peter Dinklage's performance as Bolivar T...

In this “sampler” 'cast we consider three classic-series TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, “Walking Distance,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” and “The Trouble with Templeton,” which cover a range of narrative possibilities for time-travel scenarios of longing for the personal or cultural past. But what does it have to do with Freud's death drive? Or Leslie Fiedler's interpretation of American masculinity in LOVE A...

David and Elise nearly expire on a ludicrously hot Labour Day in order to record our labour of love and bring you our discussion of two spec-fic curiosities from Hollywood's classical era that confirm last episode's Lynchapalooza as central to our topic. We propose DANGEROUS CORNER (1934), based on a play by "time-slip" dramatist and theorist J. B. Priestley, as the missing link between Henry Jame...

A very special extravaganza in which Dave and Elise return to themes of temporal strangeness, alternate universes, transdimensional beings, and doubling in David Lynch. We contemplate how Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE (2006) is like Scott Bakula in QUANTUM LEAP, and how the final section of MULHOLLAND DR (2001) might be like the alternate universe in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. If you are a person who ca...

In this episode of the podcast, Dave and Elise contemplate two movies about time travel and the military, one of which takes us from WWII to the 80s (THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT, 1984) and the other in the opposite direction (THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, 1980). We contemplate Nancy Allen's power to soothe Dave and Martin Sheen's weird second-hand Stockholm effect on Elise, and prove not to know such basic...

What happens when Jane Austen meets Back to the Future? In LOST IN AUSTEN (2008), a modern-day Pride and Prejudice fan travels to the fictional past and tries not to screw up the canon pairings, but it's hard when you're irresistible to every man in the story, and some of the women. Dave and Elise try to figure out if Mary Sue can ever be an adequate substitute for Elizabeth Bennet, and whether th...

It's sequel time on Another Kind of Distance as Elise Moore and David Fiore tackle Alan Taylor's Terminator Genisys (2015). We attempt to peel away its  Primer -like layers of plot complexity and find ourselves wondering if the writers even realize that those layers are there. Is it possible that they forgot to cast the "prime" mover of the alternate universe that takes shape in this film? Also: D...