Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics

Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw,” but that warning didn’t keep Timothy Treadwell from living among the grizzlies of Alaska for thirteen summers–until one of them killed him and his girlfriend. Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man tells Treadwell’s story and raises the issues of what happens when we ascribe human motives and characteristics to animals and the ways in which we...

Woody Allen has called A Streetcar Named Desire the most well-directed film ever made and its influence on Blue Jasmine (2013) is unmistakable. Both concern a woman whose fantasy life and self-deception break down and both feature incredible performances by the lead actress: in Streetcar, it’s Vivien Leigh and here it’s Cate Blanchett. And if Streetcar is a high point of Eliza Kazan’s filmography,...

In 1828, a seventeen-year-old boy was found wandering the streets of Nuremberg, holding two letters and unable to say more than a few words. The locals adopted him as a kind of municipal mascot; eventually, they learned that he had been bound in darkness until his release and struggled to learn more about his past. Werner Herzog took the story as a basis for his 1974 film–not one of his trademark...

“Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.” This piece of advice is as famous as it is useless: Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) will never be able to forget what he’s seen. Chinatown (1974) is also impossible to forget: whether it’s the perfect nod to noir or the best noir of all time, it’s endlessly fascinating, compelling, and disturbing. Join us for an improvised conversation about why the film still fascin...

Hollywood loves making movies about itself: on this show alone, we’ve done Sunset Boulevard, Sullivan’s Travels, and Singin’ in the Rain. Get Shorty (1995) is Elmore Leonard’s contribution to the genre, a film that was “meta” before the term became overused: we are given the illusion of spontaneity and the story–like one of Leonard’s novels–seems like it’s being made up as it moves along. This per...

A Star Is Born has been filmed four times, but the first version is the best: a combination of Singin’ in the Rain and Death of a Salesman, David O. Selznick’s production drips with “movie” and artificiality, yet still delivers an ending that seems taken from Greek tragedy. No stars were harmed in the making of this film–yet the film also dramatizes the harm inflicted by a steady diet of fame. It...

Every other movie seems to be touted as a “tour de force”--but Philip Barantini’s 2021 look at ninety minutes in the life of a chef and everyone around him really earns that praise. The entire film was shot in one take, not to be “original,” but because doing so reflects the tension and stress of the whole enterprise: a restaurant, like a film, is a complicated ecosystem in which personalities, ha...

The average estimated words-per-minute in a feature film is 90; His Girl Friday (1940) clocks in at 240. And yet the fast dialogue is only one of its many fascinations. Everything about it perfectly lands: the script, the casting, the camerawork, the minor players–all contribute to what can be called, without the kind of hyperbole found in the Morning Post, a perfect film. It’s as cynical as Netw...

Twentieth Century (1934) is a screwball comedy that moves like a runaway train and we are delightfully tied to the tracks. John Barrymore’s audacious performance as director Oscar Jaffee is awe-inspiring; Carole Lombard is equal to the task of pushing back against the man who, in a sense, created her. It’s Frankenstein meets His Girl Friday; it’s ninety minutes of screaming and yelling; it’s fille...

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.”  That line from James Joyce’s story is heard at the end of John Huston’s 1987 adaptation, a true family affair in which his son, Tony, wrote the screenplay and his daughter, Anjelica, played a major role.  Like Huston’s first film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Dead is a perfect adaptation that complements the source material an...

Wings of Desire (1987) is a film that stays with the viewer; part of how it works is to flood the viewer’s mind with images that seem, at first, disconnected but which also take root and then resurface a day or week later when one isn’t suspecting to think about a trapeze artist or Peter Falk. More like a painting than a film, Wings of Desire flips the usual extolling of the spiritual world over t...

Something film fanatics often say is that a particular director’s work is really “about the movies.” Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it isn’t–but there’s no doubt that The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is one of the “moviest” movies ever made. Every frame of it articulates the longing for life in a world superior to our own: the world of art. The problem is that the people on the screen, despite...

Have you ever felt that you keep making the same mistakes or that you have fallen into a pattern that could be Exhibit A as proof of reincarnation? The Beast (2023) uses all kinds of world-building and three different timelines to explore these ideas–and does so while faithfully adapting a 1903 story by Henry James. It’s the kind of film in which one could be lost in the red arrows that point out...

My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a film that uses the simple premise of two men sharing a meal as a vehicle for exploration of how we should live our lives. It asks fundamental questions about happiness and self-fulfillment that it doesn't wholly answer. The Trip (2010) uses the same premise as a way to dramatize two men earnestly debating who does the better impressions of Michael Caine, Al Pacino,...

Many movies tell us how to watch them. Whether it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Casablanca, or Rear Window, movies steer the viewers to certain reactions anticipated by their directors long before the first tickets have been sold. Michael Mann’s Miami Vice does this less often than other films (including Mann’s) with spectacular results. Almost twenty years after its release, the film seems to have f...

Every so often, you encounter The Perfect Movie: something with a screenplay, cast, and direction that combine in a way that reminds you of what happens when everyone working on a movie gets it exactly right. History is Made at Night (1937) is one of those movies. Join us for a conversation about how a film that accelerates emotions almost to the level of farce and shifts between genres like a bor...

Everybody was shocked when, in 1999, David Lynch released a G-rated film with a Norman Rockwell setting that didn’t have a dark underbelly or wild reveal; if you have a David Lynch bingo card, The Straight Story is the free space. And while The Straight Story is as wholesome a film as you can find, it's never sentimental or corny. Dan thinks it’s Lynch’s best. Join him and Mike as they talk about...

We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original quite like Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 film that can be called, without insult, “aggressively two-dimensional.” Join us for a conversation about how Boorman makes the experience of watching a film like the experience of reading the legends. W...

In a film in which the audience buys its tickets knowing who will play the title role, what happens when you don’t have him enter the frame until a solid hour has passed? How does the focus shift from the horrific villain to the horror felt by his victims? Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) isn’t a faithful retelling of Albert DeSalvo’s crimes or an explanation of his compulsion: he’s...

Flannery O’Connor said that stories about pious children tend to be false. She’s right, of course, but she doesn’t even say the half of it: stories about children in general tend to be false. The kids are always too brave, self-aware, or smart; they’re like the children in medieval paintings who look like miniature adults. If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952) by the Argentine director Carlos Hugo...

Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw it, he sought forgiveness for the errors of his ways. That’s an appropriate theme to consider in light of a film saturated with Italian Catholicism that explores themes of sin and redemption, but with a light touch and in a celebratory mode....

Love and Mercy A film by Bill Pohlad Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see Brian Wilson’s Kubrick-like devotion to getting Pet Sounds exactly like he wants it, as well as his becoming a whole person through the force of his future wife. The film is a nightmare version of Peter Pan, examining a boy who won’t grow up...

American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with hi...

The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from too much exposition is a matter of taste (and debated by the hosts), but both agree that the movie does what only its star can do: deliver thrills that derive from both the plot and the knowledge that what they are seeing is, in some sense, re...

Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed perf...