The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

In today’s media landscape, one thing I bet you’ve never wanted more of is choices.  A 2016 survey by Rovi  suggested that the average viewer scrolls through streaming apps for at least 20 minutes before settling on something to watch—or in other words, the average length of a sitcom episode. I’ve certainly spent longer checking all of the different apps and then re-checking, desperate t...

Though our screens are the inescapable way in which we experience stories today, nearly all of the conflicts on screen pre-date the screen itself. Take, for example, one of Northrop Frye’s four archetypal narrative structures in Anatomy of Criticism : the marriage plot. Frye writes that “The literary mode of romance deals with the marvelous and the uncommon, and, under its influence, events t...

David Fincher's latest film, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender as a kind of archetypal Fincher protagonist: a methodical control freak, cynical and arrogant and finding some mixture of success and failure based on how he navigates the complex world around him. In many ways, The Killer is explicitly about his method, his earned confidence as a contractor-assassin in a meaningless world. What give...

On today’s show, we thought we’d invite you to what may be your first day of camp—but not the Wet Hot American Summer variety. We’re talking about the kind of camp that Susan Sontag described as blurring the line between high and low culture in its appreciation of artifice, exaggeration, and stylization. This is the sort of thing that often gets called so bad it’s good , embracing the silly and ov...

Today’s show is an exploration of the paradox that is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that was ignored, seemingly forgotten, and yet has influence all over our popular media. How is it that Michael Mann’s Ferrari shares an iconic line with Walk Hard, as Dan Kois asks ? Could it possibly be that Joaquin Phoenix was intentionally mimicking John C. Reilly in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon ? Wil...

Today’s show is an exploration into the role of sex in popular culture, especially since the turn of the century. What should the role of intimacy be in storytelling? Are sex scenes unnecessary, gratuitous, slowing down the plot? Are they the plot? Is that vulnerability and passion essential to bringing humanity onto our screens? There is a long history in Hollywood of debates on where exactly the...

We’re in the lead up to this year’s Academy Awards, otherwise known as the Oscars. Presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the idea is recognizing excellence in cinematic achievement with a little gold statuette. But 96 years into this tradition, it’s not always clear why the Academy makes the choices it does—what excellence really means and to whom. These are questions...

For over a decade, the box office has been dominated by superheroes—mostly in the form of cinematic universes that linked dozens of movies and streaming series in long, complex mythologies of characters, concepts, and conflicts. In the past few years, this has even meant multiverse concepts linking the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the Fox X-Men series and DC Cinematic Universe with previous Batm...

In this final installment of our series on the films of Whit Stillman, we’re discussing Stillman’s return to filmmaking after over a decade of exile, or what he refers to as “development heck,” with the 2011 comedy Damsels in Distress starring Greta Gerwig, which led to a fruitful partnership with none other than Amazon Studios with the pilot The Cosmopolitans and then his seemingly inevitable Jan...

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s  Metropolitan . The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. This was a unique moment in...

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s  Metropolitan , a wry comedy about debutante parties. The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its sc...

The 1990s saw a boom in independent filmmaking going mainstream in American cinema. Audiences found that the art house could merge with the multiplex as filmmakers with distinct voices such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Nicole Holofcenter, and many more were able to pull off an interesting paradox: making independent films mainstream and making them through tradition...

If you’ve ever seen a Whit Stillman film, such as Metropolitan , the odds are you’d recognize another. Each of Stillman’s films features this kind of smart, witty, multilayered dialogue–often focusing on an ensemble of young people who have read a lot more about life than they’ve lived, fearing that they are at the tail end of an age of prosperity, looking ahead with apprehension or refusing to lo...

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