There's Sometimes a Buggy

Our first Halloween special looks at a monster for whom familiarity has bred unjustified contempt. Looking at Tod Browning's 1931 DRACULA and Francis Ford Coppola's misleadingly-titled BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA from 1992, we discuss the Cursed Count as a romantic and a sympathetic figure; the two films' departures from Bram Stoker's novel; xenophobia and monstrousness; their very different takes on Va...

We declare the year 1930 CANCELLED prior to discussing John Ford's UP THE RIVER & Frank Borzage's LILIOM (little known today - but based on the same source as the musical CAROUSEL). We consider the different (maybe opposite) ways in which these Fox movies portray sympathy for the victims of class society without criticizing the system, in contrast to a Warner Bros.-style treatment of similar mater...

In our second Jennifer Jones episode, we defend William Dieterle's LOVE LETTERS (1945), putting it in the context of 40s psychiatric melodramas and WWII amnesia movies, and consider the good and bad of what Ernst Lubitsch's CLUNY BROWN (1946) has to say about female sexuality and English complacency.   Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:            Love Letters (dir. William Dieterle) 1h 00m 28s:          Clun...

In our first 1930 Warner Bros. episode, we consider DAWN PATROL as an early example of cahier hero 'Auward 'Awks's philosophy of masculinity, and note the emergence of the Warners ethos in Mervyn Leroy's PLAYING AROUND, including consciousness of class, sympathy for criminals, vaudeville Yiddish characters, and a touch of patriarchal anxiety.   Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:       The Dawn Patrol (dir. Ho...

"Autumn is the most bourgeois month," as Keats said. Elise and Dave prove this is so by exploring Nora Ephron's two autumnal Upper West Side romantic comedies, WHEN HARRY MET (1989) and YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998), a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. Elise passes judgment on the two latter movies on the basis of her extensive experience of working in retail and intimate knowledge o...

In the first MGM episode of our Studios Year by Year series, the year is 1930, and Elise and Dave watch as the straggler studio struggles with the challenges of early sound in THE BISHOP MURDER CASE, starring Basil Rathbone as Philo Vance, with two credited directors (Elise posits a third, unknown genius). Then we switch over to a Marion Davies comedy, NOT SO DUMB, directed by King Vidor, Dave's f...

Join Dave and Elise for episode one of our (near-)complete filmography series on the great Jennifer Jones (née Phylis Isley). We provide a few preliminary thoughts re: our take on the Jones/Selznick synergy and then dive right into the films. Song of Bernadette kicks things off with quite a blessed bang, situating our star at the conceptual vanishing point between the instinctual and the ineffable...

Elise and Dave launch their extended excursion into oligarchic auteurism with a pair of films from the studio whose special touch may very well have been its hands-off approach to directorial oversight. Certainly Behind the Make-Up (aka The Feeder ) makes a very interesting companion piece to Dorothy Arzner's later masterpiece Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) – a film discussed on this very feed earlier...

Dave and Elise close out their discussion of the Dietrich/Sternberg septet with three films that examine three distinct paths (and aftermaths) to victory for the Dietrich persona. From superhero weepie to Henry James inflected Game of Thronery to a kind of class-conscious Carmen– this one's got it all! Time Codes: 0h 1m 00s:       Blonde Venus 0h 33m 00s:     The Scarlet Empress 1h 09m 52s:     Th...

Welcome to the first installment of Fear & Moviegoing in Toronto! This time out, it's part one of our mammoth conversation covering Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg's inspired 1930s collaborations. We saw the films as part of The TIFF Lightbox's recently concluded retrospective, Insolent Enigma/Arrogant Auteur .  Join us as we feel our way toward a critical counternarrative to the anemic a...

This week's episode serves as both a prolegomenon to our imminent Hollywood Studios Year By Year series and as a wistful look back to Dave's teen years, when he picked up Ethan Mordden's freewheeling speed date with Old Hollywood History and discovered a new way to split the difference between Adornian culture industry theory and auteurist ontology. Journey back to a time when oligopoly really mea...

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...