Vintage Sand

“Asa Nisi Masa:” 8 ½ at Sixty It is an intriguing coincidence that perhaps the two greatest films ever made about the creative breakthroughs and heartbreaks involved in making a film are both celebrating major anniversaries in 2023. First, Federico Fellini’s raucous, post-modern celebration of his own creative process, "8 ½" turns sixty. It’s important to note, though, that while we see no filmmak...

It is indeed the episode a decade in the making! Here, in Episode 43, Team Vintage Sand puts in its collective two cents on the newly released Sight and Sound decennial poll of the greatest films of all time. It is a list referred to by no less an authority than Roger Ebert as “the best damned film list of them all.” But this time, was it a “woke” poll, reflecting more our need for political corre...

In Episode 42, Team Vintage Sand returns yet again to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternative Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture Academy Awards from the 1930’s, the 1950’s, the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we hop in the Way-Back Machine and travel to one of the most inte...

Team Vintage Sand returns to the airwaves with our October episode, a neat bookend to Episode 31 wherein we explored our favorite final films by great directors. Here we present Episode 41--Gala Premieres: Our Favorite First Films by Great Directors. To begin, we decided to establish some parameters to spare you, our tenacious audience, any pointless discussion.. The first is that we tried to avoi...

Don’t call it a comeback! After a long (for us)summer break estivating in all the world’s glamour spots, Team Vintage Sand returns with Episode 40, the third in our Hidden Gems series. Those of you playing along at home will recall that in Episodes 11 and 30, we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. We promised/threatened to go d...

Episode 39 finds your intrepid Team Vintage Sand doing a deep dive into the work of one of our most promising young filmmakers, 2020 Best Director Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao. Although she has only done four feature films to this point, she has already established a distinctive painterly and brilliant visual style, and, as no less an authority than Frances McDormand put it, has shown herself able to s...

In a “New York Times” article published last month, Ross Douthat expounded on the provocative idea that the movies, as in studio films produced in Hollywood, were “over.” He was not arguing that Hollywood would ever stop producing movies for the big screen, nor that the notion of seeing a movie in a dark theater with strangers all around would ever completely disappear. Instead, he was saying that...

In a first for the ever-intrepid Team Vintage Sand, we devote an entire episode to the exploration of the history of a single genre. Thus we present Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical. From its clunky beginnings at the dawn of sound through the unexpected brilliance of Spielberg’s "West Side Story" remake last year, we take a deep dive into this most deliberately artificial (and...

As we are preparing for our first attempt at a genre episode (that would be Episode 37, our brief guide to the Hollywood musical coming in February) we could not let go the passing of some major and minor figures of film history since our last recording session in early December. Therefore, our shorter-than-usual Episode 36 will function as an extended necrology, a (hopefully) cathartic exploratio...

In Episode 35, Team Vintage Sand returns to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have approached the Academy Awards from the 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we use the Way-Back Machine to explore the first full decade in which the awards were given: the 1930’s. In exploring a period tha...

As promised, we finish this round of our study of great screen performances with this two-part episode that highlights what are, in our opinion, the best overlooked and underloved performances by supporting actresses over the years. Recall that in our last episode, we put down our usual auteurist lens in favor of a focus on actors, perhaps a filmmaker's most crucial collaborators. This is a natura...

As promised, we finish this round of our study of great screen performances with this two-part episode that highlights what are, in our opinion, the best overlooked and underloved performances by supporting actresses over the years. Recall that in our last episode, we put down our usual auteurist lens in favor of a focus on actors, perhaps a filmmaker's most crucial collaborators. This is a natura...

Our promised conclusion to Episode 33, No Small Parts: Our Favorite Overlooked and Underloved Performances by Supporting Actors.

In the past, Team Vintage Sand has focused primarily on specific directors and movements in the history of film. Of course, we understand the fundamental paradox of the auteur theory (in that film is by its nature the most collaborative medium). But if we are making the case for film as art, then there needs to be an artist, and organizing the podcast around the auteurist ideas of critics like Tru...

We know what you’re thinking. How can those Vintage Sand guys be so durned knowledgeable about film and yet still maintain their humility? Well, of course the three of us have seen way too many films over the years, but the truth is that so much of what has shaped our lives as filmgoers has come from reading some of the great books written about film by filmmakers, great critics, and film historia...

"7 Women". "Rio Lobo". "The Other Side of the Wind". "Family Plot". "Buddy Buddy". "Pocketful of Miracles". "A Countess from Hong Kong". Have you even heard of these films, let alone seen them? Yet they stand as the final works, respectively, of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin. In Episode 31 of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand ex...

Back in the Before Time, we did a long-ago episode (#11, if you're playing along at home) where we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. At the time, we promised/threatened to go down this path again and take you, loyal listeners, into some more dark and obscure corners of film history. So enjoy Episode 30, Hidden Gems Volume II,...

It was a year, and an Oscars ceremony, unlike any other in memory. That being said, there were definitely many films, both big and small, that we think will stand the test of time and which folks may still be watching 50 years from now. So join us for the ride as we explore some of 2020’s most memorable films, from Nomadland to Palm Springs and from Da 5 Bloods to Minari; it’s our Journal of the P...

Welcome to Episode 28 of Vintage Sand, your Film History podcast. In this episode, Everybody Knows the Score, we explore some of the best soundtracks in the history of film. For our purposes this time out, we are focusing strictly on non-diagetic (“background”) music written for instruments and/or voice for a particular film. So we are not focusing on… • …songs written for a soundtrack. This rules...

Team Vintage Sand returns with Bong Jun-ho: Director’s Cut, our study of the director who, following last year’s Oscars, may now properly be called one of the world’s most important filmmakers. While "Parasite" brought him Oscars, a Palme d’Or and international fame, Bong has been making his brilliant, iconoclastic films for nearly two decades. As we examine all seven of Bong’s feature films, seve...

Once again, Team Vintage Sand returns to pay tribute to Danny Peary’s wonderful 1993 book "Alternate Oscars"; this time, our focus is the 1970’s, which many call the greatest decade in the history of American film. If this is so, it’s because for a brief shining moment, from "Easy Rider" to the birth of the tyranny of opening weekend grosses engendered by films like "Jaws" and "Star Wars", the mos...

With the most important election of our lifetimes upon us, Team Vintage Sand celebrates its Silver episode by exploring our favorite political films Made in the USA. “Political film” is a very difficult term to define, and we try to examine the idea through a number of different lenses. After all, one might argue that in a sense, all films are political. There are films that deal with specific his...

In this episode, the second part of our exploration of African Americans in film, Team Vintage Sand shifts its focus to the people behind the camera. Remember that it was not until Gordon Parks directed his autobiographical "The Learning Tree" in 1969 that Hollywood released a major film by a black director. What followed in its wake was the mixed blessing of “Blaxploitation” in the early 1970’s,...

Team Vintage Sand is composed of three middle-aged cisgender White males who happen to be old friends and happen to have a passion for Film. In spite of these boundaries of perspective, however, we could not let this moment of social activism and (hopefully)progress go unnoted. Because perhaps more than any other cultural institution, Hollywood's treatment of Black people both in front of and behi...

For Episode 22, Team Vintage Sand returns to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, for the first time since Episode 5. In that one, we promised (or threatened) to devote a whole episode just to Hitchcock's villains, characters who often end up stealing the films they're in and are often more compelling than his heroes. Reaching all the way back to "The 39 Steps" (1935) and continuing through his penultima...