Words and Movies

Terrence Malik has written and directed The Tree of Life, a sprawling story that starts in the 1960s, jumps to present-day and then goes back to the birth of the universe. And that's just in the first few minutes of the film. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are the O'Briens, a couple that learns their teenage son has died. Over the years it appears that they still haven't quite gotten o...

Whether we choose to admit it or not, we're driven by some level of faith that something lies beyond our current plane of existence. Some of us simply hope so, some profess not to care, others will go wholeheartedly into some form of religion. And the search for God--however you view that particular concept--is a compelling one, especially when you tell a story about someone whose faith is being t...

In Part 2 of our episode we look at Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights , from 1999. This was the fourth time that Levinson went to the well of life in Baltimore, and the second we've looked at (we still need to get to Tin Men and Avalon). The film is not a response to any of his Baltimore films, but was a response to his portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's character in the film Sphere , which...

FIlm directors have to have a thick skin when it comes to criticism. But once in awhile, it gets to them and they let it show. More often than not, they say that the critics are out of touch with audience tastes. Others will own their failures: Roland Emmerich, for example, admitted that Independence Day: Resurgence didn't work and that he probably shouldn't have been the director. And som...

We continue this episode with To Have and Have No t, a 1944 production directed by Howard Hawks. In this film, Bogart plays a sport tourism fisherman who's asked to use his boat to assist the French Resistance in Martinique. He meets up with Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall) and that's where the fireworks started, both on and off screen. If you don't know how to whistle,...

Casablanca is a film that Sean and I have wanted to cover for a long time, but there was a little bit of a struggle to find a good film to pair it with. Not because there were so few, but because there were so MANY. Finally we came up with focusing on Humphrey Bogart himself rather than on the overall theme of the film. And then there was the realization that Bogart had a couple of films where he...

In the second half of our episode, we take a peek at THE COMPANY (2003), a fictional story involving a real ballet company, with a couple of actors thrown in who aren't professional ballet dancers. As with any Altman film, there's a lot going on, usually simultaneously, and there are are a couple of throughlines making their way through a bunch of set pieces. But once you get used to Altma...

In today's episode we're going to have a look at a couple of films made several decades apart that look at the goings-on behind the scenes in ballet companies. In this half of the episode, we're reviewing THE RED SHOES (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. We have impresario-type behavior, composers with big egos, love triangles, and all of it rather thinly overlai...

In Part 2 of today's episode, we look at TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY, directed by Michael Winterbottom. Steve Coogan is an exaggerated version of himself (we hope), playing the title character in the film adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. He's constantly sparring with another actor in the film over the relative importance of their roles. The dire...

Hey there! LTNS! Today we take a look at a pair of films that deal with the creation of a film, but the catch is that the source material is notoriously difficult to adapt. Consequently the crux of the story we see involves the difficulty the creators are having putting the thing together. We start with ADAPTATION (2002), directed by Spike Jonze. We've got a terrific ensemble cast including Ni...

As you no doubt know, actor/director/producer Robert Redford died last week at the age of 89. Now, lots and lots of people took the time to look back at his film career, so Sean and Claude took a different tack and reviewed a different aspect of Redford's legacy: the Sundance Film Festival. Redford wasn't one of the original founders, but he came in very early in the process, and just havi...

Way, way back in Episode 12, we looked at Stage Door and All About Eve , a couple of films about the theater industry that had practically no theater in them. We're going back to that well only only 76 episodes later, with today's look at two films that also deal with stage performers and the things that go into getting something on the boards. But where Part 1 stuck to the United States, this tim...

In the second half of our episode, we check out Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), which is definitely a tonal shift from the first half. Kristen Stewart is the American assistant to an international star of stage and screen played by Juliette Binoche. The death of a former mentor leads her to consider the implications of time, aging, culture in general, and the blurring lines between relationships. We&...

From New York we head down to Baltimore, Maryland for DINER (1982) written and directed by Barry Levinson. This film was, in fact, shot in and around Baltimore, and Claude takes the time to flex his Baltimore geography knowledge. (By the way, when you're visiting the gravesite he mentions during the episode, you can also visit the grave of John Wilkes Booth, perhaps the best-marked unmarked gr...

This episode takes you to the places where a pair of directors grew up. Coincidentally, these places are also the stomping grounds for Your Humble Hosts. We begin with MEAN STREETS (1973) . directed and co-written by Martin Scorsese, which is set in New York City. (Yeah, it was filmed in Los Angeles, but they found good locations so you don't really notice.) Scorsese weaves a tale through seve...

In Part Two of our episode, which isn't quite as packed as Part 1 (largely because it's a shorter, more straightforward story), we look at Wes Anderson's THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, starring Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston and a half-dozen or so other people as their adult children and in-laws. At the start of the film, the family isn't hanging together very well, until a little bit of dec...

In today's episode we are looking at the work of two directors named Anderson, although they're not related to one another. We begin with Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA, from 1999. This is a film that has the complexity of a Robert Altman film, in that we have many parallel stories in a few different spaces, and they do manage to bump into one another from time to time. PT Anderson se...

In this half of our episode we lighten the tone just a little bit for another Carl Franklin joint, Out of Time, starring Denzel Washington again (of course) along with Eva Mendes, Dean Cain and the always-delightful John Billingsley. In this film Denzel plays a police chief in Florida who needs to clear a murder before he, himself, becomes a suspect. COMING ATTRACTIONS: Our next episode is titled...

This is the second of two episodes in which we look at films in which Denzel Washington is a lawman of some kind. We start with the 1995 neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress , directed by Carl Franklin and co-starring the likes of Don Cheadle and Jennifer Beals. It's a period piece, set in post-WW2 California, and it deals with a man looking for a job but finding a mystery instead. Stay tuned--in Part 2...

In the second half of our episode, Denzel returns to the United States, and to New York City for Inside Man (2006), a Spike Lee joint. This is a crime thriller that has Denzel's character matching wits with a bank robber. There are lots of twists and turns and you're never sure who the titular "inside man" is until you're very close to the end—although there are lots of bread...

This is the first of two episodes we'll be doing, featuring Denzel Washington as a law enforcement officer of some kind.  We open up with The Mighty Quinn, a 1989 film that Washington made right on the heels of his stint in the television show St. Elsewhere . (Don't mistake it for his film debut, though.) Denzel is a police officer on a Caribbean island and there are some strange doings ha...

In Part 2 of our triumphant return (shrug), we look at 2015's The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott. This film is set on two different planets: one of them has billions of people on it, and the other has...one. And we manage to jump back and forth between the two with tension and humor, and it's a fun ride the entire way. Does it make awesome scientific sense? Mostly, and the places where it doesn...

The show returns to begin 2025 with a look at a pair of films that, on their surface, couldn't possibly be more different from one another--but in fact they have more in common than you'd think. Both of them owe some debt to Howard Hawks, whether in visual style or dialogue patterns, or something else. And we start with 1994's Speed, directed by Jan de Bont in his American directorial debut. Quick...

In this half of the episode, we look at Bergman Island (2021), written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. It stars Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps as a couple who have come to Faro Island as fans of Ingmar Bergman and want to take the tourist view while they complete their own work in a house they've rented. Like some Bergman films, as the characters move deeper into the story, the line between the audien...

In our last episode we took a look at films that followed Alfred HItchcock's filmmaking style. This time around we're looking at films that have deep echoes of the work of Ingmar Bergman. We start with Away From Her (2006), written and directed by Sarah Polley. Julie Christie plays a woman whose Alzheimer's is starting to advance, and her husband (Gordon Pinsent) has to deal with the guilt, the lo...