Bilge Ebiri has been one of my go-to film critics for at least a decade. He writes elegantly and intelligently for Vulture and New York, and has spent a lot of time watching and writing about the films of Steven Spielberg. I knew he would make for a great perspective on this podcast… and I was right.
He shares his own critical theories (Spielberg is a horror director at heart; Spielberg’s work is perhaps best understood when you appreciate either the child’s or father’s perspective they’re told from), his personal history and favorites, and how John Williams creates a fascinating synthesis (in the Sergei Eisenstein philosophy) to Spielberg’s aesthetic. We talk about everything from The Sugarland Express to The Fabelmans—and I was relieved to find out that this eminent film critic… loves Hook.
You can find much of Bilge’s writings and reviews at his Vulture author page. I also want to link to the blog post discussed at the top of this episode. His 2018 Spielberg ranking for Rolling Stone (also discussed) is here.
This week’s guest is NOT Eric André, the anarchic and hilarious and extremely NSFW comedian from The Eric André Show and Bad Trip. Why am I telling you that? Because I actually booked André as a guest—and conducted an entire interview along with his co-composer / orchestral translator Prateek Rajagopal—inspired by the fact that André just created an album of “cinematic” instrumental music literally called Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist (which is out today). I was excited to learn that he’s a musician who attended Berklee College of Music, and that he apparently is a wannabe film composer…
The conversation we had last week was very funny... and completely unusable for this podcast. We all agreed on that after the fact, and I’ll be repurposing it to write a print article about his new project instead. But I just wanted to share a few representative snippets of a truly bonkers, left-field, Mad Libs non sequitur interview:
TO BE CLEAR: ERIC ANDRÉ EMPHASIZED THAT THIS WAS A BIT (but not the part about him not really knowing or having much to say about the Spielberg & Williams canon)
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