Join Dave and Elise every week for a buggy-ride of cinematic exploration. A bilingual Montreal native and a Prairies hayseed gravitate to Toronto for the film culture, meet on OK Cupid, and spur on each other's movie-love, culminating in this podcast. Expect in-depth discussion of their old favourites (mostly studio-era Hollywood) and their latest frontiers (courtesy of the TIFF Cinematheque and various Toronto rep houses and festivals). The podcast will be comprised of several potentially…
For this Special Subject episode, we looked at a couple of interventions in European national cinemas by Max Ophüls, La signora di tutti (1934), made in Italy, and Komedie om geld (1936), made in the Netherlands. Although not generally associated with radical politics, or politics at all, in these two early, lesser-known films Ophüls uses melodrama and comedy respectively to explore…
For our inaugural Sandra Dee Acteurist Spotlight we examined two pairings with John Saxon from 1958, The Reluctant Debutante (directed by Vincente Minnelli), with Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall displaying their talents for farce, and The Restless Years (directed by Helmut Käutner), in which Dee gets to display her talent for psychological drama. Whether contending with aggressive peers and neurotic…
For this Warner Bros. 1935 episode we watched a couple of melodramas that show a side of the studio's 1930s output less familiar than its fast-talking gangster and proletarian dramas: The Right to Live (directed by William Keighley), a love triangle story set among the rich and ableist, starring Josephine Hutchinson and Colin Clive; and I Found Stella Parish , a spin on the Stella Dallas maternal…
We say farewell to Jennifer Jason Leigh for now with two more harrowing works: Georgia (1995), written by Leigh's mother, Barbara Turner, and directed by Ulu Grosbard, and Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), directed by Anjelica Huston and based on the semi-autobiographical novel by CSA survivor Dorothy Allison. We talk about the endless ambiguities of Georgia , a rare gripping dramatic work concerned…
Elise's final Family Freak-Out, as promised, is the peak of the climb: two emotional marathons totalling 316 minutes and featuring some of the finest acting in the history of American cinema, Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), starring Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone, and John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974), starring Gena Rowlands…
For this MGM 1935 Studios Year by Year episode we again explored the screen persona of forgotten star Ann Harding in a double feature, Biography of a Bachelor Girl (directed by Edward H. Griffith) and The Flame Within (produced, written, and directed by Edmund Goulding). We discuss the changes from S.N. Behrman's 1932 play Biography and how well its liberal political message survives them and then…
For Part 2 of our Acteur Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh we watched Robert Altman's cinematic embodiment of the Raymond Carver universe, Short Cuts (1993), and one of Dave's all-time faves, Altman collaborator Alan Rudolph's portrait of Dorothy Parker, her loves, and her milieu, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). We grapple with exactly why Altman wants us to spend so much time with…
For this round of Paramount 1935 we watched William A. Wellman's The President Vanishes, based on the pacifist anti-fascist novel by Rex Stout, and the first film version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring George Raft as the devoted and unlucky friend of a criminal political boss. Elise is startled by Raft's liveliness (even as he spends a good stretch of…
For the first episode of our Acteurist Spotlight on Jennifer Jason Leigh, we watched Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood (1985). We explore the possibility of Heckerling's portrait of a young woman's existential journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly of sexual discovery influencing an early draft of the Verhoeven heroine, and the young…
Our Special Subject for June is Wong Kar-wai's so-called "Love Trilogy": Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Our discussion walks a tightrope of abstraction as we consider the philosophical implications of Wong's treatment of the theme of love: whether it can be consummated and how time, secrets, androids, and epistemology are involved. Proust, Tarkovsky, and…
In this Universal 1934 Studios Year by Year episode, we discuss the original There's Always Tomorrow , starring Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes (remade by Douglas Sirk in the 50s with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) and the bizarre Claude Rains vehicle The Man Who Reclaimed His Head . The middle-class American nuclear families of the 30s and 50s curiously converge, and future Hollywood Ten…
