Deadpool 2 put us in such a foul mood when it came out in 2018 that we threw away our podcast on it. It was too toxic to publish. Fortunately, Deadpool & Wolverine, the third in the series, didn't have such an effect on us - even José found some things to compliment about it.

Perhaps it's the relative diminishment of Marvel since its peak in 2018, when it was reaching the climax of the story it had been building for a decade, that makes Deadpool & Wolverine work as it otherwise might not - its jokes about the X-Men joining the MCU at a low point really landed, for example. It's far from perfect - Ryan Reynolds' schtick remains smug, and the film tries to have it both ways, delivering snarky commentary on the sorts of things films like this do, then discarding the snark when it wants to do them itself. But it's pacey, energetic, full of intense action with a delightfully cartoony attitude, filled with so many attempts to make you laugh that some of them are bound to work, and featuring a pair of enjoyable, charismatic villains: Matthew Macfadyen's Mr. Paradox is a marvellously hammy presence, while Emma Corrin's Cassandra Nova's slight physique and genteel demeanour make her telepathic abilities all the more threatening.

Recorded on 9th August 2024.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

One of cinema's most infamous disasters, Caligula was conceived by producer Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, as an explicit, expensively-made adult film, about the rise and fall of the titular Roman emperor. In pursuing this, Guccione removed director Tinto Brass during post-production, so that he could have hardcore pornography shot and inserted into the film. On its release in 1979, Caligula was critically savaged on both moral and cinematic grounds, confiscated by police in some countries, banned in others, and the cause of lines that stretched around the block. It has remained an artifact of cult interest ever since, and the subject of occasional attempts to reconstruct it in a form that reflects something approaching its creators' original visions - to whatever extent their visions agreed with each other.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is the most thorough of these reconstructions by far, benefitting from the rediscovery of 96 hours of original material, which had been rushed out of Italy and hidden during the film's release. Opening intertitles claim that every frame of art historian Thomas Negovan's cut is previously unseen. It's long been wondered whether there's a great film within Caligula; although we don't think The Ultimate Cut demonstrates that there is, it's entertaining and striking, and offers an idea of what might have been.

Recorded on 18th August 2024.

426 - Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

A welcome new instalment in the Alien franchise, which has moved between genres and directors, remained popular for over four decades, and offered fascinating expansions of its internal mythos, Alien: Romulus moves with the times to give Generation Z the opportunity to die in space. It goes like the clappers, orchestrates loads of entertaining, tactile action, and is unbelievably good-looking. It's also underwritten, arguably overstuffed with reference to previous films in the series, and features one of those entirely uncontroversial and ethically pure reanimations of a deceased actor through CGI and other technologies. Perhaps after seeing the muted responses to the ideas on offer in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the series has decided to seek refuge in the cloying bosom of nostalgia - but we differ on how excessive it is, while enthusiastically agreeing that Romulus is great fun, and easy to recommend.

Recorded on 19th August 2024.

427 - Alien: Romulus

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/09/22/the-gus-van-sant-podcast-1-mala-noche-1985/
A new podcast to accompany a new mini-research project. Richard’s kindly humoured me and consented to help kickstart this project, but he’ll only co-host with me for the first three films so I shall be reaching out to some of you to talk to me about the rest – and certainly if you have a particular interest in any of Van Sant’s films and would like to podcast on them with me, do please get in touch. I’m hoping to build a resource here, not only with the podcasts but eventually with clips, images, a bibliography and more. It will be a process. 

In this inaugural podcast we talk about Van Sant’s first feature, based on Walt Streeter’s autobiographical novel, self-financed for $20,000 and filmed on 16mm. We discuss what made us uncomfortable on first viewing, in my case when the film first came out: the power differentials between the characters; the racialised dimension to the casting; but we also discuss why it arguably remains a great film – and the troublesome aspects are part of its greatness. We discuss how the film is an announcement of a new voice in American cinema, with roots in a history of queer culture (John Rechy, Genet, Warhol, The Beats). We speculate on the film’s romanticism within a quite fluid representation of sexuality that distinguishes between acts, desire, feelings and identities; queer avant-la-lèttre. We talk about the film’s look, one partly dictated by the film’s budget, few lights available thus the choice of hard one-directional lighting; making for a noir look but with a beat, bohemian sensibility.

MALA NOCHE arrives in the context of new forms of finance, distribution and exhibition permitted by the developing video rental market. One could now produce low-budget films which heretofore challenging subect matterand/or challenging forms and make money from niche markets. Van Sant appears alongside Jarmusch, Spike Lee and other indie filmmakers in the mid 80s. MALA NOCHE can be thought of as a the first of what may be considered a trilogy (alongside DRUGSTORE COWBOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO), at least thematically: it’s North West setting, the marginal cultures, the bohemian romance of outsiderness, it’s avant-garde components, its daring. An exciting film to re-watch and talk about.

The Gus Van Sant Podcast -- Mala Noche (1985)

José Arroyo in Conversation with Edmund Stenson, co-director with Daniel Rohar, of BLINK, a documentary which will be premiering at the London Film Festival with three screenings on October 13th, 14th and 19th. It will get a nationwide theatrical release across the United States with Disney/ National Geographic beginning next week on  October 4th. An extraordinary achievement for a documentary. 

The film tells the story of the Lemay-Pelletier family who discover that their eldest child Mia suffers from a rare genetic disease, retinitis pigmentosa, that will eventually end in blindness. To make matters worse, it turns out that three of their four children suffer from the same disease. What to do? A doctor suggests that they may want to build a memory bank of images their children can subsequently access once they go blind. They canvass their children for a bucket list of activities and they set out to make them come true by taking a year off and travelling in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It’s a moving film, beautiful to look at, about family, parenthood, childhood; and resilience in the face of the unavoidable. 

In the podcast I talk to Edmund Stenson about the making of the film, what a documentary filmmaker does, how narrative is shaped in this form, the contributions of the film editors, the differences between the starting idea and what eventually comes out via filming and editing. 

Ed is also a Warwick Film/TV graduate so from about the 33rd minute of the podcast I also ask him about process: how does a film/TV graduate end up as a director of documentaries, particularly as high profile a feature as this one.

José Arroyo in Conversation With Edmund Stenson on Blink

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/09/26/the-gus-van-sant-podcast-no-2-drugstore-cowboy-1989/
We found DRUGSTORE COWBOY, Gus Van Sant's second feature, beautiful, imaginative and moving; a film that gets better with each viewing. We discuss Matt Dillon, so extraordinarily good looking and yet also so very believable as a ‘regular guy’; Tom Waits was the original casting and we talk about what Dillon brings to the role, his choices, and another possible connection to Van Sant, how he is also drawn to the marginal, the outsider; we talk about the experimental montages, clearly influenced by Anthony Balch’s Fires Open Fire (1963) which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and help make the film aesthetically cohesive. We discuss continuities: time-lapse photography, Super8 filming, the Pacific Northwest, subject matter of marginals, outsiders, small time crims, junkies. We both agree that we don’t like William Burroughs in the film, even though he was much praised upon its release. We discuss how Van Sant’s second feature is an announcement of a major American director with a distinctive voice, a very particular style, a visual vernacular, a contiguous world from film to film, peopled by recurring figures, a darkly comic tone

The Gus Van Sant Podcast No. 2: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited passion project, Megalopolis, self-funded to the tune of $120m, has finally arrived. We love it. It's wild, imaginative, earnest, and beautiful. We discuss and decry some of the criticisms of it we've already seen while coming up with some of our own - how could we have known that an octogenarian might hold some rather traditional views? - in between breathlessly enthusing about what captivated us.

Megalopolis is hardly a perfect film but it's a visual treat and a fantastic cinematic experience. Don't let the naysayers' sniping turn you off. Indulge!

Recorded on 30th September 2024.

428 - Megalopolis

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/10/02/the-gus-van-sant-podcast-3-my-own-private-idaho-1991/
We discuss one of the films that very much marked me, the image above was the image on my letterhead in the time we still used snail mail. In the accompanying podcast we discuss the film's historical significance. Was it a 'film that (made) history? We discuss it relationship to New Queer Cinema. We speculate on whether the film queers Shakespeare and discuss the film in relation to Welles' Chimes at Midnight. We comment on the significance of the casting, the contributions of River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Udo Kier and others and what their contributions to the film might be. We also discuss in detail particular scenes, the one where the magazine covers come to life; the rhyming musical/ hustler interludes, the great campfire scene. ...and much more.

The Gus Van Sant Podcast No. 3: My Own Private Idaho

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/10/05/pofcrit-podcast-2024-liberty-boyd-white-on-funny-games-michael-haneke-2007/
A highly unforgiving work, Michael Haneke's horror cult-classic Funny Games (2007) stands as a profound critique of modern media consumption and the spectator's complicit relationship with the spectacle of violence often provided by American cinema. This podcast delves into the personal reflections on ideology, morality, genre and cinema as a whole, prompted by the unique viewing experience of Haneke's film. From an analysis of the abstract form (Emphasised best by its many meta-textual elements.), it's commitment to sound design, as well as an investigation into the film's dismissal of  spectator 'enjoyment' - this episode hopes to emphasise the pervasive genius of Haneke's U.S remake through a conversational analysis of Funny Games as an outlier within contemporary film, thanks to its unflinching hostility towards the spectator typically depended on by cinema. 
Liberty Boyd-White

Funny Games (2007) - Practice Of Film Criticism Podcast

https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/10/07/practice-of-film-criticism-2024-harry-molloy-on-superman-richard-donner-1978/
‘You’ll believe a man can fly?’  was the tagline of Superman the Movie (1978) the use of the word ‘can’ rather than ascribing a quality to the film creates a world of possibilities for the feature.  Superman as a film represents a dream-like possibility of a perfect man who can defy gravity, lift anything, and run at incredible speeds, and the film revels in the utopian idea of this man who has everything. This edition of the Film Criticism podcast will discuss how the film expresses these themes and how they differ from the modern discourse of the superhero genre. Further, we discuss the issues with the concept of the utopian man and the pure optimism presented within the film.

Practice of Film Criticism 2024: Harry Molloy on Superman (Richard Donner, 1978)

2019's Joker, which gave the iconic supervillain an all-purpose mental health disorder, a tragic origin story, and a name - Arthur Fleck - was never meant to have a sequel. But it made a billion dollars, so Joker: Folie à Deux is here. And, being a jukebox musical based primarily on show tunes from the mid-20th century canon, we ask who it's for. The first film took risks in eschewing so many trappings of the comic book genre; did the filmmakers hope that their audience would respond similarly to further experimentation? Or is it a means of punishing an audience they attracted but loathe?

If the film hates its audience... well, so does Mike, which might explain why he got on with it. José, on the other hand, liked the first film, and is happy to see more of Joaquin Phoenix and hear those classic songs. Joker: Folie à Deux is far from a great film, not that close to a good film, and doesn't have much of interest or intelligence to say about its themes - but it's fascinating that it exists.

Recorded on 7th October 2024.

429 - Joker: Folie à Deux

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo.

"I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.

425 - Deadpool & Wolverine

Eavesdropping at the Movies