This week’s theme is BADASS CG CREATURES WITH SCALES!!!!  No but really: Josh and Alex break down the first four episodes of this season of Game of Thrones, in a new segment that doesn’t yet have a name.  Then they make themselves and everyone else feel old by discussing the 20th anniversary of Jurassic Park, which they just relived in the theatre (in three whole dimensions!).  It’s basically hug a reptile week.

Spoilers:

Jurassic Park

Game of Thrones, Seasons 1-3.4

Defiance, Episode 1

PODCATS FOREVERRRRRRRR.  It’s true, Alex and Josh saw Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and they’re kind of obsessed with it now.  They discuss it in depth, along with Chan Wook Park’s Stoker, and concede that one was way more interesting than the other.  Additionally, Alex quibbles with Rifftrax’s poll designation of Twilight as the worst film of all time and gets out of breath explaining why Queen of the Damned is a way way way worse film, while Josh just tries his damnedest to explain some Kickstarter campaigns.

Fair warning!  This podcat episode has lots of NSFW talk.  Slap on your headphones before venturing with us through a discussion of oddly-colored female anatomy and things you can do with your hands.  You know what kinds of things we mean.

Spoilers:

Queen of the Damned

Bill, the Galactic Hero

Starship Troopers

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

Stoker

Spring Breakers

Hot Shots

Hot Shots: Part Deux

Top Gun

Links:

Alex Cox’s Bill, The Galactic Hero Kickstarter campaign

The RiffTrax Kickstarter for their live riff of Twilight

Harmony Korine’s Umshimi Wam short film (featuring Die Antwoord)

Trailer for Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring

By Alexandra Edwards

Kneedeep in research on 1980s cinematic styles and color palettes, I took a sick day.  Sometimes you just have to.  Camped out in bed, halfheartedly read some articles, and fired up Hulu for a background soundtrack of related—but not too related—films to get me through the day.

Criterion was featuring several Jim Jarmusch films, so I took the opportunity to dig through his back catalog.  An old boyfriend introduced me to Jarmusch via Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) right at the time when my cinematic palette was starting to develop, and I loved it, but in that way one loves small scale 90s indie features.  Intriguing as it was, the world didn’t really feel real—it was too small, too specific, not nearly lived-in enough.

A trip to the indie cinema to see Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and to the library to check out Down By Law (1986) jolted me into a weird realization: the bigger Jarmusch tried to go, the smaller his filmic worlds felt.  The atmospheric and almost-unbearably hip shorts that make up Coffee and Cigarettes need almost no time to evoke much larger worlds, like cultural superstructures drawn from the merest juxtaposition of black and white in each frame.  Likewise, the Louisiana of Down By Law felt lived in, felt real in a way that resonated deeply with the Southerner in me.  Maybe it’s hard to not make the bayou feel lived in.

Or maybe I just prefer Jarmusch in black and white.

I gave his first feature, the aimless postpunk NYC fable Permanent Vacation, a go, but the washed out colors felt toothless, especially knowing that the sharp and stinging contrasts of Stranger than Paradise (1984) were just a few clicks away.

I’m honestly not sure how I’ve gone this long without viewing Jarmusch’s second feature.  It’s a spiritual precursor to Down By Law, the place where the director first tested out so much of what would define his aesthetic, and by extension the very fabric of American independent cinema in the 80s.  The black and white cinematography is a dream, all deep grey midtones and saturated blacks, and the minimal camera movement of the film’s 67 discrete scenes gives us nothing but time to soak in the compositions and, even better, the simple but rich locations.  New York, Cleveland, and small-town Florida may be stranger than paradise for the 3 wanderers at the center of this film, but they each look positively Edenic in their own rights.

As Down By Law would further prove and features like Night on Earth and Mystery Train truly cement, Jarmusch is a master of the filmic sense of place.  Absent all landmarks, New York still feels like New York, but also like a blank slate upon which our strangers can barely make a mark.  That specific blankness is mirrored quite literally as the three main characters visit Lake Eerie—from an observation deck, they stare out at a vast, grey blankness that only suggests snow—and again in the rustic Florida cement block buildings and nearly empty beachfront.

Nothing much happens in the film—Americanized Hungarian Willie, his sweet friend Eddie, and his newly-expatriated, teenaged cousin Eva wander through the three places with little purpose and less plot—but that’s hardly the point.  The pleasure is in getting to sit with these people in their gorgeous, minimalistic world.  For me, it was a pleasure distinctly organized around Eva, the tough 16-year-old immigrant who might not know what a tv dinner is, but has no problem stuffing her overcoat with stolen food and cigarettes.  Forget the charismatic John Lurie and the boyishly cute Richard Edson—I wanted to spend all day following the ruffianly Eszter Balint around.

The film is charmingly, maybe even disarmingly, unromantic.  It’s Bande à Part without that weird French tendency to make everything about sex.  Eddie is fond of Eva, but not creepily so.  The boys thwart the only moment of potential romance when they accompany Eva and her would-be suitor Billy to the cinema.  But their barrier-like presence is nothing compared to Billy’s discomfort with the bone-crunching kung fu film Eva has chosen.  Past the pretense of blank stare, we can tell that Eva is truly enjoying the feature, much as she enjoys the powerful growl of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

In a film full of purposefully cool characters, Eva is the coolest of them all.

…

I didn’t set out to find Stranger than Paradise‘s perfect companion film, but I found it all the same. Border Radio, the 1987 indie directed by Allison Anders and 2 of her UCLA classmates, makes a terrific double feature follow-up to the undoubtedly more well-known Jarmusch.

Here’s why:

Both films have impeccable musical ties. Paradise‘s Eddie is played by Sonic Youth’s former drummer, while John Lurie both serves as Willie and composed the score. Border Radio, set in the Los Angeles punk scene, features John Doe (of the seminal band X) as a lead character, plus The Blasters’ Dave Alvin in an ensemble role. X and The Blasters also contribute songs to the soundtrack, while other bands appear in live performances.

Atmospheric black and white cinematography makes the desert just as evocative as Paradise‘s snowy lake and beach scenes. Southern California and Mexico are no less lovingly, and no less strangely, portrayed. And the ambling plot has a similar pace, though Border Radio has slightly more going on in the way of a structured story.

That story was originally a straight film noir plot, as the Criterion essay on the film notes, borrowed from Jacques Tourneur’s classic Out of the Past (1947). Certain elements remained, like the lead character’s name, while other noir setpieces, like the Echo Park lake scene that recalls Chinatown (1974), creeped in. But this is no tightly scripted detective story—and that’s a good thing.

When the film opens, two musicians and a roadie have stolen money from a club, and one of them flees to Mexico at the threat of being beat to shit for the cash. The film hops between his exile south of the border and the efforts of his wife, Lu (played by Anders’s sister, Luanna), to track him down and get him back home.  If it sounds remarkably straightforward, that’s only because the DVD description has imposed a kind of order.  In actuality, the action starts in medias res, and the audience is given very little exposition to grab onto.  What’s more important is the feel: the lazy urgence of both hiding out and hunting down, mirrored in the weird but perfect blend of laidback southern rock and driving west coast punk.

Amongst all of this, faux interview scenes are cut: a female punk fan reminisces about the scene; Lu discusses her husband and her search.  That’s a weird juxtaposition, but one that comments hugely on the place of women in the music industry. They aren’t stars, and they aren’t pursued. They are commentators, fanzine creators and journalists who seem to spend a huge amount of time taking care of the guys around them. Or at least trying to. Kind of unnoticed, but whipsmart and self-aware.

A lot like Paradise‘s Eva, actually.

Maybe, at the end of it all, it’s that synergy more than any other that makes these films feel like a perfect pair.

Alex and Josh discuss the hullabaloo surrounding the Veronica Mars kickstarter and the upcoming SyFy channel “transmedia experience”, Defiance.  They also throw out some fresh rhymes for Lee Van Cleef movies, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Justified and Chan-wook Park’s American debut, Stoker.  Then they get super arthouse and shit with Alex’s take on Devyn Waitt’s Not Waving But Drowning and The Taiwan Oyster.  There’s so much jaw-flappin’ in this pint sized episode that you’ll swear there’s a frakkin’ helicopter about to take off.  Worry not, for it’s just the confabulation of two nerds, fixin’ to grease the grimey gears of gossip and highest of high-brow, eye-brow lifting conversation for the delight and contentment of the populace of this great U. S. of Internet.

Spoilers:
Minor spoilers regarding the quality of Battlestar Galactica beyond Season 2.

Links:
The Taiwan Oyster
A Scene from Devyn Waitt’s Not Waving But Drowning

Alex and Josh return from their unplanned hiatus to discuss who went home with a little man on Oscars night, and who just went home with a little gold statue.  It’s an action-packed, lean and mean 53 minutes of cajoling and criticism aimed squarely at the hoity-toity, upper-crust of Hollywood’s Elite (and Seth MacFarlane).  Also, unless you are completely unfamiliar with the winners, this episode represents our first ever spoiler-free affair.  Finally, you can listen with impunity as we only vaguely describe the plots to some of the most critically lauded films of 2012!

Spoilers:
None!

Links:
Oscars.com list of official nominees and winners

Corrections:
It’s Kwe-VEN-zhah-nay.

Josh and Alex are in the midst of the winter blahs—now that they’ve seen Django Unchained, there’s very little in the cinemas to look forward to.  Instead they’ve been delving into Unchained’s predecessors, like Django and Drum.  They talk Tarantino, wax poetic about Franco Nero’s beard, and look forward to revisiting more Westerns this winter. They also compare two nerd culture indie films currently streaming on Netflix, and decide that The FP is everything wrong with hipster cinema, while Unicorn City is a great example of how to tease a subculture without being an asshole to them or anyone else.

Spoilers:
Sokurov’s Alexandra
Lady Snowblood
Django Unchained
Django
Drum
Drive
The FP
Unicorn City

Links:
Tegan and Sara – Closer
Film Studies for Free
Audiovisualcy
Josh’s deconstruction of the opening scene from Once Upon a Time in the West
Alex’s article on Django Unchained
Karina Longworth’s interview w/ Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino “Hollywood’s Boy Wonder” BBC Documentary (1994)
Django sequel press release
Only God Forgives teaser

Corrections:
We believe the incredibly named chapter from Lady Snowblood was “Crying Bamboo Dolls of the Netherworld”
The forgettably named Steve Carell comedy was called Crazy, Stupid, Love.

As you read this, there are a lot of words being written and posted to the internet about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  A new Tarantino is an occasion, a dumping ground for all kinds of opinions, a hanger for our hang-ups.  Out there, right now, someone is comparing this one to his last one, or the ones before that; someone is charting the synergies and differences between Unchained and its obvious predecessor, 1966′s Django, or its other obvious predecessor, 1976′s Drum, or probably a host of other, less obvious predecessors.

Me?  I’m thinking about Moby-Dick.

Yeah, I know: that’s simultaneously the most obvious and the most unenlightening comparison point imaginable.  Nothing is Moby-Dick in American culture because fucking everything is Moby-Dick.  You, me, Tarantino, movies about MMA fighting and B-movie scifi and everything in between.

But hear me out.

I’m thinking about Moby-Dick because I’m thinking about whiteness (yes, yes, that big obvious white whale smack in the middle of the book), about Valerie Babb and her book Whiteness Visible.  I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say Django Unchained is a movie about race.  But all too often, when we talk about race, we’re only talking about the Other.  Django is, but it is definitely not just, a movie about African-Americans.

Most movies that aren’t about the Other are kind of also about race, except that race—in this case, whiteness—is presented as universal.  It’s invisible.  That makes it weirdly hard to talk about, or at least it makes it easier to just not talk about it.  What is whiteness?  I agree wholeheartedly with Babb: “Part of the difficulty in characterizing whiteness lies with its having no genuine content other than a culturally manufactured one, developed unevenly over a period of time, influenced by and responding to a variety of historical events and social conditions” (16).  We can talk about what white people like until we’re blue in the face and have an Urban Outfitters book deal, but we still aren’t talking about what whiteness is.

Enter good old Herman Melville.  The problem of talking about whiteness was already a pressing concern: “By the time Melville was writing, the nebulous representations of whiteness as something vaguely English or vaguely Christian that are found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sermons, histories, travel, crime, and captivity narratives were giving way to fully fleshed literary characterizations in nineteenth-century fiction.  Yankees, frontiersmen, Southern cavaliers, greenhorns, sexless and morally pure white women—all became standard models of white identity” (Babb 90).  A large part of Melville’s project was, to borrow a thoroughly modern screenwriting term, to hang a lampshade on the notion of whiteness.  He wanted readers to be fully, even uncomfortably, aware of it.

Thus Moby-Dick is, among other things, “an exploration of what whiteness means in a culture of many races” (Babb 95).  And Melville is “a white racial identity in sympathy with the ideals of the American democratic project yet keenly aware of the undemocratic nature of its race relations” (Babb 95)—a lot like Tarantino, don’t you think?

But 161 years is a lot of time, a lot of change, and a lot of history.  Tarantino has no need to restage the questions and concerns about whiteness that Moby-Dick posed in 1851.  Django Unchained isn’t an examination of whiteness; it’s an indictment of it.

We know from the film’s title, from its genre, and certainly from its marketing who the hero is—Django himself, obviously—so it follows that we know the villain as well.  We have no trouble wrapping our minds around Leo DiCaprio as the evil slave owner who must be defeated, just as we have no trouble understanding that slavery is bad, freedom is good, and exploitation cinema will stage lurid violence for our voyeuristic pleasure against the bad and in pursuit of the good.

But this is where Tarantino plants his most interesting social message while simultaneously solving the problem of how to make a film with anything new to say about antebellum America and our supposedly post-racial contemporary moment.  Tarantino’s major concern isn’t slavery, and it isn’t exploitation.  It’s how to make whiteness visible.

We expect blood in a Tarantino film.  To a lesser extent, we expect certain markers of the antebellum South in a movie about slavery set primarily in Mississippi and Tennessee.  The cotton, the horses, whitewashed columns and walls of the plantation big house.

Tarantino’s graceful answer to the question—how do you make whiteness visible?—is almost so obvious you’d be forgiven for not paying attention.  The white cotton, the white horse, the whitewashed walls: he soaks them in blood.  Whiteness in Django Unchained is made visible by the effect of the violence whiteness has wrought.

Whiteness in Moby-Dick might “[embody] a host of symbolic associations from purity to terror” (95), but Django Unchained is significantly more brutal.  There is no purity here.  There is no such thing as clean whiteness.  And so DiCaprio menaces by sneering to reveal tarnished, rotting teeth in place of the gleaming A-list pearly whites we would expect.  And lest we think that Waltz’s Dr. Schultz is the exception to the rule, it’s worth noting that though he is a dentist, the bouncing tooth that adorns his carriage is just as dirty as those in DiCaprio’s mouth.  The analogy is a stretch but it plays out: Schultz is no anachronistic doctor in the business of repairing the rotten teeth that symbolize the moral decay.  He is, rather, of the brutal, period-specific old school, more likely to rip those dirty teeth right from your head.  Or explode one with dynamite, as the case might be.

Compare these images to the stunning, clear beauty of Kerry Washington’s Broomhilda.  Compareas well Sam Jackson’s Stephen, the only white-haired African-American in the film, who takes on ‘whiteness’ in the only way he can—by playing directly into minstrelsy stereotypes of the time.*

Stephen’s death, and Broomhilda and Django’s measured triumph, see the plantation transform into that rotten tooth writ large on the landscape.  The only cure for that decayed spot, that whiteness soaked in blood, is finally to dynamite it into oblivion.
*I’m thinking here of a thesis put forth by Robbie McCauley in her masterful one act play about race and sexuality, Sally’s Rape: “I believe white is a condition that anyone can take it.  It causes one to feel superior in order to be okay” (224).

It’s the last episode of 2012! Josh and Alex delve deep into their thoughts about The Hobbit, from Barry Humphries’s goiter to Martin Freeman’s hobbity little ass. They also try to say something about the non-action-blockbuster films they saw this year, but frankly, there weren’t many. They get meta about the work of Wes Anderson, prognosticate on the Oscar narrative for this year, and look forward to what the future brings.

Spoilers:
The Hobbit
Moonrise Kingdom
Drive
Safety Not Guaranteed

Links:
Shovels & Rope
The Story of Film: An Odyssey
CanIStream.It
Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
Vulture article on Kathryn Bigelow
Charlize Theron’s super hot buzz cut

Corrections:
Safety Not Guaranteed does indeed star Mark Duplass. He’s also in Zero Dark Thirty, which we would know if we’d seen that film yet. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. Check out the Vulture article above for information on Kathryn Bigelow’s rush to make Zero Dark Thirty in the wake of that event. The Spielberg film Josh mentions is 1941.

As the year draws to a close, Josh and Alex take a look back at their favorite—and least favorite—action blockbusters of 2012. Find out what they loved and what they hated! Hear them finally tear into The Dark Knight Rises in full! Hear wild speculation about the future of Hollywood’s major franchises!

Spoilers:
Avengers
The Amazing Spider-Man
Gwen Stacy’s fate in the comics
The Dark Knight Rises
Looper
Twilight: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2

Links:
L.A. Noir
Borderlands 2 trailer
The Hour
Cooking with Comics
The Death and Return of Superman
Much Ado About Nothing
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hit RECord
TFL podcast Episode 4: On Hot Chick Island
Star Trek Into Darkness trailer

Corrections:
The Dragon*Con panel, Games of the Apocalypse, featured creators of Borderlands, Wasteland, Fallout, and Gears of War. The Bourne Legacy is NOW available to rent online… it was released the day after we recorded. Andrew Stanton co-wrote and directed John Carter.

In this episode, #TheBondProject takes over Josh and Alex’s lives.  They get in depth with the latest movie in the James Bond franchise, Skyfall, and revisit some old classics to see how they hold up.  Alex can’t stop gushing about Daniel Craig, while Josh is concerned that rewatching GoldenEye might ruin his good memories of the eponymous N64 game.

spoilers:

Skyfall (major spoilers)
The Walking Dead (mild spoilers for seasons 1 & 2)
Casino Royale
Quantum of Solace
GoldenEye
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
From Russia with Love
Octopussy
Licence to Kill

Links:

The Walking Dead game
Warby Parker
Skyfall trailer
Every Bond title sequence
Alex’s TFL post on Daniel Craig and fantasies of consent
Hello Tailor’s post on Skyfall‘s Bond Girls
Vin Diesel’s Facebook
Every Bond theme song

Corrections:

Bond has only been shot onscreen once before, in Thunderball. And George Lazenby is indeed still alive.