Dec 24, 2019
In the first There's Sometimes a Buggy Christmas episode, we discuss two studio-era Hollywood movies that you never knew were Christmas movies: Michael Curtiz's FOUR DAUGHTERS (1938) and Preston Sturges's THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (1944). Hear us explain how Four Daughters anticipates both Casablanca and Blue...
Dec 21, 2019
In our 2nd episode devoted to a TIFF retrospective, we cover News From Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman and share with you our excitement about a new favourite director. Topics that come up in the course of discussing Akerman's obsessional-yet-variegated filmography include Freud, mothers, the historico-geographic...
Dec 13, 2019
On to 1931 and back to Paramount for a Sylvia Sidney double feature: a genre exercise from Mamoulian (CITY STREETS) and a finger exercise from Sternberg (AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY). We debate whether Sternberg's version serves or travesties Dreiser's novel, and whether it matters. Then, the return of Scorsese Corner to...
Dec 6, 2019
Jennifer Jones exhibits a new level of craft in two very different roles in two 1949 movies, WE WERE STRANGERS (dir. John Huston) and MADAME BOVARY (dir. Vincente Minnelli). Elise and Dave ponder how these movies, respectively daring for their revolutionary politics and gender politics, ever got made. Dave identifies...
Nov 29, 2019
Our first Universal 1930 episode veers from racial insanity, courtesy of John Murray Anderson's two-strip Technicolor musical KING OF JAZZ (spoiler: the King is a White Man), to grisly Christian sentimentality, via William Wyler's HELL'S HEROES (aka Several Corpses and a Baby), which also makes this an accidental...