Paul Jay returns to talk with us about Warren Beatty’s greatest love! No, not women— by all evidence it’s Dick Tracy. Also, we are interrupted by a dog.
We’ve talked about Warren a couple of times before on the show— once with beloved recurring guest Sean Morris for Bulworth, and once to inagurate the whole dang podcast with our Ishtar episode!
The Daily Beast has details of Emile Hirsch’s attack on a Paramount executive at a Sundance party, although the headline’s assertion that he “starred” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a slight exaggeration (he had a small part as man-about-town hairdresser and murder victim Jay Sebring).
Rotten Tomatoes shows The Love Witch to be a darling of critics with a rating of 95% (audiences were more lukewarm, with their rating sitting at 61%). One of the few negative reviews calls it “dawdling, hollow and kind of awful, really:”
Some of the movie comes close to camp or just falls in, as when Elaine is assaulted by former friend Trish (Laura Waddell in the film’s only genuine performance), whose husband Elaine has stolen. “Skank! Whore!” Trish yells, slapping Elaine while wearing a wig cap — the movie helpfully provides its own drag-show re-enactment. A sequence in which Elaine is confronted in a bar by a mob of superstitious goofballs (“Burn the witch!”) is frankly terrible and staged with incredible clumsiness. The Love Witch will be worshipped as a fetish object by a certain breed of film nerd who luxuriates in its DIY retro aesthetic, but it isn’t really a movie — it would have to move first, and the pacing is leadfooted. The plot’s pairing Elaine with a stolid detective (Gian Keys) just leads to a handfasting scene at a local ren faire that seems to go on for six, maybe seven years.
For their one hundred and fiftieth episode (!), Jen and Tim welcome animation expert Jerry Beck to talk about the worst cartoons ever made and the Monkees’ super freak out, Head!
Tim gets a little treat this month— we talked about one of his personal favorites, Gaspar Noé’s trippy version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Enter the Void!
Towards the end, the weird trip turns into a bad trip, like sometimes mushroom trips or acid trips turn into bad trips. But a bad trip can be very rewarding, because when you come out of one, it’s like coming out of a bad dream where you get killed or something, and the moment you wake up, you still feel the presence of that reality and the dream, or the nightmare, is always real. But you feel so safe coming back to the real world, and some people said when they came out of this movie that they were still scared. – Gaspar Noé on Enter the Void
The Hype Williams-directed video Tim got so mad about is for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.” Honestly a pretty pallid copy of the title sequence Tim loves so much.
Tim and Jen are overwhelmed by the raw charisma of Jacques from the Seeking Derangements podcast in a truly chaotic episode nominally about the chaotic 1977 film House!
Screenwriter Josh Olson returns to share the Russ Meyer phantasmagoria Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and to make it clear that he did NOT write Gigli. The film was a hit when it arrived in 1970, but it was too strong for the studio and effectively ended Meyer’s career as a mainstream filmmaker. Meyer followed BTVOTD with the leaden legal drama Seven Minutes before going back to making titty flicks, thank god. In the episode Josh holds forth on Roger Ebert’s wonderful script, and we all weigh in on “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke” filmmaking (we all think it’s good).
Josh previously joined us to bring to our attention the little-loved Martin Mull-starring satire, Serial.
BTVOTD star Edy Williams was married to Meyer and also had a career sideline in appearing partially dressed at the Oscars. She did this until at least 1999. What a queen.
Bringing the train, and the movie, to a screeching halt, and god bless him for it
Tim and Jen (mostly Tim) describe a beloved ersatz-Hammer sci-fi thriller starring the venerable team of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (plus a sensational appearance by Telly “Kojak” Savalas). Throughout, Tim is like: games games games tabletop Cthulhu saving throw Traveller roll up a character -2 sanity
In the movie, Peter Cushing discovers the image of a murderer preserved on a victim’s eye. This was a real turn-of the century theory! Smithsonian Magazine has an article about it.
