An Ear for Film: The Festival of Festivals
The three best movie-related podcast episodes of the week.

Each week or so, Dom plumbs the depths of podcast nation to bring you the best in cinema-related chats and programs. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then writing about movie podcasts is like listening to someone describe someone dancing about architecture.
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The Toronto International Film Festival just concluded—I think?—and, having never been, I understand its clout and importance only via fellow film writers and “tastemakers” who are there and have been plenty times before, and the extent to which I understand it is subsequently limited to Instagram posts of said writers with various degrees of celebrities (“I just had a wonderful chat with the always down-to-earth and fiercely intelligent Riley Keough; here she is wearing a #sweater”), the barrage of capsule reviews in major publications, and the insistence that the festival is some sort of crucible in which the edifice of the critical darlings to come for the ensuing year is molded and simultaneously fine-tuned.
I also learn about the festival via podcasts, my only window into the outside world. This week, Sam Fragoso’s Talk Easy featured a brief but enlightening conversation with Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips, recorded while Phillips was eating sushi at TIFF. Instead of describing their favorite festival movies that no one will be able to see for quite some time, the two thankfully share a pleasant rapport musing about the art of criticism, making such a calling a career, and the habit of obsessively watching films, let alone obsessively engaging in any one kind of art. Quickly dispelling the cloud of egoism that shrouds any critic’s compulsion to serve up hot takes long before the public that they’re supposed to be serving has even a remote chance of considering the validity of that opinion, Phillips talks about how “unhealthy” it is to watch so many movies so frequently, but not before admitting that most writers who are part of the exquisitely small enclave of people who give a flying fuck about TIFF are pretty much, at best, boring, and at worst, barely in control of the English language. Still, like in every episode of Talk Easy, there emerges the moment when Fragoso’s ability to foster intimacy with strangers becomes suddenly perfect, and in this case (though Fragoso and Phillips know each other) it’s when Fragoso references an email he sent when he was in high school, asking Phillips about what it takes to have a life devoted to writing about movies. Phillips remembers the email well.
Also this week, Will Sloan and Justin Decloux use their Important Cinema Club podcast to both reflect on their times spent at TIFF—which they seem to have either sparsely attended this year, or not attended all—and decry what TIFF has become. The two provide some casual but welcome context to what was once widely considered a staunchly populist festival, kneecapping any illusion that one of the highest-profile film festivals in the world has somehow strayed from its more proletarian roots, because even when it was founded in 1975 it was run under the auspices of film producers and assorted industry folk. Sloan and Decloux point notably to this year’s Opening Night film, the remake of The Magnificent Seven, wondering what kind of person would pay $60 for a ticket only to get stuck in the balcony while film stars and related personalities get an actually serviceable view of their own film, especially on a night during which the stars’ presences there functionally do nothing for boosting the film’s box office or supporting an after-screening Q&A.
Overall, the hosts’ personal oral histories of TIFF fail to encourage a non-accredited film buff to make the trip to Toronto each year, instead portraying such corporate-driven festivals as this an affair of infuriating exclusivity. No one outside of “Film Twitter” or the film industry itself really gives a shit about TIFF—unless you live in Toronto—and even then, all of the reporting and commentary and thinkpieces derived from the festival operate in a vacuum, devaluing the art of criticism by cutting it off at its fan-based roots. In other words: If you’re a movie critic but you forget that you’re writing predominantly to and for movie fans, then aren’t you just kind of a self-serving asshole?
Speaking of self-serving assholes, here are my three picks for the best movie-related podcasts of the week.