An Ear for Film: The Festival of Festivals

The Projection Booth
“Oliver Stone”

Mike White knows exactly what makes for authoritative podcasting, so while his typically ultra-thorough take on individual films isn’t on display for this Bonus Episode, White does invite Matt Zoller Seitz to the podcast in order to serve as his trusty #2 during a conversation with Oliver Stone. Even better, White knows presciently when to remove himself from the back-and-forth, which he does often during this episode, as Seitz (who literally wrote the book on the director, The Oliver Stone Experience) and Stone share a believably chummy repartee. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Oliver Stone would befriend—and to a certain extent, at least based on listening to this podcast episode, rely upon the validation of—critical experts in his oeuvre, but there’s still a strangely meta-textual component to how often White will ask Stone a question, which Stone then underhand passes to Seitz even if the question is more attempting to gauge Stone’s mindset rather than establish a seemingly objective critical interpretation. It’s all part of the charm: The interview covers a lot of ground without feeling overstuffed, mostly because Stone is relentlessly confident about his brilliance as an artist yet somehow still comes off like a humble, hardworking, boot-strapping kind of fella. Plus, his hot takes are refreshingly lukewarm: He really loved Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon.

Blank Check with Griffin & David
“Bender Siege 2: Dark Podcast”

Having finished their “We Pod a Cast” series on Cameron Crowe last week—with an instant-classic episode featuring David Sims’ patience drying up to a husk of no-fucks given, which, as you may know from a previous column, is something I love hearing in any podcast host—hashtag-the-two-friends have another “palate cleanser” before they start on James Cameron with a run-through of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Though Producer Ben Hosley is the ostensible guide on our trip through a film which stands as one of Steven Seagal’s best examples that he’s a magnetically terrible action star, like always, Griffin and David can’t help but take over the commentary, mostly because they know a lot more than Ben about Seagal, the film’s director, the film’s genre, the time during which the film was made, films, trains maybe, dark territories, Katherine Heigls, etc. While there’s plenty to make fun of here, the fact that Ben’s hosting duties are under siege solidifies what Blank Check has become: For a podcast which began as a sort of extended bit in which Griffin and David analyzed The Phantom Menace as a totally stand-alone film, divorced from the immense, galactically far-reaching context any Star Wars movie must shoulder, Blank Check is now compulsively about context. Like every podcast I love—Hollywood Handbook, say, or even the aforementioned Important Cinema Club—the best shows are those which constantly discover, each week, exactly what it is they are. It’s clear that whatever Blank Check is now, it might not be soon enough.

You Must Remember This
“Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: Mommie Dearest”

Following Karina Longworth’s meticulous, exhaustive series on the Blacklist, her summer serialization of the life of Joan Crawford (and all the folks her life touched) was a comparative frolic. By no means devoid of drama or tragedy, “Six Degrees of Joan Crawford” still felt like a spritely return to Longworth at her less-serious best, replete with plenty of Crawford impersonations (delivered in tandem with her Bette David impersonations, identical but always welcome) and all the damning, delicious gossip anyone should expect from such a compulsively listenable show.

The final installment in the series has Crawford barely in it, covering instead Christine Crawford’s tell-all book about her estranged mother, Mommie Dearest, and the making of the film adaptation, starring Faye Dunaway as the elder Crawford. The details of both are of course heartbreaking, hilarious, and more than often disturbing (with hints of the supernatural courting Dunaway’s methods in embodying Crawford), but Longworth is able to seamlessly describe how a film about Crawford, which transformed in its marketing from a serious drama to a camp masterpiece based purely on the film’s original reception (an early example of how public perception can completely alter an artist’s intent), elucidates the figure of Crawford herself. An icon who spent her whole life building the iconography that would, in a feedback loop of sorts, vaunt her even higher, Crawford came to the end of that life forgetting, Longworth suggests, the real person underneath all of that artifice. Just as audience laughter made the otherwise Oscar-baiting Mommie Dearest an arch cult classic which would never dream of winning a statue, so did Crawford’s dream of stardom erase everything about her that wasn’t star-material, until Crawford couldn’t remember the person she was before she had a devoted audience to remember all that for her.

Dom Sinacola is Assistant Movies Editor and Resident Matt Damon Expert at Paste, as well as a Portland-based writer. Like everyone on this planet, he co-hosts his own podcast, Pretty Little Grown Men, which is sometimes about movies but mostly about Pretty Little Liars. You can find it on Twitter.