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As summer slides into autumn GLoP eases into a decidedly laid back edition. Rob goes from the wilds of Alaska to the beaches of the Virgin Islands while John and Jonah go from hot to cold on supposedly classic films like The Searchers, Citizen Kane and Vertigo.
There’s also an appreciation of the film Road House and character actor Paul Willson (Cheers, It’s Gary Shandling’s Show) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
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@fynxbell So good it left you speechless, amirite?
I believe he/she/whatever had asked about the closing song, I don’t know why that was removed.
Anchorage by Michelle Shocked.
It does sound like Mary Ramsey, who sang for 10,000 Maniacs after Natalie Merchant. But it’s actually “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked.
I’m close to agreeing with John on Vertigo, perhaps that’s because I find Kim Novak uninteresting in any of her incarnations. Tremendous score, though. Great inadvertent documentary of old San Francisco as well.
Jonah could profit from a rewatch of Citizen Kane. It’s not only the first time certain things were done, in many instances it’s still the best example of that innovation. It still seems startlingly different, even after decades of people copying its tricks.
I can never quite get my head around the fact that the man who edited Citizen Kane was the director of the first Star Trek movie, but that’s another post.
GREAT song!
The casting of Kim Novak in Vertigo was indeed unfortunate. Whether this was Hitchcock’s well-known weakness for blondes, or the studio looking to cast the current sex symbol, I don’t know.
Citizen Kane is great to look at, and some of the performances are good, but what it has to say about human psychology and politics is basically stupid. Unlike the film that beat it for Best Picture, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley.
It’s a myth, using the vocabulary of the medium at the time, and turning it all inside out. It’s not about politics, but again, it inverts the usual Hollywood line: the outsider goes up against the machine, crumbles, and withdraws.
Bom dia Everyone!
Finally! Unfortunately, this podcast isn’t Joe Rogan long.
Pod “I don’t like Vertigo”. Well, you are in good company. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like Vertigo. He said so several times, last time at the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.
Jonah “Citizen Kane”. It’s defensible. For the average Joe, the innovative movie techniques aren’t that important, we are left with the story. And…who cares about Randolph Hearst gossip?
I’m left to wait 300 years until the next podcast.
When I was a kid I used to listen to this radio station that used past the closing song I never forgot the “Anchor down in Anchorage” and the mention about the size of the state. I have no clue why the song was so popular amongst the DJ at the station. Why would a song about Alaska be so popular on national radio in Portugal in the ’80s? That’s how odd the world is.
Agree with John P. on THE SEARCHERS — 100%. Easily the most overrated movie to ever make a critic’s top 10. I can watch SHANE on a continuous loop and I love Anthony Mann’s westerns of the 1950s, but THE SEARCHERS not only isn’t great, I’m not sure it’s even good. A few iconic images, sure, but overall it‘s just a long and often ludicrous bore.
Second note of the day: Jonah is too bright and too old to be using upspeak, which he resorts to a lot (particularly in moments of diffidence or vague insecurity). Drives me crazy when he does it. Well, it drives me crazy when anybody does it, but I expect more from Jonah.
(And now I’m waiting for some “clever” soul to respond to this comment by — yes — using upspeak, as in: “Um, I’m sorry if upspeak offends you? But maybe you need to, um, I don’t know … shut up?” God help us all.)
For me it’s trying to comprehend that he directed West Side Story and The Sound of Music as well.
I’ve come to expect very little from Jonah. The term “post turtle” comes to mind.
I wonder if “Citizen Kane” wouldn’t be more impactful if you were from the Hearst era and knew what a rich jerk he was. I too saw “Citizen Kane” in a class in college and understood what they were trying to do and didn’t really care and won’t watch it again.
Y’all just make me want to watch it again, just to spite ya!
Why? Directors who grew up in the studio system could handle anything.
Take Michael Curtiz. He did swashbucklers like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood to musicals such as Yankee Doodle Dandy to straight drama in Casablanca. He also directed one of the sloppiest editing jobs I’ve ever seen in White Christmas (a movie I still love.)
@filmklassik
I got a definition for upspeak from the urban dictionary. But I realized afterwards that it was written by someone illiterate
Because we don’t revert the order of words we differentiate a question from a declaration by the tone ( Portuguese).
Is that an example of upspeak?
One thing I find annoying in modern English usage is the tendency of framing declarative sentences as questions. “What did you study in school?” “English?”. Oh Jesus!
I tell you one thing that makes my blood boiling, the look of fake bewilderment I often get from my kids, they learned that from the Disney channel’s crap tv series (with real people), unfortunately in my country I would go to jail if I killed anyone of my children. The “duh!!!” is also something that demands a lot of self-control. …
Because on the one hand you have two movies where there’s movement and dancing and action and . . . on the other you have a movie where people stand around and stare at things.
Asking for a friend…
Ricochet is a private club of sorts, right?
We are all paying members, right?
Is the USA such a big brother/North Korean society that even here people hide behind an alias?
I don’t get it.
Can you lose your job if you say something out of line here?
Like “BLM doesn’t really care about black people murdered by criminals” or “socialism doesn’t work” or ” identity politics is racism for brown people”?
Probably. I’m not taking any chances. Only part of this site is behind the paywall. Anything public is searchable by people who wish to do me harm. And having been the target of doxxers more than once in recent years (who swore they’d get me fired), I’ll err on the side of caution.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I have it on hold at the library. Maybe in the next week or two I will correct my error.
That’s really sad.
So much for connecting people, eh?
Well, not every director from the Golden Age was equally versatile. Curtiz was adept at different genres. So was Howard Hawks. But even those guys couldn’t do everything. Much as I love Hawks, do you really think he could’ve done justice to something like THE HEIRESS or THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES? Come on. Just like Wyler’s version of HIS GIRL FRIDAY would have been less impressive than the Hawks version. And we should all thank God Hitchcock didn’t direct BEN HUR.
Nobody, but nobody, can do everything.
I worked for ESPN for 22 years as a freelancer/part-time employee. They were not very friendly to people who expressed conservative positions on or off the job. Now I don’t care. I’m just more known around these parts by my screen name.
The whole “Rosebud” business is very stupid — as if we need gimmicky explanations for why men seek wealth and power. Also, I get a big laugh out of a “wise” character, no doubt speaking for the screenwriter, who tells Kane that the masses no longer need rich people to represent them in politics.
Mankiewicz and Orson Wells both deserve the honour of being called artists. However, regarding the regular people, they could never go beyond the caricature. And that’s more or less the case with the people afflicted with a left-wing worldview. And since then there have been no changes. Citizen Kane is afflicted with two-bit psychology, the lost childhood of Charles Foster Kane, the cheap symbolism of the snow slide. Arghh. If we can believe the movie Mank, Mankiewicz was the typical commie fool of the time, his pet politician didn’t win because communism is unsellable to the American people, no! It had to be the movers and shakers behind the curtains.
Reading S.C. Gwynne’s magisterial Empire of the Summer Moon, about the Comanche Wars of the 19th century, at a certain point I thought, “Hey, I recognize this story. It’s The Searchers!”
The movie is based on the real history of the Parker family of Texas, which was ironically fated to be on both sides of the war: the Paramount Chief of the Comanche Nation later called himself Quanah Parker, after his mother, captured (like Natalie Wood in the movie) as a little girl.
I guess this is the main difference between the two movies. The Searchers is based on the real West; while Shane, with its archetypal (an unkind person would say cardboard) characters, is a commentary on previous generations of Western movies.
By contrast, the “hero” of The Searchers is a former Confederate border raider, technically still at war with the United States because he never surrendered. About the most you can say in his defense is that he probably committed fewer atrocities than the Comanche. But, as Victor Davis Hanson has written, sometimes a community needs a monster like that.
It is a genuinely sad comment on American culture if it is true that Boomers at NASA chose the name Enterprise for a US spaceship because it was the name of a TV spaceship. I would like to think that at least some of those who recommended the name, and especially the older, more historically informed leaders at NASA were also aware that there is a long history of US ships named Enterprise. In fact the first was captured from the British, who have a great tradition of giving bad ass names (Furious, Vengeance, Nemesis, Terror) to their warships.
It seems obvious to me, as it did when I was a young fan of the original Star Trek, that the TV spaceship was named after USS Enterprise, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, which was newly commissioned and busily making news around the globe during her first operational deployments just when writers were looking for a name for the TV spaceship.
No doubt when the 9th USS Enterprise is commissioned in the near future, the poorly educated Star Trek fans will believe and claim that it was named after their favorite Starship. They really should “Get a life!”
Edit: I’m going to leave this here, but I see now that I was listening to an old episode from June 15 because: New and “improved” Apple Podcast App. Sorry.
Actually, Gene Roddenberry wanted it to be called Yorktown.
The Enterprise Rental Car agency is named after the WWII aircraft carrier. IIRC, the founder served on it during the war.