Phi Phenomenon

It’s the ultimate episode: Ted gets to talk Jack Kirby, I get to talk Star Wars. On this episode we talk comic artist Kirby’s artistic legacy, my lack of enthusiasm towards that legacy, his departure from Marvel Comics, Stan Lee’s “Marvel method” of writing comics, the two or three baseline yet undeniable similarities between Kirby’s New Gods comic and George Lucas’s A New Hope mythology, and the brilliant Eisner Award-winning Tom King/Mitch Gerard mini-series Mister Miracle. Also: The Kirby-created character Darkseid’s influence on Marvel’s character Thanos, Lucas’s history with comic books or strips, the Marvel Star Wars comics throughout the years, the obviousness of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress influence, the less obvious avant-garde influence of the Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87 (1963), and the Kirby/Lee authorship argument.

(One oversight in the conversation: We neglect to mention the New Gods film in development from the great director Ava DuVernay, currently co-scripted by her and King.)

Ted Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

Star Wars is available on VOD and Disney+. The Hidden Fortress is available from Criterion and is also on HBO Max. Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” comics are available both physically and digitally from DC Comics.

Ted is back this week to talk with Glenn Kenny, who’s been writing knowledgeable, incisive film criticism with verve, discursive sentences, attitude, and the pop culture acumen of a rock critic for decades. On this episode we discuss his new book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, his love of Martin Scorsese’s film and filmmaking, both from encyclopedic and a proximity standpoint, his New Jersey upbringing, the literary influence Nabokov had, and his time at Premiere magazine in the ’90s when it was in competition with Entertainment Weekly. Also: his love of the grand cross-pollinating pop-cultural narrative histories of Greil Marcus, his influence from Lester Bangs, why Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God is actually an amazing screwball comedy worth 12 viewings, his book on Robert DeNiro, and why that actor takes the roles he’s taken for the last few decades.

Glenn Kenny is a film critic whose work currently appears in the New York Times and RogerEbert.com. He has also written for The Current, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, Playboy, Film Comment, and was formerly an editor for Premiere magazine. He also publishes on his blog, Some Came Running.

Ted Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

I’m joined today by esteemed editor Julia Bloch to discuss the 1984 film directed by Jonathan Demme that history has often forgotten in lieu of his celebrated Talking Heads concert documentary shot and released around the same time, Stop Making Sense. But that reputation was questioned when a 1990 Sight & Sound article by Steve Vineberg called a bootleg of the surviving director’s cut “one of the best movies made by an American in the ’80s.” On today’s episode two editors discuss all the myriad differences that can happen between two cuts of a film, speculation on all the reasons the film was recut or taken away from Demme in the first place, star/producer Goldie Hawn’s involvement, the career-best performance left on the cutting room floor, and whether or not the film deserves Vineberg’s high praise (spoiler alert: yes).

The theatrical cut of Swing Shift is available on VOD. While its director’s cut is not commercially available, digital bootlegs of a VHS from the director’s workprint are available for those able to make a judicious internet search.

Julia Bloch has worked in editing rooms for directors such as Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick, edited features for Doug Liman, the Mulleavay Sisters, and Jeremy Saulnier, including the films Blue Ruin, Green Room, and Hold the Dark. Her latest film as editor, His House, was just released on Netflix in September.

This time last century, John Ford was an actor, day-player, and assistant director hanging with his actor-brother in the emerging medium of motion pictures. Now legendary, he is the current record-holder for most Best Director Academy Awards, and in many ways the author of what we consider the mainstream movie-going experience. On today’s episode I’m joined by filmmaker Henry Butash, where we discuss not only the movie he made before his “celebrated masterpiece” The Searchers (quotation marks mine), its tonally difficult first hour, but also its justifying and deeply moving last hour fifteen. Also, randomly: Butash’s marathoning of 40 Ford films over the summer, Ford’s guilt and legend-making storytelling instincts, his intensive prolificacy (six features in one year!), his expressiveness in the studio system, his poetic tendencies, and the unending discovery that is his prodigious, uneven, deep filmography.

The Long Gray Line is available to rent VOD and frequently appears on Turner Classic Movies.

Henry Butash is a New York-based filmmaker who began his career in the editing room with director Terrence Malick on films including Knight of Cups, Voyage of Time and Song to Song. He wrote and directed his feature debut, The Atlantic City Story, starring Jessica Hecht (Friends, Breaking Bad) and Grammy Award-winner Mike Faist (Dear Evan Hansen, Steven Spielberg’s upcoming West Side Story), with the film recently premiering at the Denver Film Festival.

When Girl Talk’s album All Day came out in 2010, filmmaker Jacob Krupnick had no connection with the mashup artist. So it took a leap of inspiration to assume that within a year his $20k-budgeted accompaniment to that album would not only be on of the century’s greatest musicals and dance films, but also end up on IndieWire’s “100 Best Movies of the Decade” list for the 2010s. On today’s episode, we talk how the movie came together more from a place a pop music and dance than film history, the inspiredly fluid improv choreography of its endlessly charming star Anne Marsen, its sense of “outbreak,” the film’s sense of inspired and bravura amateurishness, and how that DIY handmade feel comes across in a “media missing” Final Cut clip that remains in the film’s highest resolution export.

Girl Walk // All Day is available for free on its website either in the entirety, or on YouTube or Vimeo in chapters.

Jacob Krupnick is a filmmaker based out of Brooklyn working on his second feature and various other projects.

This year’s Halloween pick may not be a full-blown horror movie, per se, but it definitely qualifies as one of the most confidently batshit movies ever made. On today’s episode, Ted and I talk whether Isabelle Adjani’s performance and the subway “devil’s miscarriage” scene qualifies as some of the bravest acting of all time, the legacy of Carlo Rimbaldi’s creature FX work in what is ostensibly a European art-film about divorce, how unhinged and messy and controlled this movie is technically and thematically, the pantheon of Polish cinema, and whether or not the main character or heart of the movie is the child in a bathtub at the center of an ending marriage.

Possession is, as far as we can tell, annoyingly unavailable for streaming, though it does occasionally appear on Turner Classic Movies. Criterion, maybe you should get on that.

Ted Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

Ted returns this week and makes his pick — a go-to favorite from a director in his trinity of greats. On today’s episode we talk about the director favorite hills that we die on defending, Ted’s interrupted series for Evansville’s Victory International Film Festival off-season, the cinematic history of Robin Hood with entries coming seemingly once in every three years, and A Hard Day Night’s director Richard Lester’s unheralded status in the pantheon of great directors. Also: the great Steven Soderbergh interview book with Lester Getting Away With It: Or: The Further Adventures of Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw, Sean Connery’s cinematic gimmick of love-tapping women, the current state of cinematic romantic fatalism, and, ultimately, we defend/question Lester for his female characters’ range of agency.

Robin and Marian is available to rent on VOD.

Ted Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

How are independent filmmakers hoping to make their names on the film festival circuit dealing with the pandemic? On today’s episode is Tyler Savage, whose second film, Blinders, is playing the upcoming 2020 Virtual Austin Film Festival in its Dark Matter category, is one such filmmaker who’s finding a way to make it work. Also, fun fact: I was editor on Savage’s first film as writer/director, Inheritance. On today’s episode we talk frankly about that experience, an intimate first-hand conversation between director and editor on the discovery process from first assembly to final cut. Also: Savage’s Los Angeles roots, a love of crime and film noir, his time working as a story editor for a blockbuster production company, what he learned working for director Terrence Malick, and how “patience and tenacity” are keeping his filmmaking going even in trying times.

Blinders is having its North American virtual premiere on October 24 at 10:45 CDT, and will then stay available to stream via the Austin Film Festival for 48 hours after its launch time.

Did one of the world’s boldest and most polarizing working filmmakers release a 13-hour movie last year for it to garner almost no attention? On today’s episode, I’m joined by writer/director Daniel Muller, to talk about Nicolas Winding Refn’s magnum opus neo-noir about Trump’s America that, for reasons discussed, seems to have been already discarded. We also talk about the comic book writing of the show’s co-creator Ed Brubaker, Refn’s filmmaking similarities to Stanley Kubrick, his movie curation website #byNWR, the parallels between the show and modern video game auteurism, its Lynchian sense of impending and effective dread, and the absurdity of “fascism is goodism.”

All 10 episodes of Too Old to Die Young are available exclusively on Amazon Prime.

Daniel Muller is a graduate of the American Film Institute and currently lives in Los Angeles.

Brockasmithovich returns! On today’s episode, we talk about what it’s like first-hand managing Evansville’s most popular movie theater during the pandemic, how safe he and customers should feel watching a movie, our viewing of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, Showplace’s recent announcement that it’s temporarily re-closing all its locations except for East, what it would take to financially bring back movie theaters across the country, and why Disney should’ve released Mulan in theaters alongside its Disney+ Premier Access route.

Smith is the lead manager at Showplace Cinemas East in Evansville, IN.