Shot/Reverse Shot

Shot/Reverse Shot have got sunshine in a bag this week because Matt and Ed are talking about the work of Clint Eastwood. In between discussing French documentaries and struggling to say "Joe Pesci," they delve into Eastwood's status as an icon of the Western genre, the merits of American Sniper (and the toxicity of the debate surrounding it), and lay into Jersey Boys with a passion and intensity alien to anyone involved with that film.

With the Academy Awards mere days away, Matt and Ed discuss why exactly they care about the Oscars, especially since they both occasionally hypocritically dismiss them as not really meaning anything. In so doing, they talk about the real commercial and artistic impact that an Oscar nomination can have, wonder if the Academy secretly hate Martin Landau, and talk about some of the odder wins/snubs in Oscar history. They also try to predict who will win on Sunday, foolishly.

Notes:

- Here is the article by Mark Harris on the narrative of "X and Y" films in Oscar season that Ed mentions in the episode.- Harris' book, Pictures at a Revolution, is an essential and entertaining work of film history that's especially interesting in examining what the Oscars can mean in a broader cultural context.

Considering the ongoing controversy surrounding Ava DuVernay's civil rights drama Selma and its relatively minor deviations from history (as well as the ongoing non-controversy surrounding Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game and its multiple, egregious deviations from history) Matt and Ed decided to ask why historical inaccuracy is so often used as a criticism against works of fiction, where exactly the line  between inaccuracy and artistic license lies, and wonder if Dave Lister holds the real truth behind the Kennedy assassination.

This week, Matt and Ed ponder why it is that so many film series are able to produce two good-to-great films, then fumble it when they have to make a final film to round out the trilogy. What is it about third films that makes them so prone to failure, and why do some series manage to avoid those pitfalls? They try to answer those questions, though not without deviating into an apoplectic rant about Return of the Jedi.

In the first of what will become a monthly feature, this episode finds Matt and Ed discussing the career of director Richard Linklater, the veteran of American independent cinema who is currently the toast of the town thanks to the critical and commercial success of Boyhood.

To add a structure to this episode and all future artist profiles, the boys have picked five of Linklater's films to focus on, each of which falls into a specific category: Breakthrough, Most Successful, Oddity, Dud and Crowning Achievement. That means that they get to talk about the gentle pleasure of watching Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around lovely locations and the more exuberant sight of Jack Black leading a rock and roll rebellion.

Please feel free to suggest artists you'd like us to profile in the future.

December saw the release of the third and final film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, a series which saw the man who turned a series of dense books into three fairly swift films do the opposite by transforming a short, snappy novel into three bloated epics. As fans of Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, not to mention his pre-LOTR work, who were disappointed by the Hobbitses, Matt and Ed decided to sit down and talk about the two trilogies in depth in order to figure out where the second trilogy went wrong. Along the way they talk about Star Wars, discuss the desirability of dwarfs and coin the term "Twilightise".

Links:

• Here is the interview with Viggo Mortensen referenced in the episode.

Happy New Year! We're back and we're looking forward to what lies on the horizon in 2015 in our traditional preview. We talk about the films we're excited about, the ones that we're curious about, and the ones that are sure to dominate the cultural conversation for weeks and months at a time. We also highlight some TV shows that we're excited about, and offer (hopefully) tantalising glimpses of what we have planned for the podcast itself in the year ahead.

2014 was a great year for cinema and a pretty good one for Shot/Reverse Shot. The same kind of terrible films got released that somehow get green lit every year, but you seemingly couldn't move for interesting, intelligent and entertaining films in pretty much every genre and at most budgets. Meanwhile, we put out more episodes than we ever have before, completed our Alternate 100 project, and sought to push ourselves and the format of the show as much as we possibly could. 

We've got great plans for how we can grow and evolve in 2015, but for the moment we're taking the time to talk about 2014: the good, the bad, the "why is Colin Farrell riding a flying horse?" We also find time to talk about what a fantastic year it was for comedy on television, and chart the ways in which movie marketing went completely insane in 2014.

Thank you all for listening this year. Stay safe over the holidays and we'll see you in the New Year!

Yes, our year-long journey through the undervalued and under-appreciated comes to its close and while we didn't exactly save the best for last - all 100 films could really be considered the best, really - we certainly go out with a great selection. We discuss time travel, basketball and (arguably) Jack Nicholson's best performance, and try not to get distracted by thoughts of Willem Dafoe in Morrisons. Enjoy, and remember: pimp-slapping Patricia Nixon into a china cabinet can be a sign of excessive force.

The end of the year and the end of the Alternate 100 are almost in sight, but there's still 20 more films to talk about before the boys can relax (or until they come up with another incredibly time-consuming project). In the penultimate installment, they talk about directors whose careers have gone in strange and interesting directions, compare a 1960s horror movie to the work of cult folk singer Daniel Johnston, and discus the angriest footsteps in cinema history.