Happy Halloween, everybody! In honor of this spookiest of months, we're doing a series on classic Universal monster movies. And to kick things off, we're discussing the James Whale adaptation of Frankenstein (1931).

Earlier in 1931, Universal had released the original Dracula to massive box office success. They decided to capitalize on that success by commissioning more films in the same vein. Frankenstein released to even large acclaim, and cemented horror as one of the most popular genres in the new era of talkies. It led to years of Universal monster movies, which, as a full cycle, was extremely important in defining the iconography and imagery we now associate with Halloween. It also launched the filmmaking career of James Whale, who was one of the most successful directors in Hollywood throughout the 1930s.

This podcast is intended to be educational any audio clips are utilized with gratitude under the fair use copyright law.

Clips 1 and 2: Frankenstein. Universal Studios, 1931

Clip 3: Young Frankenstein. Twentieth Century Fox, 1974

We're finishing our series on the Coen Brothers with the film that made them household names: Fargo.

Jerry Lundergard, desperate for money to pay off an unspecified debt, hires two goons to kidnap his wife and demand a ransom from his wealthy father-in-law, part of which Lundergard will keep for himself. But, as is usually the case in the world of the Coens, the scheme does not go according to plan, as the hired guns leave a pile of dead bodies in their wake and Frances McDormand's pregnant police chief is soon on their trail.

The Coens had enjoyed a career of critical acclaim and cult cachet among cinephiles up to this point, but Fargo is what brought them into the mainstream. A darkly comic neo noir, as well as a kind of treatise on contentment and domestic bliss, the film was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, with the character of Marge Gunderson becoming instantly iconic. The Coens have made better films, but they have never again captured the zeitgeist in quite the same way as with this cold, melancholy little crime classic.

We're onto part 3 of our series on the work of the Coen Brothers, and we've decided to discuss their 2000 screwball classic, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play fugitives from a chain gain in the Depression-era South, running from the law and pursuing treasure. On the way, they rob banks with Baby Face Nelson, upend a Klan rally, and become recording superstars.

O Brother is arguably the most sheerly enjoyable movie the Coens have ever made, a film the elicits a smile from viewers for basically its entire runtime. A kind of folksy, utopian fairy tale of early 20th century Americana, it invites audiences into a warm, irresistible world, populated with big-hearted characters and an ever-present feeling that things will all work out in the end. The Coens' cynicism and sense of irony pops up periodically, but this nevertheless winds up being the gentlest film of their career to date.

Welcome back, everyone. Today, we're continuing our series on the Coen Brothers with a big one: their 1990 gangster masterpiece, Miller's Crossing.

I'll dispense with any pretense of a summary this time, as the plot's complexity makes such a task basically impossible. Instead, I'll just say that this happens to be my (Ty's) favorite movie of all-time. I first discovered it nearly 20 years ago and have probably seen it north of 25 times now, with every viewing yielding even more richness than the last. It's an intricately plotted gangland noir, a love letter to crime fiction of the 20s-40s (Dashiell Hammett, most explicitly), and a grudgingly moving meditation on loyalty, ethics, and friendship. It's also the fullest expression of the Coens' love of language, overflowing with the poetry of urban slang, with essentially every line of dialogue worthy of quotation. That loving artistry also extends to every other facet of the film: the lush, elegiac score by Carter Burwell, the elegant photography by Barry Sonnenfeld, the Coens own editing, and the performances by every member of the cast (with Gabriel Byrne, in particular, doing amazing and understated work as Tom Reagan, the most enduringly fascinating and enigmatic protagonist the Coens have ever given us).

It is, in every way, a flawless jewel of a movie, and I hope our discussion is able to provide some small insight into what makes it so endlessly rewarding and magical.

Welcome back, everyone! This week's episode as pulling double-duty as a postscript to our series on the Western and the opener for our series on the Coen Brothers: True Grit.

As we discuss in the episode, this film finds the Coens in an atypically traditionalist mode, making a relatively straightforward and even sentimental Western. One of the rare instances of the duo adapting someone else's writing, the film tells an earnest story of Mattie Ross, a 14 year old girl, as she partners with a slovenly US Marshall and a Texas Ranger in her quest to avenge her father's murder.

While the film is more conventional than one might expect from the Coens, it is nevertheless filled with their typical craftsmanship, along with their penchant for stylized regional dialogue and character eccentricity. And by the end, it achieves an understated melancholy and wistfulness that lingers in the memory long after the credits have rolled.

Hello, listeners! Today, we're wrapping up our series on the Western genre with Robert Altman's elegiac classic, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

In the late 1960s, what's now known as the Revisionist Western become the dominant trend within the genre, with films self-consciously offering correctives to the myths propagated by the Classical Western. Altman's film nominally falls within that sub-genre/movement, but also stands somewhat apart from it. It isn't especially interested in subversively upending the conventions of the genre, or gleefully wallowing in gratuitous violence and unpleasantness like so many other Westerns from this era. Instead, it largely ignores the conventions in favor of a low key and realistic portrait of frontier life. It rejects the romanticized vision of the West seen in movies throughout the preceding decades, showing instead a world of harsh living, filled with mud and grime, with people eking out lives anyway they can. But it's also filled with understated poetry, finding a spare, austere beauty in the natural world, and of the people who are able to carve out a civilization within it.

Welcome back, listeners! For the third installment in our series on the Western genre, we're talking about Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.

Leone made this film after completing his Dollars trilogy, and it feels like his grand summation of the genre, and to some degree the culmination of the classical Western genre as a whole. The Western as American foundation myth, but elevated to a kind of operatic grandeur and grandiosity. The traditional archetypes and conventions of the genre are in place, but the characters and landscapes are all larger than life.

Around this time, the genre was beginning to move in a more cynical and realistic direction, taking a critical look at the romanticized myths found in the Westerns that had come earlier. Once Upon a Time in the West possessed some cynicism, to be sure, but more than anything it was a celebration of those romanticized myths, a vision of the West built from the scattered images and ideas that pervaded the genre through its history up to that point.

Hi there, listeners! For part 2 of our series on the evolution of the Western, we’re taking a look at Howard Hawks 1959 classic, Rio Bravo.

In the 1950s, the Western genre increasingly began to enter darker, less romanticized territory, with the nerve-jangling violence and psychological complexity of films by Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and others. Even John Ford’s work began to grow darker and more cynical. At the same time, though, the genre was becoming popular on television, with the low key charms and genial nature one associates with the small screen in full effect.

Rio Bravo, despite its big screen pedigree and a world class filmmaker at the helm, is rooted firmly in the latter group. John Wayne, at his most John Wayne, plays a no-nonsense small-town sheriff tasked with a seemingly suicidal mission, aided only by a “drunk and a crippled old man” Asked if that’s all he’s got, Wayne corrects his friend - “That’s… what I got.” And so proceeds a typically Hawksian study of professionalism and personal responsibility. But despite the gravity of the setup, the film’s tone is largely light throughout, with the humor and warmth of the characters lingering in the mind much more strongly than the suspense of their predicament.

Robin Wood, the celebrated film critic and academic, once said that if he had to pick a single film that justified the existence of Hollywood, he’d choose Rio Bravo. It’s a film of enormous complexity, as he explicated in his book analyzing the film. But it’s also a film of intense surface level charm, one that with every viewing evokes the joy of leisurely spending time in the company of old friends. 

Welcome back, listeners! We've decided our first series back from our break will be on the Western genre. More specifically, we're looking at how the genre evolved over the years. To kick things off, we're discussing John Ford's 1946 masterpiece, My Darling Clementine.

One of the most archetypal of all Classical Westerns, My Darling Clementine covers one of the enduring legends of the old West: the gunfight at the OK Corral, and the conflict leading up to it. While later depictions of the event and characters would hew closer to the historical record, Ford took as his focus the myth itself, and conjured up a film of peerless beauty, a kind of utopian dream of the Old West.

Ford was more responsible than anyone in establishing the basic conventions of the Western genre, and My Darling Clementine was, perhaps alongside Stagecoach, the film most instrumental in that process. He later began exploring the West with a more skeptical eye, but this is the Western in its foundational moment, where larger-than-life heroes befit the legends told about them, and where frontier life is depicted with boundless poetry.

Once again, our apologies on the lateness of this episode, due to some technical difficulties we were unable to release this episode Monday. However, we hope you enjoy our discussion as this is our final episode for this season. Stay tuned in August when we return for season 2!

Today, we're closing out our series on Hayao Miyazaki with his 2008 classic, Ponyo.

A loose adaptation of The Little Mermaid, the film follows the titular character, a goldfish (well, sort of...) whose father is a former human-turned-underwater-wizard and whose mother is the Goddess of Mercy, as she runs (er, swims) away from home, falls in love with a 5-year old human, and becomes determined to become human herself so she can stay with him.

Ponyo feels at times like a Greatest Hits for Miyazaki, as everything one typically associates with him can be found here. It's a celebration both of children (their boundless imagination and the purity of their emotions), and of traditional, hand-drawn animation. It's a film that pulsates with life and beauty in every frame, a staggering testament to the richness of the world around us and Miyazaki's uncanny ability to capture all of it. It's one of the greatest accomplishments of his career, and a fitting closer for our season here.