Welcome back, listeners! We've returned from our vacation and are discussing Hayao Miyazaki's modern classic, Spirited Away.

10 year old Chihiro is leaving her friends behind to move with her family to a new town. On the drive there, they stumble onto a gateway to a spirit world, where her parents are turned into pigs and captured. Chihiro begins working in a bathhouse owned by the evil sorceress, Yubaba, and is forced to navigate the dangers and challenges of this mysterious world while remaining true to herself and her moral compass.

Spirited Away was the first major release for Miyazaki after the world outside of Japan had really discovered his genius, and it immediately put an exclamation point on his legacy and cemented his legend. It won the first ever Best Animated Feature Academy Award, and has been a constant fixture on lists both of the greatest films of the 21st century and of all-time. It's also a film immensely important personally to both of us, one that - despite its somewhat grim setup and dark-ish undercurrent - has enriched our lives with so much beauty and warmth and humor. So it is our great privilege to discuss this wonderful, magical movie with you.

Our deepest apologies on the delay this week. Before diving into this masterpiece we do want to give you all a heads up that our next episode will be postponed until June 7th due to our first vacation in over a year (YAY!) and Memorial Day the following Monday. 

With that out of the way, join us this week as we explore the magical, imaginative world of Hayao Miyazaki in this classic film about childhood wonder, sibling relationships, and the power of community.

In My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Mei and Satskuki are two young sisters moving with their father to a rural town in Japan to be closer to their mother, who has been staying in the hospital while being treated for an undisclosed illness. Soon after moving into their new home, they discover a world of spirits - including Totoro, the king of the forest - around them that are visible only to children. They soon form a relationship with these spirits, introducing them to the beauty in the mundane, such as the patter of rain on an umbrella. In return, Totoro and the other forest spirits take the sisters on a number of magical experiences, and help them deal with the stress of their mother's situation.

My Neighbor Totoro was an immediate hit in Japan, and gradually became one of the most beloved children films of all-time throughout the world, with Totoro himself becoming the official Studio Ghibli mascot and spawning a merchandizing empire. It's also the the first major film Miyazaki made that moved away from any sort of adventure tropes or genre elements. Instead, the endlessly fertile imagination visible in every frame, the rich pastoral beauty, and the keenly observed human interactions were all foregrounded here, without need of a dense plot to keep the audience engaged.

So please join us, as we discuss one of the most genuinely magical movies ever made.

Hello, listeners! Today, we're kicking off a new series on the work of Hayao Miyazaki with his 1986 classic, Castle in the Sky.

This is the inaugural film from the legendary Studio Ghibli, two years after the success of Nausicaa led to the studio's founding. The film follows a young girl with a mysterious amulet, who is on the run from two separate groups chasing her for reasons unknown both to her and the audience. She's aided by a young boy she meets along the way, and the two of them soon discover she and her amulet are both linked to a vanished kingdom in the sky, which is fabled to contain both extravagant riches and technology that could pose immense danger to the world should it fall into the wrong hands.

Castle in the Sky immediately established the studio's signature visual style, along with Miyazaki's own specific preoccupations - in particular, his unique balancing act between large scale magical-realist spectacle and low-key, introspective character moments, all of which is suffused with the ever-present beauty and splendor of the natural world.

We're wrapping up our Francis Ford Coppola series with 1979's Apocalypse Now.

Martin Sheen plays Capt. Willard, a soldier in the Vietnam War given a classified assignment to assassinate Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, who has supposedly gone insane and is waging a guerilla war in enemy territory. Willard hitches a ride with a Navy patrol boat and sails deep into the heart of the jungle toward Kurtz's secluded compound, his physical journey along the river an allegory for a journey into the depths of his soul.

A horrifying fever dream of a movie and one of the most overwhelming sensory experiences of the decade, Apocalypse Now was immediately regarded as a masterpiece upon release, and remains one of the most acclaimed and iconic films of the last 50 years. It was a fitting end to one of the most startlingly brilliant decades an American filmmaker has ever had.

Welcome back, listeners. In the third part of our series on Francis Ford Coppola, we revisit the Corleone family in The Godfather Part II.

In this acclaimed sequel, we jump back and forth in time as we chart young Vito Corleone's initial rise to power alongside his son Michael's expansion of power. Even more sprawling and ambitious than its predecessor, this is where the series really enters the arena of high drama, its story of moral decay and family betrayal feeling explicitly Shakespearean at times.

Initially met with a polarized response, the film has since come to be regarded as a worthy successor to the first film, and one of the greatest American films in its own right.  

Today we're discussing the second movie in Francis Ford Coppola's legendary 1970s string of masterpieces, The Conversation (1974).

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert hired to record a conversation between a man and woman in a busy San Francisco plaza. He soon begins to fear the recording might put their lives at risk, a suspicion founded in part by a gruesome incident from his past.

Overshadowed somewhat by the twin monuments in Coppola's filmography that surround it - The Godfather and The Godfather Part II - The Conversation is nonetheless one of the great achievements of Coppola's career, and of 1970s American cinema. Nominally a part of the wave of conspiracy thrillers that released in the mid-70s as the country roiled from political turmoil, it was unique in how deeply personal it was. At its heart, it's a lonely, tormented character study; a death-haunted masterpiece about a man who's spent years building walls around himself as he observes the world from afar, only to have the walls ripped down and the looking glass turned on him.

We've got a big one today, folks. To kick off our new series on the films of Francis Ford Coppola, we're discussing his seminal 1972 film, The Godfather.

Widely regarded as one of the Great American Films, it is also, much like Citizen Kane, a film specifically about America - signaled immediately with its famous opening line, "I believe in America." It's a story about capitalism, the pursuit of power, and the attendant loss of innocence and ethics. A foundational immigrant story, the dark side of the American Dream. It is also one of the most perfectly crafted films of the last 50 years, overflowing with artistry in every frame, the product of a superlative visionary who has been given his first real opportunity to make a major artistic statement. Aiding him in making said statement are what Stanley Kubrick referred to as the greatest cast ever assembled, an iconic score by the incomparable Nino Rota, and wonderfully expressive photography by Gordon Willis.

Please join us as we discuss one of the true treasures of film history.

We're wrapping up our series on Bill Murray with arguably the key performance of his 21st century career - as aging movie star Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola's 2003 hit, Lost in Translation. Unhappy in both his career and his marriage, Murray finds himself adrift in Tokyo while shooting a local whiskey commercial. He winds up meeting and forging a bond with a fellow isolated American at his hotel (played by Scarlett Johannsen in her star-making role), who, despite her difference in age, seems to be at a similar emotional crossroads in her own life.

Building on the deadpan melancholy he introduced in Rushmore, Murray earned some of the most effusive praise of his career for his role here, culminating in an Academy Award nomination. It's the film in which his transformation into a major dramatic actor was completed.

Welcome back listeners! This week we delve into a more sentimental role for Bill Murray as he depicts the titular character Vincent in Theodore Melfi's 2014 film St. Vincent. The movie is a lesson in not judging a book by it's cover or a cranky neighbor by his vices. Join us as we discuss everything from Murray's accent to Melissa McCarthy's heart-touching performance to Naomi Watt's in a more comical role than what she's typically known. And always remember to love thy neighbor even if they are a cranky, old man. 

For the second part in our Bill Murray season, we’re discussing Wes Anderson’s 1998 breakthrough, Rushmore. After two decades of being Hollywood’s king of comedy, this film marked a shift into somewhat more dramatic territory for Murray, and signaled the beginning of his tenure as a mainstay of offbeat independent cinema. It is also the beginning of his long-running collaboration with Wes Anderson, who’s trademark visual style became fully established with this, his sophomore feature.