The Super 70 Podcast

I sent my friend Dave Kinnaman Hanna Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil. Dave became so engrossed in Arendt’s history of the Holocaust and her philosophy of murder that I then sent him an Israeli documentary of the Eichmann’s trial called The Specialist by director Eyal Sivan. Using original footage of the trial, Sivan reconstructs Arendt’s arguments of why the trial was a failure though it still rendered justice, and through her work she constructed a theory of how the Shoah occurred. Join Dave and I as we sift through the darkest part of the 20th Century using Sivan’s sly masterpiece of truth and Arendt’s arresting idea that the worst mass murderers use droll paperwork instead of bullets.

Works Cited

Hanna Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The Origins of Totalitarianism

On Revolution

The Human Condition

On Violence

Films

The Specialist (1999) Eyal Sivan

Eichmann (2009) Robert Young

Operation Finale (2018) Christ Weitz

The Eichmann Show (1961) Paul Andrew Williams

Hanna Arendt (2012) Margarethe von Trotta

The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996) William A Graham

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann (1997) Michael Prazan

Operation Eichamann (1961) R. G. Springsteen

The Devil Speaks (2022) Yariv Mozer

Other Books

The Desk Killers, by Dan Gretton

On Killing, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders, by Ernst Klee

You can find me, my books, and my blog at www.thatdylandavis.com.

A few months ago I asked a friend of mine, Paul Emig to pick a movie, any movie, for the Super 70 Podcast. He chose Peter Jackson’s Braindead and needless to say this was not my cup of tea. But we don’t care about bad taste at the Super 70 Podcast. We don’t care if it has a budget of twenty thousand dollars or two hundred million, if it’s shot on Super 8, or 70 millimeter. All we care about, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Russel Crowe, is if you are entertained. Also for the previous year, Ben Waterhouse has been begging me to watch the same film. Now what are the chances that I would find two people on this planet that both love Braindead? While we dissect the work of Peter Jackson we digress through his work to the other towers of ANZAC cinema, reach around the edges of the Uruk-Hai and debate the merits of The Beatles, Greta Van Fleet, and Christine McVie.

Peter Jackson had already spent most of his own money developing his third film Braindead when his producer closed a deal to bring in a quarter million dollars to finish the project. Avalon Studios of Wellington, New Zealand had to spend thousands of dollars of unforeseen expenses to clean the floors of their office and lots when Jackson and his WETA crew blasted the sets with hundreds of gallons of fake blood. Seen as one film in a movement that included Sam Raimi and countless other copycats, Jackson deployed his technical skill as a cameraman, his eye for detail in production design, and a seeming ability to find humor in the things that make the rest of us vomit. The result, Braindead, a film that sent Jackson to Hollywood and on track to be one of the ten most successful directors in cinema history.

I keep in touch with my friend Dave Kinnaman over Zoom. We talk carpentry, history, and literature. Things got pretty wild when I dove in deep discussing two famous documentaries: Ken Burns’ Vietnam and The Last Days of Vietnam on PBS. Both of these documentaries were outstanding efforts to understand and convey the toxic American experience in Asia. Unfortunately, most of this conversation was lost which we recognize now days as a part of the Zoom experience. Also unfortunately, Dave and I digressed greatly in the making of this episode and our conversation we covered so many topics that were, well, off topic that I had to cut them out. In this episode we discuss the glory of HBOMax, Peter Jackson and how literature finds itself on film.

Thanks for listening to the Super 70 Podcast. You can find me, my books, and my blog at www.thatdylandavis.com. You can email me at [email protected] I am also on Instagram. Appreciate Roz’s music at www.rozalindmacphail.com

Discussed:

The Vietnam War

The Last Days of Vietnam

F for Fake

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Office Space

The Rum Diary

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Shah Rukh Kahn was already one of the biggest stars in the world when he returned after a four-year hiatus to take the lead in Pathaan, the fourth film in Yash Raj Films’s Spy Universe. Ostensibly about a retired Indian Intelligence agent teaming up with a Pakistani spy to stop a rogue group from carrying out a mass casualty event, Pathaan quickly reveals itself to be a deeper discussion of subcontinent politics. Along the way are direct lifts from Captain America: Winter Soldier, three Mission Impossible movies, and includes elements from most James Bond films and the entire Fast and Furious franchise. The result is an action packed hundred-million-dollar blockbuster that transcends corn, camp, and pastiche to be quite possibly the greatest action film of all time. Join me and my son Luke as we try to contain our excitement scene by scene through “King” Kahn’s Bollywood action masterpiece which begs the question, is Tom Cruise the American Shah Rukh Kahn?

Dave Kinnaman and I used to teach across the hall from one another. He taught American History, which I thought was boring. I taught World History, which he really never gave a shit about. I was a conservative Republican. He was a liberal Democrat. We were fast friends. We believed in our Republic for which it stands, listened to American Hardcore Punk, and incessantly read history and literature. Dave and I reconnected recently, and I asked him a ton of questions about All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Marie Remarque. The conversation digressed and drifted through the sands of time as we discussed the First World War, an unpublished documentary on Albert Speer, and why this German anti-war film from Netflix was a mixed message in today’s time.

Check out Rozalind MacPhail at rozalindmachphail.com and me at www.thatdylandavis.com.

Michael Winterbottom might be the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of the UK with a shocking 48 directing credits, both in film and television, since 1988. Known for jumping from genre to genre, he landed in Science Fiction in 2003 when he directed Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton in Code 46. In a future in which the haves and the have-nots are starkly divided, Code 46 paints a world in which DNA is everything and the gene pool is smaller due to the enormous explosion of surrogate in-vitro technology. What happens when you share part of your DNA with someone you’re in love with? Let’s find out and go scene by scene as we explore themes on sexuality, morality, gender, and who is always left holding the bag.

Find me at www.thatdylandavis.com or email me at [email protected]. Listen to Roz at www.rozilandmacphail.com

Works Cited:

Dix, Andrew. “Do You Want This World Left On?” : Global Imaginaries in the Films of Michael Winterbottom. Style, Vol. 43, No. 1, Film and Globalization (Spring 2009), pp3-25. Penn State University.

Baker, Brian. “Here on the Outside” : Mobility and Bio-politics in Michael Winterobttom’s Code 46. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 32 No. 1 (March 2015), pp115-131. SF-TH Inc.

Porton, Richard. In Praise of Folly: An Interview with Michael Winterbottom. Cineaste, SPRING 2006, Vol 31, No 2 pp 28-31. Cineaste.

Elsheshtawy, Yasser. The Prophecy of “Code 46” : Afuera in Dubai, or Our Urban Future. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements in Review, Spring 2011, Vol 22, No. 2. International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments.

Smith, Damon. Michael Winterbottom: Interviews. University of Mississippi. Jackson, 2011.

Bennett, Bruce. The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom. Wallflower Press. New York. 2014

Please listen for an update on The Super 70 Podcast.

Dave Anderson sat down with me after FURY ROAD and we discussed the future, fascism, and femininity. Then we went through the Sight and Sound 100 list to sort out what was interesting, what was surprising, and what was a tall, stinking pile of Jeanne Dielman

You can find me at www.thatdylandavis.com and [email protected]. All music on this podcast is by Rozalind MacPhail at www.rozilandmacphail.com

Australian Auteur George Miller, MD, had already cranked out ten films and earned the top golden man for animation when Warner Brothers finally approved his 3,500 storyboarded idea for a fourth Mad Max Franchise installment. At the age of 70, Miller took almost a thousand cast and crew members to the middle of the Namibian desert for over a year to create what has been called the greatest action film ever made. Behind the scenes was a twenty-year battle between two studios, several heads of production, and three huge movie stars to create what we see on the surface to be a film about our global fears regarding survival, psychosis, and the ever-disappearing access to the elements that keep us alive. After the dust settled, and Fury Road took home an astonishing six Oscars from ten nominations, the critics and fans pointed to the real story of Fury Road: the warning of dictatorship, megalomania, and the power of femininity that could save us all. Witness me and Dave Anderson as we go scene by scene through Fury Road and argue the finer points of Valhalla, Gas Town, and the Vuvalini.

As always, all music is by Rozalind MacPhail. You can find her at www.rozilandmacphail.com.

Works Cited:

Buchanan, Kyle. Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. William Morrow. New York. 2022.

Smyth, J. E. “Prick Flick”: Taking the Measure of Manly Movies. Cineaste, Fall 2017. Vol. 42, No. 4 (Fall 2017), pp 20-24.

Walter, Martin. Landscapes of Loss: The Semantics of Empty Spaces in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. “Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History” Ed. Campbell, Courtney J., Giovine, Allegra and Keating, Jennifer. University of London Press.

Payne, Darin. Shifting Gears and Paradigms at the Movies: Masculinity, Automobility, and the Rhetorical Dimensions of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Studies in Popular Culture, Fall 2017. Vol 40, No. 1, pp 102-135.