Vintage Sand

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open or reopen some doors for our listeners to movies that are overlooked and forgotten. When we came to the 1950’s episode, in an (eerily prophetic) split decision, we chose to include only English-language works, since the sheer volume of brilliant films from around the world in that decade would overwhelm both us and you, dear listeners. As we approached the 1960’s for this episode, however, we reasoned that the relative lack of great American films from the decade suggested that this time around, we should open our tent to the entire world. We could not stand idly by, for instance while A Man for All Seasons, lovely though it is, walked away with Best Picture in the year of films like Persona, Masculin/Feminin and Blow-Up. Our worries about the length of the episode, however, turned out to be justified and then some; therefore, we needed to split the episode into two parts. So with that, we are thrilled to present our first episode(s) since our triumphant, celebratory live recording of Episode 50 in March: thus Episodes 51A (1960-1964) and 51B (1965-1969), Alternate Oscars: The 1960’s Edition.

There were a couple of things that really hit us as we were creating this entry in the Vintage Sand catalogue. The first is that an unexpectedly high number of our choices were, in fact, American films, suggesting that while common wisdom avers that Hollywood suffered a creative decline in the 60’s, there were a lot of great things happening just below the surface that were, unwittingly perhaps, paving the way for the revolution of the American New Wave that would come in the early 1970’s. And the deeper we dove into the cinema of the 60’s, we came to really understand the fundamental difference between those works and film today. Simply put, it was a time when directors really seemed to trust their audience’s intelligence and imagination. This is most obvious in structurally elliptical puzzle films like Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Blow-Up, Bergman’s Persona and even Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But in ways big and small, and in terms both of performance and filmmaking technique, there is in 60’s film a refreshing absence of rat-on-the-balcony-rail-at-the-end-of-Departed heavy-handedness that seems to be a common thread in the work of even our greatest directors today. So with all this in mind, strap in and join us for our odyssey through 60’s cinema. It promises to be highly irregular, Dave…

It began six years ago, in the before time, with three film nerds who have been friends for four decades. Through the years, whenever we hung out together, we would inevitably end up talking for hours about film. So, we wondered aloud, why not make it official? Thus was born, in the spring of 2018, Vintage Sand, your film history podcast. One pandemic, one insurrection, a few erasures and rewritings of the film business and several hundred loyal listeners later, we thought it might be appropriate to commemorate our 50th episode by inviting friends and recording said episode live at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan. As you will hear, around 30 people came to support us, to hurl the occasional metaphorical tomato, and to remind us why we love doing this so much, as we recorded our roundup of 2023 in film in an episode we call “Of Bombs and Bombshells”.

As with the last few years, this one was difficult to read. We applied our usual measure, wondering which of this year’s films, beyond “Barbie”, “Oppenheimer” and Scorsese's epic will folks will still be watching 25 or 50 years from now. Hard to say, but at least it was a year where, with the exception of Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid”, we were able to avoid a repeat of 2022, where some of our most interesting filmmakers (Russell, Aronofsky, Chazelle, Iñárritu, Luhrmann, Garland, et al.) released films that were not just bad but disastrous on an epic scale. 2023 was marked by labor strife in Hollywood, huge existential questions about the business as it has been run for over a century, and anxiety over the implications of technologies like AI and streaming. But it was also a year that welcomed a solid return to form of Vintage Sand favorites like Todd Haynes and Alexander Payne, gave us Wes Anderson’s first Oscar for his reunion with Roald Dahl, and brought forth astonishing new voices in works as varied as Celine Song’s “Past Lives”, Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction”, and Emma Seligman’s follow-up to “Shiva Baby”, the wonderful “Bottoms”. It also gave us perhaps the most ambitious American film of the century, Ava Duvernay’s stunning imagining of Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste”, in her epic “Origin”, an underseen gem that may in time prove to be the year’s greatest film.

To top that off, there was the gently surprising return to classic form of the Oscars, featuring first wins for the aforementioned Wes, Christopher Nolan, and Robert Downey, Jr. Emma Stone won for her incredibly complex performance in “Poor Things”, but this Oscars may be remembered as the year Lily Gladstone was robbed for a performance that was much less showy than Stone’s but in our opinion, much more powerful. And as for the show itself, Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken” may have been the greatest dance number the Oscars has seen in recent memory, though it only served to remind us how intensely the genius and talent behind “Barbie” were ignored by the Academy.

Writing in the “New York Times”, Mark Harris, perhaps our favorite working film writer today, posited that film as the central force in American popular culture may be dying out. But like Harris, we don’t necessarily mourn the change; after all, the “death of cinema” has been a hot topic of discussion ever since the talkies arrived 95 years ago. In fact, we agree with Harris that 2024 may be another 1970, a year when out of the rubble of the collapse of the familiar emerged a revolution of unprecedented creativity and innovation. We have no idea what the future of film will bring, but whatever it is, we hope to be there to share our thoughts with you, not as frustrated film critics or experts in any way but as passionate film lovers who want to open as many doors as possible to new films and to new lenses through which to view old ones. To Billie Eilish’s eternal question, what were we made for? Hopefully another 50 episodes—at least!

When a director of Martin Scorsese’s stature releases a new movie, it’s time to drop everything else and discuss. When last we did this, with "The irishman", our thoughts on that film were mixed; it was a summation of some of the themes and ideas that have characterized Scorsese’s work, and it also contained certain thematic elements of his “spiritual” trilogy of "Last Temptation of Christ", "Kundun" and "Silence". Michael summed it up best when he characterized "The Irishman", and not in a disparaging way, as the film of an old man, an elegy for a passing time. And here we are, once again, with the director in his early 80’s, releasing a very different kind of 3 ½ hour epic that, in our view, not only feels like it could have been made by someone in his 30’s, but encompasses an ambition (both emotional and temporal/spatial) that Scorsese has never attempted before. So we present Episode 49, "Killers of the Flower Moon: It’s Just the Way This Is Going.”

As we did with our study of "The Irishman", we divide this episode into two parts. In the first, we discuss the film on its own terms. Here, we disagree somewhat (which always makes for an interesting discussion) on the overall impact of the film; Michael sees it as an unalloyed masterpiece, while John and I, while recognizing its brilliance, express some reservations. We all agreed, for example, that the film’s extended running time was actually insufficient to tell this story, and that it might have been better done as a mini-series or some longer format. Another thing we all agree on is the acting which, down to the smallest roles, is pitch-perfect. This is especially true of the three leads, and of the stunning performance by Lily Gladstone as Mollie in particular. And we all love the opening and the ending of the film, and how brilliantly Scorsese uses the music of Robbie Robertson (who acts as almost a presiding spirit over the film) to underscore the themes and the mood of the piece. We also appreciate how Scorsese, in adapting David Grann’s brilliant book for the screen, shifts Grann’s emphasis on how the Osage murders helped put the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover on the map and puts his focus up, until nearly the very end, on the human side of these horrific crimes, centered around the extraordinarily complex relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and Gladstone’s Mollie.

Then, as we did with "Irishman", we try to place the film in the context of Scorsese’s body of work, and this is where things get really interesting. While his films often focus on violence, and often depict this violence through elaborate set pieces, Scorsese’s approach is very different here. For one, with the possible exception of the misbegotten "Gangs of New York", Scorsese has never attempted to show organized violence perpetrated over such a long period of time and on such an epic scale. Paradoxically, though, while this film contains countless acts of brutal violence, Scorsese chooses to show them in the most blunt, matter-of-fact way. It’s as though he felt that calling attention to his own craft would only distract from the horrific story he is trying to tell. And this raises the stakes for the director in an unprecedented way. Rather than focusing on the violence between rival gangs, or internecine strife within a gang, Scorsese seems to be saying that the whole of American history is at least in part a kind of gang war, with profit and gain for some happening only with the suffering, exploitation and murder of "othered" peoples across the centuries. It is an exploration of the darkest corners of the American Dream, and we think you will find our conclusions about where it fits in the Scorsese canon to be interesting. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is a film of tremendous resonance, depth and contradiction as seen through the eyes of someone who, as an artist, has always been one of the sharpest observers of the complexities of who we are as a people.

As of our taping of this episode, Hollywood is still under the shadow of the labor problems which have arisen periodically since the beginnings of the industry. After all, remember that the formation of the Academy and the establishment of the Oscars were in many ways the studio moguls’ attempts to crush the burgeoning union movements. Periodically, since the unions were established, they have engaged in strikes, most memorably in 1960 when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA struck to create a fair distribution of revenue from the then relatively-new medium of television. And every time in the ensuing years when the modes of distribution changed, from syndication to video tapes to DVD’s, these issues of equity have led to labor tensions across the board. With the double whammy of streaming and the technological possibilities of AI upon us, both the writers and the actors went on strike again earlier this year. The writers have settled, but the actors are still on the picket lines, and seem far away from a settlement. Some casual observers see this as a case of millionaires fighting with billionaires. So Team Vintage Sand wades into the fray by beginning this latest episode with Michael, who is a longtime and proud member of SAG-AFTRA, discussing the issue from the lived perspective of the 95%+ of his fellow union members who cannot make a living as actors. Simply put, what’s at stake is the ability of talented, hard-working people without whom the industry could not exist to put food on their table and make this month’s rent.

From there, it was a logical pivot to focus the episode on films that deal with labor movements, workers’ rights and unionization. We each chose three movies, and naturally, you will find well-known films like "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Norma Rae" in the mix. But the real revelation of the episode for us is that in spite of the powerful human drama that is inherent in the struggles of labor, Hollywood has produced almost no films that touch on the subject beyond a well-known handful. We suppose this should not be a huge surprise given the industry’s deep-rooted animosity towards organized labor, but the fact is that of our nine films on the issue, three are from England, one is from France, and one was rejected by the studios and produced and distributed independently. Our hope, as always, is that the episode will open some doors to films you’ve never seen or haven’t seen in a long time. In the end, we make no claims to objectivity here; to quote 8-year-old Charlie Kane (in a completely different context), “The Union Forever!”

Combine the fact that we are preparing for the run of episodes in the fall that will culminate in our 50th episode in November and that summer has kept the old gang apart for a couple of months, we could not in good conscience let go the passing of some figures both major and minor figures in the history of film whom we have lost since last we convened in May.

Therefore, as kind of a bridge to what is to come, Episode 47 will function as an extended necrology, though we do begin with a detour into some of our favorite film moments of the summer. And an interesting summer it was! Let’s put it this way--it was more than Kenough. We will explore the lives of towering figures like Glenda Jackson and Alan Arkin, controversial figures like William Friedkin, and the less well-known as well. Come catch up with us, and for goodness’ sake, at least see "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" on a big screen before the summer is over…

It is one of the great wonders of American business that the same handful of companies have run the movies in Hollywood, almost since the beginning. After all, how many American industries of 2023 feature a power structure that would be familiar to someone from the late 1920’s? Yes, there were mergers then, like the ones that created MGM, Universal and Fox, and today there are yet more mergers, the challenges of adjusting to a streaming culture, and globalization. And yes, there is Dreamworks, but there’s still Paramount, and Columbia, and Universal, and Fox, and iterations of both MGM and UA, and of course the looming shadow of Disney. And while Warner Brothers is now part of Time Warner, which is part of Discovery (SO complicated), it’s still very much the powerful and influential studio that the eponymous brothers opened on April 4, 1923. After wars, depressions and recessions and other complete erasures and redrawings, those familiar logos that we and our grandparents saw as children remain.

Therefore, since TCM seems to have stolen so many ideas from us (viz Episode 31 on best final films by great directors), we return the favor here by using this episode to celebrate Warners’ centennial. We thought it silly to try to come up with our three favorite films by the studio, so we each came up with three (warning, there are double entries) films for which the studio was either producer, the main distributor or both, that have had the most impact on us. We also tried to avoid films we’ve already discussed a lot, and strike out in some new directions. So come join us as among our many stops, we ride the rails with the wild boys of the road, make a stop in Ford Country, go as far afield as Bette Davis in Malaysia and Audrey Hepburn in the Congo, and end up in space with the Mercury astronauts. We promise an amazing trip, though, as Warners’ greatest star often said, we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque…

2022 was definitely the everything bagel of movie years. No less an authority than Stephen Spielberg anointed Tom Cruise as the savior of movies this summer, which made sense given the success of "Top Gun: Maverick". Then came the fall, and excellent movies were released…and no one showed up. And even when they did, as with the $2.2 billion dollar gross accumulated by James Cameron’s "Dances with Smurfs Part Deux", the movies barely seemed to make a dent in the cultural landscape. It didn’t help that so many of our beloved directors released crappy movies: Aronofsky with the odious "The Whale", Russell with his how-could-it possibly-go-wrong-with-that-cast disaster "Amsterdam", Alex Garland with the puzzling (and not in an interesting way) "Men", Iñarritú inadvertently reminding us how brilliant both "Roma" and "8 ½" are with "Bardo", and the literal crapfest (elephant, in this case) that was "Babylon". Sometimes, it felt like 2022 was a living, breathing argument against the auteur theory.

Yet there were some very good spots too, including not one but two really interesting portrait-of-the-filmmaker-as-a-young-man movies with "Fabelmans" and "Armageddon Time". The scene of the year? Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tar (née Linda Tarr of Staten Island!) arguing with one of her students about the pointlessness of cancelling Bach in Todd Fields’ most welcome return. "Everything Everywhere" became the only film in history to win three acting Oscars and Best Picture. Underappreciated gems like "The Menu" and (sorry, John and Michael) "Don’t Worry Darling", and even appreciated ones like "Aftersun" wormed their way into our brains and didn’t let go, though I will never look at s’mores the same way again. And we even had a solid Oscars ceremony, with powerhouse performances by Rihanna and Lady Gaga and nearly an epic battle between Malala and Cocaine Bear. Plus, we got perhaps the most sublime moment in American film this century: David Lynch playing John Ford in a Spielberg film. That glorious scene almost took away the sour taste of the “Look, I’m doing Bergman!” montage of film history that ended "Babylon" not nearly soon enough. And while we liked "EO" better when it was "Au Hasard Balthasar", and "Living" better when it was "Ikiru", and we thought that the Siegfried Sassoon biopic "Benediction" was a better World War I film than "All Quiet", there were definitely some tasty tidbits to be found on that everything bagel. An up and down year, but to paraphrase the wondrous Lashana Lynch as Miss Honey in Matilda, it wasn’t much, but it was enough for us.

“Asa Nisi Masa:” 8 ½ at Sixty

It is an intriguing coincidence that perhaps the two greatest films ever made about the creative breakthroughs and heartbreaks involved in making a film are both celebrating major anniversaries in 2023. First, Federico Fellini’s raucous, post-modern celebration of his own creative process, "8 ½" turns sixty. It’s important to note, though, that while we see no filmmaking in that film, the actual portrayal of the logistical and emotional vicissitudes of film creation are very much at the heart of François Truffaut’s much-beloved "Day for Night", which itself turns fifty this year. We will focus most of our time in this episode on Fellini’s film, taking our intrepid listeners on a tour that begins with an opening that stands as the most brilliant metaphor for creative blockage ever put on film, all the way through the end with the circus band playing Nino Rota’s indelible march as every character we’ve seen from the director’s past and present joins hands and dances in perhaps the most life-affirming moment in all of film. We then use Fellini’s work as a springboard to discuss the other films about filmmaking that we love, starting with "Day for Night", and bringing in works ranging in tone from Assayas’ "Irma Vep" to Jonze’s "Adaptation" to Burton’s loving tribute to Ed Wood. Finally, we’ll take a quick peek at this year’s two great portraits of the filmmaker as a young man, Gray’s "Armageddon Time" and Spielberg’s "The Fabelmans" (though honestly, I’d take J.J. Abrams’ "Super 8" over either of them). But it’s important to keep in mind that all of these wonderful films probably never even come close to happening without Fellini blazing the trail. To paraphrase the master himself, he may have had nothing to say, but fortunately for all of us, he found the most brilliant way to say it all the same. Grazie mille, maestro!

It is indeed the episode a decade in the making! Here, in Episode 43, Team Vintage Sand puts in its collective two cents on the newly released Sight and Sound decennial poll of the greatest films of all time. It is a list referred to by no less an authority than Roger Ebert as “the best damned film list of them all.” But this time, was it a “woke” poll, reflecting more our need for political correctness than a genuine and deep understanding of film history, as old-timers like Paul Schrader proclaimed? Or was it about damn time that the old white men gave up at least some of the strangle hold they’ve had on the poll since its inception in 1952, as many younger critics proclaimed? Does this new list signify that the battle lines have been drawn irrevocably between older and younger film people?

As always, the truth is never that simple. Team Vintage Sand tries to approach the poll by avoiding either extreme, oversimplified position, reaching, as ever, for the complex and embracing the gray. Does Akerman’s "Jeanne Dielman" deserve its new place atop the rankings? Probably not, but it surely is a much better film than its position in the mid-30’s for the 2012 edition of the poll suggested. And if the poll is so politically correct, why are there no films by the Mexican New Wavers here? Along these same lines, 16 of the 22 directors who have multiple entries on the list are white men; four of the remaining six are Asian men. Yes, there are no films by Howard Hawks or Roman Polanski. No Buñuel. No Lean. No Altman. No Demy, or Melville, or Resnais. No Sternberg or Stroheim. No Huston. No Malick. No Tarantino. No Anderson, be it Wes or P.T. No Coen Brothers. No Linklater. No Spielberg, for goodness’ sake! No silent films in the Top 10, and all the silent films that are still there from 2012, with the exception of "City Lights", plummeted to the nether reaches of the list. (If anyone tells me that there are 20 films greater than "The Passion of Joan of Arc", it’s ON!) And yet…

…there’s "Do The Right Thing" entering the list at #24. FINALLY. And there’s Burnett’s brilliant "Killer of Sheep". And Dash’s "Daughters of the Dust". Maybe now someone will give her some money to make a second film, three full decades after she released a Top 100 masterpiece. And there, brand spanking new, are Jordan Peele and Barry Jenkins. And there's Agnes Varda’s extraordinary "Cleo from 5 to 7" entering the list in the top 15. And my historical experimental film crush Maya Deren is finally here as well for her extraordinary and endlessly influential "Meshes of the Afternoon". And Claire Denis in the Top 10. And Jane Campion, Barbara Loden(!), Celine Sciamma and the aforementioned Julie Dash. If it took some “woke” (whatever that means) younger critics to put these artists in their rightful places in the pantheon, we’ll take it.

Ultimately, we recognize the silly waste of energy in trying to compare, say, "Jeanne Dielman" with "Tokyo Story" with "In the Mood for Love" with "Man with a Movie Camera". For us, this poll has one purpose only, and it’s the same purpose that guides what we do at Vintage Sand: it opens doors. It takes us out of our comfort zone as viewers, and reminds us that there are vast aspects of film history about which we know little or nothing. So look carefully at Sight and Sound 2022 through this lens, check off the films you haven’t seen yet or not in a long time anyway, and track them down. We’ll bring the popcorn!

In Episode 42, Team Vintage Sand returns yet again to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternative Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture Academy Awards from the 1930’s, the 1950’s, the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we hop in the Way-Back Machine and travel to one of the most interesting periods in film history: the 1990’s. As best described in Peter Biskind’s must-read book "Down and Dirty Pictures", that decade began with the promise of an honest-to-goodness revival of independent films emerging from smaller companies, most notably Miramax. It was also marked by the rise of the Sundance Festival, a time long before that event became the completely corporatized show it is now. That period, from roughly 1989-1995, witnessed the arrival of such new voices as Steven Soderbergh, Richard, Linklater, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith, Carl Franklin, John Dall and most notably Quentin Tarantino. But that fertile era came to a crashing halt with the sale of Miramax to Disney, and the subsequent absorption of most of the smaller production companies into the studio conglomerates. As a result, things turned a bit flabby in the middle of the decade, only to return with a boom in 1999, considered by many film historians to be one of the great years in the history of the medium.

Another interesting aspect of the 90’s with regards to the Oscars is that unlike in the other decades which we have examined, the Academy made an unusual number of solid choices for Best Picture, such as "The Silence of the Lambs", "Unforgiven" and "Schindler’s List". Who could argue with that? (Hint: us.) But there were plenty of head scratchers as well, such as "Dances with Wolves" over "Goodfellas", "The English Patient" over "Fargo" and perhaps most egregiously, "Forrest Gump" over "Pulp Fiction". So kick back, relax and join us as we return to a uniquely fascinating decade, and remember: you’re entering a world of pain, Smokey. A world of pain…