Vintage Sand

Team Vintage Sand returns to the airwaves with our October episode, a neat bookend to Episode 31 wherein we explored our favorite final films by great directors. Here we present Episode 41--Gala Premieres: Our Favorite First Films by Great Directors. To begin, we decided to establish some parameters to spare you, our tenacious audience, any pointless discussion.. The first is that we tried to avoid directors about whom we have already discoursed at great length in these pages. The second, what we termed the Julie Dash Rule, is that we would only focus on first films by directors who went on to long and predominantly successful careers in feature films. That’s why you won’t find movies like "Boys Don’t Cry"(Kim Pierce), "One False Move" (Carl Franklin), "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (Benh Zeitlin) or one-hit-wonders like Laughton’s "Night of the Hunter" or Loden’s "Wanda" here. Plus, we already did a full episode on one-hit wonders—that would be Episode 10. (The fact that the brilliant Dash has only been able to make one film in three decades is a mystery to be explored in another episode or two—utterly inexplicable). Our last rule is the Rosebud Rule; we tried to exclude any first films that were too obvious to spend time on. That would include "Citizen Kane", "The Maltese Falcon", "The 400 Blows", "Breathless", "Badlands", "Boyz ‘n’ the Hood", "Reservoir Dogs" and similar fare all the way through "Get Out". So join us as we bring back those wonderful moments where you wandered into a film by a new director and left the theater realizing that you had just witnessed the birth of a new voice to be reckoned with.

Don’t call it a comeback! After a long (for us)summer break estivating in all the world’s glamour spots, Team Vintage Sand returns with Episode 40, the third in our Hidden Gems series. Those of you playing along at home will recall that in Episodes 11 and 30, we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. We promised/threatened to go down this path yet again and take you, loyal listeners, into some more dark and obscure corners of film history. So enjoy Episode 40, Hidden Gems Volume III, where John, Michael and Josh take a closer look at three very different films: a broad screwball heist film from the early 70's that should have been a huge hit; a quietly powerful and engrossing tale of a year in the life of a group of middle-aged friends, created by the man who is perhaps the greatest living director of actors; and a one-of-a kind, zero-budget film created by blacklisted creatives at the height of McCarthyism that is not only the greatest film ever made about the labor movement, but is also decades ahead of its time in its approach to both feminist issues and immigrant rights. And remember, the code phrase is Afghanistan Banana Stand…

Episode 39 finds your intrepid Team Vintage Sand doing a deep dive into the work of one of our most promising young filmmakers, 2020 Best Director Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao. Although she has only done four feature films to this point, she has already established a distinctive painterly and brilliant visual style, and, as no less an authority than Frances McDormand put it, has shown herself able to successfully walk the line between sentiment and sentimentality.

We take an auteurist approach to Zhao’s work by dividing her young career into two distinct parts. She began with two very low-budget films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, using non-actors essentially playing themselves. Notably, both were set in the unique and wonderful landscape of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a location that is becoming to Zhao what Monument Valley was to John Ford. Her Oscar winner, Nomadland, was a transitional work, featuring old pros McDormand and David Strathairn mixed in with non-actors. This unexpected success then led to her chance to be part of the MCU with Eternals, a huge-budget film that many connoisseurs of the genre consider to be the worst of the Marvel films.

So our fundamental question is simple: how do the visual and thematic elements that made her first two films so uniquely personal and intimate carry over into the second pair of films, done on a much different scale? As frequently happens, there is some dissent within Team Vintage Sand. Michael, and to a lesser extent John argue, as do many, that Zhao’s films suffer from her insistence on non-actors, and that Songs and The Rider would have been better had Zhao populated her film with professional actors. I’m not bothered as much by it, but I see where they’re coming from, especially since they are both trained actors. That being said, there is no doubt that Zhao has a phenomenal eye and that she is an artist to be closely watched; for us, she is one of the few young directors who has earned a lifetime ticket, which simply means that if she’s directing a film, we’ll be there opening weekend. So sit back, enjoy, and we’ll see you all down the road.

In a “New York Times” article published last month, Ross Douthat expounded on the provocative idea that the movies, as in studio films produced in Hollywood, were “over.” He was not arguing that Hollywood would ever stop producing movies for the big screen, nor that the notion of seeing a movie in a dark theater with strangers all around would ever completely disappear. Instead, he was saying that The Movies, the heart of American popular culture for over a century, has now become just another source of content in a world of seemingly endless content. He attributes this to the rise of streaming and the improved quality of what we can see on our screens at home, to a globalized market that rewards the exploitation of familiar properties over anything that might be truly innovative, and, to be fair, the expense and sheer unpleasantness of taking one’s family to see a movie in an actual theater. And since most of what was on offer in the big theaters was Marvel/DC multiverse epics, other tentpole/franchise films or anything with a Roman numeral on the end of the title, is this such a big loss?

Viewed through this lens, Team Vintage Sand was kind of split on the legacy of 2021 in film. Michael thought the year was one of the best in recent memory, whereas John and I were a bit more ambivalent. Of course, it my not be coincidental that Mike, as a card-carrying member of the union, got to see nearly everything this year in a real theater at SAG screenings. John and I saw a handful of films on the big screen, but most via streaming. (If this is not a coincidence, it argues strongly in favor of the primacy of the theater experience). And as you’ll hear in the episode, we could not even agree on whether any 2021 films met our highest standard: that they will still be watched 25 or 50 years from now. The most likely possibility is “Drive My Car”, although John expressed some sensible reservations. What else? Spielberg’s shockingly good “West Side Story” update? Maybe “Power of the Dog”, although Michael pointed out what I’m sure many felt: that the film was beautiful and technically perfect, but was so cold that very few will feel compelled to watch it again. Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” has an outside shot, but I objected that, to paraphrase Mike’s oft-quoted mantra, I could not in the end love a film where I did not care about the central character (brilliant performance though it was). And “CODA”? A film that no one could dislike, with some tremendous performances, but an Afterschool Special script that, like “Green Book” or “Crash”, allowed Hollywood to pat itself on the back for being sensitive to the voices of an outsider group without really saying anything.

As we did at this time last year, we frame the year in film in terms of the Oscar ceremony, which was well on its way to being one of the worst ever before you-know-what happened. We discuss the glaring omissions (Villeneuve not being nominated for “Dune”; “Passing”, which in some ways was the best film of the year, not getting nominated for anything; Hans Zimmer over Jonny Greenwood, etc.) and the occasions where they actually got it right (Hello, Ariana De Bose!). Not the greatest year, but to return to Douthat’s article, he concludes with an important plea: that it is more necessary than ever to teach the history and technique of classic film as an art form, as the chance that younger generations will be exposed to these works grows smaller and smaller. I felt a sense of validation personally, as I have been doing just that with high school students for a quarter of a century. But we also felt that this highlighted why we put together Vintage Sand in the first place: our mission to open some doors and some new perspectives for our listeners. So kick back, enjoy, and hope along with us that film in 2022 will be less of the proverbial slap in the face than in the year just passed.

In a first for the ever-intrepid Team Vintage Sand, we devote an entire episode to the exploration of the history of a single genre. Thus we present Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical. From its clunky beginnings at the dawn of sound through the unexpected brilliance of Spielberg’s "West Side Story" remake last year, we take a deep dive into this most deliberately artificial (and therefore most polarizing) of all film genres. Rather than going decade by decade, we divided this history into six “movements” that provide a lens to view the rise, steep decline and startling rebirth of the musical over the last century. After a brief mention of such important early works as the Best Picture-winning "Broadway Melody of 1929" and King Vidor’s first foray into sound, the daring and dazzling (if problematic for contemporary audiences) "Hallelujah!"(1929), the movements we lay out are as follows:

I. The Warner Brothers musicals of the pre-Code 1930’s, which confronted head-on the difficulties of life during the Great Depression and gave the world its first glimpse of the lunatic genius of Busby Berkeley

II. The RKO musicals of the mid and late 1930’s, featuring Astaire and Rogers, silly escapist story lines and music by some of the greatest composers of American popular song

III. The Golden Age, a quarter century dominated though not exclusively limited to MGM, which is bookended by "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939 and "The Sound of Music" in 1956. This is the age of Vincente Minnelli and the Kelly/Donen team, of "Singin’ in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon", of larger budgets and production values and, at its height, a rapidly increasing artistic ambition

IV. The decline, which starts in the late 1960’s with horrors like "Doctor Doolittle" and "Thoroughly Modern Millie". With the notable exception of "Grease" and the uniquely odd success of "Rocky Horror", the live action musical is essentially moribund from the 70’s through the end of the century. However…

V. …we argue that the traditional Hollywood musical is kept alive by whoever it was at Disney that had the vision, after having seen "Little Shop of Horrors", to hire Menken and Ashman to revive their animated musical division. The run of successes that Disney had from "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" through Ashman’s untimely death halfway through "Aladdin", and up through 1997’s "Mulan" showed that the Musical hadn’t died; it had just morphed into cartoon form for a while

VI. The unlikely revival of Musicals in this century, sparked out of nowhere by a most unlikely film: Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 "Moulin Rouge". The genre’s return was cemented by the choice of "Chicago" for Best Picture the next year, and it has been going strong ever since

As a final note, we also posit our Grand Unification Theory of the Hollywood Musical—that the greatest among these films were ones originally created for the screen rather than adaptations of Broadway shows. Yes, there are exceptions, but for every "West Side Story" (particularly the 2021), there are a few dozen films like "South Pacific", "Camelot", "A Little Night Music", "Rent", "Cats" and "Dear Evan Hansen". So come and meet those dancing feet as we take you on a whirlwind tour of a century of supreme artistry and epic fails, with stops at just about every point in between.

As we are preparing for our first attempt at a genre episode (that would be Episode 37, our brief guide to the Hollywood musical coming in February) we could not let go the passing of some major and minor figures of film history since our last recording session in early December.

Therefore, our shorter-than-usual Episode 36 will function as an extended necrology, a (hopefully) cathartic exploration and celebration of the life and work of both towering figures like Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich and lesser figures as well. (After all, we did lose Truly Scrumptious this month) As the title of the episode suggests, in a straight steal from "Hamlet", we shall not look upon their like again.

In Episode 35, Team Vintage Sand returns to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have approached the Academy Awards from the 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we use the Way-Back Machine to explore the first full decade in which the awards were given: the 1930’s. In exploring a period that featured some truly abysmal Best Picture choices ("Cimarron", anyone? Not to mention what is possibly the worst film ever chosen, 1933’s "Cavalcade"?), we learned a couple of things. The least surprising of these is that Jean Renoir completely owned the decade; his films might have won Best Picture nearly every year. Another is that there really are two 1930’s for film: the period before the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 and the years that followed. What made this episode fun for us is that, perhaps more so that any of our other Alternate Oscar shows, this one features a ton of movies that our listeners may have not seen or even heard of. And why are we doing this? Well, like the fella once said, everyone has their reasons…

As promised, we finish this round of our study of great screen performances with this two-part episode that highlights what are, in our opinion, the best overlooked and underloved performances by supporting actresses over the years.

Recall that in our last episode, we put down our usual auteurist lens in favor of a focus on actors, perhaps a filmmaker's most crucial collaborators. This is a natural move for us, considering that both Michael and John are trained actors and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our enterprise.

So join us, Vintage Sand fans, as we follow a slightly different path and focus on our favorite underloved and overlooked performances in film by supporting actresses. And as we learned last time out, when you get John and Mike talking about acting, there’s no stopping them; thus another two-parter (Episode 34 B will be appearing in a couple of weeks). As for me, the non-actor in the group, I would say that I learned more from these episode than any one we’ve ever done; our hope is that this will open the same kind of doors for you as well.

As promised, we finish this round of our study of great screen performances with this two-part episode that highlights what are, in our opinion, the best overlooked and underloved performances by supporting actresses over the years.

Recall that in our last episode, we put down our usual auteurist lens in favor of a focus on actors, perhaps a filmmaker's most crucial collaborators. This is a natural move for us, considering that both Michael and John are trained actors and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our enterprise.

So join us, Vintage Sand fans, as we follow a slightly different path and focus on our favorite underloved and overlooked performances in film by supporting actresses. And as we learned last time out, when you get John and Mike talking about acting, there’s no stopping them; thus another two-parter (Episode 34 B will be appearing in a couple of weeks). As for me, the non-actor in the group, I would say that I learned more from these episode than any one we’ve ever done; our hope is that this will open the same kind of doors for you as well.

Our promised conclusion to Episode 33, No Small Parts: Our Favorite Overlooked and Underloved Performances by Supporting Actors.