Two Reel Cinema Club

We’ve seen the future in this episode’s films, and frankly it doesn’t look like a place we’d want to visit. Netflix’s new Hong Kong Chinese sci-fi action movie Warriors of Future paints a bleak picture of the rest of the 21st century, with killer plants, killer robots, killer air pollution and killer civil engineers to contend with. We compare it to 1995 anime classic Ghost in the Shell, which adds urban flooding, malign AI, existential crises and brain hacking to the mix. But which film fights for the greater good, and which film exudes noirish resignation? Which film has the biggest spider-shaped armoured tank in it? And which film sees the protagonist’s clothes fall off every time they need to start shooting? Plus a run in with the garbage collectors, a quick look at an anime sequel, a farewell to a veteran film journalist, and a singalong chant about dog adoption.

I have come late to this film but it seems to my eye more or less as zeitgeisty now as it was on its release in 2019.

Joaquim Phoenix gives a highly committed performance as the unemployed clown and aspiring stand up Arthur Fleck who, having been let down by life, psychiatrically ill, his medical services cut and his housing poorly maintained, becomes violent and then inspires an entire movement of eat-the-rich anarchists.

On a craft level the film is outstanding. 1980s Gotham is grimy and grim, urine yellow and refrigerator-light blue, with a sense of place so believable you can smell the stench of fried onions and uncollected trash.

But it’s the political content of the film that garnered the headlines. And there’s a great deal to unpick. Fleck might be an unhinged, violent iconoclast, but all he’s really asking for in the film is a little socialism: healthcare and regulated housing, universal basic income and a fair redistribution of wealth. And an education system that teaches enough social cohesion and tolerance that men know not to harass lone women on the subway. On paper it doesn’t seem like a bad manifesto at all.

But it’s not so much what is said as the way it’s said. The movie may state its ideas clearly, but they look different when juxtaposed with the fact that all the anarchists are men.

What does this film think of women? Not much. It’s a man’s world here. White men at that, I think. As soon as you notice that none of the rioters or dissenters is a woman, the film stops looking like a violent cry for collectivism and instead reads as a story about angry incels flipping police cars over. It feels like someone important read the script as far as act three before they remembered that Joker is supposed to be a baddie, so they quickly put all the socialism in parentheses and demanded a few more scenes of men being dicks.

As it stands, by the end of the film, following a scene that heavily implies (SPOILER) a black female psychiatrist being murdered off screen by Fleck before he does a little dance, the whole movie feels less to me like ‘eat the rich’ and more like ‘that poor, much maligned Jordan Peterson actually talks a lot of sense, it’s such a shame a few of his followers take things too far.’ As the credits rolled I couldn’t figure out if the film is about anarchists or 4Chan. What does that say about attitudes to collectivism?

Back in the 80s, when we were naive enough to think that the song ‘White Lines’ was a road safety anthem, cocaine was a big thing in movies – and not a small thing in the movie industry. Join us in a cramped toilet cubicle for a few snorts of our favourite cocaine films, including Die Hard, Annie Hall and Maria Full of Grace. Plus a quick look at drug slang, a celebration of Melle Mel, and a little insight into how medical grade cocaine is used legally.

We take a hike in the wilderness for this week’s episode, and find ourselves shimmying up a tree at speed in the hope of avoiding the worst of Cocaine Bear, the not-so-impressive new comedy horror from the Lord and Miller stable. Then once we’re in a position of safety we take our time with Werner Herzog’s astonishing and revelatory 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. There’s a lot of gruesome violence between these two, but which film has the scariest bear in it? Which film has the most heinous cliches? And why is the most frightening character in either of these films someone who is barely seen on screen at all? Plus a self-help book from the master of suspense, a quick look at new European features ‘Close’ and ‘Godland’, reflections on ‘Medical Student TikTok’, a revisit of a tasty Pixar classic and a confession that at least one of us doesn’t know what a ‘wheelhouse’ is. What IS a wheelhouse? Seriously? What do you wheel in it?

This week on the pod we’re talking about the Werner Herzog picture Grizzly Man. It’s an amazing collage of interviews, archive material and found footage, but interestingly there is a bonus feature on the DVD about the making of the film’s soundtrack which probably sheds as much light on one of the primary themes of the film as anything that appears in the main event. Herzog subtly manipulates and directs the musicians in much the same way that he does the actors, his process clearly visible on camera.

It made me realise how much I miss the bonus features that used to be the norm at the height of the DVD revolution. This was one of the selling points of these silver discs when they were first introduced. At the time it wasn’t clear if the improved picture quality of DVD over VHS cassette was going to be enough to convince consumers to switch to the new format, so the notion of bonus features like alternative soundtracks and director’s commentaries, ‘making of’ documentaries and deleted scenes were all crammed onto the disc and advertised with stickers and banners.

Some of these add-ons amounted almost to a film-school-in-a-box. The DVD for Christopher Nolan’s debut ‘Following’ had a feature that let you follow along with the shooting script, gave you the option to rewatch the scenes of the film in chronological instead of narrative order, and had a director’s commentary that was 50 percent of a complete course on low budget film making. Robert Rodriguez’s commentary for ‘El Mariachi’ filled in the other 50 percent.

Where are the directors’ commentaries now? I have no evidence, but I suspect they’ve died because of a mix of budget constraints and filmmakers’ reluctance to draw back the curtain. Any extras that still exist have become promotional shorts on YouTube or music videos. Online streaming would be the obvious home for these bonuses, but perhaps there simply isn’t the demand.

Instead maybe DVD will become the new vinyl in a few years, when nostalgia for the golden age of directors’ commentaries becomes a cool hipster thing. Just in case, I won’t clear out all those old DVDs in the attic just yet. Might be sitting on (under) a goldmine…

We get stuck in a phone booth on the way to the popcorn counter this episode. (Do they still even exist?) Mobile telephony has ruined a lot of plots since about 1999, and smart phones have spoiled even more since 2007, but on the other hand there have been some great telephone scenes in cinema. We talk about the joys and pitfalls, celebrate Hal Hartley and Scorsese, curse Steve Jobs, and discuss the lengths we’ve had to go to in our own projects to stop someone’s phone ruining the whole thing.

Many years ago we enjoyed a wonderful week’s holiday in Paris, and, yes, we did go to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the Fondation le Corbusier, but largely we spent our time eating. Every night we visited a different restaurant, with the exception of a place almost opposite the hotel called ‘Les Epicureans’, I believe, which we went to twice, and where the maitre d’ looked exactly like Kevin Spacey. (I am aware that detail is no longer the mildly amusing story it used to be…)

This Saturday we watched Brad Bird’s 2007 movie Ratatouille – written by Bird with Jan Pikava and Jim Capobianco – and I was reminded vividly of that week, set as it is in a recognisable (though romanticised and Disneyfied) Paris.

The film is superficially an aspirational fable about achieving your goals, but at its heart it is a nested series of love stories. Family love and its associated expectations for Remy the culinary rat, workplace love for Linguini the love child of the famous chef Gusteau and fierce sous-chef Colette (although their affair is the most underbaked ingredient in the movie in my opinion…)

But greater than all of these, the film is about the love of food. It is a film about food made by people who love food. And sure enough the food looks and sounds fabulous. The camera is synaesthetic and Proustian in its appreciation.

Yet underneath the gastronomic headlines, what the film really gets right in my opinion is the tone of working in a restaurant kitchen. My first job was in a steak house in the village where I grew up, and Ratatouille’s portrayal of the eclectic team of outsiders working behind the swing doors and the high pressure mix of camaraderie, ambition and drudgery that forms a day at the hob is brimming with authenticity.

This, I think more than any other aspect of the film, is what elevates it. It underlines one of the fundamental principles of writing for the screen: whatever the film seems to be about, it is always really about the characters. We may come for the food, but we stay for the staff.

Sarah Polley’s new film Women Talking gives us plenty to discuss this episode, with shocking violence, sobering drama and a deep examination of patriarchy, all delivered through outstanding performances. But for all its excellence, we have one major criticism: is it really a film at all? Then after the break we compare it to Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 international hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Two different looks at the issues facing women, with wildly different presentation, but it turns out they have more in common than we expected. Plus some IMDB news, a viewing of 2011’s Jane Eyre adaptation, a look at this year’s Oscar short film nominees, a trip to watch live theatre group Manual Cinema, an ad about the future of food science and a brief interlude while we let the dog out. There’s always an animal connection, isn’t there?

This time as we shoot the breeze at the Popcorn Counter, we have a confession about school punishments, make a trip through the Chambers English Dictionary and add some reminiscences about the UK stand-up comedy scene before we compare some of our favourite frenemies in cinema. Surely, any proper believable friendship on screen has an element of the frenemy about it, doesn’t it? It’s yin and yang. Butch and Sundance, Whiplash, the Avengers and more come up for discussion before we realise that we’ve already been down this road in one of our own scripts a few years ago…

Welcome back to the Two Donkey Cinema Club, where we seem to exclusively discuss donkey based films from around the world. This episode, current Oscar favourite The Banshees of Inisherin grazes the pastures alongside 1990 Richard Harris classic The Field. These two films about rural Ireland have so much in common that one feels almost like a remix of the other. But their differences really underline the ways the world has changed in the last 32 years. Which film goes full Hamlet, and which one warns the audience: beware of the artist? Plus the Cliche Squad turns up to arrest some fiddlers, we discover we both want to be the same character but for very different reasons, there’s a quick look at Puss In Boots and Regle du Jeu, and we have a very, very brief word from our sponsor.