by Ty Burr
Lively, provocative conversations about movies and popular culture with former Boston Globe/ Entertainment Weekly film critic Ty Burr and friends. An audio companion to the newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.substack.com <br/><br/><a href="https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">tyburrswatchlist.substack.com</a>
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December 20, 2023
<p>A confession: When I first saw Terrence Malick’s “<strong>The Tree of Life</strong>” in 2011, I didn’t really get it. I <em>liked</em> it — was wowed by the imagery, moved by the music, and appreciative of the film’s long-range lens on human existence. I got into a squabble outside the movie theater with a quartet of retirees who thought “Tree” was the dumbest thing they’d ever seen — and certainly not the escapist Brad Pitt movie they’d paid their money for — because I felt they didn’t respect the art and enormity of what Malick was attempting. But I guess on some level the movie still seemed an attempt, rather than an achievement.</p><p>I don’t think so now. Great works meet you where you live and only when you’re ready. I was in a different place in 2011 than I am twelve years later, both emotionally and along the long string of a life. My kids were teenagers back then, were in peak rebellion, and maybe I came down on the crabbed Pitt/Nature side of the film’s equation, as opposed to the forgiving Chastain/Grace side. Or maybe my spiritual self was simply undernourished at the time; faithful readers know (and perhaps share) the exhalation and exploration that can happen once children are out of the house and there’s time to remember who you once were.</p><p>Or maybe it’s even simpler than that: That global and national events of the past decade have all of us thinking in more epic and/or apocalyptic terms than we’re used to. In any event, “The Tree of Life” now seems to me one of a handful of movies that could be called holy in the largest and most non-denominational sense, in that it forcefully, artfully, <em>gracefully</em> reminds us of the big picture and our essential/infinitesimal place in it; of the value of mercy (in dinosaurs as well as humans) and of the radical nature of love. And to those who have said, then and now, that the movie is “pretentious” — well, that word means either that an artist is trying too hard or that you’re just not looking hard enough.</p><p>My guest for this episode is <strong>Alex Winter</strong>, an actor and filmmaker who is best known in the popular culture as Bill of the “Bill and Ted” movies but who also has an acclaimed resume as a documentary filmmaker, with his well-received and -awarded Frank Zappa bio-doc “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4F0rT0F6OQ">Zappa</a>” (2020) and a series of docs on the perils of Internet technology, of which “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo2EWOU6J6U">The YouTube Effect</a>” (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-youtube-effect">available for streaming)</a> is the latest. Alex is a NYU film school grad who can drop a <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenji_Mizoguchi">Mizoguchi</a> reference with the best of them; he brings a cineaste’s appreciation and a director’s insights to the discussion of this uniquely transcendent movie. “The Tree of Life” <a target="_blank" href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/larbre-de-la-vie">can be rented on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube and elsewhere </a>— do yourself a favor and watch it on the biggest, most hi-def screen you can manage. This podcast is also <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJYQWzLtmBM">streaming on YouTube</a> with additional film clips.</p><p></p><p>Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.</p><p>If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.</p><p>If you’re not a paying subscriber and would like to sign up for additional postings and to join the discussions, here’s how.</p><p>It’s the holiday season, and if you have cinephiles on your list, you might want to…</p><p>Or refer friends to the Watch List and get credit for new subscribers. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll:</p><p>* Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals</p><p>* Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals</p><p>* Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">tyburrswatchlist.substack.com</a>
December 6, 2023
<p>This was a delight: A deep-dish discussion of one of my favorite films of all time with one of my favorite young critics. Hunter Harris has written for GQ, New York magazine’s Vulture, and the New York Times, but it’s her pop culture newsletter “<a target="_blank" href="https://hunterharris.substack.com/">Hung Up</a>” and its associated social media tendrils that had Forbes recently name Harris to its “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/hunter-harris/?sh=fd695aa73d63">30 Under 30” list </a>of media up-and-comers. “Hung Up” has the energy and smarts of heyday-era <em>Entertainment Weekly</em>, a laugh-out-loud wit, and one of the best b******t meters in the business, and for a sixty-something critic who fell off the back of the zeitgeist truck ages ago, it’s a bulletin from the front lines of entertainment culture that doubles as a cheat sheet for <em>alter kockers</em>. </p><p>Up to now, Hunter and I have mostly waved at each other in passing from across the Internet, but it turns out we both stan for the same Paul Thomas Anderson movie, the elegantly subversive, almost unbearably beautiful <strong>“Phantom Thread.”</strong> Because the film was billed as Daniel Day-Lewis’s final screen performance — as Reynolds Woodcock, a couturier in 1950s London who has a power-play love affair with his muse and model Alma, played by Vicky Krieps — it attracted a larger and perhaps more mainstream audience than is usual for PTA. That audience seemed baffled by a romantic melodrama that’s actually a dark comedy in disguise — a love story about two people who seemingly want to kill each other. That “Phantom Thread” plays these games under a veneer of the most luxuriant cinematic craft imaginable (the dresses! the camerawork! <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kkASQKOcI1OsxC5Hxpwylb2nGziBKztBo">that score</a>!) is part of its pleasure and definitely part of the joke. </p><p>As I wrote in my <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2018/01/10/phantom/QCiWWhRcqcQSDfduMTdVPK/story.html">2017 Boston Globe review</a>, “<em>At the heart of ‘Phantom Thread’ is a dance between two difficult people, embodied by a pair of actors at the absolute top of their game. Day-Lewis is an acknowledged alchemist, and Reynolds — foppish, temperamental, gifted, insecure — is a dazzlingly complete creation. That said, the generosity with which he allows Krieps to serve as the film’s center is remarkable and rewarded. The Luxembourg-born actress, a 10-year veteran of European film and TV, charts every subtle step of Alma’s transformation, from meekness to a godlike serenity that’s only a little terrifying.”</em></p><p>Factor in Lesley Manville’s Oscar-nominated performance as Reynolds’ officious sister Cyril — gatekeeper of both the House of Woodcock and her brother’s island of breakfast calm — and the echoes of such classics as Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” and “Phantom Thread” is an experience so lush that it teeters on the edge of the absurd. It’s rare and great fun when you get to talk about something you love with someone who knows and loves it as much as you do, and this week’s “Classics of the New Millennium” episode finds my guest and me wandering all over the force field of this remarkable piece of cinema. Is Barbara Rose (Harriet Sansom Harris), the drunken heiress deemed unworthy of a Woodcock gown, a figure of mockery or the film’s most tragic character? Are the (Oscar-winning) dresses high art or the high bourgeoisie’s idea of same? Is Alma a strong-minded heroine or a delusional psychotic? Do she and Reynolds deserve each other? Would anyone else have them? Come listen in as Harris and I untangle the warp and weft of “Phantom Thread.”</p><p>N.B. The movie is currently streaming on Netflix and for VOD rental <a target="_blank" href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/phantom-thread">on all the usual platforms</a>. This podcast is also <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_jZ_JqxJeQ">available on video on YouTube</a>, with film clips. Audio-only listeners won’t be able to see the well-known photo of author Vladimir Nabokov with his wife Vera that I compare in the podcast to a shot in “Phantom Thread,” so I offer it to you here as a hint to the movie’s possible antecedents and gamesmanship.</p><p>Enjoy.</p><p>Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.</p><p>If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.</p><p>If you’re not a paying subscriber and would like to sign up for additional postings and to join the discussions, here’s how.</p><p>It’s the holiday season, and if you have cinephiles on your list, you might want to… </p><p>Or refer friends to the Watch List and get credit for new subscribers. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll:</p><p>* Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals</p><p>* Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals</p><p>* Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">tyburrswatchlist.substack.com</a>
November 27, 2023
<p>If you have never seen Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film <strong>“Paterson”</strong> (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), now would be a very good time to watch it, with the world falling to pieces on a daily basis and your frazzled soul in need of a balm. If you’ve already seen “Paterson,” now would be a good time to watch it again. In fact, it would be entirely within the philosophy of this movie to watch it every day, as part of the cycle of quotidian events that turns like a bus driver’s steering wheel from morning to night. When I reviewed “Paterson” <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2017/01/18/paterson-poetry-motion/KA5yOotBoXJ9QMo3hMNfTO/story.html">for the Boston Globe in January 2017</a> — two days before the Presidential inauguration of a certain orange-hued megalomaniac — I wrote:</p><p><em>“Paterson” is set in Paterson, N.J., and concerns a bus driver, played by Adam Driver, who is also named Paterson. Already you may be getting a sense of the resonant circular prayer wheel that is Jim Jarmusch’s new film.</em></p><p><em>Paterson the man is a poet — although most people don’t know it — and he takes his inspiration from the late, great William Carlos Williams, who did not live in Paterson the city (rather in nearby Rutherford) but who dedicated 12 years and five volumes to an epic poem called “Paterson.” If you pick up a copy of “Paterson” the poem, you may come across the repeated line: “Say it! No ideas but in things,” and that may be the best guide to what Jarmusch has achieved here. “Paterson” the movie is about the ordinary slipstream of our days — about all the stuff we touch but never notice — and also about life’s piercing, inexhaustible beauty when we do notice. Coming out at a time when the world seems both upside down and backward, watching this film feels like drinking from a cool, clear lake.</em></p><p>So maybe there’s never a time when the movie is <em>not</em> necessary. To talk about “Paterson,” I enlisted my old friend <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Kenny">Glenn Kenny</a>, who currently reviews films for the New York Times and RogerEbert.com, was one of the tent-poles of the sorely missed movie magazine “<a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premi%C3%A8re_(magazine)#US_edition">Premiere</a>,” has written <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Made-Men-Goodfellas-Glenn-Kenny/dp/1335016503">an excellent book</a> on “Goodfellas,” and pens one of the more erudite movie blogs out there, “<a target="_blank" href="https://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/">Some Came Running</a>.” Glenn brings a wealth of knowledge about Paterson the city — he went to college there — and I bring an obsessive interest in Jarmusch the semi-intentional Zen filmmaker, which this particular movie (and “Broken Flowers”) (and “Dead Man”) (and “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai”) go a long way to making a case for.</p><p>You can stream “Paterson” <a target="_blank" href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/paterson">on Amazon Prime or, with ads, on Amazon’s Freevee service</a>. This podcast is also available in video form, with film clips, at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-cfmE9L6A">the Watch List YouTube channel</a>. I do hope you enjoy the discussion.</p><p>Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.</p><p>If you liked this edition of Ty Burr’s Watchcast, please feel free to pass it along to friends.</p><p>If you’re not a paying subscriber and would like to sign up for additional postings and to join the discussions, here’s how.</p><p>You can give a paid Watch List gift subscription to your movie-mad friends —</p><p>Or refer friends to the Watch List and get credit for new subscribers. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll:</p><p>* Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals</p><p>* Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals</p><p>* Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://tyburrswatchlist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">tyburrswatchlist.substack.com</a>
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