Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to the podcast that takes a powder!
This week: lighter than hair; whee the people; Biden our time; a man’s gotta know his imitations; special delivery; waxing wrath; loser error; burning questions; Eddy, set, go; the great white lines; the Eh Team; residual resentment; granting a wish; title match; hey, ladies; the old, grey mayor; novel legislation; swatting flies; unfunny Punchline; the roots of Wes Anderson; 70’s handsome; the hubba-hubba dilemma; hubba-bubba, toil and trubba; candy interlude; mouth music; cool for Cubs; it’s a gas; local horse; different -paths; class dismissive; future planning; lessons in face melting; some people call him Maurice; dyeing for it; Scooby-Done; murder-based financial ruin; too Marvelous; movie rundown: Longlegs, Maxxxine, Twisters; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; mighty mouse; obscure toons; evergreen knock-knacks; and, finally, Rudy can’t fail.
Question of the Week: What’s a film you like, but find confusing?
Sub-question of the Week: What’s something foolhardy – or dangerous – that you got up to as a kid?
Thanks for listening.
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Greetings all. Reading my “lost” letter towards the top of the show last week really touched me, a very special delivery and many thanks for it. In fact I’m getting T-Shirts printed that say ‘DAVID DEDRICK IS NOT A JERK’ because glitches do happen and tech falls between the cracks now more than ever. I’m blessed to have both you and this audience to write to each week about anything, a most kind and therapeutic weekly gesture.
A friend and co-worker of mine has difficulty keeping up with the plots from 007 films, he thinks they’re confusing and hard to follow. Then there’s those who have trouble keeping tabs on the long franchises like Marvel or Star Wars, because I follow those closely and I’m always being asked by others for help keeping up with them. In most cases it’s about how the films compare to the comics since I read those too and everyone remembers me reading them when we were kids. For me personally it’s most of Chris Nolan’s films I find confusing but at the same time interesting and enjoyable, they just take a little extra work with some repeat viewings. I still have not made it through “Tenet” or “Interstellar” with a complete understanding of either film…but I will. The man can make a movie and I know the solution is deep inside like a puzzle, I just have to give Nolan’s films the extra attention they need to unlock it.
There were a few summers where both my Mom and Dad worked and I was old enough to watch over my brother. Texas summers were hot and boring out in the garage which made our idle hands the devil’s workshop. We had some of those Estes model rocket engines that are supposed to go inside rockets OUTSIDE so they can fly high into the sky and parachute to the ground. The engines are ignited with an electric charge from a control box by use of batteries safely AWAY from the rocket and engine. So what did we do out of sheer fascination? We took an electric extension cord and stripped it down to the wires, stuck them into the large “D” sized engine and then plugged that extension cord into the wall socket. This ignited the engine, no rocket just the engine, which went flying in a flaming blaze around our closed garage and underneath our Dad’s Fiat. For a few seconds my brother and I thought we were both dead, we imagined how lucky we were that the engine didn’t blow the Fiat to smithereens. In a panic we aired the rocket fumes out of the garage and promised each other never to tell our folks since we played our only “Get Out of Death” card that day. From that day on we never did anything stupid like that again.
You mentioned David Byrne’s “True Stories” which I remember really well because he filmed some of it right here in Dallas, in fact a few of my friends were in the film! My boss Will at Lone Star Comics (take a drink) who didn’t start a cult but joined one instead, was a huge follower of Byrne and The Talking Heads. It seems Byrne was a member of my Will’s “cult” the Church of the SubGenius and they had some contact with him as well as the band Devo back in those days. Since Will was heavily involved with the SubGenius guys, he had a heads up about Byrne filming in Dallas. The scenes I remember from “True Stories”, were filmed at NorthPark Mall in Dallas. The mall is the oldest existing shopping mall in Dallas built in 1965 and is still going strong today! Hey, it’s the same age as me!
The funny disconnect here is that the mall they show at the beginning of this clip is Big Town Mall and was demolished years ago, my Mom worked at that mall’s Montgomery Ward for ten years throughout the 80’s. The editing makes it look as if Byrne is at the same mall the entire time but these were two of Dallas’s oldest malls and they were miles away from one another when they filmed “True Stories.” Once Byrne is inside the mall with John Goodman, they’re at NorthPark and not Big Town, the one they filmed from outside. Maybe this film is confusing too….
https://youtu.be/4cYYPpZ8rFI?feature=shared
Everyone enjoy your summer, we’re into the triple digit farenheit temps down here…so be mindful of the heat!
This means only warm wishes from me to everyone, until next time!!
I can’t remember if I saw the Chamber of Horrors at the now-closed wax museum in Victoria but I did see the one in Gastown when I was a kid. I found it “gruesome” and “disturbing”, not “interesting” or “neat” as Dave speculated that children would. I understood, for example, that someone having their eyes gouged out with a poker would be unpleasant. They also had a real live person in a scary mask that would jump out at you from the darkness. That must’ve been a weird gig.
There aren’t many films I like that I find confusing. If it’s too confusing, I don’t like it. I don’t mind not knowing right away if a character is alive or dead, or dreaming or hallucinating, or being gaslit or in a VR world. I just want the mystery to be solved or at least a point to be made by the end of the story. Somewhat confusing to me is the Blade Runner debate over whether Deckard is a replicant. I would’ve be okay if they left it ambiguous but I don’t think the original cut of the film succeeds in even raising the question.
Speaking of mysteries, I’m enjoying doing the AFI Get the Picture guessing game that Ed tipped us off to. I like how they try to mislead you in the multiple choices. Some of the movies I haven’t even heard of so it’s an entertaining way to learn about lesser known films.
My Dearest Sneaklings –
Took me a while but I eventually thought of a rather good ‘Secret Sequel’ in response from your question of a few weeks ago: Rounding out the trilogy begun by ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Two Jakes’ – of course, it’s ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’. All three are about corruption and public utilities: water, oil, and transport. I had to check, and originally Chinatown was intended to be a trilogy, with the third part, ‘Cloverleaf’ never produced. The Roger Rabbit writers cleverly used this plot as a solid structure over which they could go wild.
On confusing films… I love a puzzle picture, and as Ed says above, Nolan’s films are fun to puzzle over, with a perfect balance of clever ideas, satisfying solutions, and unresolved elements we needn’t worry about too much. A side effect of the intricacy of such twisty plots is that there’s always an army of nerds (ahem…) ready to leap on any possible plot hole in search of an easy ‘win’. The Endless is another elusive riddle of a film, and one which like Dave I deeply love. I’m half way through Benson and Moorhead’s latest ‘Something in the Dirt’, and like their previous work it’s super confusing, but so carefully assembled, with so many ideas, and so fundamentally humane that it never gets annoying.
Unlike… drumroll please… the ‘hard science fiction’ time travel mumblecore movie ‘Primer’. Oof. Such a great collection of ideas shrouded by ambiguous voiceovers, muttered dialogue, unexplained scenes, and more. I mean, I still liked it, but it so irritated me that I had to go and read a bunch of ‘Primer’ primers in order to understand how many key pieces of the puzzle I’d missed because they were so low in the mix.
One for the Pretention Selection – sprawling Polish epic ‘The Hourglass Sanatorium’. One of the best films I’ve seen, and I couldn’t tell you a thing about it, save that it vaguely follows a character reviewing his life by travelling through a sumptuously realised dreamscape where each scene bleeds into the next. Every frame is stunning, and even though you won’t have a clue what’s going on you won’t mind a bit.
Ahh childhood memories of stupid shit we did… My number one was trying to cook a frozen fish finger kebab on a campfire. The skewer snapped the fish finger in half, entered my left hand just above the index finger and exited through the other side. I looked at it for a moment or two, feeling that strange sense of calm we sometimes get from adrenalin before pulling it out: I swear I remember seeing light through the square hole it left, but that could be a bit of anecdotal embroidery. Luckily for me the skewer didn’t hit anything important on the way through, so all I have to show for this misadventure is a neat little pair of scars.
Keep it tasty,
Peter.