SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: Some Movies That Changed Filmmaking
An estimated 50,000 films were made worldwide in 2009 alone. Many are surely clunkers, but in this episode Chuck and Josh talk about the ones that emerged throughout cinema history to change the course of all movies that followed. Get your popcorn and lean back while you enjoy this classic episode.
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Hey, everybody, continuing the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist, this episode from February 2015 focuses on some movies that changed filmmaking.
From the very beginning of the film industry up to Star Wars and beyond, all these movies pushed the whole thing forward that much more and got us to where we are today.
And as a bonus, Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes a nice little cameo in here.
Enjoy!
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W.
Chuff Bryant,
aka Siskel and Ebert.
Save it the I'll see.
And Jerry's over there.
I guess she's Gene Shalet.
That's the Stuff You Should Know triumphant.
I don't know why that tickled me so much.
Because Gene Salett's a funny-looking, I guess.
Yeah.
Jerry's not.
I'm just picturing her with a big afro and a mustache and like a tweed jacket and bad opinions about movies.
Gene Shalet had a look, for sure.
Still, he's around, right?
Oh, yeah, I think so.
Yeah, R.I.P., both Siskel and Ebert.
So sad.
I know.
Have you seen the Roger Ebert documentary?
No, I've heard nothing but good things.
Really, really good.
Very touching.
Yeah.
What is it?
something life
life uh like mine life with me life on top life itself life with thumbs life itself life itself life with thumbs it was really great and i watched it on made the mistake of watching on a plane and i was just like my allergies are acting up oh yeah oh yeah i was i was watering because of your allergies no because i was sad I was crying.
Do you want me to say it?
I was crying on a plane.
I was confused there for a second.
That's better than when I watch other movies that are on my laptop that are like, uh,
have like bad violence or nudity or something.
I'm always just like, oh, and I kind of lower the laptop and it's like, I didn't realize this was in here.
And the lady next to me is just like, ugh.
You disgust me.
Yeah, because I don't,
I want to be sensitive to people around me, and I'm not one of those jerks that's like, just lives in my own bubble.
It's like watching some sex scene on a plane.
You're like elbowing the lady.
No, I hate it.
I was so embarrassed.
That happened to me a couple of times.
I'm like, I needed to start going PG on movies.
You just looked at airplanes.
Judd Appetow, huh?
Am I right?
He's unpredictable.
Yeah.
All right.
So, Chuck, this is your episode to Shine, man.
Is it?
Yes.
You're a movie guy, too, though.
I like movies, but I almost consciously don't let myself watch movies on a...
film aficionado level.
Oh, right.
You're just pure enjoyment.
Yeah, I don't ever want to see the individual shots and just be like, oh, well, that could have been better or whatever.
And just miss the movie as a whole.
Yeah, I fall somewhere in the middle of that.
I try to let go, but
like our video producer, director, Casey, is pretty bad about that.
And our buddy Scotty, who shot our TV show,
he's the worst.
Yeah.
He's just, oh, yeah, the camera work and that lighting in that scene.
Scott's awesome.
Hey, Scott.
Hey, Casey.
They're all in here with us in spirit.
And hey, this is the last show in this studio.
Yeah.
Last episode in the old office.
Yep.
The murder room.
Couldn't feel more neutral about it.
I actually feel less than neutral, less than zero.
It's weird.
That was a good movie.
Thank you.
Great shots.
I say thank you as if I directed it.
I not only directed it, I also played Andrew McCarthy.
Yeah, I'm ready to get the heck out of here, man.
Can't wait to get in that new office.
Yeah, it's going to be good.
Tiny little dedicated studio.
Whole new world.
All right.
Let's do this.
Okay, so Chuck, films.
You've seen one or two of them in your time.
Sure.
Have you seen any of the ones in this list?
I know you've seen a few of them, but have you seen some of the early ones?
I've seen, well, we'll just go piece by piece because I have not seen Battleship Potankin.
Okay.
But I do love Mandy Patankin.
It's a little different.
Yes.
In spelling, pronunciation, meaning, the whole thing.
Uh-huh.
But it's close, I guess.
But we're talking, of course, about films that change filmmaking
in some way or another.
And the first one on the list is from 1925, Battleship Potemkin.
That's hard for me to say.
Which is not the first movie, by the way.
The first screen movie was Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, which is 47 seconds long and the most boring piece of celluloid anyone's ever put together.
But it was the first.
That's right.
This was many years.
That was a full 30 years before Battleship Potemkin.
By the time 30 years had passed, like, we were doing narratives and there was banning and all sorts of great stuff.
And Battleship Potemkin fell under both of those umbrellas.
It was a narrative story.
It was a silent movie.
That's right.
But it told a pretty clear story and it was a bit of Russian propaganda as well.
Yeah, it tells the story of a 1905 uprising where there were Russian sailors.
Basically, there was a mutiny aboard a ship.
And then the bad guys, the Cossacks, came in looking for
revenge.
Yeah, 1905 that would have been rising up against tyranny it would have been rising up against the Romanov monarchy I guess nice but it was made in 1925 so this is a time when you know
Lenin and Trotsky and all those dudes were running around trying to do the great experiment yeah and it ends up it turns out that the battleship Potemkin was banned in some countries.
Some countries are like, we don't want this rusky propaganda.
Right.
But Russia itself later on banned it when Stalin came to power because he was a self-aware dictator.
Oh, was that the deal?
Yeah.
Okay.
He knew this could be a metaphor for rising up against my dictatorship.
So I'm going to just ban this movie.
Yeah.
Even though it's Russian propaganda.
Well, filmatically, I need to bring the history, by the way.
Filmatically speaking, it was a landmark film because of the montage, most notably the Russian or Soviet theory of montage, which is basically that
your impact is going to come from juxtaposition of shots and not necessarily a smooth sequence of shots.
Right.
And it should be rhythmic instead of necessarily being tied to the story.
It was like a rhythmic series of shots.
And
this one is popular.
It was the Odessa Step sequence as one of the five acts.
And it is huge because it has been aped and
mimicked and mocked and homaged probably more than, well, I don't know about more, but a lot of times in film history.
Well, yeah, the montage, it's like a go-to editing technique, right?
Oh, yeah, well, the montage in general, but specifically the Odessa steps.
Oh, okay.
There are two notable parts in that sequence.
One is the,
you know, it's basically a big charge on these grand steps leading up to a building and a big battle.
In Odessa.
Odessa, Texas.
And there's a part of it where there's the old baby carriage going down the steps.
You know, what's going to happen to the baby?
And it sounds tired because we've seen that in
Yeah.
Notably.
I did not find it tiresome.
Everything is Illuminated, the great movie by Lee of Schreiber.
That was from, directly from the Odessa Step sequence in Battleship Potimkin.
Nice.
The baby carriage.
Yeah.
And the old
shot in the eye through the glasses.
Oh, cool.
That comes from this movie, too.
They were the first ones to do it.
Yeah.
And you've seen that in Woody Allen's Love and Death and Bananas.
And of course, The Godfather, the great sequence where Mo Green's getting the massage, and he looks up and puts on his glasses.
During a montage.
Yeah, that's exactly
the assassination montage.
Yeah, because there was an assassination on the steps as well.
Oh, yeah.
So that was definitely.
Who was that?
That was Francis Ford Coppola?
Oh yeah.
He was clearly aware of Battleship Potemkin.
Clearly.
I was trying to think of other examples of montages and the only thing I could come up with was the A-team building something.
But that counts as a montage, right?
Yeah, oh, yeah.
It's like some related, in some way, related shots that are kind of put together that a little bit transcend like
tell a story in itself.
Yeah.
Like Rocky training for a fight or something.
That's another good one.
A lot of times it's set to music.
Yeah.
I love that.
That's the only one one you can think of.
And the great movie Brazil 2 has the shot through the glasses bit, as I like to call it.
So that's Battleship Potimkin.
Doesn't one of the Nazis and Raiders of the Lost Ark get shot through the glasses?
Maybe.
That wouldn't surprise me.
It's been oft-homaged.
So Battleship Potimkin was a...
It made a pretty big splash in 1925.
In 1926, the following year,
the next movie on the list,
it wasn't his first, but it really solidified, I think, his stardom.
Buster Keaton's stardom.
Yeah, the general.
Rightfully so, too.
Yeah.
He was one of the great,
well, some people call him the greatest stuntman to ever live.
He's done some stuff that I think earns him that.
Yeah.
This is back in the day, too, where he was legitimately risking his life.
Right.
You know.
Like
very famously where he's standing on the street in front of a house and then the whole front of the house falls over him and the window just goes right around him.
Yeah.
I watched that again today.
It is,
I can't believe he did that.
There's actually a half of a second where his arm jerks up because he's startled as the house finally makes its way like into his peripheral vision.
Yeah.
And it has to be one of the most dangerous things a human being's ever done on film.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure the whole time before that was like, we did the math, right?
You did the math.
Do the math again.
Do the math again.
Show me the math.
Right.
Show me the math.
Yeah.
Because that's all it was.
It was math and measurements.
Right.
But yeah, he could have been squashed and killed very easily.
And he had a lot of faith in everybody who was pulling off the stunt with him.
He had to just stand there.
That was his whole thing.
He had to just stand there.
And his bit was that he was, he played it straight, constantly.
He was a stone-faced actor.
Yeah, Deadpan.
Yeah.
He kind of started that whole thing because his big,
I was about to say rival, but I guess
just contemporary, Charlie Chaplin, while similar in some ways, was completely different because Chaplin was constantly mugging for the camera and like asking for the audience sympathy.
Right, raising his eyebrows.
Yeah, like, look, what's happening to me?
Come on, come on.
Whereas Buster Keaton would just, he had that deadpan look the whole time.
Yeah, he would go from like a house falling around him to jumping on a train or something like that with just the same blank facial expression.
Yeah, and the reason this is a highly influential film, The General, is because it kind of showcases the best of both.
The amazing stunts that would be mimicked throughout the years and built upon, and then the deadpan
style that influenced everyone from obviously Bill Murray is one of the great deadpan actors of all time.
Yeah.
Like,
you can count the number of times Bill Murray even smiles in a movie on like two hands.
Sure.
Much less like apes or laughs or anything.
Michael Sarah is mentioned in here, and I'm like,
I think he might have Bill Murray beat as far as a deadpan actor goes, yeah.
Well, Zach Galifanakis is on the list.
He's super deadpan.
Yeah.
Leslie Nielsen, of course.
Amy Poehler, I think, is a is a a woman that's a very deadpan uh has a deadpan style.
Jason Schwartzman.
Yes.
But people say this is this all is a direct descendant of Buster Keaton's work.
Yeah, and if you think we're overstating this, go watch any Buster Keaton movie.
You will be thrilled and delighted.
And if your attention span has been shredded to ribbons by the internet, just go onto YouTube and type in Buster Keaton, and it'll bring up all sorts of clips of his awesome stunts.
It's pretty great.
You will be thrilled and amazed, I promise.
Yeah, and I think I made a note here, by the way, that we have a Fatty Arbuckle retraction to make.
Remember when we called him out as the rapist to murderer?
I didn't say murderer.
Well, we said rapist at least.
Right.
But we were taken to task by fan.
He was acquitted of all that stuff and apparently didn't do
either act.
And his career and life and family name were ruined forever.
So he was evidently done a grave misjustice.
And we sort of cavalierly just still call him that today.
Yeah, I need to look into it more.
All right, so next up we have the Jazz Singer, the 1927 edition.
Not the Neil Diamond one.
No, and there was one in between, too, with Danny Thomas, I believe.
I like Neil Diamonds.
It's good.
I never saw it.
Did you ever see it?
No.
No, it's not bad.
But this is the original from Alan Crossland.
And it is notable because it was
the first feature-length
movie that was
at least 25%
spoken dialogue.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it's totally new.
Yeah, it wasn't the first talkie because they had short films that were talkies.
Right.
And there was a movie the next year, I'm sorry, yeah, in 1928 called Lights of New York that had 100% full spoken dialogue.
But the jazz singer had a mix of music and spoken dialogue.
Right.
The first big, big daddy feature-length film to do so.
Right, with substantial dialogue, right?
Yeah.
And they
did it in the most roundabout, difficult way that you could possibly do it, which is to record the audio and the soundtrack.
both the dialogue and the music onto vinyl records.
Probably wax records, really.
And then the projectionist had to sync the record up with the film strip, so everything was in sync.
Yeah, it was a device called a Vitaphone that Warner Brothers sunk about half a million into.
This company called Western Electric, who invented it.
And it was actually physically connected to the projector's motor.
So they did while they did have to sync it, it was a physical connection between the phonograph player and the projection
reel, I guess.
Yeah.
And it went on to gross three and a half million bucks for 1927.
That's
a lot of dough.
That's a ton of dough.
That's like five, six million dollars today, at least.
Yeah, at least.
But
was ineligible for the best picture because they were just like, you can't compete with the rest.
That's not fair.
Oh, wow.
Because everything else is silent and everyone's going to vote for you.
Yeah.
So that changed the whole game for sure.
We will continue on with our awesome and engrossing list right after this.
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So Chuck, if you'll notice the first three movies in our list, the first three films that changed everything happened in 1925, 26, and 27.
Things were changing fast.
They really were.
I mean, like, we by leaps and bounds.
Sure.
But you can also make the case that there was a lot of new ground to cover.
So just about anybody who did anything new that was noteworthy.
It was an innovation.
Yeah, it was a big innovation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Harder to innovate these days.
It is.
And if you'll notice on the list, so the earliest ones were like technical editing innovations.
Now, starting with Citizen Kane from 1941, we start to get into innovations in storytelling, which is a lot more nuanced than
doing your own stunts or using a montage or something.
It's figuring out how to tell a story in a much less linear narrative fashion.
And Citizen Kane was one of the early ones to pioneer a non-linear narrative.
Yeah, did you saw this?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
I didn't see it till, I mean, it was probably like
about 15 years ago, but like way later than you would think I would have seen this as a big film buff.
I saw it in college
in a film class.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
If you sign up for a film class, you're going to study Citizen Canada.
Exactly.
Pretty much.
And I finally found out what Rosebud was.
Don't ruin it.
I won't.
But it is a landmark film in every way, and it has often been top of best films of all time lists for great reasons.
One of which, like you said, the non-linear narrative was a really unique thing at the time.
Although flashback wasn't brand new, it was the first time it had been this extensive and effective in the story.
Yeah, because I mean, it's substantial enough that it really cuts up the flow.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it's not like a quick flashback and they come back and the actor's like staring off into space to transition back into the present again.
I mean, like, it was all over the place.
Yeah.
You know.
some of the more concrete cinematic landmarks, one was using deep focus.
Director of photography Greg Toland, legend, used he had used deep focus before on a movie called Long Voyage Home, but
it's all over the place in Citizen Kane.
And that basically means if you see a shot where something
very far away is in focus in the shot,
basically where everything's in focus.
Where the background and the foreground are in focus.
so you can press pause and look around exactly like you're sticking your head into a box yeah that's called deep focus yeah and it was brand new uh as far as citizen kane uh goes is how extensive it used it yeah uh one of the other things was um off-center framing um it was a big you know pretty common thing to just center whatever
the main action was, either the the character or the object.
And Citizen Kane had a lot of things where the main focus of the scene, the character may be even off-screen,
which was really weird at the time.
People didn't know what to think of it.
Right.
Expressionistic lighting.
Back then,
they just lit it.
They're like, make sure everything's well lit.
Yeah.
Wasn't Otto Preminger also like a big pioneer with that?
Yeah, I think so.
With
I think he directed that.
Was that Hitchcock?
I think that was Hitchcock.
Was it?
Okay, well, Otto Preminger directed stuff like that, though, right?
He used moody lighting and shadows and stuff a lot.
I probably messed that up.
People are going to be.
Dial-in for murder, I think it was Preminger.
Okay.
But
Orson Welles, of course, I don't think we even mentioned that, too,
wrote, directed, starred, and produced, and I think he even edited Citizen Kane.
Yeah, I just assumed everybody knew that, you know?
Yeah.
He came from the theater where you create a mood with lighting, only certain parts of the stage.
So he brought that into the movies, and it was very
evocative and set the mood well.
And people are like, man, why are we lighting everything all bright all the time?
Look at Citizen Kane.
It just really worked.
Yeah.
A couple of other things, one of which I know you will appreciate, sir, is that he pretty much invented the wipe.
Oh, the star wipe?
Not the star wipe.
But it followed.
Yeah, the star wipe followed.
Okay.
Which I know is your favorite.
transition in cinema.
Oh, it's almost
the star wipe.
Because it almost makes a beep
sound, you know?
By the way, I want to say, you're right.
Dallin for murder, it was Hitchcock.
Oh, was it?
Yeah.
Okay.
What was Primager?
Did you look that up?
He did one called Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm.
It's not who I'm thinking of.
I'm thinking of a director named Otto who directed in like the 20s or 30s.
You know, he directed like moody,
like
moody
movies, like
murder movies.
Yeah, yeah, like Fill Noir.
Yes, Film Noir.
That's exactly what I was going for.
And I don't remember who it was.
Maybe his name was Otto Fill Noir.
He's French.
And then one final thing, of course, you could study Citizen Kane for a week in a film class.
So this is an overview.
But
the low-angle shots.
People didn't use a lot of low or high-angle shots back then.
It was kind of just shot from straight on.
Orson Welles even dug out, cut out the floor a lot of times to get the camera lower.
Wow.
And for the first time, we saw ceilings in view in a movie because quite often things were shot on a sound stage where you don't have ceilings.
And he wanted those low-angle shots, so they used fabric most times to act as a ceiling.
But very effective shots of from below of Orson Welles as
I mean, it wasn't exactly William Randolph Hearst, but it was an approximation of William Randolph Hearst.
Right.
So very effective low-angle stuff.
That now, I mean, we take for granted all these things.
But, you know, there would be no pulp fiction in that non-linear storytelling if there was no.
Well, maybe somebody would have done it.
Maybe eventually, but
he did the first, and that's why it was innovative.
Exactly.
It's Fritz Lang that I was.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Fritz Lang.
And M.
Just M.
That's.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's all making sense now.
You get confused.
Yeah, but
you were right there.
Fritz and Otto are not close.
I mean, they're both German, but that's about it.
Yeah, but you know the difference between M and dial M?
Just a telephone.
What's up next, Chuck?
One of my faves.
So I am going to rely on you mostly for this one because I looked up what the French New Wave really did, what it accounted for.
Yeah.
And like all of the essays I found were
hard to, they were dense.
Yeah.
And I didn't really understand.
I understood that the French New Wave like changed everything.
Yeah.
And that a lot of the movies that I know and love today are the offspring of the French New Wave, but I still didn't get exactly specifically what the French New Wave did.
So, and you were going to allow me to summarize this?
Yeah.
No pressure.
No.
Well, for me, the French New Wave basically ushered in an era of
what now I think most people might associate with ND filmmaking.
Okay.
Okay.
Like
handheld camera work and what some people at the time considered amateurish camera work.
Movies where maybe not a lot seemingly happens.
You know, nothing grand happens, which was the case in Breathless.
A lot of people didn't like it at the time because it was like, you know,
not much happens.
You know,
the two leads in the movie,
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Gene Seaberg, weren't really like...
didn't show express a whole lot of deep love and there weren't these big moments of love and affection and these huge action sequences sequences and it was described as flat by a lot of people.
And I think a lot of indie movies do that, just kind of show life as it happens.
Yeah, so without Breathless, we wouldn't have like bottle rocket.
Maybe.
Wes Anderson's definitely a a big French New Wave guy, for sure.
But
Godard, Jean-Louis Godard, who directed it, and Truffaut and some other French New Wave forefathers were film critics at first.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and they decided as a group, like, we want to look at cinema in a new way
and do something different.
So they went and started making their own movies.
That's like James Fenimore Cooper.
Oh, yeah.
The guy who wrote Last of the Mohicans.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he apparently used to complain that nobody wrote good books anymore.
And so I think his wife or something said, well, why don't you do it, Big Shot?
And he did.
And the books he wrote really weren't so great, but he went and wrote them.
And he wrote a bunch of them, too.
One of my favorite far sides ever is the second to the last of the Mohicans.
It's just a line of Native Americans and the second to the last one.
They're online facing away.
He's just sort of turning around and waving it at the camera.
That's a good one.
Or I guess the camera at Gary Larson's hand.
So Breathless is notable for those reasons.
It kind of kicked off the French New Wave.
But the use of jump cut editing, which we see so much now, it was the first movie, and it was very jarring at the time to see jump cuts in a movie.
Yeah, I'll bet.
And that's when you're showing, like,
I guess the best way to describe it is
multiple shots of the same
subject or thing from different angles.
Right.
It's like
you indicate the progression of time or movement of something by just cutting quickly.
Rather than focusing on somebody walking down the street for five minutes,
you cut a couple of times and all of a sudden they're just closer to the camera and then closer and closer and then they're past the camera.
It's a jump cut.
Yeah, or even something as simple as like, you're going to leave the house, so you go and pick up your keys and you put on your coat.
Instead of showing all that, you come out of the bedroom, boom, you're putting on your coat.
Boom, you're putting the keys in the door.
Right, exactly.
You're just showing the highlights of this progression of stuff where that would otherwise be boring to watch the whole thing.
But it also
is used to create tension too.
Yeah.
Because it's jarring.
I guess is probably why it creates tension.
And Scorsese famously used it in Goodfellas.
Oh, Oh, yes.
At the end, when Henry Hill is like trying to sell some guns
to Nero, yeah, he's cooked to the gills, right?
And he's like trying to sell some guns to Nero, but they don't fit the silencers.
And
the helicopter's following him.
He's got the sauce going.
And all this stuff is being represented and compressed into a very short amount of time by the use of jump cuts.
Yeah, very effective.
And for budding filmmakers, it's a great way to hide mistakes
of things you may not have gotten that you thought you got.
Jump cutting is a really easy way to just sort of,
yeah, to hide your errors.
I did it a lot, in other words, when I was making those shorts.
I realized in my head I was referencing the
shot in Soul Taker.
Have you ever seen that Mystery Science 3000?
His last name is Esteves.
It's Martin Sheen's brother.
And he is a Soul taker, and he's next to this guy who's a soul taker.
You just have to see this.
But anyway, they're walking down the road, and this jump cut has this progression of them.
It's so unnecessary, but it's like a great use of jump cut.
You could tell the director was like, I can't wait to use a jump cut.
And that's what she did.
She used it on.
But go watch that MSC 3K.
It's a good one.
Man, did you see every single one of those episodes?
No,
I still run across ones that I haven't seen, yeah.
Nice.
Hey, and a shout out to Bill Corbett, who I know is a listener.
Oh, yeah, he is, isn't he?
Yeah, I don't know if he's gonna hear this one, but um the great Bill Corbett.
Uh next we are gonna move on to Federico Fellini's Eight and a Half.
Have you ever seen this one?
No, I haven't.
It's good.
Now I understand why it's called that, though.
Yeah, it was one of the first, although not the first, movies about movie making.
And starring the great Marcelo
Mastroiani from La Dolce Vita,
a muse of Fellini's over the years, too.
And this one,
this one really kicked off the surrealist filmmaking and sort of saying you can play around and shoot a dream sequence where the guy's in traffic and then he leaves his car and floats up in the air and is being pulled down to the ground on the beach from a rope tied around his ankle.
Just like go nuts.
Yeah, and successive filmmakers did go nuts.
Like Gondry did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Oh, yeah, he's hugely influenced.
Darren Aronofsky did some weird stuff here or there.
Yeah.
David Lynch and Terry Gilliam, of course.
Yeah.
Just basically surrealism is what I'm taking Fellini introduced into this.
Yeah, for real.
And
besides the surrealism,
that opening sequence of Eight and a Half where the director,
he's the director in the movie, Guido, is stuck in traffic.
It's really claustrophobic feeling, and that's why he floats away and escapes
that traffic jam.
But that was directly mimicked in R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts video.
Oh, yeah.
And the beginning of the movie Falling Down.
Do you remember that?
That started with the traffic jam that Michael Douglas just left.
He doesn't float.
He gets like an Uzi.
I saw that again the other day.
Most of it.
Did it hold up?
It's weird.
It alternately felt way ahead of its time
and also very dated.
Yeah.
Because the stuff that Michael Douglas is doing felt way ahead of its time.
But then there was, I just forgot about the whole weird subplots with Robert Duvall retiring and he had this wife that was henpecking him and like this retirement party they were trying to throw on.
I forgot about that too.
Yeah, it was just so unnecessary and felt really weird and out of place the other day when I was watching it.
Was there like a jump cut montage where he's putting on his watch, his gold retirement watch?
No.
But then, too, the Barbara Hershey, you know, is in Venice at home with the daughter, and he spends a whole day coming there to grab them basically.
And the whole time, she just keeps calling the cops, like, I know he's coming, I know he's coming.
And I was watching the other day, I was like, freaking leave.
Oh, yeah.
What are you doing there?
Yeah.
That's a movie character thing.
You know, that's just bad writing, bad directing.
When you just walk right past the ability to leave,
you missed a huge step.
Where were we?
Falling down?
Yep.
I think that pretty much sums up eight and a half.
I think so too.
Falling down.
Boom.
So, Chuck, we got a little more left.
We got more films.
Is this making you want to watch films?
Yeah.
Me too.
I feel like eating ice cream, watching a film, and scratching from poison ivy lately.
Yeah, and burning this office down.
You know, if that happens now, suspicion's going to fall on you for saying that.
That's all right.
We'll be right back after this.
The reviews and ratings are in, and Ice Cube's Big Three is the surprise hit of the summer.
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All right, so we're back.
with our awesome jingles, which by the way,
we have to thank John Bagin.
Begin.
John Begin.
Begin the Begin.
He even emailed with the pronunciation of his name, but he, the original guy who did our jingle, the first jingle ever, Rusty Mattius.
Or Matthias.
Man, I'm not good with the pronunciation.
Well, anyway, Rusty, who's band the sheepdogs, are on tour right now.
Yeah.
Just because his work was so original, we contacted him and said, hey, we got this other guy who's done like covers of your work.
Can we use these?
He's like, totally.
Mash it up, brother.
And John's been making awesome versions of it ever since.
Yeah, they're both great and talented.
Thanks to you both.
And go check out, I think, what did you say they're on tour, right?
Yeah, the sheepdogs.
Yeah, go check out the sheepdogs.
Yeah.
And in town near you.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's finish with these two in reverse order.
Okay, Toy Story.
was a big one.
Hugely innovative.
Big landmark.
Huge.
Oh, yeah.
And again, it's one of those things where now almost everything about it seems pedestrian.
Sure.
Or what it did.
Yeah, yeah.
See, it's still a great movie, I'm sure.
Oh, yeah.
But the innovations that it undertook just seemed pedestrian.
But at the time, it was totally groundbreaking.
Yeah, game changer.
It was
the first CGI movie, all-CGI movie ever.
Yeah.
That was enormous.
Well, yeah, and I remember at the time seeing it and just being like, wow, this is the future of animated films.
What's the best all-CGI animated film you've you've ever seen visually?
Well, I haven't seen a lot of them these days because Emily doesn't like those.
So I probably wouldn't be the best person to ask.
Holly from
Stuffy Miss in History Class, she'd probably be the one to ask.
For my money, have you seen The Adventures of Tintin?
Oh, yeah.
That was amazing.
Mind-blowing.
Yeah, I saw that on your recommendation and really, really liked it.
Yeah, the story was great.
The action was great.
The characters were great.
But the CGI, the computer animation, is, I think, possibly the best ever done.
Yeah, and that's a bit of a different style than, say, like UP or The Incredibles.
It's not nearly as cartoonish.
It's like the what?
I think it's the motion capture.
Yeah.
I think that's what they did for that.
Oh, yeah, with Up, it would strictly be totally just animation, right?
Yeah, but I mean, they're both animation.
Right.
But yeah, man, Tintin, that was really good.
It was good.
I was surprised how much I liked that.
But Up was good too, and Toy Story was good too.
But all of these things came as a result of the ground that Toy Story broke.
Absolutely.
In 1995,
like you said, what seems like a common thing today.
I mean, you don't see cell animation anymore.
It's almost.
I know, I kind of miss it.
I totally miss it.
Like the new Mickey Mouse is all weird and CGI.
Like stuff from our generation should have just been discontinued.
Yeah.
And then you just come up with all new stuff that's CGI.
Strawberry Shortcake, not supposed to be CGI.
It just all looks weird now.
Yeah, I wish there would have people would have done a little bit of both still
because I think cell animation, like I think the Iron Giant came out after Toy Story, and they did cell animation.
Yeah.
And that was great.
Yeah.
Great movie.
I haven't seen that.
Oh, it's really good.
You'd like it.
It was a movie for grown-ups.
And Toy Story sort of laid the way for that because it was one of the first movies, I guess cartoony kids movies, to really have a lot of dialogue that flew over kids' heads that adults got a little nod and a wink.
What, Toy Story?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not like dirty humor, but.
It's not like Fritz the Cat.
No, no, no.
But a little entendre here and there that adults might appreciate that kids won't understand.
Right.
Those are the best jokes.
Right.
And now we have, you know, best animated
feature in the Oscars, which definitely came straight out of the original Toy Story because movie started being considered before they created its own category.
Up in Toy Story 3 were actually nominated for a regular Best Picture.
And I think everyone was like, ooh, we need to get them in their own category because we can't have an animated movie when Best Picture came out.
Well, UP would have come after
the Best Animated Picture category came out.
Oh, really?
So that kind of goes as a testament to just how amazing that movie is.
Yeah, that's right.
But it was still up for Best Picture.
Oh, it was both.
I don't know if it was up for, it probably was up for Best Animated as well, but it was definitely also up for Best Picture.
Oh, wow.
While there was an animated category.
Yeah, I never considered that.
Bam.
That was a good movie.
Yeah.
That was sweet.
So I got nothing else in Toy Story.
Well, then, what about the last one?
Yeah.
Man.
Quite a film.
You sent this essay on Criterion.
I think Criterion.com, but you know, the Criterion Collection.
Yeah.
It was written, I guess, in 1988.
Even though it says posted in 1988, it's like there wasn't an internet to post it on in 1988.
Maybe it means posted it like in the mail.
Maybe.
But I realized like I can read film essays about Stanley Kubrick's work all day long.
Yeah, me too.
Like I love that documentary, Room 227.
Was it 227?
237.
246?
237.
237.
247?
You know the one about the shining conspiracy theory.
Yeah, the number of the room is amazing.
I can't remember, though.
I read a bunch bunch of articles.
I think 237.
I read a bunch of articles around the release of that documentary, which were basically like film essays
on the shining.
I read this one amazing one
from several years ago about Eyes Wide Shut.
Oh, yeah.
About how it's like a masterpiece of sociology.
I love that.
Studying sociology.
A lot of people hate that movie.
Yeah.
And then now this, like 2001.
I'm sure there's tons out there to consume, but I can just read that stuff all day long because that guy was so
just amazingly detailed as a director.
Yeah, I agree.
I can read more about his work, critical essays on his work than any other director.
It's just unbelievable.
It's almost like it's its own genre.
It is.
You know?
Kubrickian.
Yeah.
It's got a word named after it.
And well it should.
So 2001, a Space Odyssey, 1968.
Blew minds back then, blows minds today.
One for its
just the amazing look and the technical achievement.
It ages really well.
I mean, if you see a movie from 1968 about outer space.
It still looks like the future.
Yeah, you don't expect it to hold up well, but it totally does.
So much so that a lot of the, you know, George Lucas and Ridley Scott were just like, it's done.
Right.
Like, we might as well give up.
Yeah, George Lucas, when Star Wars came out, said, Star Wars is technically comparable, but for my money, 2001 is by far the better movie.
Yeah, everyone was sort of intimidated, I think, by how talented Kubrick was.
Well, plus, also,
you have to take into account that he made this movie at a time when other sci-fi movies were just pure schlock.
Oh, yeah.
So, not only to make the movie in this way, this visually amazing and
amazing with an audio soundtrack and just totally innovative, it also took that mindset to just completely go in a different direction that everybody else has as well.
Yeah, of course, I think about Ridley Scott saying that, and then he goes on to make Alien and Blade Runner after that.
So,
I mean, he he helped me.
Prometheus, man.
Yeah.
I people don't like Prometheus.
I don't care.
It's a cool movie.
No, I liked it too.
I thought, okay, one flaw, the big flaw to me was,
and I'm sure it's like part of the subtext or the context or one of the texts.
But
the the engineer coming back to life or coming out of har hibernation after however long and just immediately like inflicting violence on these pea-brained humans who are showing him no threat whatsoever.
Yeah.
I just thought it was a little
it wasn't explained well enough, I think, for my taste.
Yeah, I think I agree with you.
But when I'm watching a Ridley Scott movie, I just assume if I'm missing something, he has an explanation for it.
I'm just not catching it.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
I think I read some stuff about how it tied into the alien canon
and realized I need to go see it again with all this knowledge that I wasn't really thinking about.
Yeah.
And maybe I'd like it more.
Yeah.
But I haven't done that yet.
So back to 2001.
Oh, yeah.
It was also notable for
being bookended basically with 30 minutes of silence on both ends of the movie.
The first 30 minutes are, and when I say silent, I mean no dialogue.
And the last 30 minutes have no dialogue.
Yeah, the last line comes like a full 30 minutes before the end.
Yeah, and over the 146 minutes, there are only 40 minutes of dialogue in the whole thing.
And
that's why I just, when people compare something like Interstellar
and call it Kubrickian, I just want to smash.
Did you not like Interstellar?
Not really.
Oh, I liked it.
I was super let down.
Despite McConaughey doing Waterson in the future, I still liked it.
I even liked him in it.
I liked a lot of the parts of it, but to me, it's anti-Kubrickian
because every 10 minutes, they're explaining everything that's going on all over again.
That was another thing.
Just like Inception.
Ellen Page's entire character was written in to explain what was going on every 10 minutes.
Yeah, and I felt like Interstellar was the same way.
It's like Christopher Nolan needs to just trust his audience a little bit like Kubrick did and say, figure it out or don't.
Yeah, no, that's true.
I'm not going to...
stop every 10 minutes just to explain everything.
Here's what's going on.
Remember?
If you didn't get it right, here's what's going on again.
Well, I think if they are labeling something like interstellar as Kubrickian, right?
One of the ways that you can interpret that is that he was he rooted his
2001 in science fact.
Yeah.
Right.
So like the stuff that the astronauts are like dealing with and the things that are going on and the conditions of space, it was all factual.
Whereas with interstellar, same thing.
They went to really great lengths to do what they could to make everything scientifically factual, aside from the fact that the idea that you could go into a black hole and then come back out or something like that,
drifting in space, that's not going to happen.
But for the most part, Interstellar was scientifically accurate.
So maybe that's what they meant when they called it Kubrickian.
Because you're absolutely right.
Like, they did explain a lot
and went to great lengths to explain a lot.
Whereas with 2001, you just watch it the first five times, like, what just happened?
Yeah.
And apparently Carrie Grant had that same reaction as well.
That was Rock Hudson.
Rock Hudson, that's right.
Yeah, the original screening that Roger Ebert was at in L.A., Rock Hudson just left and said, can somebody tell me what the hell that was about?
Yeah, and it wasn't even over yet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the reason it
has science fact and not science fiction is because Kubrick and Arthur C.
Clarke, who
it wasn't actually a book that was made into a movie.
It was a movie, a book made after a movie yeah and they collaborated on both and
they went to Carl Sagan of course of Cosmos and said he said you're gonna make billions and billions of dollars that was pretty good was it yeah that sounded a lot like him they went to Carl Sagan and said hey we want to portray these extraterrestrials
are they maybe the starchild is
or they turned Dave into the star child right are they humanoids what are they gonna look like And Sagan was like, they were very unlikely to be humanoid.
So Kubrick did the smart thing and was just like, well, we just won't show them at all.
Instead of making a fool of myself, like signs and making some dumb-looking aliens.
Oh, man.
Man.
Let me just not show the aliens.
Very smart move.
Yeah.
Getting back to the story of 2001.
Although, I think the village is underrated.
Yeah.
I can stomach that one.
What about, well, you like the Sixth Sense, right?
Everybody liked the Sixth Sense.
Sure.
I guess that was it for him.
I loved Unbreakable.
Yeah.
That was one where, like, yeah, I think it was maybe even better the second time.
Yeah.
I still like that movie.
But he also made that Lady in the Water movie and
the one with Marky Mark.
Where the people were jumping off.
No.
Is it the one in the elevator?
No, he just produced that.
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
The one where people are jumping off of buildings and stuff.
Inexplicably.
Yeah.
I didn't see that either.
I couldn't get through 10 minutes of that movie.
So
2001, back to good movies,
had a
three-part structure, but not a conventional three-act structure that you might be used to in movies, which is why it confounded people like Rock Hudson.
The first, they called them movements.
The first movement was the dawn of man sequence with
the apes with the monolith.
And he has that great part where he throws his little bone tool up in the air and then it morphs into, well not morphs, but it maybe is a dissolve into the
spinning in outer space.
It's called the match cut.
Yeah, match cut.
of the rotation of what we now know was a nuclear warhead because I read that little article, 20 Things You Didn't Know About 2001.
I didn't know those were nuclear warheads necessarily in outer space.
They made it a little more vague.
Initially it was going to be more explicit and they were going to explode it in outer space.
But he said, nah, that's a little too close to
the ending of
Yeah, so let's not do that.
Yeah.
Probably a good choice.
Yeah, but
as a result, some people have taken it to mean that
that match cut was supposed to show how far humans have come from using a bone to murder somebody to satellites in space.
But if you know that the satellite is actually loaded down with nuclear warheads, that match cut demonstrates how little humans have changed from using a bone to murder somebody to using satellites to murder somebody.
The motif is still the same, and it's murder.
Yeah.
He was going for some deep things.
Oh, yeah.
A lot of metaphor happening.
Yeah.
I mean, supposedly in every single shot, because he started out as a still photographer, right?
Oh, yeah.
Supposedly every frame of a Kubrick movie,
there is nothing that isn't unintentional and placed there by him.
He did a lot of his own set decorating.
Yeah, like the pencil holder on the desk in the office of the guy at the Shining Hotel was where it's supposed to be.
Right.
And if, like, if it has, like, a, the picture of a goat head inscribed on it, that means something.
Right.
It's not accidental.
Yeah, although I will say room 237, which I think may have been the point, is a little bit like, these people are crazy.
Not like, oh man, just see what they're saying in all this.
You're right.
I was just thinking these people are nuts.
Right.
It was just kind of enjoyable to hear their interpretations of it.
Well, and I think it was a comment on obsession and fandom more so than The Shining.
For sure.
But I thought
some of their ideas were interesting.
Totally.
I said Room 227, didn't I?
Like one of the conspiracy theorists was like, Mary.
Wasn't room 227 like a sitcom?
Yeah, Yeah, it was just called 227.
Okay, yeah, 227.
Gotcha.
Remember with Jack A.
She'd be like, Mary.
Oh, okay.
That's what my impression was.
What'd you think I was doing?
Well, I wasn't sure what you meant.
Just being a weirdo?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
The second movement was, of course,
the HAL sequence, the computer, the HAL.
Was it the HAL 9000?
Yeah.
Really creepy, and HAL ended up being a lot of people's favorite character, even though it was just a voice, the supercomputer on the Discovery ship.
I remember he's like what are you doing dave it's so creepy i had the mad magazine spoof of 2001 when i was a kid it was great yeah and then the third movement is when dave uh moves on to
uh the next stage of human development with these extraterrestrials that you know only hear and um
basically it's when it comes full circle
the third movement And the third movement is the one that has almost well, it's really just the second movement that's that's
that has dialogue.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some of the alternate titles for 2001, Journey Beyond the Stars.
Terrible.
Universe.
Not bad.
Yeah, okay.
Not so great.
That sounds bad.
Sounds like a James Bond movie.
And then How the Solar System Was Won as a play on How the West was won.
Yeah, which, like,
movie geeks would find that appealing, but everybody else would say that's dumb.
You ruined everything.
Yeah, and Kubrick was, this is the last thing I have.
He was so obsessive with protecting his material that he allegedly,
I don't think allegedly, I think he did, have all the sets and props and miniatures destroyed after he shot it so they would never be reused, which is a common thing at the time.
Yeah.
Like, hey, we're doing a space movie.
Go get that.
Go get that space ring from Stanley's set.
Yeah.
Let's reuse it for Planet Fall.
He also destroyed all of the footage that didn't make it into the original theatrical release.
Yeah.
Destroyed.
It's gone.
Yeah, so they wouldn't one day after his death recut it, which they invariably probably would have done.
Yep.
He's a smart man.
Yeah, I could...
We should just do a podcast on Kubrick.
Okay.
He was...
I'm down for that challenge.
A B.A.
dude.
Yes.
One of my heroes.
Yeah.
Cinematically.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
If you want to know more about movies, if you like this one, one, you probably also love our exploitation episode.
Ooh, exploitation movie episode.
Fun one.
What else have we talked about movies in?
Oh, yeah.
That had a lot to do with the movie.
Yeah, our James Bond episode.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we've had a few of these, and people always respond to these.
They're like, you guys should have a spin-off show.
You should do an all-movie podcast?
Sure.
Maybe one day.
Maybe.
Remember, if you're looking for any of these, press Ctrl F or Apple F in your web browser and search that way on our podcast archive page.
You can also search for this article on how stuff works by typing movies in and seeing what comes up.
And since I said how stuff works, it's time for listener mail.
I'm going to call this Mike DuPont really clear something up for us on scientific method.
Okay.
Hey guys, it was a great...
Well, actually, he doesn't say it was great.
I think I just made that up.
Hey guys, your scientific method podcast has a consistent misuse of what a scientific law is in relation to the working of the scientific method uh it appears that you believe that a law e.g.
newton's law of gravity is then held uh in higher esteem than theory and that eventually a theory matures into a law um i think i probably did think that because of politics right you know yeah how a bill becomes a law right exactly he says when in fact theory is considerably more robust than a law a law is a mathematical model that describes observed behavior does not answer the why right theory does uh answer why something happens Did we not say that?
I thought we did.
Like, I knew that.
I remember finding that out from the research.
I just can't believe it didn't come out of my mouth.
He claims we did not.
And I feel like I'm learning this, so I definitely did not.
Okay, go ahead.
But you may have.
For example, Newton's law of gravitational attraction describes the action of two bodies that can be used for pretty much everything.
It is perfect for describing what happens, but it cannot tell you why the two items are attracted or drill down to the underlying mechanism.
Yeah, law is like much more succinct.
It just is what it is.
Nor is the law even universal and could not be used to explain the
perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit.
Burn.
In comparison, Einstein's theory of general relativity was eventually used to solve the Mercury issue.
Oh yeah, the Mercury issue.
And the standard model, along with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson by CERN, can answer the why do these two masses
attracted to each other question.
I think what you mean is why are these two masses attracted to one another.
Mike.
It's pretty teleological.
Theory is considerably more developed and richer than a scientific law, which is more of a tool that is applicable to a wide range of applications.
Keep up the good work.
That is Mike DuPont.
Thanks, Mike.
Thanks for that.
Of the Valley Forge DuPonts?
I think so.
Have you seen Foxcatcher?
Oh no, I've heard it's good.
Is it good?
No.
Oh, really?
I don't think so, no.
I've heard it's kind of slow.
It's beyond slow.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
I can understand why
the Academy loved it.
Sure.
A lot of people, I'm sure, do like it.
I was not a fan of Fox Catcher.
I think people generally seeing, like, a turn by an actor like Steve Curl doing something really different.
They're knocked out by that.
No.
I still can't believe he didn't like Birdman.
No.
Spoiler alert for people who have not seen Birdman, the following conversation is full of spoilers.
Yes.
What didn't you like about it?
So
I thought Michael Keaton was good.
Okay.
Who plays his daughter, Emily Blunt?
Is that who that is?
Emma Stone.
Emma Stone.
Excellent.
Okay.
Ed Norton, even pretty good.
Okay.
So the acting was fine.
Who is Naomi Watts was in it?
Yeah.
She did great.
Okay, so yes, the acting was fine.
Sure.
So the acting was fine.
I thought the photography was amazing.
Yeah.
The whole seemingly one-take thing kind of knocked you out, Broadway.
I didn't even pick up on that, but yes, it did.
It was more the,
for me, the juxtaposition of the story,
which was pretty boring and realistic in everyday life, even though it was about a Broadway production, it was still about the everyday life of it.
Sure.
Against the surrealism that's like threaded and embedded in throughout the whole movie.
I didn't like that.
Okay.
It was like, choose one or the other, man.
Gotcha.
It irked me.
And
then just so that one part with the critic, or Michael Keaton tells off the critic, I thought Michael Keaton did a wonderful job.
Yeah.
But just the whole point that it was in there of like the director,
you know, using Michael Keaton's character to tell off all the critics he's ever wanted to tell off in his movie.
Yeah, yeah.
I just thought it was pretentious.
Yeah.
And I thought it was kind of clumsy in that sense too.
And it was enough that it
tainted it.
Yeah.
And then the ending,
I did not like the ending at all.
Yeah.
At all.
That'll ruin a good movie.
Because it was com it completely went contrary to all the other stuff that he went out of his way to point out was fake or fraudulent or not real.
And then all of a sudden it is?
What?
Yeah.
No, choose one or the other.
The director refused to make very important decisions, and I think that that ruined the movie.
That is a very well
thought out criticism, I think.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Sure.
Man, that was the end of listener mail, even, wasn't it?
Yeah, because now I'm not like, geez, Josh is weird.
He didn't like Birdman.
Now I'm like, Josh didn't like Birdman.
He has good reasons.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I like justifying my opinions.
Don't we all?
So if you want to get in touch with Chuck and I, or Jerry, who I apparently just spoiled Birdman for,
you can contact us via Twitter at SYSK Podcast.
You can join us on facebook.com/slash stuffy should know.
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