The Silver Screen
NBN goes to the movies
Q: Why is it so hard to make a good film?
A: Why is it so hard to keep a marriage alive? A lot of the same reasons.
In this week’s newsletter…
The Oscars with Bruce Vilanch
Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics
New Books in Film Channel
UConn Popcast
The Oscars with Bruce Vilanch
Bruce Vilanch is a comedy writer, songwriter, and actor who has won two Emmy Awards for his work. He was the Oscars program co-writer for 10 years and then head writer from 2000-2014. He is also a featured writer for the Tonys, Grammys, and Emmys. Listen to his podcast: OSCARS: What Were They Thinking?!
Q: The Oscars are the most watched awards show for arts entertainment. More people tune into the Oscars than the Grammys, Tony Awards, BAFTAs, Emmys, and other similar events. Why do we care so much about the Oscars?
A: It’s the movies, a larger than life experience we’ve all grown up with. And the oscars are the only awards that are voted on by people who make them, from every discipline, every craft.
Q: 96 films have won the Best Picture award, typically the film considered the best by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Who are the people who chose the best film?
A: 10,000 filmmakers from all walks of the industry, much more diverse, international and less Hollywood-centric than the voting body used to be.
Q: Why does Best Picture go to the producers of the film?
A: They are the ones who put the movie together, the captains of the ship.
Q: What's the most underrated Best Picture winner and why?
A: Hard to call any picture that won the best picture at the Oscars underrated but personally, I don’t think Tom Jones has gotten the love it deserves over the course of time.
Q: What's the most overrated Best Picture winner and why?
A: The Greatest Show on Earth was the first movie that I ever saw, so I was dazzled. But it is a pretty hokey piece of work, with a great pre-CGI train wreck, very impressive in its day. Probably any of the other movies in the category should have gotten the award, but it was an era of spectacles and Cecil B. DeMille was not to be denied.
Q: Which Best Picture film is your favorite?
Tom Jones. Wonderful adaptation of the novel and breathtakingly realized by all hands.
Q: This year, there are 10 nominees for Best Picture? Which is your favorite film, and which do you think the Academy will choose?
A: The White Lotus. Oh, wait, that’s not a movie. I’ve got to get my ass in gear and start streaming, or actually leave the house.
Q: Your book, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, covers the trials and tribulations of making entertainment for the screen. Why is it so hard to make a good film?
A: Why is it so hard to keep a marriage alive? A lot of the same reasons.
Q: What are your favorite books about film and the film industry?
A: Bill Goldman’s books Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting and The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays. Or Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which tells you how the business got invented.
Q: If you could have dinner with any dead filmmaker, who would it be and why?
A: I’ve had dinner with a quite a few of the great dead ones – while they were alive, of course, not in some seance – but I think Charlie Chaplin or Ernst Lubitsch. The funny guys.
Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics
Dan Moran and Mike Takla have been recording Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics since 2020. Every episode they share their fresh takes on movies old and new, across a variety of genres. We asked them to share some of their favorite conversations from this past year. It was difficult for them to choose: they dropped 49 episodes this year, all on movies they love (save two disagreements: one major, one minor.) Check out their top 5!
A Serious Man (2009). The film begins with a quotation by the Sufi mystic Rumi, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” That’s easier read than lived, as Larry Gopnik discovers when he finds himself undergoing a Job-like series of trials with his wife, son, neighbor, and job. It’s easy to understand why this one is sometimes overlooked in light of the Coen Brothers' other films, but it’s every bit as strong as No Country for Old Men— and it asks many of the same questions without answering them.
First Reformed (2017). In a recent interview, writer and director Paul Schrader said he was lucky with Taxi Driver because he “caught the zeitgeist.” He did so again with First Reformed, a film that reflects our age of extremism. Ethan Hawke is perfect as the well-meaning (and guilt-ridden) Reverend Toller who tries to minister to others as his own beliefs become twisted and he trades in one religion for another.
Hobson’s Choice (1954). David Lean’s “capitalist romance” features Charles Laughton’s best performance and is infused with a Dickensian love of humanity. It’s a perfect film about a deeply complicated topic: what makes the world go round and how individual family units come together, function, and endure.
After Hours (1985). The phrase “cult classic” doesn’t do justice to the fervor expressed by fans of Martin Scorsese’s strangest, yet perhaps most approachable film. When a midtown yuppie takes an impromptu trip to the Village, he finds getting home trickier than he ever imagined. It’s not the Scorsese you’d expect from Raging Bull or Mean Streets. It’s 90 minutes of Alice in Wonderland written by Franz Kafka in a long-gone New York City.
Defending Your Life (1991). One of the most difficult feats in comedy is to transform a dreaded, serious subject into a platform for genuine observation and laughter. Albert Brooks makes it look easy. He traces his own anxieties about mortality and the meaning of life and turns them into a charming romantic comedy with a perfect three-act structure.
Listen to Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics and subscribe to hear more of Dan and Mike’s conversations about film. You can also find all of the episodes on our website.
5 Film-Based Book Interviews
You can also listen to Dan’s interviews with scholars who have written about the impact of film critics, directors, and genres on cinema. To start you off, Dan shared 5 of his favorite film-based book interviews from 2024:
Alexander Greenhough, Albert Brooks: Interviews. Everyone loves Albert Brooks–or should. Greenhough’s collection reads like a biography of the one-of-a-kind writer and director, whose Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life showcase his sensibility. Readers will learn about Brooks quitting as a standup comic and instead devoting himself to creating acts that he performed for Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. Fans of Brooks who hope for one more movie can read these interviews and be reminded of just how funny Brooks is every time he speaks about anything.
Daniel de Visé, The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic. I’ve read many “the making of” books and this is one of the best. I confess that I asked myself upon opening it if I really wanted to hear the story of John Belushi meeting Dan Aykroyd and what led up to the movie, but de Visé is a great writer who tells, as he promises, the story of their friendship as much as how John Landis coordinated all the car chases and assembled all the musical talent. It’s also a sobering story of addiction and loss.
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, Kubrick: An Odyssey. In part because of the intensity and singular vision of his films, Stanley Kubrick has acquired a reputation for obsession and eccentricity. While he was particular about his work, he wasn’t a hermit and greatly enjoyed sharing ideas with writers and other directors. Kolker and Abrams offer a full cradle-to-grave biography that treats Kubrick’s formative years in the Bronx, his early work as a photographer, and the creation of each of his films. Readers will learn as much about his never-realized works, such as Aryan Papers and Napoleon, as they will about 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut.
Matt Singer, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. Readers of a certain age will recall how Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, two leading film critics in Chicago, made two guys talking about films worth watching. Film criticism became accessible, relevant, and entertaining— and while their conversations seem natural, a great deal of work went into the Siskel and Ebert banter, although the two were never as close as some viewers assumed. Every film podcaster can thank these two for showing them how to do it.
Jeremy Dauber, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond. Dauber’s knowledge of American horror films and literature is exhaustive and his enthusiasm (on the page and before the microphone) is— like the plagues that turn people into zombies— contagious. Dauber examines the ways in which witches, vampires, aliens, werewolves, monsters and all kinds of frightening films reflect cultural trends. This is a work of American studies for anyone who’s ever been afraid of the dark (in a theater).
Don’t forget to subscribe to Dan’s excellent Substack, Pages and Frames:
New Books in Film
Want to learn even more about film? Subscribe to the New Books in Film channel to hear scholars of film discuss their recently published scholarship.
Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive examines residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples— one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery.
Seung-hoon Jeong’s Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema analyzes a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. By taking a global frame, he highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. This book renews critical discourses on global issues—including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia— through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.
Listen to Victoria Sturtevant discuss her book, It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy. She investigates how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the 20th century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights. In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around non-marital pregnancy in the 1960s and 70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.
Check out more interviews with scholars of film on the New Books in Film Channel
UConn Popcast
Are you interested in hearing more about how popular culture shapes society? Tune into the UConn Popcast. This show emphasizes film and television, and features in-depth discussion, interviews with prominent scholars, and recordings of live shows. Your hosts are Stephen Dyson, the associate director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and a professor of political science, and Jeffrey R. Dudas, professor of political science and affiliate faculty of American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
In the most recent episode they discuss The Beast, a 2023 science-fiction/romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger and must be surgically controlled. Stephen and Jeffrey consider if it’s a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal decline, or something else entirely.
They also recently looked back at Alex Garland’s 2014 science-fiction movie Ex Machina. Our hosts look at this film as an examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul/genius.
You can also catch Stephen and Jeffrey’s interview with Dr. Dexter Gabriel, an associate professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom, including teaching a superb class on slavery in popular culture, particularly film. As P. Djèlí Clark, he’s the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. In this compelling episode, they explore the question of whether there can be a “good” portrayal of slavery on film and what that would look like. They also look at whether there are lessons for our future with AI from our past with slavery.
Subscribe to the UConn Popcast below to catch more conversations between Stephen and Jeffrey!
