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Unlock with Patreon158 – Gymkata
Tim and Jen try and fail to recall the name of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps as they discuss Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas’s sole feature film, Gymkata.
Jen’s half-assed inaccurate anecdote about Phelps being considered to play Tarzan is actually true, albeit not the way she told it. Producer Jerry Weintraub (no relation to Gymkata producer Fred Weintraub) believed that he’d found the new Johnny Weissmuller in Phelps. However, the swimmer’s appearance on SNL in 2008 immediately disabused him of that notion, as Phelps appeared to Weintraub as little more than a “goon.”
Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz has only five minor credits on IMDb, incidentally, none of which involve starring in a feature film. In case you were wondering.
You can hear our interview with martial arts superstar Cynthia Rothrock here!
156 – Halloween III: Season of the Witch
They just can’t stop witchin’! Tim and Jen continue the unending spooky season with a franchise entry that pleased no one, Halloween III: Season of the Witch!
Hear the whole thing at our Patreon and get access to 75 other bonus episodes!
Chris Evangelista defended the movie over at SlashFilm, as part of that site’s The Unpopular Opinion series.
Let’s all thank Sean for his partial preservation of hotep public access show Spearman’s Addiction.
155 – Season of the Witch
Jen and Tim attempt to purge the lingering memory of a certain occult-y art film with a viewing of an early George Romero work, Season of the Witch.
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In case you had no idea what he was getting at, Tim’s latest thing is calling Chantal Akerman’s feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles “the Jean Teasdale movie.”
Marxist art critic John Berger’s analysis of western media, Ways of Seeing, is available on YouTube. He casts a critical eye on the depiction of the female nude in European oil painting in the second episode.
Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look, or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
153 – The Love Witch
Tim and Jen are dumbfounded by a universally praised and vacantly pretty auteur statement, The Love Witch!
Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!
Rotten Tomatoes shows The Love Witch to be a darling of critics with a rating of 95% (audiences were more lukewarm, with their rating sitting at 61%). One of the few negative reviews calls it “dawdling, hollow and kind of awful, really:”
Some of the movie comes close to camp or just falls in, as when Elaine is assaulted by former friend Trish (Laura Waddell in the film’s only genuine performance), whose husband Elaine has stolen. “Skank! Whore!” Trish yells, slapping Elaine while wearing a wig cap — the movie helpfully provides its own drag-show re-enactment. A sequence in which Elaine is confronted in a bar by a mob of superstitious goofballs (“Burn the witch!”) is frankly terrible and staged with incredible clumsiness. The Love Witch will be worshipped as a fetish object by a certain breed of film nerd who luxuriates in its DIY retro aesthetic, but it isn’t really a movie — it would have to move first, and the pacing is leadfooted. The plot’s pairing Elaine with a stolid detective (Gian Keys) just leads to a handfasting scene at a local ren faire that seems to go on for six, maybe seven years.
-Rob Gonsalves
152 – Spaced Invaders
Jen and Tim enjoy a silly 1990 comedy with startlingly good practical effects, Spaced Invaders!
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Director/writer Patrick Read Johnson’s long-gestating nostalgia trip, 5-25-77, will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on November 22, 2022. In the meantime, you can read Karina Longworth’s review of a cut of the film in 2008 from the now-defunct Sprout Blog. The director left a comment rebutting some of her criticism there (thank you, Internet Archive).
This Slate article sums up the probable facts behind the “War of the Worlds mass panic” myth quite well.
The song from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds that Jen was talking about is “The Artilleryman and the Fighting Machine.” Ulla!
147 – R.O.T.O.R.
Jen and Tim finally tackle one of their shared albatrosses— the Robocop before Robocop, R.O.T.O.R.!
Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!
Isadora Fox wrote a piece in memory of actress Margaret Trigg for New York magazine back in 2004. The article details her struggles with disordered eating and poor mental health, but also serves as a eulogy for a legitimately talented person gone too soon.
You can also watch an entire episode of Aliens in the Family, the unlamented sitcom Trigg starred in for 8 episodes. By the way, Aliens in the Family was co-written by everyone’s least favorite “satirist,” Andy Borowitz.
Like abysmal independent films from the 80s? Why not try our episode on Things?
146 – Enter the Void
Tim gets a little treat this month— we talked about one of his personal favorites, Gaspar Noé’s trippy version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Enter the Void!
Hear the whole episode at our Patreon!
Read an interview at Den of Geek with a voluble Noé about Enter the Void.
Towards the end, the weird trip turns into a bad trip, like sometimes mushroom trips or acid trips turn into bad trips. But a bad trip can be very rewarding, because when you come out of one, it’s like coming out of a bad dream where you get killed or something, and the moment you wake up, you still feel the presence of that reality and the dream, or the nightmare, is always real. But you feel so safe coming back to the real world, and some people said when they came out of this movie that they were still scared. – Gaspar Noé on Enter the Void
The Hype Williams-directed video Tim got so mad about is for Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.” Honestly a pretty pallid copy of the title sequence Tim loves so much.
See Paz de la Huerta crash the shooting of Louis Theroux’s Scientology documentary.
For more transgressive cinema, listen to our episode about Lars von Trier’s divisive masterpiece Antichrist.
144 – Fatal Beauty
Tim and Jen host Jacques of the Seeking Derangements podcast so they can hold forth about a personal favorite: Fatal Beauty starring Whoopi Goldberg!
Jacques somewhat confused the timeframe of Whoopi’s brief relationship with Ted Danson. They had an affair on the set of the 1993 film Made in America, and the infamous Friars Club blackface bit occurred in the fall of that same year. Ted and Whoopi dated until 1994; they moved on with Mary Steenbergen and Frank Langella(!), respectively.
Several stories exist on the origin of Whoopi’s stage surname, incidentally. The anecdote about “Goldberg” being her mother’s suggestion so she could appear Jewish enough to succeed in show business has not been confirmed. Hilariously, noted treat boy John Podhoretz once wrote an editorial for the New York Post demanding that she drop her adopted surname, in light of some wild-ass comments about the Holocaust Whoopi made on The View.
If you don’t recall the story of Big Lurch, we told it on our Disco Godfather episode.
143 – Wet Hot American Summer
Jen and Tim fight to a standstill over a comedy that flopped in theaters, Wet Hot American Summer.
Hear the whole thing over at our Patreon!
Tim incorrectly identifies co-writer Michael Showalter as director. It was David Wain, not that Tim gives a fuck.
The five episodes of sketch comedy show The State produced by MTV have been preserved on the Internet Archive!
The children’s TV special Jen struggled to name is The Night Dracula Saved the World, aka The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. We highly recommend the Rifftrax version!
For more Angry Tim, try our episode on True Stories!