No truer words were spoken about this movie than “So Fucking What.” Jen and Tim welcome Bryan Quinby of Street Fight Radio to talk about a justly forgotten 90s something-or-other called S.F.W.
Jen was wrong about Juliet, incidentally— she was intended to be about 13 or 14.Romeo was 16 or 17, though, so obviously the play is problematic due to the age gap and Shakespeare is still cancelled.
The name of the teenaged girl school shooter Jen failed to recall is Brenda Spencer. She committed the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in 1979, and she is still incarcerated.
Jen pointed out a mention of another poet, Anne Sexton, in the movie. Interestingly, while Sexton’s daughter reported credibly in her memoir Looking For Mercy Street and elsewhere that her mother sexually abused her, Sexton’s own memories of abuse have been called into question due to the methods her psychiatrist used to unearth them. However, Sexton’s history of dissociation, psychotic breaks, and eventual suicide seem to point to some kind of trauma.
Go here for a bio of Piñero, the trailblazing Nuyorican playwright, as well as a list of his works.
BTW, there’s a documentary called The Survivor’s Guide to Prison that is slick, well made, and narrated by Danny Trejo as well as many other cultural icons. You can watch it for free with ads on Tubi, or on Kanopy with a library card. In other words, it’s perfect for sending to your normie friends who haven’t been hipped to the cause of prison abolition yet!
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is an excellent treatise on what we know about trauma, the human brain, and addressing the treatment needs of people suffering from people with PTSD. Visit van der Kolk’s website to read an interview about the book.
This monster isn’t actually in the film, I just thought the art was sick
Have You Seen…All Possible Worlds?! Tim and Jen team up with Josh and Brian of The Worst of All Possible Worlds podcast to discuss a wretchedly stupid British horror film starring Roddy McDowall called It! No, not that one. This one came out in 1967 and involves a golem that looks like a wet trash bag.
Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph’s A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies is a fascinating read about the days of analog movie bootlegging, a must for any film buff. Read an excerpt about the Roddy McDowall film piracy case over at ScreenAnarchy (you can also buy the book directly from University Press of Mississippi). And yes, to answer Josh’s question from the episode, the MPAA (now the MPA) was one of the driving forces behind the crackdown as a proxy for the major film studios.
The documentary Jen failed to remember the name of is Recorder, which is the story of an activist named Marion Stokes who obsessively taped the news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and thus amassed a library of 70,000 cassettes.
“The Windigo is sick because it’s cut off from its roots. It’s a ghost with a heart of ice. It eats everything in sight. Its hunger knows no bounds. When there is nothing left to eat, it starves to death. When it sees something, it wants to own it. No one else can have anything. This illness feeds on a spiritual void. Canada and US are presently in an advanced stage of the ‘Windigo Psychosis.’”
Jen and Tim host Mike Rosen, who is a witch, to discuss a very witchy cult horror movie, Eyes of Fire! Also, if you were dying to know Jen’s thoughts on Midsommar, they’re in there.
If you’re not familiar with Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, just watch!
The 17th century samurai, philosopher, and artist Miyamoto Musashi is considered a kensei— a “sword saint”— in Japan. Read a short Bruce Eder essay on the first installment in the Samurai trilogy of films, in which Toshiro Mifune played Musashi.
Tim confused God Bless America with Red State (and Jen did not catch the error, shame on her) — the other movie from 2011 with a divisive title and middling reviews about a gun-toting ingenue.
We didn’t get a chance to talk about the film’s writer, Alan Sharp, who said his own screen work embodied “moral ambiguity, mixed motives and irony.” Matthew Asprey Gear describes the protracted gestation of Night Moves and illuminates some biographical details about Sharp in an article for Bright Lights Film Journal.
For more Melanie Griffith, check out our episode on Roar, the absolutely wrong-headed movie project inflicted on her by mom Tippi Hedren and stepdad Noel Marshall.
