Patreon Archives - Page 8 of 15 - Have You SEEN This?

155 – Season of the Witch

In a frame from George Romero's 1973 film SEASON OF THE WITCH, actress Jan White sips from a cocktail while rocking frosty eyeshadow and an astonishing beehive hairdo — Female self-actualization = giant hair

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

Samantha Robinson as the titular character in The Love Witch (2016) — she’s got piss jars / she knows how to use them

Tim and Jen are dumbfounded by a universally praised and vacantly pretty auteur statement, The Love Witch!

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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

Vomit TAG!

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!

150 – Head

For their one hundred and fiftieth episode (!), Jen and Tim welcome animation expert Jerry Beck to talk about the worst cartoons ever made and the Monkees’ super freak out, Head!

Hear the whole thing over at our Patreon and get access to more than 70 other bonus episodes!

Visit Jerry’s website for all the animation news and discussion you can eat.

You can watch Two Wet Bears and Sam Bassett, Hound For Hire on YouTube, if you dare. You can also see the first episode of Jerry and Frank Conniff’s nightmare children’s show parody, Cartoon Dump!

Someone else remembers WBAI’s collage radio show, “Techie Time!”

147 – R.O.T.O.R.

Brad Overturf as the titular character in R.O.T.O.R. (1987) — To quote Bill Corbett: “We…SEE…HIM!!”

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!

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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!

Hear the whole thing at our Patreon, where you can also listen to Jacques’s guest appearance for House (1977), as well as more than 50 other bonus episodes!

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

Key art for Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

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!

141 – S.F.W.

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.

Hear the whole thing over at our Patreon!

Trace the history of the beer ball!

If you want to revisit that scene we mentioned from Sleep With Me, watch it here.

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.

140 – Maps to the Stars

Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars (2014), written by Bruce Wagner

Tim and Jen scratch their heads over an incest-filled nightmare of a David Cronenberg movie, Maps to the Stars!

Hear the whole thing over at our Patreon!

Hey remember that Mysteries and Scandals show on E!? They did an episode about Jon-Erik Hexum! (Whatever happened to A.J. Benza?)

The poem by John Cooper Clarke that so moved Tim, “Evidently Chickentown,” may be heard here.

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.

Finally, if you missed our Crash episode, listen to it here!