The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
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!
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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.
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
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