The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

38. Nick Beaulieu on 'My Omaha' and the Distance Between Realities

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:00:00 GMT

A new documentary attempting to put both a personal and a political perspective of Omaha on screen is the aptly titled My Omaha, directed by Nick Beaulieu, which embarks on its director’s dueling journey to balance the tense relationship he has with his terminally ill father, a big supporter of Donald Trump with his exposure to the legacy of Malcom X and activist Leo Louis II, each representing radically different worldviews in a polarized climate. In doing so, Beaulieu explores his Omaha, but also Omaha as a microcosm of a country that is full of contradictions so deep that they may never be reconciled. And, if one confronts that prospect, then what?

My Omaha premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival and is currently making its way around the country, starting its journey toward readily available viewing. Watch out for it as it likely comes to your neck of the woods sometime soon. Find showtimes and events at myomahafilm.com.

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37. The State of the Race

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:20:20 GMT

Some years, one film locks in early as a popular, unbeatable favorite to win all of the major awards at all of the major ceremonies, such as last year’s Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly a billion dollars and swept the Oscars. This year? It’s not so clear what the frontrunner is, how various controversies might have affected Academy voting, or what the significance of the awards might be in the age of streaming. This week's first segment is an attempt to parse through these questions with filmmaker, critic, and host of KIOS at the Movies Joshua LaBure. Then, we're replaying parts of a 2024 conversation with Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears—a sweeping history of what has been nearly a century of Academy Awards. Get it now wherever you buy books.

Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

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36. Guy Maddin on 'Rumours' and the Collapsing World Order

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:18:11 GMT

Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World, and Brand Upon the Brain is a filmmaker who seemingly operates by no rules and often merges the surreal, the traditional, and the experimental. The idea of discomfort at the merger of traditional ideas with the inexplicable, of the familiar with the bizarre, is both true of his style and also the substance of his latest film, Rumours—which he directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. Available now on video on demand, the film follows a G-7 meeting between leaders from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K in the midst of an apocalyptic event that leaves them alone in the woods, having to fend for themselves without any of their systems of support. This week's show is a conversation with Maddin about both the construction of the movie but also its context as an artifact of a world in transition, whether its leaders want to admit it or not.

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35. The Best of 2024 Roundtable

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:31:38 GMT

It’s the time of year where awards bodies, critics, and audiences alike are all finally able to catch up on the notable releases of the past year, to look in retrospect at trends, and start to let works settle in ways that they don’t always in the heat of the moment. Most critics will do a best of list, awards bodies have released or already given out their awards. But the idea of our episode today is not to look to the critics who have access to all of the prestige movies, or who have seen exclusive premieres at festivals, but to instead give you a perspective on the last year on our screens from Midwest authorities on film, television, and streaming. So we put together a roundtable discussion where we invited three guests to give their take on 2024: Ryan Syrek, longtime critic for The Reader, Genevieve Radosti, critic and author of I was a Twenty-Something CineMama, and Paul Sanchez, education manager at our local arthouse theater Film Streams.

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34. The Case for Physical Media

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:38:26 GMT

Something that has changed drastically about our relationship with screens over the course of the past few decades has been the shift from reliance on physical media to streaming. With the click of a button and an internet connection, you now no longer need the middle man of DVDs, Blu Rays, or rental stores. You have it all. Or do you? If you listened to our four part series on the life and legacy of Elaine May, you know that a legal nightmare has stopped her 1972 classic The Heartbreak Kid from getting any kind of digital release. And the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery in 2022 led to a new practice among streamers of deleting their original programming that didn’t meet standards of requisite clicks such as Moonshot, Mrs. Fletcher, Vinyl, and Run. It turns out that the ease of digital programming is subject to more politics than simply offering a library of content.

But not everyone is content to accept the precarity of the streaming age, and that’s the focus of our show today: the case for physical media. First, we’ll hear from executive director Kate Barr and inventory assistant Joel Fischer from Scarecrow Video, a nonprofit video rental store in Seattle which offers nearly 150,000 titles including rare and out of print offerings that represent over a century of cultural history that they’re here to archive, not delete. Then, later in the show, The Blair Witch Project producer Mike Monello discusses the path toward the latest physical release of the 1999 classic, which finally captures the filmmakers’ intended vision and documents its story in a way that can only be found on physical media.

Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

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33. Zia Anger on 'My First Film' and the Pressures of the Debut

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 15:10:22 GMT

Fairly or not, there’s a huge amount of pressure placed on the way an artist chooses to debut. The first film, album, book–it has potential to launch, and sometimes even define, a career. There’s something thrilling about a first film that manages to break out and signal a unique voice, someone announcing their talent and potential that we as viewers get to anticipate and experience across an emerging body of work. If we perhaps put too much emphasis on debuts, there are only a few debuts about debuting. This is, in fact, the plot, the function, and the thematic exploration of Zia Anger’s aptly titled My First Film, which tells the story of a failed attempt at debuting, mixing autobiographical elements with the fictionalized telling of how authorship manifests, clashes, and announces its presence. My First Film is streaming now on Mubi.

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32. The Rick Steves Philosophy of Travel

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 14:34:32 GMT

One of the things we’re not doing when we’re buried in our screens is soaking in the world around us. Sometimes that’s intentional—a way of hiding from an often ugly and overwhelming reality. Sometimes it’s to fight off the horror of boredom. But the more we live inside our screens, the less we’re outside in our communities or exploring new kinds of cultures that exist all around us. And this brings us to Rick Steves—today’s Herodotus in chinos, insisting that “out there” remains not just more interesting than the echo chamber of our screens but that engaging with it is vital for us as people, and that, in fact, the very act of travel is an act of transformative politics. In an era of walls and fears of “the other,” he continues a crusade for curiosity. His call is simple: put down the phone, go out there, and meet the world.

For decades, Steves has been bringing his mission to the homes of Americans through his public access show Rick Steves’ Europe, his radio show Travel with Rick Steves, his travel guides, and his lectures. He has a new edition of his book Travel as a Political Act out now, and he’s currently touring the country with his live orchestral series A Symphonic Journey with Rick Steves, which you can see at the Holland Center on February 15th and 16th. Tickets are available now.

Then, later in the show, we’re diving into the history of the travelogue by going all the way back to The Innocents Abroad author Mark Twain in a conversation with Matt Seybold, Professor of American Literature and Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. You can learn more about the Center for Mark Twain Studies here.

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31. Will There Ever Be Another Spielberg?

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:56:40 GMT

For decades now, outlets and scholars have been predicting who the next Spielberg might be, including names like J. J. Abrams or M. Night Shyamalan. But what does it mean to be the next Spielberg? To answer that, we'd have to know what it means to be Spielberg in general. So, to get to the bottom of this, Ian Nathan, author of Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work, chimes in. What accounts for the wild popularity of the filmmaker behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a career that spans many genres and decades? Why is it that his inward turn in 2022’s autobiographic The Fabelmans failed to resonate with audiences like his bigger works? We’re digging into it all, along with which Spielberg films may deserve a second look.

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30. Beck/Woods on ‘Heretic,’ Making Hugh Grant Scary, and the Meaning of Life

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:28:49 GMT

Today we’re looking at a movie that is about exploring more than just meaning in culture but meaning in general. What is meaning? How do we know? What do we believe and why? This may sound more like the territory of an art-house move or prestige drama, but perhaps surprisingly it’s the focus of the new horror film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods called Heretic, which is playing now in theaters. It follows a pair of Mormon missionaries who meet with a man claiming to be searching for information about their religion but seems to be up to something substantially more sinister. Further complicating matters, he’s played by Hugh Grant.

You might know Beck and Woods as the writers of A Quiet Place, which relied on its characters remaining as silent as possible to avoid the hyper-sensitive ears of a brutal alien race. Heretic, instead, is all about dialogue, a single location journey into the murky questions of faith, fear, and the meaning of life. How do you make a talky horror movie stay tense? How do you balance fears of the visceral with the existential? Can Hugh Grant’s charms be overridden by his possibly sinister intentions? How do perhaps unlikely influences, from M. Night Shyamalan to William F. Buckley, Jr. manifest on the screen? That’s the focus of today’s spoiler-free episode.

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29. What Happened to the Blockbuster Documentary?

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 18:58:17 GMT

Often, when we look at our screens, we’re looking for distractions, But just as often, we want to be informed. This election weekend, maybe a frantic mixture of both. If we can be informed and be entertained? Even better. Almost all of our coverage on The Entertainment so far has been focused on narrative spaces, telling fictional stories or adapting reality into something broadly fictional. But, of course, much of what has been on screens since 1922’s Nanook of the North has existed in a hazy space known as the documentary. What is a documentary? It seems like a deceptively simple question until you start to unpack it. Is a documentary news? Should its standards be that of journalism? Of the essay? Of authenticity? How authentic can a documentary or, for that fact, the news ever really be?

These questions are, of course, evergreen while the key players change. Just this past month, Am I Racist?—directed by Justin Folk, and starring The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh—became the highest grossing documentary of the decade and had the highest opening weekend for a documentary in 20 years since Michael Moore’s unprecedented and unparalleled blockbuster documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Walsh is, of course, very far from Michael Moore’s politics, and yet may be a kind of successor of the Moore revolution in documentary filmmaking centered on a scrappy outsider trolling the establishment. I wondered: is this a political realignment of the popular documentary? Will there ever be another blockbuster documentary? To dive into these questions, I asked Joshua LaBure, critic, host of KIOS at the Movies, and documentarian himself, director of The Women Who Ran and The Instrument in Six Movements, among others, to come on the show and talk through the wild ride of the genre over the past several decades.

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28. The Dawn of Post-Roe Horror

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 15:06:40 GMT

Last week, we started a two part series exploring the way horror films in 2024 seem to feature significant overlap, often manifesting through a woman losing control in a malicious world full of corrupt institutions and family structures imposing their will on her in uniquely horrific ways, from Immaculate to The First Omen to Longlegs, and more. The critic Vern calls this a strand of "post-Roe" horror. He means Roe v. Wade, but we saw another meaning in there in the fact that nearly every film exploring these ideas is doing so under the long shadow of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. The convergence of feminocentric body horror, folk horror, and Satan as a manifestation of the corrupt institutions preying on women, is, of course, nothing new in the genre. But our relationship with these ideas as viewers may be shifting in the Post-Roe world.

To get into all of this on today’s show, we have two guests, Faith Horror: Cinematic Visions of Satanism, Paganism, and Witchcraft author LMK Sheppard describing the trends from Rosemary, The Omen, and The Wicker Man leading up to today's shifts, and, later in the show, Film Streams programmer Taylor Eagan describes what she sees as a subgenre within both pre- and -post Roe horror that she calls "postpartum horror," as seen in recent films like Baby Ruby, Birth/Rebirth, and the upcoming Nightbitch.

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27. Why We're Still Watching 'Rosemary's Baby'

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 18:50:33 GMT

The 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby works as psychological thriller, satanic horror, and social satire all at once. Closely adapted from Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, Roman Polanski’s film tells the story of Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who becomes increasingly convinced that her aspiring actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has made a horrible deal with maybe the literal devil to advance his career in exchange for their unborn child. Its plot, its supernatural implications, and its imagery are all horrific enough, but what has been the subject of much of the enduring decades of discourse around Rosemary’s Baby is the horror that can be found simply in motherhood, in family you can’t trust, in a community that is lying to you, and in the institutions that will do nothing to protect you.

These ideas are, of course, all over the horror since Rosemary and in ways that are especially prevalent in the films 2024. It’s difficult to look at The First Omen, Apartment 7A, Immaculate, or even Longlegs without seeing the long shadow of Rosemary’s Baby, but also as manifestations of particularly palpable fears of a world where women’s bodily autonomy is under more governmental scrutiny following the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. In Dobbs v. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court ended nearly 50 years of federally protected abortion rights in the United States, establishing what critic Vern calls the post-Roe world.

He meant Roe v. Wade, but we saw another meaning in there, “Roe” being what Guy often calls Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. And we’re in a post-Rosemary world, too. One shaped, in some sense, by it. So, we’re going to do a two part series looking at the world Roe/Roe built and the way post-Roe horror might take us into the future. In this episode, we hear from Eleanor Johnson, professor at Columbia University, author of the forthcoming book Scream With Me on 1970s horror films, and writer of the Public Books article “Guy Horror: Rosemary’s Baby and Coercive Control.” Then, later in the show, Vern describes his conception of the trends in post-Roe horror, which he noticed in writing about the sometimes-bizarre overlaps between Immaculate and The First Omen.

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26. India Donaldson on 'Good One' and the Universal Disappointments of Growing Up

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 15:52:14 GMT

One of the most popular genres of the past several years, one you’ve probably seen on the screen, on the page, in music, and just by living through various stages of life is the bildungsroman or the coming of age story: the journey from youth into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood–the messy formation of identity and the conflict between an innocent conception of the world and the often ugly realities that wait around the corner. In her debut feature film Good One, writer/director India Donaldson taps into both this genre as well as a universal sensation that comes along with growing up: disappointment. Today's show is a conversation about the personal influences that led to Good One, the post-COVID landscape of independent film, and the reality that, when you shoot a movie on a low budget outside, it always rains. Check your local art-house to see if Good One is playing near you.

Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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25. Kurt Andersen's Plan to Save the World

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 17:30:41 GMT

For a lot of people over the past decade, the nonstop campaigning and chaos of our political system has instilled a kind of constant dread about the future, compounded by looming environmental disaster and geopolitically uncertainty. And sometimes it feels like all we can do is accept that the train is slowly crashing. But what if we could do something about it? In 2023, Kurt Andersen teamed up with Larry Doyle and Steven Soderbergh to create Command Z, a sci-fi comedy web series about a group of time-travelers from the ruined world of the future who are given the opportunity to send their minds back to 2023 to right the ship. Their perhaps impossible mission? Convince the movers and shakers currently ruining everything to become better people. The show features a cast of very funny people including Michael Cera, Roy Wood Jr, Chloe Radcliffe, JJ Maley, and Liev Schrieber and, beyond its humor, is full of insights about what exactly is going wrong with a society that seemingly can fix itself but first has to want to do so.

This conversation originally aired last year on Riverside Chats. We’ve repurposed it for today’s episode because all of the show’s anxieties are just as relevant today as they were a year ago. You can find all of Command Z’s episodes here. Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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24. Moon Zappa Tells Her Story Her Way

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 21:50:20 GMT

Over the past few months, we’ve done several episodes that return again and again to the word genius. What is a genius? Is it something objective we can all agree on? Is it a lofty way to say favorite? Is it a way of saying a person was a mess but they were talented? Moon Zappa has strong feelings about the concept as the daughter of a man who got a lot of leeway by being known as a genius. Frank Zappa became known for guitar solos, unconventional compositions that never quite fit into the genres of his time, and lyrics that range from poetic to profane to goofy. Blending rock, jazz, classical, and even avant-garde influences, it’s hard to classify him as anything other than himself. But who was the man behind the body of work?

In her new memoir, Earth to Moon, she tries to grapple with her father’s legacy as a countercultural icon of the music industry and also a complicated human being, trying to find an answer to the question of whether genius is worth its collateral damage. Along the way, she explains, she even found herself. On today’s episode, she tells her story—her way. You can buy her memoir wherever you get books.

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23. The Man Behind 'The Twilight Zone'

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 16:50:42 GMT

Few people have made an impact on our screens as profound and lasting as Rod Serling, creator and host of The Twilight Zone, in which he and his team would interpret anxieties about human nature, nuclear war, the problems of power, and many more universal themes through genre exercises that exaggerate, allegorize, and depoliticized its subjects just enough to get by network censorship across the 1950s and 60s. And, since The Twilight Zone ended its original run in 1964, it has been rebooted in various forms: as an anthology film in 1983, a second TV series in 1985, a TV movie in 1994, another TV reboot in 2002, and finally a streaming series co-created by Jordan Peele in 2019. But none of these reimaginings caught on, perhaps for the simple reason that none of them had Rod Serling.

So who was Rod Serling? How did he accomplish what he did, what some have described as fundamentally changing the television landscape? And what should we make of a new short story from Serling’s archive that has plenty of horror but nothing supernatural? In today’s show, we hear an excerpt from a newly published story from Serling’s archive, “First Squad, First Platoon,” read by Matthias Jeske, followed by Nicholas Parisi, author of Rod Serling: His Life Work, and Imagination, and then Jodi Serling discusses her father’s legacy beyond The Twilight Zone.

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22. The Kubrick Mystique

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 14:32:06 GMT

Whether you’re a fan of classic cinema or, say, just saw Barbie last year and wondered what that opening sequence was all about, you’re living in a world that is unmistakably in the shadow of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t help but recognize the Kubrick touch behind a Kubrick film, from their composition to their tone, to their sheer ambition. The number of monumental works he wrote, produced, and directed is nearly unparalleled, from early hits like Dr. Strangelove or 2001: A Space Odyssey to later titles shrouded in enduring mystery like The Shining or Eyes Wide Shut. Alongside his cinematic innovations and explorations, however, there existed (and exists) a growing mystique, an aura of mystery that pervades both his films and his persona. Kubrick is known not only for being a good director but for being a mystery that the films help viewers solve.

Today’s show seeks to identify where the man exists within the legends, as well as how much of the Kubrick mystique was a conscious construction of himself as a brand. You’ll hear from Filippo Ulivieri, author of the upcoming Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick Through Archival Research, as well as Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, whose latest book is Kubrick: An Odyssey.

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21. Donald Sutherland's Smile

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 15:00:00 GMT

Donald Sutherland passed away in June at the age of 88 after a long, unusual, and widely celebrated career. His performances range from M*A*S*H to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Don’t Look Now to JFK and, more recently, The Hunger Games. This is to say that he never let himself become limited to one type of character, film, or genre. And, while he could seemingly play any range of character, he always maintained that Sutherland charm. What is the secret of his charm? We asked Daryl Sparkes, Sonny Bunch, and Bobbie O’Steen.

Sparkes is a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland and he wrote “Hollywood Didn’t Know Exactly What to Do with Donald Sutherland – So They Did Everything with Him” for The Conversation. Bunch is a film critic at The Bulwark and writer of “RIP, Donald Sutherland.” O’Steen is a historian and author of books like Making the Cut at Pixar and The Invisible Cut. You can find a great interview she conducted with Don’t Look Now’s editor Graeme Clifford on the film’s Criterion release.

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20. What is the Best Movie of 2024 So Far?

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 18:56:07 GMT

We’ve talked before on this show about the concept known as the paradox of choice—that having infinite choices across infinite streamers and live channels is less of a utopia of riches than an overwhelming landscape of indecision. What’s worth your time? How do you know? Well, that’s what critics try to help with. They watch a lot more than the average person and, in particular when it’s easier than ever for movies to slip through the cracks of various streamers and digital releases, we decided that today’s show could be a chance to hear from a trio of critics about not only what you should check out from 2024 but where you can find it. We’ll hear from Marya E. Gates, Ethan Warren, and KIOS’s own Joshua LaBure across the show.

Marya E. Gates has written for Roger Ebert.com, The Criterion Collection, IndieWire, and many more. She also has a Substack called Cool People Have Feelings, Too. Ethan Warren is a critic, essayist, author of The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, and director of West of Her. He also has a new book coming out next year called When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan on Film and edits the journal Broad Sound. Joshua LaBure hosts KIOS at the Movies and recently directed In a Good Way.

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19. Ishtar: Money Well Spent

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 10:00:46 GMT

In part four of our four part series on Elaine May, it’s finally time to talk about her final directorial effort and what has become a cultural punching bag as the worst film of all time: Ishtar. The 1987 release saw May returning to her screwball roots with, as so much of her work centers on, a dysfunctional partnership pushed to its extremes. Unlike the darkness of Mikey and Nicky, though, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty play lovable idiots, men who are so desperate to become the next Simon and Garfunkel that they never stop to notice that they can neither sing nor write music.

But quickly the discourse around the movie had little to do with anything other than the movie’s high price tag and long production schedule, so when the movie eventually came out, audiences and critics alike seemed to be rooting against it. As for the reasons why and how the worst movie of all time can undergo a critical re-evaluation decades later, we’ll hear from Richard Brody, Elizabeth Alsop, Carrie Courogen, Matt Singer, and Lindsay Zoladz.

Check out Richard Brody’s New Yorker article “Better Late Than Never” on Ishtar here; Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; Matt Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever; and Carrie Courogen is the author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which hit bookstores this week.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

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18. Mikey and Nicky: Letting Go

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 10:00:43 GMT

Mikey and Nicky is unmistakably an Elaine May film and yet it stands out compared to her other directorial efforts as far less comedic and far more openly tragic. If her comedies drew criticism for their brutality, here the brutality is the star alongside Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. It is a film about the difficult of letting go and, as often was the case with Elaine May’s productions, one she went to extreme lengths to hold onto. To make sense of Mikey and Nicky, a dark gangster drama, and its place in the Elaine May body of work, we’ll hear from Lindsay Zoladz, Elizabeth Alsop, and Carrie Courogen.

Check out Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; and Carrie Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th.

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17. Finding The Heartbreak Kid

Mon, 27 May 2024 22:53:26 GMT

If A New Leaf was a romantic comedy with a tinge of attempted murder that ultimately gave way to sweetness, The Heartbreak Kid is a murderless romantic comedy that is much more brutal. Directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon, The Heartbreak Kid tells the story of Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a newlywed who falls out of love with his wife Lila (Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon, only to become infatuated with the beautiful and unattainable Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). What ensues is maybe the earliest example of what today we might call cringe comedy. And, despite the film attaining a classic status, good luck finding it by traditional means.

Today’s show features insights from Elizabeth Purchell, Carrie Courogen, Ethan Warren, and Matt Singer about the film’s production history, bizarre distribution purgatory, and legacy. Purchell is currently working with theaters around the country to bring The Heartbreak Kid back to the big screen from a newly discovered print. Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th. Warren wrote about The Heartbreak Kid in his Bright Wall/Dark Room essay “Still Heartbroken After All These Years.” And Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever.

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16. Elaine May's Genius

Sat, 18 May 2024 22:29:36 GMT

How does a genius make the worst film of all time? Well, she doesn’t. She didn’t. And the world is finally ready not only to embrace Ishtar as a worthwhile movie, but Elaine May into the pantheon of American auteurs. And in light of her ongoing re-evaluation, we are launching a four part series on the films, life, and legacy of May. In this first episode, we’ll hear from Carrie Courogen, author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th.

Then The New Yorker’s Richard Brody explains the genius he finds in May’s first film, A New Leaf—something he wrote about last year. And finally we hear from Maya Montañez Smukler, head of UCLA Film and Television Archive Research and author of Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema about the legacy of May’s debut both in its initial context and today.

Tune in next week for our episode on The Heartbreak Kid.

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15. The Miracle of Adult Swim

Sat, 04 May 2024 18:54:04 GMT

It’s not unusual to laud a channel or a production company for cultivating a unique brand. HBO runs on brand reliability. A24 promises counterprogramming to the familiar and safe. Cartoon Network supplies family friendly content for kids. That is, until their bedtime. Starting in 2001, evenings on Cartoon Network have increasingly become a new channel with entirely different sensibilities known as Adult Swim.

If Cartoon Network provides reliability, Adult Swim has cultivated years of programming unreliability and unpredictability—truly some of the strangest content to ever come out of a traditional media company. It’s about as close to punk rock as cable can get in the 21st century, whether the myriad shows from Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or the edgy animated ensemble Aqua Teen Hunger Force to its recent mainstream turn in Rick and Morty.

There is perhaps no way to convey the strangeness of so many of these shows, the avant-garde silliness and experimentation with form that has become popularized in internet content today. Meme culture, Tik Toks, and YouTube are the Wild West, uncensored and free from traditional corporate oversight, and they may exist because of the true experimentation and goofing around that manifested on Adult Swim. So how did Adult Swim manage to do all of that before internet culture found itself and under the umbrella of a cable channel? This is the subject of Michael Walsh’s Nerdist article, “Why Adult Swim’s Strange Early Days Can Never Be Replicated.” We hear from him about the miracle that is Adult Swim.

Later in the show, Adult Swim personalities Tim Heidecker and Joe Pera discuss their craft and process. Heidecker created and starred in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, Beef House, On Cinema at the Cinema, and Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. He now runs the Hei Network can can be heard in The People’s Joker, which is playing in limited engagements now. Pera created and starred in Joe Pera Talks With You, Adult Swim’s answer to Mr. Rogers that ran from 2018-2021. He is currently performing the Peras Tour around the country. Both of these interviews originally aired on Riverside Chats, where you can still hear the full conversations wherever you get podcasts.

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14. The Movie Warner Bros. Doesn't Want You to See

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 09:53:34 GMT

Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is ostensibly a parody of the Batman universe, but it’s also a personalized reinterpretation of the characters and themes to tell a love story, a coming of age story, and a story about gender. Though Warner Brothers, who holds the rights to Batman and the related characters, has not made a public comment on the Vera Drew’s parody of the universe, it seems fair to say that they’d rather you didn’t see The People’s Joker, which is currently playing around the country in limited engagements. The movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 was cancelled due to copyright concerns. It’s just now that the movie is rolling out in limited engagements around the country.

In today’s episode, Drew talks about the path to making The People’s Joker, why a personal story made sense to be projected onto the Batman universe, and the long road to its release. And later in the show, film historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell discusses the queer history of the superhero genre as well as how The People’s Joker may shift that landscape.

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13. Two Thumbs Up

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 14:05:18 GMT

In today’s media landscape, one thing I bet you’ve never wanted more of is choices. A 2016 survey by Rovi suggested that the average viewer scrolls through streaming apps for at least 20 minutes before settling on something to watch—or in other words, the average length of a sitcom episode. I’ve certainly spent longer checking all of the different apps and then re-checking, desperate to find the exact right thing. This is what Barry Schwartz calls “the paradox of choice,” where the more choices presented to a consumer often lead to a less satisfactory outcome. So how do we parse through endless entertainment? Well, the solution may not need to be something new at all. This is what critics have been trying to do since the profession began.

What is worth your time? What is worth seeking out? How do we process what it means? A good critic answers all of these questions rather than simply working through a checklist of subjective qualifiers. And the best critics are as entertaining as a lot of the entertainment they assess. If you follow film criticism at all, it’s impossible not to have some awareness of two titans of the industry: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

So in a time where culture reporting is seemingly more precarious than ever, we thought it would be worth doing a show looking into the role of criticism in our media ecosystem both in the past and present—and how the two most successful critics navigated these questions. All of this is the subject of Matt Singer’s new book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever, which is available now wherever you get books.

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12. The Mom-and-Dad-Are-Fighting Plot

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 10:00:13 GMT

Though our screens are the inescapable way in which we experience stories today, nearly all of the conflicts on screen pre-date the screen itself. Take, for example, one of Northrop Frye’s four archetypal narrative structures in Anatomy of Criticism: the marriage plot. Frye writes that “The literary mode of romance deals with the marvelous and the uncommon, and, under its influence, events turn into symbols and characters into types.” He identifies the marriage plot as a recurring motif in narratives that typically involve a quest for love, union, and resolution.

People like romance. It’s fun to watch the formation of a bond, the chemistry, and the highly dramatic path toward commitment. But while many of the marriage plots focus on the moments of young love, of the early days leading up to the marriage itself, there’s another tradition in contemporary marriage plots that we’re focusing on today: the mom-and-dad-are-fighting plot.

If the classic marriage plots revel in the bliss of two people getting to know each others, the mom and dad are fighting plots dwell on two people who perhaps know each other too well. You can find variations of this plot all over the past half century of cinema from Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road to Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life to Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and many in between. But it’s nearly impossible to look at contemporary marriage plots, particularly in American media, and not see the shadow of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

In today’s show, we hear from Philip Gefter about his new book Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and then director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center Dennis Lim discusses the enduring appeal of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy—in particular the way Before Midnight does and does not adhere to the tradition of Woolf. You can read Lim’s Criterion essay on the trilogy, “Time Regained,” here.

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11. His Name is David Fincher

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 18:01:08 GMT

David Fincher's latest film, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender as a kind of archetypal Fincher protagonist: a methodical control freak, cynical and arrogant and finding some mixture of success and failure based on how he navigates the complex world around him. In many ways, The Killer is explicitly about his method, his earned confidence as a contractor-assassin in a meaningless world. What gives him meaning is his impeccable craft. Until he misses. More than a few critics couldn’t help but view The Killer as a kind of autobiographical work, a self-reflective tale of a control freak trying to come to terms with the limits of his talent.

Beyond the narrative boldness of Seven, Fight Club or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the intelligence of Zodiac or Gone Girl or even the confident swings-and-misses of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Mank, Fincher is known for being such a control freak that he sometimes even alienates actors—like Jodie Foster and Jake Gyllenhaal—and would rather blow up a project than see it through without being true to his singular vision. The result of this approach has been several great movies, a few classics even, and also several long stretches where Fincher couldn’t line up what he considered the right budgets or creative control and thus made nothing. The implication has always been that he proudly would not make a movie if the alternative would be something that wasn’t his.

But to what extent, if any, might The Killer be a self-portrait? The world may never know, but what we can understand is how the auteur's filmography helps explain the man behind them. So who better to talk to than Adam Nayman, the man who wrote the book on David Fincher? Today's episode is a re-edit of Nayman's 2022 interview on Riverside Chats promoting his book David Fincher: Mind Games.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review.The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from The Killer, Fight Club, Zodiac, Mank, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

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10. First Day of Camp

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 10:00:00 GMT

On today’s show, we thought we’d invite you to what may be your first day of camp—but not the Wet Hot American Summer variety. We’re talking about the kind of camp that Susan Sontag described as blurring the line between high and low culture in its appreciation of artifice, exaggeration, and stylization. This is the sort of thing that often gets called so bad it’s good, embracing the silly and over the top in place of obviously recognizable emotion.

This is murky territory, especially in a time when genres are often very clearly delineated and follow recognizable conventions. It’s often not difficult to decide whether a movie is in on a joke—or if the movie is operating with jokes at all. But one movie stood out last year for sparking a debate often on the grounds of its categorization as much as its thorny subject matter: Todd Haynes’s May December.

May December is a story about unethical behavior as it manifests in a few dimensions. You have Elizabeth, played by Natalie Portman, as an actress looking to find authenticity in her new role playing a dramatized version of the life story of Gracie and Joe, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Their life story is itself a dramatization of the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, in which then-adult Letourneau had an illegal affair with one of her twelve-year-old students. May December, written by Sammy Burch as something inspired by but not beholden to the Mary Kay Letourneau story, imagines them decades after the incident blew up their lives. Still together, Gracie and Joe are about to become empty nesters as their children graduate high school and they are left to face the life they’ve lived together—provoked by Elizabeth’s attempt to understand them as the subject of her new film. Much of the movie exists in a space of discomfort and unethical decision making, something made even thornier in its employment of a real life scandal as the basis for the story. Is it ethical to use a real life crime as the inspiration for a film that seems, at times, to be poking fun at the idea of its characters and the way their traumas manifest? All of this has been further complicated by a persistent debate over tone and genre: would a more reverent tone help? Is the movie laughing at these people? If it laughs at these people, are you unethical for laughing at them, too?

To try to understand what to do with May December, both on its own terms and as part of broader trends in media literacy, we turned to perhaps the real experts on media today: YouTube personalities. We hear from Izzy Custodio from the channel Be Kind Rewind about the ethical considerations of Todd Haynes’ new movie and storytelling in general. Then Maia Wyman from the channel Broey Deschanel discusses the implications of the camp debate over May December for our culture’s media literacy.

Check out each guest’s video essays on May December and the themes of this episode—Custodio’s The Collaborations of Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes: Masters of Genre and Wyman’s May December and the Melodrama of Film Twitter.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from May December, Wet Hot American Summer, Miller’s Crossing, and Darkman.

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9. The Canonization of Dewey Cox

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 11:00:44 GMT

Today’s show is an exploration of the paradox that is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that was ignored, seemingly forgotten, and yet has influence all over our popular media. How is it that Michael Mann’s Ferrari shares an iconic line with Walk Hard, as Dan Kois asks? Could it possibly be that Joaquin Phoenix was intentionally mimicking John C. Reilly in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon? Will we ever, as Brianna Zigler writes, learn the lessons of Walk Hard?

Jake Kasdan’s parody of the musical biopic came out in 2007 with the full support of Sony and a $35 million budget that allowed the production to look every bit as legitimate as the movies it poked fun at. Its cast, from John C. Reilly to Jenna Fischer to Kristin Wiig and all sorts of comedy legends, music legends, and Judd Apatow’s friends is something to behold all on its own. The entire enterprise stands out as perhaps the last big budget parody of its kind. And it may remain the last for one key reason: it made no money and it certainly didn’t win anybody any Oscars.

By winter 2007, it looked like Dewey Cox would never amount to more than a blip on the radar of popular culture, a goofy comedy that audiences didn’t know what to do with. But here we are in 2024 and, if you’ve seen Walk Hard before, there’s a good chance you still see it everywhere. We’ll hear from Brianna Zigler, Dan Kois, “How Walk Hard Almost Destroyed the Musical Biopic” writer Alan Scherstuhl, and Walk Hard’s oral historian Alan Siegel about the often surprising and persistent legacy of what might be the last big budget parody in Hollywood history.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork is created by Topher Booth. Today’s show features music and clips from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Bohemian Rhapsody, Ferrari, and Napoleon.

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8. sex, lies, and streaming

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 13:00:23 GMT

Today’s show is an exploration into the role of sex in popular culture, especially since the turn of the century. What should the role of intimacy be in storytelling? Are sex scenes unnecessary, gratuitous, slowing down the plot? Are they the plot? Is that vulnerability and passion essential to bringing humanity onto our screens? There is a long history in Hollywood of debates on where exactly the line should be—if anywhere at all—from the scandal of Pandora’s Box in 1929 to the enforcement of the Hays Code in the 1930s, censoring most of the sexual content that came before.

Then came the postwar period, largely inspired by European movies like And God Created Woman or Belle de Jour, where the erotic, the sensual, and the trashy went mainstream in American cinema again. Ann Hornaday, chief film critic at The Washington Post writes that “The 1980s and early 1990s were a heyday of sex scenes that might have been hot and heavy but stayed within the parameters of bourgeois good taste: movies such as An Officer and Gentleman, Body Heat, 9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct were must-see films, not just because of their twisty plots but because of sex scenes that were frank and artfully staged.” But by the 2010s, even with hit shows on TV full of racy content like Game of Thrones, The Guardian reported that the amount of sexuality in movies had declined to the lowest point since the 1960s.

And in a UCLA study last fall, a majority of the surveyed 1500 adolescents from ages 10-24 said they wanted less romantic content in TV and movies. A near majority said sex is not necessary and that romance is over-used in entertainment. What should we make of this? Is this, as Doreen St. Felix has speculated, a result of the decline of the so-called mid-budget adult drama? Or what Naomi Fry calls “the very lucrative infantilization of the viewing public?”

We dig into all of this: first by speaking with Stephanie Rivas-Lara, one of the UCLA researchers about the study making so many headlines, followed by R. S. Benedict, whose essay “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” seeks to diagnose just what is going on with the characters who populate our content in the post 9/11 world. And Zachary Wigon discusses his new psychosexual thriller/romantic comedy, Sanctuary, and how it fits into a climate that is increasingly at odds with both genres.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork is created by Topher Booth. Today’s show features music and clips from Basic Instinct 2, And God Created Woman, Punch Drunk Love, and Sanctuary.

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7. A Century of Oscars

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 11:00:25 GMT

We’re in the lead up to this year’s Academy Awards, otherwise known as the Oscars. Presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the idea is recognizing excellence in cinematic achievement with a little gold statuette. But 96 years into this tradition, it’s not always clear why the Academy makes the choices it does—what excellence really means and to whom. These are questions we’re exploring today with Michael Schulman, author of the new book, Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears, a near century-long history of cultural trends as exemplified by what gets the gold.

Will Oppenheimer coast to victory? Will anyone open the wrong envelope? Will anyone get slapped? Will you be watching? Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from various Emmys and Oscar ceremonies, along with Hollywood Hotel and Of Human Bondage.

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6. The Year of the Bomb

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 11:00:52 GMT

For over a decade, the box office has been dominated by superheroes—mostly in the form of cinematic universes that linked dozens of movies and streaming series in long, complex mythologies of characters, concepts, and conflicts. In the past few years, this has even meant multiverse concepts linking the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the Fox X-Men series and DC Cinematic Universe with previous Batmans played by George Clooney and Michael Keaton. Everything is now connected. The problem? Audiences finally, after years of predicted superhero fatigue, might just be over it all.

The biggest bombs of 2023 were movies like The Flash, Aquaman 2, Shazam 2, and The Marvels. As perhaps part of the same phenomenon, a kind of tentpole fatigue, movies like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One all underperformed despite some of the highest budgets in cinematic history. Rather than the predictable hits, two wildcards emerged victorious in the year of the bomb. And they came out on the same day.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both released on July 21, 2023, two movies that could not be more tonally opposite and yet became entwined in popular culture as a bundled phenomenon known as Barbenheimer. Both wildly overperformed expectations and are continuing to ride that wave all the way through awards season. Oppenheimer is different in several ways from Nolan’s run of hits leading up to it, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. It is his longest movie to date—3 hours long. It is rated R. It is almost entirely made up of people talking. It is based on real history. And it is about as bleak as a movie can get.

In the year of bombs, the question is: how did a movie about the atomic bomb and the foreboding thought of nuclear holocaust make nearly a billion dollars and sweep several award ceremonies? What does this say about Christopher Nolan, our contemporary anxieties, and the relationship audiences have with nuclear war going back through popular culture over the past several decades?

Tom Shone, author of The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan explains the phenomenon of Nolan as one of the only blockbuster auteurs who could not only get a movie like Oppenhemier made but turn it into a huge hit. Then David Craig, author of Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War, discusses the use of art to engage with existential threats from Dr. Strangelove to Don’t Look Up, including how The Day After was not only a hit but that it might have saved the world.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show features music and clips from Oppenheimer, Barbie, Memento, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After.

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5. The Barbarians and the Mansion

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 11:00:00 GMT

In this final installment of our series on the films of Whit Stillman, we’re discussing Stillman’s return to filmmaking after over a decade of exile, or what he refers to as “development heck,” with the 2011 comedy Damsels in Distress starring Greta Gerwig, which led to a fruitful partnership with none other than Amazon Studios with the pilot The Cosmopolitans and then his seemingly inevitable Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship.

Stillman discusses the making of each of these later projects, how they do and don't diverge from his 90s trilogy, and what he hopes to accomplish with his career going forward in the constantly shifting media landscape of the twenty-first century. This episode also features insights from critics Fran Hoepfner and Marya E. Gates as well as author Girish Shambu.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from Damsels in Distress, Love & Friendship, The Cosmopolitans, and Metropolitan.

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4. Development Heck

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:00:55 GMT

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s Metropolitan. The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. This was a unique moment in American cinema, a time where independent became not just an economic condition but a brand. Stillman became a symbol of authentic, personal cinema with his subsequent films, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, with each carrying a bigger budget than the last until Disco became Stillman’s first financial failure.

Because he’d made three witty, funny, romantic comedies about a certain type of upper class white American, that was what he was expected to keep making. The problem was: he didn’t particularly want to. In this episode, Stillman discusses the difficulties of both the lost momentum following Disco's release and his struggle to break out of the brand he'd created for himself with his 90s trilogy. In addition to conversations with Stillman, this episode features interviews with critic Fran Hoepfner and author Girish Shambu.

The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Metropolitan.

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3. Cynicism in the Optimism

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 11:00:40 GMT

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s Metropolitan, a wry comedy about debutante parties. The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. This was a unique moment in American cinema, a time when independent became not just an economic condition but a brand. Studios began to harness the idea of independent cinema and crafted entire marketing campaigns around authentic voices as brands–Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Nicole Holofcener, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Sofia Coppola, and many more.

Today's show focuses on the making of his third film, The Last Days of Disco, the conclusion in what is often referred to as his Doomed Bourgeoise in Love Trilogy. Each film follows characters navigating the tensions between who they thought they’d be and who they become, often set in a backdrop of a changing world threatening to leave people like them behind. Disco was the biggest production Stillman had mounted to date, a critical success, but a financial failure that threw off the momentum Stillman had amassed throughout the 1990s. This episode features interviews with Stillman, actor Taylor Nichols, composer Mark Suozzo, and critic Marya E. Gates.

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2. Like Oil and Water

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:00:48 GMT

The 1990s saw a boom in independent filmmaking going mainstream in American cinema. Audiences found that the art house could merge with the multiplex as filmmakers with distinct voices such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Nicole Holofcenter, and many more were able to pull off an interesting paradox: making independent films mainstream and making them through traditional studios. Rather than describing the economics, independent often began to describe the aesthetic. These were the authentic voices in a sea of corporate sludge, bringing perspectives and styles that only they could. This very much includes the focus of our episode today, Whit Stillman, who came onto the scene right at the outset in 1990, with Metropolitan: a debut about debuts that would go on to earn him an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.

Stillman's follow-up, Barcelona, pushes him into a more overtly political realm and something often more broadly comedic as a common thread emerges: the struggle to preserve virtues in an increasingly barbarous world. In this second episode of our series on the career, legacy, aspirations, and regrets of Whit Stillman, we hear from the filmmaker as well as with actor Taylor Nichols and critics Fran Hoepfner and Girish Shambu to tell the story of a man moving onward and upward, having written and directed two successful films–one explicitly independent and the other fitting into the new brand of American independent cinema.

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1. I'm Not Entirely Joking

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:00:16 GMT

If you’ve ever seen a Whit Stillman film, such as Metropolitan, the odds are you’d recognize another. Each of Stillman’s films features this kind of smart, witty, multilayered dialogue–often focusing on an ensemble of young people who have read a lot more about life than they’ve lived, fearing that they are at the tail end of an age of prosperity, looking ahead with apprehension or refusing to look forward at all in favor of attempting a Gatsby-like recreation of the past. More than that, they grapple with the concept of failure in its many dimensions: failure to develop into the person you want to be, failure to acquire the means to live the life you want, failure to appreciate what you have, and failure to preserve the worthwhile traditions of the past in a rapidly shifting world.

Stillman, though he bristles at the affiliation, emerges out of what is called the Auteur movement, a construction rooted in French criticism in the 1950s as they looked back at classical Hollywood hits of the 1930s and 1940s. Simply, they argued for the celebration of a filmmaker’s body of work as a coherent whole. Thus the body of work could be viewed through a lens of authorship, with the director as authority analogous to the way we view a singular ownership over the work of novels by their writers or paintings by their artists.

This is the first of five episode charting the life, career, and influence of Stillman during the rise of a new American auteur movement in the 1990s, featuring conversations with Stillman himself, collaborators like actor Taylor Nichols and composer Mark Suozzo, as well as critics Fran Hoepfner, Marya E. Gates, and Girish Shambu. Join us each week as we work through Stillman's filmography and contextualize it in a constantly shifting cinematic landscape.

The Entertainment was created and is hosted by Tom Knoblauch. The show is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio and is produced by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from Metropolitan, Jules and Jim, The Wild Angels, and Filmmaker Magazine’s podcast Back to One.

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Trailer

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:22:05 GMT

The adventure begins January 13th. Subscribe today!

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