Episode 64: Hidden Gems, Volume V  (December 2025)

For the fifth time in the history of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand returns to one of its most popular formats: the Hidden Gems episode. As we did in episodes 11, 30, 40, and 53,  Michael, John and I each choose one film to discuss that we feel has been underappreciated and overlooked by the madding crowd yearning to see anything besides a prequel, sequel, spinoff, or reboot. And while the episode features three films that could not be more different from one another, the one thing that they do have in common is that they are definitely movies made for grown-up sensibilities.

Michael kicks things off by taking us back three decades to Nobody’s Fool,  a film written and directed by the great Robert Benton and featuring one of Paul Newman’s best performances, which is saying something. Benton’s script, as well as a ridiculously good cast featuring Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, a young Philip Seymour Hoffman and, in her final performance, the matchless Jessica Tandy, remind us of how unfortunate it was that this film, while not exactly overlooked, got lost in the Oscar tsunami that was Forrest Gump. I once again focus on an imperfect but powerful and prescient film, in this case Cary Joji Fukunaga’s low-budget debut from 2009 Sin Nombre. Fukunaga tells the story of a young man from Chiapas and a young woman traveling with her uncle and father from Honduras who meet on the treacherous and often terrifying train ride through Mexico to the American border. A decade and a half before the dehumanization of people like Willy and Sayra became government policy, Fukunaga spares us nothing in showing us the humanity, resilience, strength, and decency of these people and why they feel compelled to make this almost suicidal journey just in the remote hope of finding a better life. Finally, John shines the spotlight on City Island, a sweet and gentle comedy from 2009 featuring Andy Garcia and Juliana Margulies as the parents of a family living in the titular unique and lovely section of the Bronx. The father, Vince, played by a charmingly understated Garcia, is a corrections officer with dreams of becoming the next Marlon Brando, and is taking an acting class (and eventually going to an audition) without telling anyone. But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the secrets this family is keeping from one another. Featuring supporting performances by old pros like Alan Arkin (as Vince’s acting teacher who hates pauses) and Emily Mortimer as a friend he makes in the class who may have secrets of her own, the film is a lovely slice of life that contrasts its uniquely placid setting with the universally complicated dynamics of family and of wrestling with both one’s past and one’s dreams. So please enjoy, go see the many great films that are playing in theaters as the year comes to a close, and have a peaceful and restful holiday!

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “And if you get bored in Oklahoma City, you can always go over to Tulsa for the weekend.”

A: The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) 

Vintage Sand Episode 64 on SoundCloud

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Episode 63: “What Do We Do Now?”: A Tribute to Robert Redford (November 2025)

Happiest of Thanksgivings, Vintage Sand fans, and welcome to Episode 63, our tribute to the incomparable and quietly brilliant Robert Redford. Consider this. If all the Sundance Kid had given us was a series of memorable and subtly complex performances as an actor in a career spanning half a century, that would have been enough to make him a critically important figure in Hollywood, particularly in that mini-Golden Age of the American New Wave of the 1970’s. Had the only thing he given us was two masterpieces (Ordinary People and Quiz Show) and his other often beautiful work as a director, that alone would make him a legend. Had the only thing he done was pave the way for the arrival of nearly every single great American film director of the last four decades through his work as the founder and inspiration behind the Sundance Film Festival, that would make him one of the towering figures in the history of American film. And had he focused his seemingly boundless energies exclusively on the best of social causes, such as climate issues and indigenous rights, in the quiet and unassuming way he did, that would be a cause for a celebration of his greatness. The fact that Robert Redford managed to do all of this and more during his lifetime, and with such an unerring sense of grace, cements his place as a foundational figure of modern American cinema. Team Vintage Sand takes the last line from one of his greatest performances, in 1972’s The Candidate, and uses it as the title of our tribute to him as we ponder the what American film will look like without him: What do we do now?

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “Tell them we’re all out of souvenirs.”

A: Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Abraham Polonsky, 1969) 

Vintage Sand Episode 63 on SoundCloud 

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Episodes 61 and 62: “Are You Not Entertained?”: Vintage Sand’s Top 10 Films of the 21st Century (So Far)(September/October 2025)

And…we’re back! Did you miss us? You can say so—it’s OK. Yes, it’s the return of Vintage Sand, your film history podcast, with our first episode since May. It was a frantic and wonderful summer, but now the leaves are falling and it’s time for us to get back to what we love to do, with a double episode no less than 25 years in the making. That’s right, fellow film fanatics; it’s Vintage Sand’s Top Ten Films of the 21^st Century (So Far). And once again, a major cultural institution has stolen our idea! When last we three met in May, we had decided to do these episodes. But fate intervened and delayed us, and, sure enough, when we opened up the New York Times in mid-July, there was their best of the century list. This has happened to us far too often to be coincidence—anyone know any good intellectual property lawyers out there?

And that Times list was truly interesting in several ways. First of all, we much preferred the fans’ list of the Top 100 (to my great pleasure it included La La Land, Blade Runner 2049, Sinners and Midsommar, all omitted from the main list). But, in what was perhaps a bit of quiet backlash to the 2022 Sight & Sound Poll, only a handful of directors of color, and fewer female directors than one might have expected made the times list.On the other hand, the clear “winner” of that poll was Christopher Nolan, the only director with five films on the list (the Coens, PTA, and Alfonso Cuarón each had four). Nolan is the Hitchcock of our times, in the sense that he is one of those rare directors who both receives critical acclaim and puts asses in the seats. Now if he would only put those blaring soundtracks a little lower in the audio mix so that older, cranky audience members such as us have a shot at hearing the dialogue…

Ultimately, the work we put into creating these lists revealed a surprising and heartening truth. From long before the time we started Vintage Sand back in 2018, all we’ve heard is doom and gloom about the state of cinema this century. “Film is dead” because folks are watching on their phones, or because of the algorithm, or because of streaming, or because of the emphasis on the global marketplace over the domestic, or because our attention spans have vaporized, and on and on. Not that those are not real issues, but the death of film has been continuously reported since sound arrived roughly a century ago. And let me tell you, dear and faithful listeners: we had an incredibly difficult  time narrowing down our respective lists to 25, let alone 10. We were overwhelmed with the number of creative, innovative, and moving films we had to choose from, films that will stand the test of time as well as any you could mention from the imagined “Golden Ages” of film. So our message, in the end, is one of optimism. Film is still a vital and glorious art form, and while you may have to dig around a bit more than you used to to find the greatness, it is clearly there. Enjoy these two episodes, and join us in facing the future of film with anticipation, excitement and joy.

Josh’s Complete List

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2003)

2. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

3. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

4. Parasite (Bong Jun-ho, 2019)

5. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

6. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000, HK)

7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

8. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)

9. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

10. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

John’s Complete List

1. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000, Tai.)

2. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018, Mex.)

3. Mulholland Dr.

4. Parasite

5. The Tree of Life

6. In the Mood for Love 

7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019, Fr.)

8. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

9. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2018, Jap.)

10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) 

Michael’s Complete List

1. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)

2. Killers of the Flower Moon

3. Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004, Sp.)

4. Tár (Todd Field, 2022)

5. Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010, UK)

6. Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)

7. The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, UK)

8. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023, UK)

9. Mulholland Dr. 

10.Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012 – Fr.)

honorable mentions (in alphabetical order):

Adaptation (Jonze, 2002)

Almost Famous (Crowe, 2000)

Away from Her (Polley, 2006)

Before Midnight (Linklater, 2013)

Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004)

Carol (Haynes, 2014)

Catch Me if You Can (Spielberg, 2002)

Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)

Drive My Car (Hamaguchi, 2021, Jap.)

First Reformed (Schrader, 2017)

Get Out (Peele, 2017)

Hell or High Water (Mackenzie, 2016)

Her (Jonze, 2013)

Inside Llewyn Davis (Coens, 2013)

La La Land (Chazelle, 2016)

Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012)

Midsommar (Aster, 2019)

No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007)

Notes on a Scandal (Eyre, 2006, UK)

Past Lives (Song, 2023)

Pianist, The (Polanski, 2002)

Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000)

Serious Man, A (Coens, 2009)

Sinners (Coogler, 2025)

Taste of Others, The (Jaoui, 2000, Fr.)

There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007)

West Side Story (Spielberg, 2021)

White Ribbon, The (Haneke, 2010, Ger.)

Worst Person in the World, The (Joachim Trier, 2021, Nor.)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Episode 61

Q: “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

A: Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961)

Episode 62

Q: “I’m already pregnant, so what other shenanigans could I get up to?” 

A: Juno (Ivan Reitman, 2007)

Vintage Sand Episode 61 on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 62 on SoundCloud

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Episode 60: “Now It’s Dark:” Reflections on David Lynch (May 2025)

I can tell you the exact date and place: October 16, 1986, at the Fine Arts Theater in downtown Chicago. I was too young to have appreciated the Hollywood New Wave of the 70’s, so I got to come of age as a moviegoer in the corporate dominated, big-opening-weekend-or-fail era of the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was a child of Jaws, Star Wars, Indy and Back to the Future. With occasional exceptions like Stranger than Paradise and Blade Runner, American film in the early and mid 80’s felt corporate and soulless. And then I saw Blue Velvet, and my moviegoing life was saved. Skip now to nearly four years later, to those glorious two months in the spring of 1990 when Twin Peaks changed everything that television was and could be. For these moments, and so many more, we use Episode 60 to pay a last tribute to Hollywood’s favorite Eagle Scout, the irreplaceable David Lynch.

Looking back, what separates Lynch from almost every other filmmaker, certainly in America, was that whereas most great directors were filmmakers who evolved into artists, Lynch was an artist (a celebrated painter, composer) who happened to choose filmmaking as his major means of expression. And when the filmmaking money dried up after Inland Empire’s failure, he didn’t spend the rest of his career in a quixotic attempt, a la Welles or Gilliam, to scrounge up money for his next film. He simply turned to other art forms to express what he wanted to say. Lynch was most certainly a surrealist, every bit as much as Dali, Magritte or De Chirico were, but he was, as one critic termed him, a “populist surrealist”. In his films, the line between dream and reality (or between reality and film in his later works) is blurred. This makes sense, since surrealism is founded on dreams and dreamlike juxtapositions. Lynch, like those great painters he so admired and emulated, was an artist of the unconscious and the uncanny. But for all the serious artistic ambition, everything he created was leavened with that art-school sense of humor, off-center and dry as a bone.

For all of his unsettling imagery and the deep questions his work raised about the nature of identity, he seemed, at least from the outside, to have led the happiest of lives. Raised mainly in Missoula, Montana, Lynch often paid tribute to the quotidian beauties of life in small-town America (think Twin Peaks, Lumberton, the Iowa and Wisconsin towns we see in The Straight Story) while also, as in the opening of Blue Velvet, reminding us of the darkness that often lies just beneath those finely-manicured lawns. And his childhood happiness also manifests in his endless use of music from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, not to mention all those period diners where cherry pies go to die. For all of his artistic sophistication, he never even came close to an artsy sense of condescending irony; it’s perfect that he spent the last years of his life sending in daily weather reports to the LA public radio station for broadcast. No winks, no air quotes—just the desire to share his genuine excitement about the miracles of nature all around us.

And for an artist who was such a unique stylist that he was one of the last to become an adjective (we all know “Lynchian” filmmaking when we see it), he was at the same time constantly paying tribute to film history; consider the endless Wizard of Oz references in Wild at Heart, or casting just about all of the hot new movie stars of 1961 in the original Twin Peaks series. How perfectly fitting it was, then, to watch him, in his final and uncredited big screen appearance, playing a cranky John Ford in Spielberg’s The Fablemans.

For our tribute to Lynch (which is more than they did for him at this year’s Oscars), we eschewed our usual formula and chose not to do a chronological reckoning of Lynch’s work and its impact from Eraserhead to Inland Empire. This episode, like the director’s work itself, is more associative and non-linear. In the end, we conclude that David Lynch, that Man from Another Place, is someone whose absence makes the world that much poorer a spot to live in. To quote the repeated incantation from Blue Velvet, now it’s dark.

Ten Moments that Could Only Have Come from the Mind of David Lynch

1. The Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. No hay banda, glowing blue cubes, Roy Orbison’s “Crying” en español, and it’s all on tape. The textbook definition of uncanny.
2. “We got to got to got to go to Ben’s” from Blue Velvet. Disturbing, frightening, hilarious, heartbreaking, and is there anything more iconic in American film of the last fifty years than Dean Stockwell lip-synching to Orbison’s “In Dreams”?
3. The Dance of the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead. Even more than the dancing bleeding chickens, the baby that might not be a baby, the man with the levers, and all the other unforgettable imagery of this film, this scene is the perfect introduction to Lynch’s unique sensibility. In Heaven, everything is indeed fine!
4. “God, I love this music!” Audrey’s (Sherilyn Fenn) entrance to the Double R Diner in Season 1 of Twin Peaks. A perfect Lynch actress, a perfect Lynch moment, and a perfect reminder of how Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti are among the greatest director/composer pairs of all time.
5. Glinda the Witch of the North appears to Sailor near the end of Wild at Heart. The payoff to all of the Wizard of Oz references in this film (and in many of his other films as well)…and lo and behold, it’s Laura Palmer!
6. “What’s the number for 911?” asks the neighbor trying to be helpful in The Straight Story. Perfectly emblematic of Lynch’s sense of humor, right up there with “Yes, Jeffrey, that is a human ear”, “We call her the Log Lady”, and the botched assassination in Mulholland Dr.
7. The opening five minutes of Blue Velvet. Starting with the flowers and the white picket fence cast against a perfect blue sky through the insects fighting with each other just below the grass, and the sudden cut to the Lumberton radio DJ giving listeners the time at the sound of the falling tree. It sets up everything you need to know about Lynch’s vision.
8. Robert Blake’s eerie, kabuki-faced Mystery Man in Lost Highway. Accosting Fred at Andy’s party, the Mystery Man tells Fred to call his own home number, where the phone is answered by…the Mystery Man himself,
9. Any scene from Twin Peaks or Fire Walk with Me involving the room with red curtains, zebra-striped floors, flashing strobe lights and Michael Anderson as The Man from Another Place discoursing (backwards, kinda) on topics like how much his cousin looks like Laura Palmer
10. The L.A. prostitutes of Inland Empire suddenly break into a perfectly choreographed dance number to Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion”.Because of course they do… 

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”

A: 12 Years a Slave, (Steve McQueen, 2012)

Vintage Sane Episode 60 on SoundCloud

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Episode 59: The Year of the Brutal: 2024 in Film (March 2025)

Now that Adrien Brody has finally wrapped up his acceptance speech, we can bring you Episode 59 of Vintage Sand. And since it’s March, and the Oscars just passed, we’re right on time with our annual year-end review, which we call 2024: The Year of the Brutal.

As seems to be the case over the last few years, we came away from the year in film with mixed feelings. The interesting thing is that we did not seem to agree on any of the major films of the year. Mike and I liked Anora a lot, and John did not. We also both liked Emilia Pérez, which John actively disliked. John and I liked Garland’s Civil War, which Mike didn’t like at all. John liked The Brutalist, and Mike and I were underwhelmed. I was alone in loving both Nosferatu and The Substance. Mike and John liked Conclave and A Complete Unknown, both of which I found kind of conventional despite outstanding performances. And so on. It makes it difficult to come to a consensus on the year, but it makes, as you will hear, for an excellent episode; after all, what could be more boring than when the three of us agree?

As for the Oscars themselves, we were pleasantly surprised at how good Conan was, and pleasantly not surprised how good the opening number from Wicked was. We were relieved at the absence of Malala vs. Cocaine Bear audience schtick (minus Adam Sandler), surprised at the politics-free nature of the evening, appalled at the James Bond “tribute”, amazed at how young Mick Jagger looks, and, as ever, disappointed in the In Memoriam section. And while we appreciated the Gene Hackman and Quincy Jones tributes, we were shocked that nothing special was done for David Lynch (something we plan to remedy in our next episode). Good on Sean Baker for winning four statuettes for Anora, yet continuing puzzlement as to why Denis Villeneuve, among the greatest world-builders currently directing, can’t seem to get nominated for films that all seem to get nominated for Best Picture.

In considering our eternal question of which of these films will be watched by anyone in 25 years, let alone show up the Sight and Sound poll in 2032, I can only imagine that Anora and Nosferatu, in the contexts of their respective directors’ careers, might make the cut. It seems slightly possible that the Dylan film, Conclave and The Brutalist might have some legs as well, but it’s less likely. For me, 2024 will always stand out as the year of women in films that were social commentaries in the context of the horror genre (The Substance, Maxxxine, and Blink Twice being among the best examples). It suggests that a kind of brutality, often directed at women though not exclusively, has crept into American film, as it seems to have done in American life itself. So we urge you, intrepid listeners, to support the arts and humanities, go to movies in theaters, and keep fighting the good fight.

Josh’s Top 10:

1. Anora (Sean Baker)
2. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
3. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, Fr.)
4. Civil War (Alex Garland)
5. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
6. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
7. Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz)
8. My Old Ass (Megan Park)
9. Maxxxine (Ti West)
10. Carry-On (Jaume Collet-Serra)

Michael’s Top 10:

1. Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, UK)
2. The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)
3. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
4. Ghostlight (Kelly O’Sullivan & Alex Thompson)
5. Problemista (Julio Torres)
6. High Tide (Marco Calvani)
7. Good One (India Donaldson)
8. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
9. National Anthem (Luke Gilford)
10. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)

John’s Top 8 (in no particular order):

1. Sing-Sing (Greg Kwedar)
2. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
3. Conclave (Edward Berger)
4. Civil War
5. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
6. Hit Man
7. The Fall Guy (David Leitch)
8. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, Lat.)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.”

A: Dune, Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)

Vintage Sand Episode 59 on SoundCloud

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Episodes 57 and 58: Alternate Oscars: 1940’s Edition (January and February 2025)

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all ships at sea, and welcome to Episode 57 of Vintage Sand, our first of 2025. In this episode and the next one we return, for the penultimate time, to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic Alternative Oscars. In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach every full decade in which the Academy has handed out Oscars except two: the 2010’s, and the topic for this two-part episode, Alternate Oscars: The 1940’s Edition.

It’s interesting that the 40’s are considered to be the peak of Hollywood’s Golden Age, yet many films that were beloved and honored back then have not well withstood the passage of time. The early part of the decade’s most important development was the rise of the writer/director in Hollywood. Preston Sturges was the first, with his incredible run of films from 1940-1945, and he was followed quickly by the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett team and, of course, that clever young fellow from the Mercury Theater. The 40’s also marked the arrival of Hitchcock to these shores, and the rise to prominence of new directorial voices like Huston, Preminger, Zinnemann and Nicholas Ray. There were also many high points in the decade for well-established directors like Ford, Capra, Hawks, Lubitsch and Wyler. We have the incredible run of films between 1942 and 1946 made by Val Lewton’s brilliant B-movie unit at RKO, and, of course, there’s the birth of film noir, overseen predominantly by expats like Wilder, Lang, Preminger, Ulmer, Lewis and Siodmak.

The latter half of the decade, which we will cover in Episode 58 in February, saw two major developments. The end of the war saw the return to strength of many European film industries as well as studio filmmaking in Japan. In France, in the wake of 1945’s miraculous Les Enfants du Paradis, directors as different as Cocteau, Clouzot and Bresson began or restarted their careers. This explosion of creativity was matched in the UK, with the arrival of Lean, Reed, and especially with the flowering of the Powell-Pressburger Archers team. Clearly, though, the most important such event was the rise of what today is called Italian Neo-Realism, as directors like Rossellini, De Sica, and to a lesser extent Visconti, created a brand new way to tell stories on film that is still influencing directors today. The second big change of the late 40’s was really two changes in one: the landmark Paramount court case in 1948 that ended the vertical monopoly the studios had long held as owners of theater chains as well, and the mass arrival of television. Between 1948 and 1952, Hollywood lost nearly half of its audience, bringing down the curtain on that so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood.

In terms of the Oscars, the Academy made solid choices for Best Picture–they certainly picked better films than they did in the 1930’s! These included enduring works like The Best Years of Our Lives, All the King’s Men and especially, Casablanca. Who could argue with that? (Hint: us.) But there were plenty of head scratchers as well. Prestige choices like How Green Was My Valley, Mrs. Miniver and Olivier’s Hamlet look a little creaky these days. Hell, we might argue that Rebecca was not even Hitchcock’s best film of 1940! And the less said about Going My Way and Gentlemen’s Agreement, the better. So kick back, round up the usual suspects, and help us make this podcast more important than the gas in that light…

1940: Rebecca (Hitchcock)

What Should Have Won:

Michael – His Girl Friday (Hawks)

Josh and John – The Grapes of Wrath (Ford)

Sleeper Picks: The Great McGinty (Sturges), The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch), Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock), The Philadelphia Story (Cukor), The Letter (Wyler)

1941: How Green Was My Valley (Ford)

What Should Have Won:

Michael, Josh, and John – Citizen Kane (Welles)

Sleeper Picks: The Maltese Falcon (Huston), Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges), The Lady Eve (Sturges), Ball of Fire (Hawks), 

1942: Mrs. Miniver (Wyler)

What Should Have Won: 

Michael and Josh – The Palm Beach Story (Sturges)

John – The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles) 

Sleeper Picks: To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch), Cat People (Lewton RKO Team) 

1943: Casablanca (Curtiz)

What Should Have Won: 

Michael and John – Casablanca

Josh – Day of Wrath (Dreyer, Den.) 

Sleeper Picks: Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man and The Seventh Victim (all by the Lewton RKO Team) 

1944: Going My Way (McCarey)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Curse of the Cat People (Lewton RKO Team) 

John – To Have and Have Not (Hawks)

Michael – Double Indemnity (Wilder) 

Sleeper Picks: Laura (Preminger), Scarlet Street (Lang), Ministry of Fear (Lang), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Sturges)

1945: The Lost Weekend (Wilder)

What Should Have Won: 

John and Josh – Rome: Open City (Rossellini, It.) 

Michael – I Know Where I’m Going (Powell and Pressburger, UK) 

Sleeper Picks: They Were Expendable (Ford), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz), Children of Paradise (Carné, Fr.), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Kazan), Blithe Spirit (Lean, UK), Isle of the Dead (Lewton RKO Team), Detour (Ulmer), My Name is Julia Ross (Lewis), Hangover Square (Brahm) 

1946: The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger, UK) 

John – Notorious (Hitchcock) 

Michael – Brief Encounter (Lean, UK – Year of Oscars Eligibility)

Sleeper Picks: It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra), Paisán (Rossellini), The Big Sleep (Hawks), Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau, Fr.), My Darling Clementine (Ford), The Killers (Siodmak), Bedlam (Lewton RKO Team) 

1947: Gentlemen’s Agreement (Kazan)

What Should Have Won: 

John – Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, UK)

Michael – Shoeshine (De Sica, It.)

Josh – Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)

Sleeper Picks: Out of the Past (Tourneur), Crossfire (Dmytryk)

1948: Hamlet (Olivier, UK)

What Should Have Won: 

John and Josh – Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, It.)

Michael – Red River (Hawks)

Sleeper Picks: The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, UK), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston), Unfaithfully Yours (P. Sturges), Cry of the City (Siodmak), Oliver Twist (Lean, UK), The Snake Pit (Litvak), The Big Clock (Farrow)

1949: All the King’s Men (Rossen)

What Should Have Won: 

John – Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, UK)

Michael – The Heiress (Wyler)

Josh – The Third Man (Reed, UK)

Sleeper Picks: A Letter to Three Wives (Mankiewicz), On the Town (Donen and Kelly), Battleground (Wellman), Jour de Fête (Tati, Fr.), Late Spring (Ozu, Jap.), DOA (Maté), Caught (Ophuls) 

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “I have not forgotten or forgiven the boredom of the sermon of young Henry’s funeral. And I decided to promote the Lord Henry D’Ascoyne to next place on the list.”

A: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, 1949, UK)

Vintage Sand Episode 57 on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 58 on SoundCloud

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Episode 56: “He’s Making a List:” Team Vintage Sand’s Favorite Christmas Movies (December 2024)

No deep insight or analysis here, Vintage Sand fans. Just a list of our favorite Christmas and Christmas-adjacent films as the season approaches. (Not counting blazingly obvious choices like It’s a Wonderful Life and a Christmas Story). May your days be merry and bright, may your hearts grow three sizes that day, as they say in Whoville, and, may your favorite holiday films always be streaming.

Films (In Chronological Order):

Miracle on 34^th Street (George Seaton, 1947)

The Bishop’s Wife (Henry Koster, 1947)

A Christmas Carol (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1951, UK)

The Holly and the Ivy (George More O’Ferrall, 1952, UK)

Trading Places (John Landis, 1983)

Die Hard (John Mc Tiernan, 1988)

Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)

The Ref (Ted Demme, 1994)

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

TV Extras

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (1964)

“Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown” (1965)

“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966)

“Carol of the Bells” (Ted Lasso, Season 2 Episode 4)

“Fishes” (The Bear, Season 2 Episode 6)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.”

A: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002)

Vintage Sand Episode 56 on SoundCloud

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Episode 55: Megalopolis and Necropolis (November 2024)

Vintage Sand listeners this month will get something of a twofer, a BOGO episode. Since we really have not had the chance to do a full necrology since July, Michael takes the time to relate the accomplishments of some very bright lights in the film business that have gone out over the past four months. These include artists who leave behind a great legacy and holes that can never really be filled, including people like Dame Maggie Smith, James Earl Jones and Alain Delon.

Before we get to that point, though, we begin with a very different kind of eulogy: our reflections on Francis Ford Coppola’s summa, the egregious Megalopolis. We felt, as we did for Scorsese in our episodes on both The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, that a sprawling work by one of our greatest filmmakers, in this case a film that had a gestation period of nearly fifty years, deserved to be examined both in its own right as a work of art and in context as part of its creator’s career. In hindsight, it’s risible to think that at the end of the 70’s, film fans were heatedly debating who among the heroes of the American New Wave would end up with the greater career: Scorsese or Coppola? (Let’s not even talk about some of the others around the periphery of that conversation at the time, like De Palma, Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Rafelson, Cimino, Lucas and yes, perhaps even Spielberg—although, surprisingly, Paul Schrader has been coming up with a few late-period masterpieces). Megalopolis ends that debate, and stands, as I referred to Eyes Wide Shut relative to Kubrick’s career in our episode devoted to that film, as a cardboard tombstone to the career of a gifted filmmaker. While the members of Team Vintage Sand, whose bottomless intrepidity was confirmed by each of us successfully wading through (a la Andy Dufresne) the 2 ½ hours of excrement that is Megalopolis, did find the occasional positive to light on, for the most part it was an example of a work of incredible consistency, in that just about every choice Coppola makes as writer and director was the wrong one.

Perhaps the comparison with Scorsese is unfair, and certainly nothing could ever erase the impact of Coppola’s four films of the 1970’s, or even the smaller delights of his later work (Mike’s a fan of The Cotton Club, and I’ve always thought that Tucker was a much better film than its reputation dictates). But for us, the truth is that between the gratuitous literary and high culture references, the sophomoric philosophizing that would make any actual 10^th grader cringe, the derivative film tributes sprinkled throughout (including, unbelievably, a moment where the film appears to physically burn up in the projector—a brilliant idea had Bergman not done it 60 years ago in Persona), and a script that even good actors like Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito can’t save, Megalopolis was, quite unintentionally, the funniest film of the year—and given how much we love and admire its creator, the most painful. Once can only hope that this is not Coppola’s final statement, and that in future efforts he will trust his audience, not try so hard to impress us with his erudition, and remember what made him so great in the first place.

Those We’ve Lost:

John Amos, TV and Film Actor

John Ashton, Actor

James Darren, Singer and Actor

Alain Delon, Actor

Teri Garr, Actress

Mitzi Gaynor, Actress and Dancer

Jonathan Haze, Actor

Will Jennings, Oscar-Winning Lyricist

James Earl Jones, Stage and Screen Actor

Quincy Jones, Oscar-Winning Music Producer and Arranger

Kris Kristofferson, Singer, Songwriter and Actor

Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Stage and Screen Actress

Paul Morrissey, Actor and Director

Bob Newhart, Comedian, TV and Film Actor

Lynda Obst, Producer

Dick Pope, Cinematographer

Gena Rowlands, Film and Stage Actress

Dame Maggie Smith, Stage and Screen Actress

Norman Spenser, Production Designer

Tony Todd, Film and TV Actor

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “Deep in most of us is the potential for greatness, and the potential to inspire greatness.” 

A: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Neame, 1969) 

Vintage Sand Episode 55 on SoundCloud

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Episode 54: Director’s Cut: Joseph Losey (October 2024)

Elegant. That was the adjective used by Team Vintage Sand’s own Michael Edmund to describe why the films of Joseph Losey are so important to him, and why he has been such a huge fan of Losey’s for nearly all of his film-going life. Losey’s was a name that seemed to keep popping up in a wide variety of contexts over the course of the podcast, so, after many delays, we are proud to present Episode 54—Director’s Cut: Joseph Losey. This is only the third time we have focused an entire episode on the career of one director, and the only time we have reached back into history to do so. (We previously looked at Bong Jun-ho’s career in Episode 27 and that of Chloe Zhao in Episode 39). Losey’s is a unique career in the sense that it really was two distinct careers. After growing up in a life of privilege in Wisconsin (where he was a high school classmate of another pretty good director, Nicholas Ray) and an education at Harvard and Dartmouth, Losey made his way to Hollywood and directed a couple of interesting, low-budget films. Among these were the stilted but prescient The Boy with Green Hair (1948), and the rather senseless remake of Lang’s M (1951), the latter replete with awful soundtrack music and L.A. sunshine. One possible reason that Losey might have gotten involved with this misguided effort might have been to give actors (Luther Adler, Martin Gabel) and other creatives (screenwriter Waldo Salt), who had been or were about to be blacklisted, a shot at getting some work.

Losey himself, an unapologetic member of the Communist Party and an important creative associate of Bertolt Brecht, knew that when Brecht was called before HUAC, it was only a matter of time before he would meet the same fate. So before he could be summoned, he fled to London, and never again worked in the United States for the remaining three decades of his life. He began his English period with some low budget films, some of which, like 1954’s The Sleeping Tiger, still hold some interest. It was during this period, however, that he met two men who were going to help him create the reputation that he still carries to this day, that of a director of great style whose films, not surprisingly given his own life experience, were always political without ever dealing directly with politics: the actor Dirk Bogarde, and the legendary playwright Harold Pinter.

Their first work together, 1963’s The Servant, is generally regarded as Losey’s masterpiece. It is an absolute evisceration of a rotting class system that has yet to realize its time has passed and that the empire on which it was founded has disintegrated. The complex, ever-changing relationship between upper class twit Tony (the wonderful James Fox) and Barrett, the manservant Tony hires (Bogarde), is cold, chilling and surprising right to the very end. Losey continued his obsession with social class in the World War I drama King and Country (1964), a film with a setup similar to Paths of Glory that in some ways is an even more powerful anti-war statement than Kubrick’s film. Losey teamed up again, somewhat less successfully, with Pinter and Bogarde for 1967’s Accident, and with Pinter for one more masterpiece, 1971’s The Go-Between, a gorgeous period piece featuring pitch-perfect performances by Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, newcomer Dominic Guard as the titular young man, and especially by the never-more-luminous Julie Christie.

Losey’s status as a great director is complicated by the fact that while occasional successes did follow (his adaptation of A Doll’s House in 1973, 1976’s Mr. Klein, featuring Alain Delon, and his 1979 setting of Mozart’s Don Giovanni), several of Losey’s failures have been cited as being among the worst movies ever made. These include Modesty Blaise (1966), Boom! (1968), the unwatchable The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) and his final work, Steaming, released a year after Losey’s death in 1983.

There are no easy answers when it comes to Losey, but two things come to mind. As John notes in the episode, had Losey not fled persecution and stayed in America, he probably would have been nothing more than a more-talented-than-average studio hack. Exile turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him creatively, and it may be a direct result of his outsider status that Losey was able to cast an even sharper eye on the follies and perils of the dying English class system more effectively even than the great native British directors of the 1960’s. Whatever your thoughts on his work, in the end, it is that aforementioned elegance and intelligence that make Losey’s best films worth watching today.

Our Top 10 Joseph Losey Films:

1. The Servant (1963)
2. The Go-Between (1971)
3. King and Country (1964)
4. Mr. Klein (1976)
5. Accident (1967)
6. A Doll’s House (1973)
7. The Boy with Green Hair (1948)
8. Don Giovanni (1979)
9. The Sleeping Tiger (1954)
10. M (1951)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I would not advise you to try to invade.” 

A: Casablanca (Curtiz, 1943) 

Vintage Sand Episode 54 on SoundCloud

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Episode 53: Hidden Gems, Volume IV (July 2024)

For the fourth time in the history of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand returns to one of its most popular formats, the Hidden Gems episode. As we did previously in episodes 11, 30, and 40,  Michael, John and I each choose one film to discuss that we feel has been unjustly neglected and overlooked by the huddled masses yearning to see anything besides a prequel, sequel, spinoff, or reboot. So please enjoy Episode 53, which features three films that could not be more different from one another. Michael takes us back to the 70’s and to a John Cassavetes film that was ignored and even despised upon its (very limited) initial release but has only gained in reputation and influence across the years. I focus on a very imperfect genre film, Neill Blomkamp’s second feature, 2013’s Elysium that, perhaps even more powerfully and viscerally than acknowledged masterworks like The Social Network and Her, predicted a desperate future that we appear to be headed for much sooner than the filmmaker anticipated. Finally, John shines the spotlight on Alice Wu, a unique filmmaker and storyteller. Her second film, The Half of It, a lovely variation on the Cyrano de Bergerac tale, had the misfortune of being premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival…that never took place, because it was 2020. It ended up in the undifferentiated mass of content that is Netflix, from which John will hopefully save it. So Enjoy, stay cool in the heat, see great movies, and Thank You for Listening, Citizen!

FILMS:

Michael: Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)

Josh: Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

John: The Half Of It (Alice Wu, 2020)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.” 

A: Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022) 

Vintage Sand Episode 53 on SoundCloud

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Episode 52: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Films of 1974 (June 2024)

The end of 1974 saw the implosion of the Director’s Company, founded just a year earlier by three of Hollywood’s hottest directors: Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin. Funded by Paramount, the idea was that within a certain budget, these directors would make whatever they wanted, have final cut on their work, and split the profits on each other’s films. Its rapid collapse, amid artistic failure and hubris and egged on by corporate intrigue, signaled the beginning of the end of what later came to be known as the Hollywood New Wave. A year later, the phenomenon that was Jaws recentered the narrative so that blockbuster weekend box office was everyone’s sole and explicit goal. This in turn led to the return of the money people to power, and they have barely relinquished any of that power in the ensuing half-century.

It’s not a coincidence that 1974 also saw Hearts and Minds, one of the great antiwar films ever made in this country, win the Oscar for Best Feature-Length Documentary. The film was also a milestone in that it was the last film ever released by BBS, the renegade company founded by Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson and Steve Blauner in 1969. Buoyed by the money they had made from the success of the Monkees, BBS disrupted an already-crumbling industry by releasing Easy Rider, which grossed $60 million on a budget of $400K. The next few years saw releases from BBS like Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut in Drive, He Said, Jaglom’s A Safe Place and Bogdanovich’s mainstream breakthrough, The Last Picture Show. By the middle of the decade, however, BBS had been swallowed up by Columbia, and the writing was on the wall for the days of the creative freedom that came with this iteration of American independent film.

So while few knew it at the time, 1974 would mark the end of something unique and the beginning of something else. Come, then, and join our intrepid Team Vintage Sand as we step into the Way-Back Machine to say goodbye to Tricky Dick Nixon, spend weekend days waiting on line for gasoline, and explore that sui generis year in film. It was, of course, the year of young Vito Corleone, Jake Gittes and Harry Caul, but also a time when even many low-budget genre films ended up as classics. In the end, you very well might end up agreeing with our own John Meyer, who back in Episode 5 called 1974 the greatest year in film history.

The Films of 1974:

The Big Three:

Chinatown (Roman Polanski)

The Conversation (Francis Coppola)

The Godfather Part II (Francis Coppola)

Other Greats:

Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks)

Female Trouble (John Waters)

Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet)

Parallax View, The (Alan J. Pakula)

Taking of Pelham 123, The (Joseph Sargeant)

Woman Under the Influence, A (John Cassavetes)

Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks)

Sleepers:

Butley (Harold Pinter/American Film Theater)

California Split (Robert Altman)

Claudine (John Berry)

Gambler, The (Karel Reisz)

Longest Yard, The (Robert Aldrich)

Lords of Flatbush, The (Martin Davidson and Stephen F. Verona)

Sugarland Express, The (Steven Spielberg)

Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman)

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino)

Yakuza, The (Sydney Pollack)

Awesome Genre Films:

Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme)

Cleopatra Jones (Jack Starrett)

Death Wish (Michael Winner)

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (John Hough)

Earthquake (Mark Robson)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill)

Freebie and the Bean (Richard Rush)

It’s Alive! (Larry Cohen)

Macon County Line (Richard Compton)

Mr. Majestyk (Richard Fleischer)

Super Cops, The (Gordon Parks)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (Tobe Hooper)

That’s Entertainment! (Jack Haley, Jr.)

Towering Inferno, The (John Guillermin)

Uptown Saturday Night (Sidney Poitier)

Foreign Language Films:

Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, Ger.)

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, Fr.)

Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ger.)

Going Places (Bertrand Blier, Fr.)

Lacombe, Lucien (Louis Malle, Fr.)

Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, Fr.)

Phantom of the Liberty, The (Luis Buñuel, Sp./Fr.)

Scenes from a Marriage (Theatrical Release – Bergman, Swe.)

Swept Away (Lena Wertmuller, It.)

Disappointing-to-Atrocious Films from Good-to-Great Directors:

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah)

Conrack (Martin Ritt)

Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich)

Front Page, The (Billy Wilder)

Great Gatsby, The (Jack Clayton)

Harry and Tonto (Paul Mazursky)

Lenny (Bob Fosse)

Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma)

Stavisky (Alain Resnais, Fr.)

Tamarind Seed, The (Blake Edwards)

Zandy’s Bride (Jan Troell)

Zardoz (John Boorman)

Awful on an Epic Scale:

Mame (Gene Saks)

Savage Is Loose, The (George C. Scott)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “See? Another 25 years, you’ll be able to shake their hands in broad daylight.” 

A: Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) 

Vintage Sand Episode 52 on SoundCloud

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Episodes 51A and 51B: Alternate Oscars – 1960’s Edition (May 2024)

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open or reopen some doors for our listeners to movies that are often overlooked and forgotten. When we came to the 1950’s episode, in an (eerily prophetic) split decision, we chose to include only English-language works, since the sheer volume of brilliant films from around the world in that decade would overwhelm both us and you, dear listeners. As we approached the 1960’s for this episode, however, we reasoned that the relative lack of great American films from the decade suggested that this time around, we should open our tent to the entire world. We could not stand idly by, for instance, while A Man for All Seasons, lovely though it is, walked away with Best Picture in the year of Persona, Masculin/Feminin and Blow-Up. Our worries about the length of the episode, however, turned out to be justified and then some; therefore, we decided to split the episode into two parts. So with that, we are thrilled to present our first episode(s) since our triumphant, celebratory live recording of Episode 50 in March: Episodes 51A (1960-1964) and 51B (1965-1969), Alternate Oscars: The 1960’s Edition.

There were a couple of things that really hit us as we were creating this entry in the Vintage Sand catalogue. The first is that an unexpectedly high number of our choices were, in fact, American films, suggesting that while common wisdom avers that Hollywood suffered a creative decline in that decade, there were a lot of great things happening just below the surface that were, unwittingly perhaps, paving the way for the revolution of the American New Wave that would come in the early 1970’s. And the deeper we dove into the cinema of the 60’s, we came to really understand the fundamental difference between those works and film today. Simply, it was a time when directors really seemed to trust their audience’s intelligence and imagination. This is most obvious in structurally elliptical puzzle films like Resnais’ Last Year AT Marienbad, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Blow-Up, Bergman’s Persona and even Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But in ways big and small, and in terms both of performance and filmmaking technique, there is in 60’s film a refreshing absence of rat-on-the-balcony-rail-at-the-end-of-Departed heavy-handedness that seems to be a common thread in the work of even our greatest directors today. So with all this in mind, strap in and join us for our odyssey through 60’s cinema. It promises to be highly irregular, Dave…

1960: The Apartment (Wilder)

What Should Have Won:

Michael – The Apartment (Wilder)

John – La Dolce Vita (Fellini, It.)

Josh – Peeping Tom (Powell, UK)

Sleeper Picks: L’Avventura (Antonioni, It.), Psycho (Hitchcock), Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, Fr.), Breathless (Godard, Fr.), The Entertainer (Richardson, UK), Inherit the Wind (Kramer), Never on Sunday (Dassin, Gre.)  

1961: West Side Story (Wise and Robbins)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – The Hustler (Rossen)

John – Yojimbo (Kurosawa, Jap.)

Michael – La Dolce Vita (Oscars Eligibility Year)

Sleeper Picks: Judgment at Nuremberg (Kramer), One, Two, Three (Wilder), La Notte (Antonioni, It.), Viridiana (Buñuel, Sp./Fr.), One-Eyed Jacks (Brando), Paris Blues (Ritt), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, UK), Summer and Smoke (Glenville), A Raisin in the Sun (Petrie), Divorce Italian Style (Germi, It.)

1962: Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Exterminating Angel (Buñuel, Sp./Mex.)

Michael and John – Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Lumet) 

Sleeper Picks: The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford), The Miracle Worker (Penn), To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan), Lolita (Kubrick), Vivre Sa Vie (Godard, Fr.), Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, Fr.), Jules and Jim (Truffaut, Fr.), Days of Wine and Roses (Edwards), Hatari! (Hawks), Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman, Swe.) Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich),  Advise and Consent (Preminger), An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu, Jap.), The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Richardson, UK)

1963: Tom Jones (Richardson, UK)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – The Birds (Hitchcock)

Michael – 8 1/2 (Fellini, It.)

Sleeper Picks: Contempt (Godard, Fr.), Hud (Ritt), The Servant (Losey, UK), The Great Escape (J. Sturges), Shock Corridor (Fuller), Winter Light (Bergman, Swe.) From Russia with Love (Young), Knife in the Water (Polanski, Pol.), Sundays and Cybele (Bourguignon, Fr.), This Sporting Life (Anderson, UK), Love with the Proper Stranger (Mulligan), The L-Shaped Room (Forbes)

1964: My Fair Lady (Cukor)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, Fr.)

John and Michael – The Servant (Oscars Eligibility Year)

Sleeper Picks: Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick), Band of Outsiders (Godard, Fr.), Nothing But a Man (Roemer), A Hard Day’s Night (Lester), Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer), Woman in the Dunes (Oshima, Jap.), The Americanization of Emily (Hiller), Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Forbes), The Pumpkin Eater (Clayton), One Potato Two Potato (Pierce), The Best Man (Schaffner), Gertrud (Dreyer, Den.), Marnie (Hitchcock), Night of the Iguana (Huston), Cheyenne Autumn (Ford), The Silence (Bergman, Swe.)

1965: The Sound of Music (Wise)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Repulsion (Polanski, UK)

Michael – Darling (Schlesinger, UK) 

John – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Ritt)

Sleeper Picks: Bunny Lake is Missing (Preminger), Pierrot Le Fou (Godard, Fr.), Doctor Zhivago (Lean), The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, It.), The Pawnbroker (Lumet), The Hill (Lumet), Inside Daisy Clover (Mulligan), The Train (Frankenheimer), King Rat (Forbes), In Harm’s Way (Preminger), The Collector (Wyler), The Cincinnati Kid (Jewison)

1966: A Man for All Seasons (Zinnemann)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Seconds (Frankenheimer) 

John – Persona (Bergman, Swe.)

Michael – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols) 

Sleeper Picks: Au Hasard Balthasar (Bresson, Fr.), Blow-Up (Antonioni, It.), Masculin/Feminin (Godard, Fr.), Chimes at Midnight (Welles, Sp./Fr./Swi.), Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, Rus.), Black Girl (Sembene, Sen.), Cul-de-Sac (Polanski, UK), The Professionals (R. Brooks), The Shop on Main Street (Kadar, Cze.), The Shameless Old Lady (Allio, Fr.), Georgy Girl (Narizzano, UK), Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Reisz, UK), You’re a Big Boy Now (Coppola)

1967: In the Heat of the Night (Jewison)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Playtime (Tati, Fr.) 

John – Belle de Jour (Buñuel, Fr.)

Michael – Persona (Oscars Eligibility Year)

Sleeper Picks: Bonnie and Clyde (Penn),The Graduate (Nichols), Weekend (Godard, Fr.), Mouchette (Bresson, Fr.), Le Samourai (Melville, Fr.), Point Blank (Boorman), In Cold Blood (R. Brooks), The Whisperers (Forbes), Accident (Losey, UK), Two for the Road (Donen), Thoroughly Modern Millie (Hill)

1968: Oliver! (Reed)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 

Michael – Faces (Cassavetes) 

Sleeper Picks: The Producers (M. Brooks), Night of the Living Dead (Romero), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, It.), Petulia (Lester), Hot Millions (Till, UK), Pretty Poison (Black), Shame (Bergman, Swe.)

1969: Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and Michael – The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)

John – Army of Shadows (Melville, Fr.) 

Sleeper Picks: Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone, It.), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Hill), Z (Costa-Gavras, Fr./Alg.), Medium Cool (Wexler), The Damned (Visconti, It.), If… (Anderson, UK), The Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Pollack), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Mazursky), Alice’s Restaurant (Penn)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” 

A: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 

Vintage Sand Episode 51A on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 51B on SoundCloud

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Episode 50: Of Bombs and Bombshells: 2023 in Film (March 2024 – Recorded Live!)

It began six years ago, in the before time, with three film nerds who have been friends for four decades. Through the years, whenever we hung out together, we would inevitably end up talking for hours about film. So, we wondered aloud, why not make it official? Thus was born, in the spring of 2018 in a great Chinese restaurant that no longer exists, Vintage Sand, your film history podcast. One pandemic, one insurrection, a few erasures and rewritings of the film business and several hundred scattered but loyal listeners later, we thought it might be appropriate to commemorate our 50^th episode by inviting friends and recording said episode live at the 14^th Street Y in Manhattan on the afternoon of Saturday, March 16^th. As you will hear within, around 30 people came to support us, to hurl the occasional metaphorical tomato, and to remind us why we love doing this so much, as we recorded our roundup of 2023 in film in an episode we call “Of Bombs and Bombshells”.   

As with the last few film years, this one was a difficult one to read. We first applied our usual measure, wondering which of this year’s films, beyond Barbie, Oppenheimer and the latest Scorsese epic will folks still be watching 25 or 50 years from now. Hard to say, but at least it was a year where, with the exception (for me) of Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, we were able to avoid a repeat of 2022, where some of our most interesting filmmakers (Russell, Aronofsky, Chazelle, Iñárritu, Luhrmann, Garland and so many others) released films that were not just bad but disastrous on an epic scale. 2023 was marked by labor strife in Hollywood, huge existential questions about the business as it has been run for over a century, and anxiety over the implications of technologies like A.I. and streaming. But it was also a year that welcomed a solid return to form of Vintage Sand favorites like Todd Haynes and Alexander Payne, gave us Wes Anderson’s first Oscar for his reunion with Roald Dahl, and brought forth astonishing new voices in works as varied as Celine Song’s Past Lives, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, and Emma Seligman’s follow-up to Shiva Baby, the wonderful Bottoms. It also gave us perhaps the most ambitious American film of the century, Ava Duvernay’s stunning imagining of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste in her epic Origin, an underseen gem that may in time prove to be the year’s greatest film.

To top that off, there was the gently surprising return to classic form of the Oscars, featuring first wins for the aforementioned Wes, Christopher Nolan, and Robert Downey, Jr. Emma Stone won for her incredibly complex performance in Lanthimos’ Poor Things, but this Oscars may be remembered as the year Lily Gladstone was robbed for a performance that was much less showy than Stone’s but in our opinion, much more powerful. And as for the show itself, Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken” may have been the greatest dance number the Oscars has seen in recent memory, though it only served to remind us how intensely the genius and talent behind Barbie were ignored by the Academy.

Writing in the New York Times, Mark Harris, perhaps our favorite working film writer today, posited that film as the central force in American popular culture may be dying out. But like Harris, we don’t necessarily mourn the change; after all, the “death of cinema” has been a hot topic of discussion ever since the talkies arrived 95 years ago. In fact, we agree with Harris that 2024 may be another 1970, a year when out of the rubble of the collapse of the familiar emerged a revolution (however short-lived) of unprecedented creativity and innovation.  We have no idea what the future of film, American and otherwise, will bring, but whatever it is, we hope to be there to share our thoughts with you, not as frustrated film critics or experts in any way but as passionate film lovers who want to open as many doors as possible to new films and to new lenses through which to view old ones. To Billie Eilish’s eternal question, what were we made for? Hopefully another 50 episodes—at least!

Josh’s Top 10:

1. Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
2. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
3. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
4. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
5. Origin (Ava Duvernay)
6. Past Lives (Celine Song)
7. May/December (Todd Haynes)
8. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)
9. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer – U.K./Pol.)
10. Bottoms (Emma Seligman)

John’s Top Ten

1. Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Past Lives
3. The Holdovers
4. Oppenheimer
5. The Zone of Interest
6. American Fiction
7. Origin
8. Barbie
9. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
10. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet – Fr.)

Michael’s Top Ten

1. Killers of the Flower Moon
2. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh – U.K.)
3. Anatomy of a Fall
4. After Love (Aleem Kahn – Fr.)
5. Afire (Christian Petzold – Ger.)
6. Eileen (William Oldroyd – U.S./U.K.)
7. Fallen Leaves (Ari Kaurismaki – Fin./Ger.)
8. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
9. Maestro (Bradley Cooper)
10. Saltburn (Emerald Fennell)

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “Yeah, I left it noisy. That way, it scares away any innocent, pain-in-the-ass bystanders.”

A: The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

Vintage Sand Episode 50 Available on SoundCloud

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Episode 49: “Killers of the Flower Moon”: It’s Just the Way This Is Going (December 2023)

Way back in Episode 17, five years ago, Team Vintage Sand set aside its usual agenda to do something a little different: focus on an analysis of a single film. The occasion, of course, was the release of Martin Scorsese’s 3 ½ hour epic, The Irishman. When a director of Scorsese’s stature releases a new movie, it’s time to drop everything else and discuss. Our thoughts on that film were mixed; it was certainly something of a summation of some of the themes and ideas that have characterized Scorsese’s work from Mean Streets on, and I argued that just below the surface, it also contained certain thematic elements of his “spiritual” trilogy of Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun and Silence. I think Michael summed it up best when he characterized The Irishman, and not in a disparaging way, as the film of an old man, an elegy for a passing time. And here we are, once again, with the director in his early 80’s, releasing a very different kind of 3 ½ hour epic that, in our view, not only feels like it could have been made by someone in his 30’s, but encompasses an ambition (both emotional and temporal/spatial) that Scorsese has never attempted before. So it is with all this in mind that we present Episode 49, “Killers of the Flower Moon”: It’s Just the Way This Is Going.

As we did with our study of The Irishman, we divide this episode into two parts. In the first, we discuss the film on its own terms, and how it functions as a work of art. Here, the three of us disagree somewhat (which always makes for an interesting discussion) on the overall impact of the film; Michael sees it as an unalloyed masterpiece, while John and I, while recognizing its brilliance, express some reservations. We all agreed, for example, that the film’s extended running time was actually insufficient to tell this story, and that it might have been better done as a mini-series or some such longer format. Another thing we all agree on is the acting, which, down to the smallest roles, is pitch-perfect. This is especially true of the three leads, and of the stunning performance by Lily Gladstone as Mollie in particular. we all love the opening and the ending of the film, and how brilliantly Scorsese uses the music of Robbie Robertson (who acts as almost a presiding spirit over the film) to underscore the themes and the mood of the piece. We also appreciate how Scorsese, in adapting David Grann’s brilliant book for the screen, shifts Grann’s emphasis on how the Osage murders helped put the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover on the map and puts his focus up until nearly the very end Squarely on the human side of these horrific crimes, centered around the extraordinarily complex relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and Gladstone’s Mollie.

Then, as we did with Irishman, we try to place the film in the context of Scorsese’s body of work, and this is where things get really interesting. While his films often focus on violence and its impact, and often depict this violence in elaborate auteurist set pieces, Scorsese’s approach is very different here. For one, with the possible exception of the misbegotten Gangs of New York, Scorsese has never attempted to show organized violence perpetrated over such a long period of time and on such an epic scale. Paradoxically, though, while this film contains countless acts of brutal violence, Scorsese chooses to show them in the most blunt, matter-of-fact kind of way. It’s as though he felt that calling attention to his own craft would only distract from the horrific story he is trying to tell. And this raises the stakes for the director in an unprecedented way. Rather than focusing on the violence between rival gangs, or internecine strife within a gang, Scorsese seems to be saying that the whole of American history is, at least in part, a kind of gang war, with profit and gain for some happening only with the suffering, exploitation and murder of “othered” peoples across the centuries. It is an exploration of the darkest corners of the American Dream, and in the end, we think you will find our conclusions about where it fits in the Scorsese canon to be interesting. Killers of the Flower Moon is a film of tremendous depth and contradiction, our history seen through the eyes of someone who, as an artist, has always been one of the sharpest observers of the complexities of who we are as individuals and as a people.

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “Not all who wander are aimless, especially not those who seek truth beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image.”

A: Mona Lisa Smile (Newell, 2003)

Vintage Sand Episode 49 Available on SoundCloud

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Episode 48: “The Union Forever!” (October 2023)

As of our taping of this episode, Hollywood is still under the shadow of the labor problems which have arisen periodically since the beginnings of the industry. After all, remember that the formation of the Academy and the establishment of the Oscars was in many ways the studio moguls’ attempts to crush the burgeoning union movements. Periodically, since the unions were established, they have engaged in strikes, most memorably in 1960 when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA struck to create a fair distribution of revenue from the then relatively new medium of television. And every time in the ensuing years when the modes of distribution changed, from syndication to video tapes to DVD’s, these issues of equity have led to labor tensions across the board. With the double whammy of streaming and the technological possibilities of AI, both the writers and the actors went on strike again earlier this year. The writers have settled, but the actors are still on the picket lines, and seem far away from a settlement. A casual observer might see this as a case of millionaires fighting with billionaires. So Team Vintage Sand wades into the fray by beginning this latest episode with Michael, who is a longtime, proud member of SAG-AFTRA, discussing the issue from the lived perspective of the 95%+ of his fellow union members who cannot make a living as actors. Simply put, what’s at stake is the ability of talented, hard-working people, without whom the industry could not exist, to put food on their table and make this month’s rent.

From there, it was a logical pivot to focus the episode on films that deal with labor movements, workers’ rights and unionization. We each chose three movies, and naturally you will find well-known films like The Grapes of Wrath and Norma Rae in the mix. But the real revelation of the episode for us is that in spite of the powerful human drama that is inherent in the struggles of labor, Hollywood has almost no films that touch on the subject beyond that well-known handful. We suppose this should not be a huge surprise given the industry’s deep-rooted animosity towards organized labor, but the fact is that of our nine films on the issue, three are from England, one is from France, and one was rejected by the studios and produced and distributed independently. Our hope, as always, is that the episode will open some doors to films you’ve never seen or haven’t seen in a long time. In the end, we make no claims to objectivity here; to quote 8-year-old Charlie Kane (in a completely different context), “The Union Forever!”

Our List

A Nous la Liberté – Rene Clair, 1931 (Fr.)

Our Daily Bread – King Vidor, 1934

The Grapes of Wrath – John Ford, 1940

The Man in the White Suit – Alexander Mackendrick, 1951 (UK)

I’m All Right Jack – The Boulting Brothers, 1959 (UK)

Blue Collar – Paul Schrader, 1978

Norma Rae – Martin Ritt, 1979

Matewan – John Sayles, 1987

Pride – Matthew Warchus, 2014 (UK)

A Note from Josh: My favorite film about the labor movement is actually Biberman’s Salt of the Earth, from 1954, which we already discussed at length in Episode 40.

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “You’re about to bust a gut to know what I done, ain’t ya. Well, I ain’t a guy to let ya down. Homicide.“

A: The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940)

Vintage Sand Episode 48 Available on SoundCloud

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Episode 47: Dead Reckoning (August 2023)

Combine the fact that we are preparing for the run of episodes in the fall that will culminate in our 50^th episode in November and that summer has kept the old gang apart for a couple of months, we could not in good conscience let go the passing of some figures, both major and minor, in the history of film whom we have lost since last we convened in May.

Therefore, as kind of a bridge to what is to come, Episode 47 will function as an extended necrology, though we do begin with a detour into some of our favorite film moments of the summer. And an interesting summer it was! Let’s put it this way–it was more than Kenough. We will explore the lives of towering figures like Glenda Jackson and Alan Arkin, controversial figures like William Friedkin, and the less well-known as well. Come catch up with us, and for goodness’ sake, at least see Barbie and Oppenheimer on a big screen before the summer is over…

Our List

1. Jim Brown – Football star and actor
2. Bill Lee – Jazz musician, soundtrack composer, father of Spike
3. Martin Amis – Novelist and screenwriter
4. Helmut Berger – Actor and model
5. Kenneth Anger – Experimental filmmaker and author
6. Tina Turner – Singer and actress
7. George Maharis – TV, stage and screen actor
8. Cynthia Weil – Songwriter
9. Barry Newman – Film and TV actor
10. Jacques Rozier – Last of the French New Wave directors
11. Lawrence Turman – Film producer
12. Paxton Whitehead – Stage and screen actor
13. Glenda Jackson – Stage and screen actress, Labour MP, two-time Best Actress Oscar winner (Women in Love, A Touch of Class)
14. Frederic Forrest – Film and TV actor
15. Julian Sands – Screen and stage actor
16. Alan Arkin – Film and theater actor, director, Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner (Little Miss Sunshine)
17. Treat Williams – Film, stage, and TV actor
18. Ellen Hovde – Documentarian
19. Jane Birkin – Actress, singer, fashion icon
20. Carlin Glynn – Stage and screen actress
21. Tony Bennett – Singer and occasional screen actor
22. Bo Goldman – Oscar-winning screenwriter for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Adapted) and Melvin and Howard (Original)
23. Julian Barry – Playwright and screenwriter
24. Inga Swenson – TV, screen, and stage actress
25. Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman) – Screen and TV actor
26. Mark Margolis – Screen and TV actor. Uncle Tio!
27. William Friedkin – Oscar winning director (The French Connection)
28. Arthur Schmidt – Editor, best known for his work with Zemeckis
29. Carl Davis – Film composer and conductor
30. Robbie Robertson – Legendary musician and soundtrack composer

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: “He’d strangle in his own spit if he didn’t have me around to swab out his throat for him.”

A: From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953)

Vintage Sand Episode 47 on SoundCloud

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Episode 46: “The House that Jack Built”: Warner Brothers at 100 (May 2023)

It is one of the great wonders of American business that the same handful of companies have run the movies in Hollywood, almost since the beginning. After all, how many American industries of 2023 feature a power structure that would be familiar to someone from the late 1920’s? Yes, there were mergers then, like the ones that created MGM, Universal and Fox, and today there are endless mergers, Plus the challenges of adjusting to streaming culture and globalization. And yes, there is Dreamworks, but there’s still Paramount, and Columbia, and Universal, and Fox, and iterations of both MGM and UA, and of course the looming shadow of Disney. And while Warner Brothers is now part of Time Warner, which is part of Discovery (SO complicated), it’s still very much the powerful and influential studio that the eponymous brothers opened on April 4, 1923. After wars, depressions and recessions and other complete erasures and re-drawings, those familiar logos that we and our grandparents saw as children remain.

Therefore, since TCM seems to have stolen so many ideas from us (viz Episode 31 on best final films by great directors), we return the favor here by using this episode to celebrate Warners’ centennial. We thought it silly to try to come up with our three favorite films by the studio, so we each came up with three films (warning, there are double entries) for which the studio was either producer, the main distributor or both, that have had the most impact on us. We also tried to avoid films we’ve already discussed a lot, and strike out in some new directions. So come join us as among our many stops, we ride the rails with the wild boys of the road, make a stop in Ford Country, go as far afield as Bette Davis in Malaysia and Audrey Hepburn in the Congo, and end up in space with the Mercury astronauts. We promise an amazing trip though, as Warners’ greatest star often said, we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque…

A List of Featured Warner Brothers Films (in Chronological Order)

Heroes for Sale (Wellman, 1933)

Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman, 1933)

The Letter (Wyler, 1940)

To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944)

The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)

“Long-Haired Hare” (Jones, 1949)

“The Rabbit of Seville” (Jones, 1950)

The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

“What’s Opera, Doc?” (Jones, 1957)

The Nun’s Story (Zinnemann, 1959)

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975)

All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976)

The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983)

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: “Those are harsh words to throw at a man, especially when he’s walking out of your bedroom.”

A: The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)

Vintage Sand Episode 46 on SoundCloud

Episode 45: Mapping the Metaverse: 2022 in Film (April 2023)

2022 was definitely the everything bagel of movie years. No less an authority than Stephen Spielberg anointed Tom Cruise as the savior of movies this summer, which made sense given the success of Top Gun: Maverick. Then came the fall, and excellent movies were released…and no one showed up. And even when they did, as with the $2.2 billion dollar gross accumulated by James Cameron’s Dances with Smurfs Part Deux, the movies barely seemed to make a dent in the cultural landscape. It didn’t help that so many of our beloved directors released crappy movies: Aronofsky with the odious The Whale, Russell with his how-could-it possibly-go-wrong-with-that-cast disaster Amsterdam, Alex Garland with the puzzling (and not in an interesting way) Men, Iñarritú inadvertently reminding us how brilliant both Roma and 8 ½ are with Bardo, and the literal crapfest (elephant, in this case) that was Babylon. Sometimes, it felt like 2022 was a living, breathing argument against the auteur theory.

Yet there were some very good spots too, including not one but two really interesting portrait-of-the-filmmaker-as-a-young-man movies with Fabelmans and Armageddon Time. The scene of the year? Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tar (née Linda Tarr of Staten Island!) arguing with one of her students about the problems with cancelling Bach in Todd Fields’ most welcome return. Everything Everywhere became the only film in history to win three acting Oscars and Best Picture. Underappreciated gems like The Menu and (sorry, John and Michael) Don’t Worry Darling, and even appreciated ones like Aftersun wormed their way into our brains and didn’t let go, though I will never look at s’mores the same way again. And we even had a solid Oscars ceremony, with powerhouse performances by Rihanna and Lady Gaga and nearly an epic battle between Malala and Cocaine Bear. Plus, we got perhaps the most sublime moment in American film this century: David Lynch playing John Ford in a Spielberg film. It almost took away the sour taste of the “Look, I’m doing Bergman!” montage of film history that ended Babylon not nearly soon enough. And while we liked EO better when it was Au Hasard Balthasar, and Living better when it was Ikiru, and we thought that the Siegfried Sassoon biopic Benediction was a better World War I film than All Quiet, there were definitely some tasty tidbits to be found on that everything bagel. An up and down year, but to paraphrase the wondrous Lashana Lynch as Miss Honey in Matilda, it wasn’t much, but it was enough for us.

OUR TOP TEN OF THE YEAR

Michael:

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving.”

A: Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola, 1979)

Vintage Sand Episode 45 on SoundCloud

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It is an intriguing coincidence that perhaps the two greatest films ever made about the creative breakthroughs and heartbreaks involved in making a film are both celebrating major anniversaries in 2023. First, Federico Fellini’s raucous, post-modern celebration of his own creative process, 8 ½ turns sixty. It’s important to note, though, that while we see no filmmaking in that film, the actual portrayal of the logistical and emotional vicissitudes of film creation are very much at the heart of François Truffaut’s beloved Day for Night, which itself turns fifty this year. We will focus most of our time in this episode on Fellini’s film, taking our intrepid listeners on a tour that begins with an opening that stands as the most brilliant metaphor for creative blockage ever put on film, all the way through the end with the circus band playing Nino Rota’s indelible march as every character we’ve seen from the director’s past and present joins hands and dances in perhaps the most life-affirming moment in all of film. We will then use Fellini’s work as a springboard to discuss the other films about filmmaking that we love, starting with Day for Night, and bringing in works ranging in tone from Assayas’ Irma Vep to Jonze’s Adaptation to Burton’s loving tribute to Ed Wood. Finally, we’ll take a quick peek at this year’s two great portraits of the filmmaker as a young artist, Gray’s Armageddon Time and Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (though honestly, I’d take J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 over either of them). But it’s important to keep in mind that all of these wonderful films probably never even come close to happening without Fellini blazing the trail. To paraphrase the master himself, he may have really had nothing to say, but fortunately for all of us, he found the most brilliant way to say it all the same. Grazie mille, maestro!

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: “I had a long talk with that lady in Musical Therapy, Johnny, and she says that Mozart is the boy for you. The broom that sweeps the cobwebs away.”

A: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Vintage Sand Episode 44 on SoundCloud

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Episode 43: “The Best Damned Film List of Them All”: Thoughts on the 2022 Sight & Sound Poll (December 2022)

It is indeed the episode a decade in the making! Here, in Episode 43, Team Vintage Sand puts in its collective two cents on the newly released Sight and Sound decennial poll of the greatest films of all time. It is a list referred to by no less an authority than Roger Ebert as “the best damned film list of them all.” But this time, was it a “woke” poll, reflecting more our need for political correctness than a genuine and deep understanding of film history, as old-timers like Paul Schrader proclaimed? Or was it about damn time that the old white men gave up at least some of the strangle hold they’ve had on the poll since its inception in 1952, as many younger critics proclaimed? Does this new list signify that the battle lines have been drawn irrevocably between older and younger film people?

As always, the truth is never that simple. Team Vintage Sand tries to approach the poll by avoiding either extreme, oversimplified position, reaching, as ever, for the complex and embracing the gray. Does Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman deserve its new place atop the rankings? Probably not, but it surely is a much better film than its position in the mid-30’s for the 2012 edition of the poll suggested. And if the poll is so politically correct, why are there no films by the Mexican New Wavers here? Along these same lines, 16 of the 22 directors who have multiple entries on the list are white men; four of the remaining six are Asian men. Yes, there are no films by Howard Hawks or Roman Polanski. No Buñuel. No Lean. No Altman. No Demy, or Melville, or Resnais. No Sternberg or Stroheim. No Huston. No Malick. No Tarantino. No Anderson, be it Wes or P.T. No Coen Brothers. No Linklater. No Spielberg, for goodness’ sake! No silent films in the Top 10, and all the silent films that are still there from 2012, with the exception of City Lights, plummeted to the nether reaches of the list. (If anyone tells me that there are 20 films greater than The Passion of Joan of Arc, it’s ON!) And yet…

…there’s Do The Right Thing entering the list at #24. FINALLY. And there’s Burnett’s brilliant Killer of Sheep. And Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. Maybe now someone will give her some money to make a second film, three full decades after she released a Top 100 masterpiece. And there, brand spanking new, are Jordan Peele and Barry Jenkins. And there’s Agnes Varda’s extraordinary Cleo from 5 to 7 entering the list in the top 15. And my historical experimental film crush Maya Deren is finally here as well for her utterly unique and endlessly influential Meshes of the Afternoon. And Claire Denis in the Top 10. And Jane Campion, Barbara Loden(!), Celine Sciamma and the aforementioned Julie Dash. If it took some “woke” (whatever that means) younger critics to put these artists in their rightful places in the pantheon, we’ll take it.

Ultimately, we recognize the silly waste of energy in trying to compare, say, Jeanne Dielman with Tokyo Story with In the Mood for Love with Man with a Movie Camera. For us, this poll has one purpose only, and it’s the same purpose that guides what we do at Vintage Sand: it opens doors. It takes us out of our comfort zone as viewers, and reminds us that there are vast aspects of film history about which we know little or nothing. So look carefully at Sight and Sound 2022 through this lens, check off the films you haven’t seen yet or not in a long time anyway, and track them down. We’ll bring the popcorn!

One Positive and One Negative Takeaway from the 2022 Poll from Each of Us:

Josh

Positive: Three words: Maya frickin’ Deren!

Negative: I know I’m going to catch a lot of sh*t for this, but I object to the presence of My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away on the list. Miyazaki is one of the greatest artists the world has seen in any medium in the last fifty years. Period. Full stop. But to me, animation is a completely coequal but totally different art form from live-action film. After all, I wouldn’t vote for Michelangelo’s “David” for a list of the hundred greatest paintings of all time… 

Michael

Episode 42: Alternate Oscars – 1990’s Edition (November 2022)

In Episode 42, Team Vintage Sand returns yet again to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic Alternative Oscars. In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture Academy Awards from the 1930’s, the 1950’s, the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we hop in the Way-Back Machine and travel to one of the most interesting periods in film history: the 1990’s. As best described in Peter Biskind’s must-read book Down and Dirty Pictures, that decade began with the promise of an honest-to-goodness revival of independent films emerging from smaller companies, most notably Miramax. It was also marked by the rise of the Sundance Festival, a time long before that event became the completely corporatized show it is now. That period, from roughly 1989-1995, witnessed the arrival of such new voices as Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith, Carl Franklin, John DaHl and most notably Quentin Tarantino. But that fertile era came to a crashing halt with the sale of Miramax to Disney, and the subsequent absorption of most of the smaller production companies into the studio conglomerates. As a result, things turned a bit flabby in the middle of the decade, only to return with a boom in 1999, considered by many film historians to be one of the great years in the history of the medium.

Another interesting aspect of the 90’s with regards to the Oscars is that unlike in the other decades which we have examined, the Academy made an unusual number of solid choices for Best Picture, such as The Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven and Schindler’s List. Who could argue with that? (Hint: us.) But there were plenty of head scratchers as well, such as Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas, The English patient over fargo and perhaps most egregiously, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction. So kick back, relax and join us as we return to a uniquely fascinating decade, and remember: you’re entering a world of pain, Smokey. A world of pain…

1990: Dances with Wolves (Costner)

What Should Have Won:

Michael and John – Goodfellas (Scorsese)

Josh – Edward Scissorhands (Burton)

Sleeper Picks: Dick Tracy (Beatty), The Grifters (Frears), Reversal of Fortune (Schroeder), Postcards from the Edge (Nichols), Wild at Heart (Lynch), Miller’s Crossing (Coens), Slacker (Linklater) 

1991: The Silence of the Lambs (Demme)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Daughters of the Dust (Dash)

John – A Bright Summer Day (Yang, Tai.)

Michael – Life Is Sweet (Leigh, UK)

Sleeper Picks: JFK (Stone), Thelma and Louise (R. Scott), My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant), Defending Your Life (A. Brooks), Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang, Chi.), New Jack City (Van Peebles), The Fisher King (Gilliam) 

1992: Unforgiven (Eastwood)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and Michael – The Player (Altman) 

John – Howard’s End (Ivory) 

Sleeper Picks: Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino), Bob Roberts (Robbins), Glengarry Glen Ross (Foley), Malcolm X (S. Lee), Enchanted April (Newell), One False Move (Franklin), Last of the Mohicans (Mann)

1993: Schindler’s List (Spielberg)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – A Perfect World  (Eastwood)

Michael – The Age of Innocence (Scorsese)

John – Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 

Sleeper Picks: The Wedding Banquet (A. Lee), Groundhog Day (Ramis), Short Cuts (Altman), Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh), The Ref  (T. Demme), The Summer House (Hussein), Falling Down (Schumacher), Natural Born Killers (Stone)

1994: Forrest Gump (Zemeckis)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh, Michael, and John – Pulp Fiction (Tarantino) 

Sleeper Picks: The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont), Quiz Show (Redford), Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell), Red (Kieszlowski, Fr.), Eat Drink Man Woman (A. Lee), The Last Seduction (Dall), Nobody’s Fool (Benton), Bullets Over Broadway (Allen), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliott), Clerks (Smith)

1995: Braveheart (Gibson)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Safe (Haynes) 

Michael and John – Nixon (Stone)

Sleeper Picks: To Die For (Van Sant), Clueless (Heckerling), Sense and Sensibility (A. Lee), Home for the Holidays (Foster)

1996: The English Patient (Minghella)

What Should Have Won:

Michael and John – Fargo (Coens)

Josh – Irma Vep (Assayas, Fr.)

Sleeper Picks: Secrets and Lies (Leigh,UK),  Trainspotting (Boyle),  Lone Star (Sayles), Crash (Cronenberg), Flirting with Disaster (Russell), Mother (A. Brooks) 

1997: Titanic (Cameron)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Jackie Brown (Tarantino) 

Michael – Deconstructing Harry (Allen)

John – The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 

Sleeper Picks: Good Will Hunting (Van Sant), L.A. Confidential (Hanson), Boogie Nights (P.T. Anderson), Afterglow (Rudolph), The Wings of the Dove (Softley), The Ice Storm (A. Lee) 

1998: Shakespeare in Love (Madden)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Big Lebowski (Coens)

Michael and John – Bulworth (Beatty)

Sleeper Picks: Rushmore (W. Anderson), Affliction (Schrader), Primary Colors (Nichols), The Truman Show (Weir), Central Station (Salles, Braz.) 

1999: American Beauty (Mendes)

What Should Have Won: 

Michael and John – Topsy-Turvy (Leigh, UK) 

Josh – Magnolia (P.T. Anderson)

Sleeper Picks: The Matrix (Wachowskis), Being John Malkovich (Jonze), Election (Payne), Three Kings (Russell), Boys Don’t Cry (Pierce), Fight Club (Fincher), The End of the Affair (Jordan), All About My Mother (Almodovar, Sp.), Office Space (Judge), The Limey (Soderbergh), The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella), Go! (Liman) 

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” 

A:  Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Vintage Sand Episode 42 on SoundCloud

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Episode 41: Gala Premieres–Our Favorite First Films by Great Directors (October 2022)

Team Vintage Sand returns to the airwaves with our October episode, a neat bookend to Episode 31 wherein we explored our favorite final films by great directors. Here we present Episode 41–Gala Premieres: Our Favorite First Films by Great Directors. To begin, we decided to establish some parameters to spare you, our tenacious audience, any pointless discussion. The first is that we tried to avoid directors about whom we have already discoursed at great length in these pages. The second, what we termed the Julie Dash Rule, is that we would only focus on first films by directors who went on to long and predominantly successful careers in feature films. That’s why you won’t find movies like Boys Don’t Cry (Kim Pierce), One False Move (Carl Franklin), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin) or one-hit-wonders like Laughton’s Night of the Hunter or Loden’s Wanda here. Plus, we already did a full episode on one-hit wonders—that would be Episode 10. (The fact that the brilliant Dash has only been able to make one film in three decades is a mystery to be explored in another episode or two—utterly inexplicable). Our last rule is the Rosebud Rule; we tried to exclude any first films that were too obvious to spend time on. That would include Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The 400 Blows, Breathless, Badlands, Boyz ‘n’ the Hood, Reservoir Dogs and similar fare all the way through Get Out. So join us as we bring back those wonderful moments where you wandered into a film by a new director and left the theater realizing that you had just witnessed the birth of a new voice to be reckoned with.

Our FAVorites, in chronological order:

The Great McGinty– Preston Sturges, 1940

12 Angry Men – Sidney Lumet, 1957

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Mike Nichols, 1966 

The Landlord – Hal Ashby, 1970 

Eraserhead – David Lynch, 1977

Pi – Darren Aronofsky, 1998

American Beauty – Sam Mendes, 1999 

Being John Malkovich – Spike Jonze, 1999

Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)

honorable mentions:

Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel/Dali, 1929, Fr./Sp.); The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930, Fr.); A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945); The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1949); The Killing* (Stanley Kubrick, 1956); Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959); Whistle Down the Wind (Bryan Forbes, 1961, UK); Period of Adjustment (George Roy Hill, 1962); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1963, UK); Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1963, Pol.); This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963, UK); The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1967); Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969); A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971); Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1976); Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982); Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984); Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984); Blood Simple (Coen Brothers, 1984); She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986); sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989); Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989); Hard Eight (P.T. Anderson, 1996); The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999); Y Tú Mama También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001, Mex.); Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005); Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005); Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014); Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015); Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

*Yes, attentive listeners, we know that The Killing is technically not Kubrick’s first film; it was his first with kind of a major release. But be honest with us: when’s the last time you watched Fear and Desire or Killer’s Kiss?

john’s monthly quote quiz

Q: “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.”

A: The Departed – Martin Scorsese, 2006

Vintage Sand Episode 41 on SoundCloud

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Episode 40: Hidden Gems, Volume III (September 2022)

Don’t call it a comeback! After a long (for us)summer break estivating in all the world’s glamour spots, Team Vintage Sand returns with Episode 40, the third in our Hidden Gems series. Those of you playing along at home will recall that in Episodes 11 and 30, we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. We promised/threatened to go down this path yet again and take you, loyal listeners, into some more dark and obscure corners of film history. So enjoy Episode 40, Hidden Gems Volume III, where John, Michael and Josh take a closer look at three very different films: a broad screwball heist film from the early 70’s that should have been a huge hit; a quietly powerful and engrossing tale of a year in the life of a group of middle-aged friends, created by the man who is perhaps the greatest living director of actors; and a one-of-a kind, zero-budget film created by blacklisted creatives at the height of McCarthyism that is not only the greatest film ever made about the labor movement, but is also decades ahead of its time in its approach to both feminist issues and immigrant rights. And remember, the code phrase is Afghanistan Banana Stand…

FILMS:

John: The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972)

Josh: Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954)

Michael: Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)

Episode 40 on SoundCloud

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Episode 39: Director’s Cut: Chloe Zhao

Episode 39 finds your intrepid Team Vintage Sand doing a deep dive into the work of one of our most promising young filmmakers, 2020 Best Director Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao. Although she has only done four feature films to this point, she has already established a distinctive painterly and brilliant visual style, and, as no less an authority than Frances McDormand put it, has shown herself able to successfully walk the line between sentiment and sentimentality.

We take an auteurist approach to Zhao’s work by dividing her young career into two distinct parts. She began with two very low-budget films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, both used non-actors essentially playing themselves. Notably, both were set in the unique and somehow primordial landscape of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a location that is becoming to Zhao what Monument Valley was to John Ford. Her Oscar winner, Nomadland, was a transitional work, featuring old pros McDormand and David Strathairn mixed in with non-actors. This unexpected success then led to her chance to be part of the MCU with Eternals, a huge-budget film that many connoisseurs of the genre consider to be the worst of the Marvel films.

So our fundamental question is simple: how do the visual and thematic elements that made her first two films so uniquely personal and intimate carry over into the second pair of films, done on a much different scale? As frequently happens, there is some dissent within Team Vintage Sand. Michael, and to a lesser extent John, argue, as do many, that Zhao’s films suffer from her insistence on non-actors, and that Songs and The Rider would have been better had Zhao populated her film with professional actors. I’m not bothered as much by it, but I see where they’re coming from, especially since they are both trained actors. That being said, there is no doubt that Zhao has a phenomenal eye and that she is an artist to be closely watched; for us, she is one of the few young directors who has earned a lifetime ticket, which simply means that if she’s directing a film, we’ll be there opening weekend. So sit back, enjoy, and we’ll see you all down the road.

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.”  

A: North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Episode 39 on SoundCloud

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Episode 38: 2021 and the “End of the Movies” (April 2022)

In a New York Times article published last month, Ross Douthat expounded on the provocative idea that the movies, as in studio films produced in Hollywood, were “over.” He was not arguing that Hollywood would ever stop producing movies for the big screen, nor that the notion of seeing a movie in a dark theater with strangers all around would ever completely disappear. Instead, he was saying that Movies, the heart of American popular culture for over a century, haVE now become marginalized to just another source of content in a world of seemingly endless content. He attributes this to the rise of streaming and the quality of what we can see on our screens at home, to a globalized market that rewards the exploitation of familiar properties over anything that might be truly innovative, and, to be fair, the expense and sheer unpleasantness of taking one’s family to see a movie in an actual theater. And since most of what was on offer in the big theaters was Marvel/DC multiverse epics, other tentpole/franchise films or anything with a Roman numeral on the end of the title, is this such a big loss?

Viewed through this lens, Team Vintage Sand was kind of split on the legacy of 2021 in film. Michael thought the year was one of the best in recent memory, whereas John and I were a bit more ambivalent. Of course, it my not be coincidental that Mike, as a card-carrying member of the union, got to see nearly everything this year in a real theater at SAG screenings. John and I saw a handful of films on the big screen, but most via streaming. (If this is not a coincidence, it argues strongly in favor of the primacy of the theater experience). And as you’ll hear in the episode, we could not even agree on whether any 2021 films meet our highest standard: that they will still be watched 25 or 50 years from now. The most likely possibility is Drive My Car, although John expressed some sensible reservations. What else? Perhaps Spielberg’s shockingly good West Side Story update? Maybe Power of the Dog, although Michael pointed out what I’m sure many felt: that the film was beautiful and technically perfect, but was so cold that very few would feel compelled to watch it again. Trier’s The Worst Person in the World has an outside shot, but I objected that in the end, to paraphrase Mike’s oft-quoted phrase, I could not in the end love a film where I did not care about the central character (brilliant performance though it was). And CODA? A film that no one could dislike, with some tremendous performances, but an Afterschool Special script that, like Green Book or Crash,allowed Hollywood to pat itself on the back for being sensitive to the voices of an outsider group without really saying anything.

in the episode, we frame the year in film in terms of the Oscar ceremony, which was well on its way to being one of the worst ever before you-know-what happened. We discuss the glaring omissions (Denis Villeneuve not being nominated for Dune; Passing, which in some ways was the best film of the year, not getting nominated for anything; Hans Zimmer over Jonny Greenwood, etc.) and the occasions where they actually got it right (hello, Ariana De Bose!). Not the greatest year, but to return to Douthat’s article, he concludes with an important plea: that it is more necessary than ever to teach the history and technique of classic film, as the chance that younger generations will be exposed to this art grows smaller and smaller. I felt a sense of validation personally, as I have been doing just that with high school students for a quarter of a century. But I also felt that this highlighted why we put together Vintage Sand in the first place: our mission to open some doors and some new perspectives for our listeners. So kick back, enjoy, and hope along with us that film in 2022 will be less of the proverbial slap in the face than in the year just passed.

some un-nominated (or under-nominated) films of 2021 that we loved:

• Passing (Rebecca Hall) – A perfect adaptation of a brilliant novel. That this didn’t even get nominated for Adapted Screenplay, let alone the two amazing central performances, was the worst oversight of the Oscars.
• Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Love) – Film-within-a film fun on Bergman’s home turf, the Faröe Islands, featuring fantastic performances by Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps
• The Green Knight (David Lowrey) – A surprisingly faithful and fascinating adaptation of perhaps the weirdest of all the Arthurian legend poems
• In the Heights (Jon Chu) – A movie musical made by people who actually understand both movies and musicals. And Olga Meredíz should have been nominated for reprising her Broadway turn as Abuela
• The Card Counter (Paul Schrader) – Schrader continues his most welcome comeback that began with First Reformed, this time featuring yet another great performance by Oscar Isaac
• The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson) – Demonstrating, as he did with Budapest, that his sensibility seems to work very well when dealing with unique times and places that are about to fade into history, Wes creates 2/3 of a great anthology film. And how about a nom for Jeffrey Wright, essentially playing James Baldwin?
• The Matrix: Resurrections (Lana Wachowski) – Just the opening 45 minutes or so, as brilliantly self-referential and meta as film gets

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”  

A: Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Vintage Sand Episode 38 on SoundCloud

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Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical (March 2022)

In a first for the ever-intrepid Team Vintage Sand, we devote an entire episode to the exploration of the history of a single genre. Thus we present Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical. From its clunky beginnings at the dawn of sound through the unexpected brilliance of Spielberg’s West Side Story remake last year, we take a deep dive into this most deliberately artificial (and therefore most polarizing) of all film genres. Rather than going decade by decade, we divided this history into six “movements” that provide a lens to view the rise, steep decline and startling rebirth of the musical over the last century. After a brief mention of such important early works as the Best Picture-winning Broadway Melody of 1929 and King Vidor’s first foray into sound, the daring and dazzling (if problematic for contemporary audiences) Hallelujah! (1929), the movements we lay out are as follows:

I. The Warner Brothers musicals of the pre-Code 1930’s, which confronted head-on the difficulties of life during the Great Depression and gave the world its first glimpse of the lunatic genius of Busby Berkeley

II. The RKO musicals of the mid and late 1930’s, featuring Astaire and Rogers, silly escapist story lines and music by some of the greatest composers of American popular song

III. The Golden Age, a quarter century dominated though not exclusively limited to MGM, which is bookended by The Wizard of Oz in 1939 and The Sound of Music in 1965. This is the age of Vincente Minnelli and the Kelly/Donen team, of Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, of larger budgets and production values and, at its height, a rapidly increasing artistic ambition

IV. The decline, which starts in the late 1960’s with horrors like Doctor Doolittle and Paint your wagon. With the notable exception of Grease and the uniquely odd success of Rocky Horror, the live action musical is essentially moribund from the 70’s through the end of the century. However…

V.…we argue that the traditional Hollywood musical is kept alive by whoever it was at Disney that had the vision, after having seen Little Shop of Horrors, to hire Menken and Ashman to revive their animated musical division. The run of successes that Disney had from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, through Ashman’s untimely death halfway through Aladdin, and up through 1997’s Mulan showed that the Musical hadn’t died; it had just morphed into cartoon form for a while

VI. The unlikely revival of Musicals in this century, sparked out of nowhere by a most unlikely film: Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge!. The genre’s return was cemented by the choice of Chicago for Best Picture the next year, and it has been going strong ever since

As a final note, we also posit our Grand Unification Theory of the Hollywood Musical—that the greatest among these films were ones originally created for the screen rather than adaptations of Broadway shows. Yes, there are exceptions, but for every West Side Story (particularly the 2021), there are a few dozen films like South Pacific, Camelot, A Little Night Music, Rent, Cats and Dear Evan Hansen. So come and meet those dancing feet as we take you on a whirlwind tour of a century of supreme artistry and epic fails, with stops at just about every point in between.

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“Well, I used to be bad when I was a kid,  but ever since then I’ve gone straight, as has been proved by my record: 33 arrests and no convictions.”  

A: Guys and Dolls (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1955)

The American Film Institute’s List of the 25 Greatest Hollywood Musicals

Vintage Sand Episode 37 on SoundCloud

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Episode 36: We Shall Not Look Upon Their Like Again (January 2022)

As we are preparing for our first attempt at a genre episode (that would be Episode 37, our brief guide to the Hollywood musical coming in February) we could not let go the passing of some major and minor figures of film history since our last recording session in early December.

Therefore, our shorter-than-usual Episode 36 will function as an extended necrology, a (hopefully) cathartic exploration and celebration of both towering figures like Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich and lesser figures as well. (After all, we did lose Truly Scrumptious this month) As the title of the episode suggests, in a straight steal from Hamlet, we shall not look upon their like again.

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“Just remember, beautiful–everything gets old if you do it often enough. So if you want to find out about monotony real quick, marry Dwayne.”  

A: The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

Vintage Sand Episode 36 on SoundCloud

————————————————————–Episode 35: Alternate Oscars – 1930’s Edition (December 2021)

In Episode 35, Team Vintage Sand returns to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic Alternate Oscars. In the past, we have approached the Academy Awards from the 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we use the Way-Back Machine to explore the first full decade in which the awards were given: the 1930’s. In exploring a period that featured some truly abysmal Best Picture choices (Cimarron, anyone? Not to mention what is possibly the worst film ever chosen, 1933’s Cavalcade?), we learned a couple of things. The least surprising of these is that Jean Renoir completely owned the decade; his films might have won Best Picture nearly every year. Another is that there really are two 1930’s for film: the period before the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 and the years that followed. What made this episode fun for us is that, perhaps more so that any of our other Alternate Oscar shows, this one features a ton of movies that our listeners may have not seen or even heard of. And why are we doing this? Well, like the fella said, everybody has their reasons…

1930: All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone)

What Should Have Won:

Josh, Michael and John – All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone)

Sleeper Picks: The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg, Ger.), Earth (Dovzhenko, Rus.), The Big House (Hill), The Big Trail (Walsh), Little Caesar (LeRoy)

1931: Cimmaron (Ruggles)

What Should Have Won:

Josh and John – M (Fritz Lang, Ger.)

Michael – City Lights (Chaplin)

Sleeper Picks: Le Million (Clair, Fr.), La Chienne (Renoir, Fr.), The Public Enemy (Wellman)

1932: Grand Hotel (Goulding)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – Scarface (Hawks)

Michael – Boudu Saved from Drowning (Renoir, Fr.)

Sleeper Picks: Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch), Freaks (Browning), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy), Frankenstein (Whale), Island of Lost Souls (Kenton), Vampyr (Dreyer, Den.), I Was Born, But… (Ozu, Jap.)

1933: Cavalcade (Lloyd)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – 42nd Street (Bacon & Berkeley)

Michael – Duck Soup (McCarey)

John – The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (Lang, Ger.)

Sleeper Picks: King Kong (Cooper & Schoesdack), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra), Baby Face (Green), Wild Boys of the Road (Wellman)

1934: It Happened One Night (Capra)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Scarlet Empress (Von Sternberg)

Michael and John – The Thin Man (Van Dyke)

Sleeper Picks: Imitation of Life (Stahl)

1935: Mutiny on the Bounty (Lloyd)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale)

Michael and John – The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, UK)

Sleeper Picks: The Informer (Ford), Captain Blood (Curtiz), A Night at the Opera (Wood), Top Hat (Sandrich)

1936: The Great Ziegfeld (Leonard)

What Should Have Won:

Josh and John – Modern Times (Chaplin)

Michael – Dodsworth (Wyler)

Sleeper Picks: Swing Time (Stevens), Fury (Lang), Theodora Goes Wild (Boleslawski), Sabotage (Hitchcock, Eng.), Osaka Elegy (Mizoguchi, Jap.)

1937: The Life of Emile Zola (Dieterle)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey)

Michael and John – The Awful Truth (McCarey)

Sleeper Picks: The Grand Illusion (Renoir, Fr.), A Star Is Born (Wellman), Nothing Sacred (Wellman)

1938: You Can’t Take It with You (Capra)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Adventures of Robin Hood (Curtiz & Keighley)

Michael and John – Bringing Up Baby (Hawks)

Sleeper Picks: The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, UK.), The Human Beast (Renoir, Fr.), Pygmalion (Asquith & Howard, UK), Angels with Dirty Faces (Curtiz), Holiday (Cukor), Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein, Rus.)

1939: Gone with the Wind (Fleming)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh, Michael and John – The Rules of the Game (Renoir, Fr.)

Sleeper Picks: The Wizard of Oz (Fleming), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra), Ninotchka (Lubitsch), Stagecoach (Ford), Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks), The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi, Jap.), Daybreak (Carne, Fr.)

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“You still think it’s beautiful to die for your country? The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for country, it’s better not to die at all.”  

A: All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)

Vintage Sand Episode 35 on SoundCloud

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Episodes 34 A and B: No Small Parts II: Our Guide to Our Favorite Overlooked and Underloved Performances by Supporting Actresses (November 2021)

As promised, we finish this round of our study of great screen performances with this two-part episode that highlights what are, in our opinion, the best overlooked and underloved performances by supporting actresses over the years. Recall that in our last episode, we put down our usual auteurist lens in favor of a focus on actors, perhaps a filmmaker’s most crucial collaborators. This is a natural move for us, considering that both Michael and John are trained actors and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our enterprise. So join us, Vintage Sand fans, as we follow a slightly different path and focus on our favorite underloved and overlooked performances in film by supporting actresses. And as we learned last time out, when you get John and Mike talking about acting, there’s no stopping them; thus another two-parter (Episode 34 B will be appearing in a couple of weeks). As for me, the non-actor in the group, I would say that I learned more from these episode than any one we’ve ever done; our hope is that this will open the same kind of doors for you as well.

Michael’s Complete List

1. Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

2. Harriet Andersson in Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) and Bibi Andersson in Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman, 1973 – Swe.)

3. Lesley Manville in Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2018)

4. Dame Edith Evans in The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith, 1952 – UK)

5. Valentina Cortese in Day for Night (Francois Truffaut, 1973 – Fr.)

John’s Complete List

1. Thelma Ritter in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and Pickup on South Street (Sam Fuller, 1953)

2. Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) and Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)

3. Ruby Dee in A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961)

4. Jane Alexander in All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)

5. Ann Sheridan in The Man Who Came to Dinner (William Keighley, 1942) and Edge of Darkness (Lewis Milestone, 1947)

Josh’s Complete List

1.  Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

2. Lillian Gish in The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1954)

3. Sandra Oh in Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

4. Christina Ricci in Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1993)

5. Julianne Moore in Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

honorable mention

Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup (Mc Carey, 1933)

Joan Blondell in Gold Diggers of 1933 (Berkeley and LeRoy, 1933)

Gladys George in The Roaring Twenties (Walsh, 1939)

Mary Astor in The Palm Beach Story (Sturges, 1942)

Josephine Hull and Jean Adair in Arsenic and Old Lace (Capra, 1944)

Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit (Lean, 1945 – UK)

Leopoldine Konstantin in Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946)

Thelma Ritter in All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950)

Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952)

Setsuko Hara in Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953 – Jap.)

Vera Miles in The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

Hope Lange in Peyton Place (Robson, 1957)

Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)

Jessica Tandy in The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)

Sylvia Sidney in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (Cates, 1973)

Madeleine Kahn in Blazing Saddles (Brooks, 1974)

Vanessa Redgrave in Prick Up Your Ears (Frears, 1987 – UK)

Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl (Nichols, 1988)

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel, 2006)

Ann Dowd in Hereditary (Aster, 2018)

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“When you’re young, you believe there are many people you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.“

A: Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Vintage Sand Episode 34A on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 34B on SoundCloud

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Episodes 33 A and B: No Small Parts: Our Guide to Our Favorite Overlooked and Underloved Performances by Supporting Actors (October 2021)

In the past, Team Vintage Sand has focused primarily on specific directors and movements in the history of film. Of course, we understand the fundamental paradox of the auteur theory (in that film is by its nature the most collaborative medium). But if we are making the case for film as art, then there needs to be an artist, and organizing the podcast around the auteurist ideas of critics like Truffaut and Andrew Sarris makes a great deal of sense. In Episode 33, however, we finally put that idea on the shelf for a moment and use another lens to focus on some of the movies we love: the importance of acting. This is a natural move for us, considering that both Michael and John are trained actors and bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to our enterprise. So join us, Vintage Sand fans, as we follow a slightly different path and focus on our favorite underloved and overlooked performances in film by supporting actors. And when you get John and Mike talking about acting, there’s no stopping them, so we have divided the episode in half; Episode 33 B will be appearing in a couple of weeks. For me, the non-actor in the group, I would say that I learned more from this episode than any one we’ve ever done; our hope is that this will open the same kind of doors for you as well.

Michael’s complete List

1. Ralph Richardson in The Heiress (Wyler, 1949)

2. Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

3. Lee Tracy in The Best Man (Franklin Schaffner, 1964)

4. Robert Preston in S.O.B. (Blake Edwards, 1981)

5. Jack Carson in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958)

John’s COMPLETE List

1. Claude Rains in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943)

2. John Cazale in The Godfather, Part II (Francis Coppola, 1974)

3. Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

4. Alan Rickman in Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1994)

5. Sessue Hayakawa in The Bridge Over the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

Josh’s COMplete List

1, Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

2. John Goodman in The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers, 1997)

3. John Hawkes in Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

4. Burt Lancaster in Field of Dreams (Phil Alden Robinson, 1989)

5. TIE: Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and Don Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)

honorable mention

Sidney Greenstreet in Christmas in Connecticul (Godfrey, 1945)

Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)

Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959)

Ossie Davis in The Hill (Lumet, 1964)

Tom Courtenay in Doctor Zhivago (Lean, 1965)

Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons (Zinnemann, 1966)

Paul Ford in A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Cook, 1966)

Charles Boyer in Barefoot in the Park (Saks, 1967)

Richard Castellano and John Marley in The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

Melvyn Douglas in The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972)

Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)

Charles Durning in To Be or Not to Be (Brooks, 1983)

Vincent Gardenia in Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987)

Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride (Reiner, 1987)

Ed Harris and Gary Sinise in Apollo 13 (Howard, 1995)

Christopher Walken in Catch Me if You Can (Spielberg, 2003)

John’s Monthly Quote Quiz

Q: –“You bastard. 

–Yes sir. In my case, an accident of birth. But you–you’re a self-made man.”

A: The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966)

Vintage Sand Episode 33A on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 33B on SoundCloud

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Episode 32: The Vintage Sand Guide to Our Favorite Books on Film (August 2021)

We know what you’re thinking. How can those Vintage Sand guys be so durned knowledgeable about film and yet still maintain their humility? Well, of course the three of us have seen way too many films over the years, but the truth is that so much of what has shaped our lives as filmgoers has come from reading some of the great books written about film by filmmakers, great critics and film historians.  At Vintage Sand, we’ve never claimed any expertise in film as such. We have tried simply to share our enthusiasm in the hope of opening doors for our listeners regarding our favorite films and perhaps some different and useful ways to watch them.

So, instead of trying to take you to school this time, we’re taking you to the library. The books listed below, as mentioned above, do what film studies does best – open new doors. You’ll find that the books on our list are pretty much free of jargon (the use of the word “liminality” is expressly forbidden), as is tell-all gossip. For time’s sake, the only books we’ve left out are fictional works about Hollywood and the process of making movies: West’s The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Southern’s Blue Movie, are some examples that are worth your time. So dig up your library cards, clean your glasses and come along with us to see why names like David Thomson and Donald Spoto are as important to our lives as film fanatics as are those of Kubrick or Hitchcock.

The List

General Film History and Theory/Reference

Thomson, David – A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 6^th ed. (2014)

Thomson, David – Have You Seen…? (2010)

Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall, eds. – Film Theory and Criticism. 8^th ed. (2016)

Bazin, Andre – What is Cinema? Vols. 1 and 2 (1967-1971)

Cook, David – A History of Narrative Film, 5^th ed. (2016)

Giannetti, Louis – Understanding Movies, 14^th ed. (2018)

Monaco James – How to Read a Film, 4^th ed. (2009)

Peary, Danny – Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986)

Peary, Danny – Alternate Oscars (1993)

 

The Great Critics

Agee, James – Agee on Film (1958)

Kael, Pauline – I Lost It at the Movies (1965)

Kauffman, Stanley – A World on Film (1966)

Sarris, Andrew – The American Cinema (1968)

Farber, Manny – Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (1971)

Hillier, Jim, ed. – Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950’s (1989)

Rosenbaum, Jonathan – Essential Cinema (2004)

Lopate, Philip, ed. American Movie Critics (2006)

 

Filmmakers on Filmmaking

Eisenstein, Sergei – Film Sense (1925)

Bresson, Robert – Notes on Cinematography (1975)

Rosenblum, Ralph – When the Shooting Starts, the Cutting Begins (1979)

Murch, Walter – In the Blink of an Eye (1992)

Lumet, Sidney – Making Movies (1995)

 

 Studies of Individual Directors

Rohmer, Eric and Claude Chabrol – Hitchcock (1957)

Truffaut, Francois – Hitchcock (1964)

Wood, Robin – Hitchcock’s Films (1965)

Spoto, Donald – The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976)

Spoto, Donald – The Dark Side of Genius (1980)

White, Edward – The 12 Lives of Alfred Hitchcock (2021)

Bogdanovich, Peter – John Ford (1971)

Bogdanovich, Peter – This is Orson Welles (1992)

Crowe, Cameron – Conversations with Wilder (1999)

Eisner, Lotte – Murnau (1964)

Eisner, Lotte – Fritz Lang (1976)

Salles-Gomes, P.E. – Vigo (1972)

Durgnat, Raymond – Jean Renoir (1974)

Roud, Richard – Godard (1968)

Richie, Donald – The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965)

Schrader, Paul – Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer (1972)

Harris, Mark – Five Came Back (2014)

 

Representation

Anything by Donald Bogle

Haskell, Molly – From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974)

Russo, Vito – The Celluloid Closet (1981)

Diawara, Manthia, ed. – Black American Cinema (1993)

Feng, Peter – Identities in Motion (2002)

Rodriguez, Clara – Heroes, Lovers and Others (2004)

 

Genre Studies

Eisner, Lotte – The Haunted Screen (1969)

Kracauer, Siegfried – From Caligari to Hitler (1947)

Mast, Gerald – The Comic Mind (1973)

Hirsch, Foster – The Dark Side of the Screen (1981)

Hoberman, J. – Midnight Movies (1983)

Peary, Danny – Cult Movies 1-3 (1981/1983/1988)

 

Film of a Particular Era or Year

Ramsaye, Terry – A Million and One Nights (1926)

Brownlow, Kevin – The Parade’s Gone By (1968)

Everson, William K. – American Silent Film (1978)

Doherty, Thomas – Pre-Code Hollywood (1999)

Harris, Mark – Pictures at a Revolution (2008)

Biskind, Peter – Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)

Biskind, Peter – Down and Dirty Pictures (2004)

Raftery, Brian. 1999. Best. Movie. Year. Ever. (2019)

  

Books Focusing on One Particular Film

O’Donnell, Pierce – Fatal Subtraction (1992 – about Coming to America)

Salomon, Julie – The Devil’s Candy (1992 – about Bonfire of the Vanities)

Bach, Steven – Final Cut (1999 – about Heaven’s Gate)

Wasson, Sam – The Big Goodbye (2020 – about Chinatown)

 

Memoirs

Sternberg, Josef – Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965)

Signoret, Simone – Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be (1978)

Winters, Shelley – Shelley: Also Known as Shirley (1980)

Bunuel, Luis with Jean-Claude Carriere – My Last Sigh (1983)

Goldman, William – Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983)

Phillips, Julia – You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991)

Evans, Robert – The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994)

NEW feature! this month’s quote quiz

Q: “I looked for you in the closet tonight.”

A: Blue Velvet – David Lynch, 1986 

Vintage Sand Episode 32 on SoundCloud

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Episode 31: The Final Countdown: Our Favorite Last Films by Great Directors (July 2021)

7 Women. Rio Lobo. The Other Side of the Wind. Family Plot. Buddy Buddy. Pocketful of Miracles. A Countess from Hong Kong. Have you even heard of these films, let alone seen them? Yet they stand as the final works, respectively, of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin. In Episode 31 of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand explores the question of why so many, if not most, of our greatest directors conclude their careers with middling, occasionally atrocious, and almost universally forgettable films.

But do not despair, dear listener; we also travel to France, Sweden, Japan and back home, and across the years from the early 1930’s to the first years of this century, to give our favorite examples of great directors who ended their careers on a high note. These latter fall into two distinct categories: the majority, where directors were unaware that their latest effort would serve as their final statement, and those rare cases where the artists involved knew that it would be their last word as an artist and acted accordingly. It’s a great mix of films, so come along for the ride and hope with us that Inland Empire will not be David Lynch’s final feature, that An Officer and a Spy will not be Roman Polanski’s last word, and that if Tarantino stops at ten, as he has promised, that the next one will be better than the last few.

Our FAVorites, in chronological order:

L’Atalante – Jean Vigo, 1934 (Fr.)

Lola Montes – Max Ophuls, 1956 (Fr.)

Street of Shame – Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956 (Jap.)

That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Buñuel, 1977 (Fr./Spa.)

Once Upon a Time in America – Sergio Leone, 1984

A Passage to India – David Lean, 1984

Red – Kristof Kieslowski, 1994 (Fr.)

Sarabande – Ingmar Bergman, 2003 (Swe.)

honorable mentions:

Tabu – F.W. Murnau, 1931

Imitation of Life – Douglas Sirk, 1959

The Sacrifice – Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986 (Rus.)

The Dead – John Huston, 1987

A Prairie Home Companion – Robert Altman, 2006

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – Sidney Lumet, 2007

NEW feature! this month’s quote quiz

Q: “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie laced with arsenic.”

A: The Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick, 1957 

Vintage Sand Episode 31 on SoundCloud

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Episode 30: Hidden Gems, Volume II (June 2021)

Back in the before time, we did a long-ago episode (#11, if you’re playing along at home) where we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. At the time, we promised/threatened to go down this path again and take you, loyal listeners, into some more dark and obscure corners of film history. So enjoy episode 30, Hidden Gems, Volume II, where john, Michael and JOSH take a closer look at three very different films: a broad satire from the early 70’s by a first-time director about to become a small-screen legend; a sweet, lowkey, oddball comedy by a brilliant director who never could find his place in hollywood; and a comedy-drama by a skilled craftsman of a director based on a book by one of our greatest modern novelists. and by the way, how do You get ice cream out of velour upholstery?

FILMS:

John: Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)

Josh: Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984)

Michael: Cold Turkey  (Norman Lear, 1971)

Vintage Sand Episode 30 on SoundCloud

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Episode 29: Home Movies: The Best of 2020 (May 2021)

It was a year, and an Oscars ceremony, unlike any other in memory. That being said, there were many films, both big and small, that we think will stand the test of time and which folks may still be watching 50 years from now. So join us for the ride as we explore some of 2020’s most memorable films, from Nomadland to Palm Springs and from Minari to Da 5 Bloods; it’s our Journal of the Plague Year.  Whatever our feelings about the films of 2020, though, Episode 29 is a cause for celebration for us. It is the first time in 14 months that John, Michael and I were able to record the episode live and together in the same room. All due respect and love to the makers of Zoom, which allowed us to continue the podcast through this miserable year, but this was a reminder of why we started Vintage Sand in the first place and why we so enjoy creating it. We hope that the joy we felt in really working together again will be contagious for our fans, and that you will all stay safe and take care. As Fern says, we’ll see you down the road.

First Things First: Oscar Snubs

• All respect to Chadwick Boseman and Anthony Hopkins, but two of the most powerful performances of the year were overlooked: first, the criminally underrated Delroy Lindo inhabiting a character the likes of which we’ve never seen before, in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.
• And as awesome as it was seeing Jodie Foster accepting the Golden Globe for The Mauritanian in her jammies, how does Tahar Rahim, who gives a brilliant turn as the title character in that film, not even get nominated?
• While we’re at it, how does Radha Blank get shut out for one of the most original screenplays of the year, The 40 Year Old Version? Certainly more original than any of the nominees, including the winner.
• And the man who put “Original” in the term “Original Screenplay”, Charlie Kaufman, gets nothing for his usual mind-bending meta jazz in I’m Thinking of Ending Things?
• How in the name of Gregg Toland did Mank beat Nomadland for cinematography? Seriously? And while we’re on Mank, it’s a shame that Amanda Seyfried’s wondrous embodiment of Marion Davies was the same year as Youn Yuh-jung’s unforgettable Grandma in Minari. Seyfried’s performance was, for us, the only thing that made Mank worthwhile.
• We love the octopus, of course, but he really beat Crip Camp for Best Doc Feature? And Boys State wasn’t even nominated?
• And to begin where we started, no recognition AGAIN for Spike Lee, this time for showing us for the Black experience in Vietnam in Da 5 Bloods? What does this man have to do to get a Best Director nom, let alone a statue?

Oscar Highlights

• H.E.R. Enough said.
• Logistics and Soderbergh aside, L.A.’s Union Station is the most beautiful train station in the country
• Oh, and the fact that after the horror show that was Green Book, they’ve gotten it right two years in a row with Parasite and Nomadland
• And if you loved Judas and the Black Messiah, PLEASE do anything in your power to track down the 1971 doc The Murder of Fred Hampton (I think it’s free on YouTube). As wonderful as Daniel Kaluuya was (and he was), nothing compares to watching Chairman Fred himself

TEN BEST Unsung Films of the Year

• The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson) – Sweet, atmospheric, Twilight Zone-style science fiction
• The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Blythewood) – Fun action film with Charlize Theron
• I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman) – Time has shown that Kaufman is more effective when Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry is behind the camera, but this is a must for fans of Kaufman’s unique vision
• The 40 Year Old Version (Radha Blank) – Announcing the arrival of a completely new voice!
• On the Rocks – (Sophia Coppola) – Even if it doesn’t recapture the Bill Murray magic of Lost in Translation, still very much worth your time
• Palm Springs (Max Barbakow) – This smart, spiky Groundhog Day variation features lovely performances in the leads by Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti and great cameos by JK Simmons and many others
• The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow) – Pete Davidson gets the Amy Schumer/Trainwreck treatment in a film that I, as a native Staten Islander, can say with some authority captures the uniqueness of my homeland with painful and perfect accuracy
• Bill and Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot) – a sweet, smart, enjoyable and unexpectedly necessary conclusion to the trilogy after much too long a wait
• Better Days (Kwok Cheung Tsang, Chi.) – A unique take on teenage bullying, to say the least
• The Truth (Hirokatsu Kore-eda, Jap.) – A stellar cast is featured in Kore-eda’s follow up to one of John’s recent favorites, Shoplifters

Film lovers unite in celebration: David Thomson has a new book out on the history of directors!

Vintage Sand Episode 29 on SoundCloud

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Episode 28: Everybody Knows the Score (March 2021)

Welcome to Episode 28 of Vintage Sand, your Film History podcast. In this episode, Everybody Knows the Score, we explore some of the best soundtracks in the history of film. For our purposes this time out, we are focusing strictly on non-diagetic (“background”) music written for instruments and/or voice for a particular film. We are not focusing on…

• …songs written for a soundtrack. This rules out both musicals and collections ranging from Isaac Hayes’ music for Shaft to Aimee Mann’s original songs for Magnolia.

• …curated collections of songs by various artists. We call this the T-Bone Burnett Rule. Choosing songs for a film is an art in itself, and such directors as Scorsese, Tarantino, both our favorite Andersons and the Coen Brothers are among the masters. A worthy endeavor if done well, but another art form entirely.

• …collections of classical pieces by one composer (Manhattan, for example) or multiple composers (think 2001 and The Tree of Life)

So we range from Golden Age Hollywood masters like Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman, all the way through the best work being done today, from Alexandre Desplat and Carter Burwell to Reznor/ Ross and Jonny Greenwood. We also try to establish that the collaboration between director and composer can be among the most crucial in making bad films good and good ones classics. So don’t be surprised if a lot of work that these partnerships produced appears among our faves: Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock, John Williams and Steven Spielberg/George Lucas, Nino Rota and Francis Coppola, Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone and Danny Elfman and Tim Burton, to name but a few. Fair warning—between our atrocious humming skills and copyright issues, you may not hear much actual music. But by episode’s end, you will surely know the score.

OUR FAVORITES:

NOTE: These lists come with the understanding that Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is simply in a category all its own.

Josh’s Complete List

1. Ennio Morricone – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1968 – It.)

2. Richard Einhorn – “Voices of Light”, 1993 – The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928)

3. John Williams – Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

4. Erich Wolfgang Korngold – The Adventures of Robin Hood (Keighley & Curtiz, 1938)

5. Danny Elfman – Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)

6. Jonny Greenwood – There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007)

7. Vangelis – Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981) & Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

8. Clint Mansell & the Kronos Quartet – Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)

9. Peter Gabriel – The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

10. Rachel Portman – Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998)

John’s Complete List

1. Bernard Herrmann – Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

2. Nino Rota – The Godfather, Parts I and II (Francis Coppola, 1972/1974)

3. Elmer Bernstein – To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)

4. John Williams – Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

5. Jerry Goldsmith – Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

6. Maurice Jarre – Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

7. Miklos Rosza – Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)

8. Peter Gabriel – The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988)

9. Randy Newman – The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)

10. Carter Burwell – Carol (Todd Haynes, 2014)

Michael’s Complete List

1. Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread (P.T. Anderson, 2018)

2. Nino Rota – Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973 – It.)

3. Elmer Bernstein – The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)

4. John Barry – The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1967) & The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968)

5. Bernard Herrmann – North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

6. David Raksin – Laura (Otto Preminger & Reuben Mamoulian, 1944)

7. Miles Davis – Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958 – Fr.)

8. Jerry Goldsmith – Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)

9. Aaron Copland – The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

10. Miklos Rosza – The V.I.P.’s (Anthony Asquith, 1963)

NOTE: We also strongly recommend hunting down the last score Bernard Herrmann ever wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, 1966’s Torn Curtain. Hitchcock gave in to studio pressure to replace the score with something more contemporary, which he did without even telling Herrmann. The two never spoke to each other again.

Vintage Sand Episode 28 on SoundCloud

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Episode 27: Director’s Cut: Bong Jun-ho (February 2021)

Team Vintage Sand returns with Director’s Cut: Bong Jun-ho, our study of the artist who, following last year’s Oscars, may now properly be called one of the world’s most important filmmakers. While Parasite brought him Oscars, a Palme d’Or and international fame, Bong has been making his brilliant, iconoclastic films for nearly two decades. As we examine all seven of Bong’s feature films, several things become clear. The first is that he is a true poet of dislocation. South Korea has transformed from a relatively sleepy backwater to late-capitalist tech powerhouse in only a couple of decades. While the nation appears prosperous from the outside, Bong’s films directly and implicitly tell the story of what the sudden change has meant in terms of economic insecurity, fracturing family relationships and a general mistrust and lack of respect for those in authority. But what makes Bong truly unique is that he may be the most adept director in history at making sudden and frequent tonal shifts that feel organic to his stories. Working in a multitude of genres, from social and ecological allegory to police procedurals to late Hitchcock to monster films, he is somehow able to skip from intensity to lightness and back again without missing a beat. In his first feature, 2002’s Barking Dogs NEVER Bite, the apartment super says, “Who would ever imagine that someone would live under a building?” After watching Parasite’s incredible twist featuring another man living under a building, we salute Bong with the same word that that half-crazed, creditor-dodging, knife-wielding soul repeats constantly: Respect!

OUR TOP Ten BONG JUN-HO MOMENTS

1. The almost literal descent into Hell as the Kim family flees the Parks’ home in the worst rainstorm Seoul has ever seen in Parasite (2019). Here, Bong creates the perfect visual metaphor for the issues of social class that are so much the heart of his work.
2. The non-stop pan in The Host (2006) that takes us from the lab, where an endless series of formaldehyde bottles is being “harmlessly” emptied into the drain, dissolves into a shot of the River Han flowing along, and dissolves again into a couple of fishermen discovering an infant mutant creature and tossing it back into the river. Horror, humor and social commentary all in one, as Bong tends to do.
3. The introduction of Mother (2009), where the title character wanders, almost Monty Python-like, through a field towards us, stops in front of the camera and spontaneously breaks into a bizarre dance worthy of a character in Lynch’s Twin Peaks. A lovely match with the dance on the tour bus that closes the film.
4. “Jessica”, from the University of Illinois, convinces Mrs. Park that her son Da-song is in desperate need of an art therapist in Parasite. Mr. Kim is quite correct is stating that if Oxford gave a degree in the art of the con, his daughter would easily get a PhD.
5. Bong is unparalleled at scenes involving motion, especially chase scenes, and nowhere is this done better than the amazing chase of Suspect #3 through the quarry at night in Memories of Murder (2004)
6. The tragic, emblematic tale of “Boiler Kim” from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2002). One of Bong’s first references to the rampant corruption in South Korean society, told through a lens borrowed straight from Edgar Allan Poe. “It’s spinning!”
7. The nonchalant way in which Chung-sook, the new housekeeper for the Park family, casually kicks her predecessor down a flight of stairs to the sub-basement in Parasite. Terrifying and utterly hilarious, and completely representative of the lengths people will go to avoid falling on the wrong side of the widening economic divide in South Korea.
8. The genuinely moving sacrifice by our young heroine Ah-sung at the end of The Host
9. Okja, the genetically enhanced mega-pig, risks his own life to save his beloved Mija, who is hanging off a cliff, in Okja (2017)
10. Any of the snowscapes we glimpse out of the window of the train in Snowpiercer (2013), especially Yekaterina Bridge and the concluding polar bear.

Vintage Sand Episode 27 on SoundCloud

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Episode 26: Alternate Oscars – 1970’s Edition (December 2020)

Once again, Team Vintage Sand returns to pay tribute to Danny Peary’s wonderful 1993 book Alternate Oscars; this time, our focus is the 1970’s, which many call the greatest decade in the history of American film. If this is so, it’s because for a brief shining moment, from Easy Rider to the birth of the tyranny of opening weekend grosses engendered by films like Jaws and Star Wars, the most powerful figure in Hollywood was the director. The studios had collapsed under their own weight at the end of the ’60’s, and the Film School Generation of directors, inspired by American mavericks and the French New Wave alike, were handed the keys. This was the generation of Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Spielberg, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Rafelson and some kindred spirit Hollywood vets like Altman and Ashby. Can you imagine a system that was able to produce Godfather, Part II and Chinatown in the same year? As Peter Biskind relates in his essential Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. it was all over by the middle of the decade, as the money people regained control with the rise of the likes of Eisner and Ovitz, CAA and package deals. There was never anything like the “Hollywood New Wave” before, and chances are we will never see anything like it again. So come celebrate along with us as we battle it out amongst ourselves to select the very best of a brilliant bunch–Yeah, we’re talkin’ to you!

1970: Patton (Schaffner)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson)

Michael – M*A*S*H (Altman)

John – Little Big Man (Penn)

Sleeper Picks: The Landlord (Ashby), My Night at Maud’s (Rohmer, Fr.)

1971: The French Connection (Friedkin)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich)

Michael – Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Schlesinger, UK)

John – The Conformist (Bertolucci, It.)

*Sleeper Picks: See Michael’s list below.

1972: The Godfather (Coppola)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh, Michael and John – The Godfather

Sleeper Picks: The King of Marvin Gardens (Rafelson), Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Herzog, Ger.), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Buñuel, Fr./Spa.), The Candidate (Ritchie)

1973: The Sting (Hill)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Badlands (Malick)

Michael – Cries and Whispers (Bergman, Swe.)

John – Mean Streets (Scorsese) 

Sleeper Picks: Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (Cates), Paper Moon (Bogdanovich), The Long Goodbye (Altman), The Last Detail (Ashby), American Graffiti (Lucas), Don’t Look Now (Roeg, UK), Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, Spa.), The Wicker Man (Hardy, UK)

1974: The Godfather, Part II (Coppola)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and Michael – Chinatown (Polanski)

John – The Godfather, Part II

Sleeper Picks: Day for Night (Truffaut, Fr.), Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, Ger.), The Parallax View (Pakula), The Conversation (Coppola), Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman, Swe.), Lacombe, Lucien (Malle, Fr.)

1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Jaws (Spielberg)

Michael – Nashville (Altman)

John – Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)

Sleeper Picks: The Man Who Would Be King (Huston), Amarcord (Fellini, It.), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Jones and Gilliam, UK), The Romantic Englishwoman (Losey, UK)

1976: Rocky (Avildsen)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Taxi Driver (Scorsese)

Michael – Network (Lumet)

John – All the President’s Men (Pakula)

Sleeper Picks: Face to Face (Bergman, Swe.), The Shootist (Siegel), Next Stop Greenwich Village (Mazursky), Carrie (De Palma)

1977: Annie Hall (Allen)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Star Wars (Lucas)

Michael and John – Annie Hall

Sleeper Picks: Eraserhead (Lynch), That Obscure Object of Desire (Buñuel, Fr./Spa.), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg), 3 Women (Altman), Providence (Resnais)

1978: The Deer Hunter (Cimino)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – No Pick

Michael – Stevie (Enders, UK)

John – The Deer Hunter

Sleeper Picks: Fingers (Toback), An Unmarried Woman (Mazursky)

1979: Kramer vs. Kramer (Benton)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – Apocalypse Now (Coppola)

Michael – Manhattan (Allen)

Sleeper Picks: Alien (Scott), Breaking Away (Yates), Being There (Ashby), The Last Wave (Weir, Austra.), Norma Rae (Ritt)

*Mike’s List of 25 Great Films from 1971

1. Allen – Bananas  
2. Altman – McCabe and Mrs. Miller 
3. Arkin – Little Murders  
4. Ashby – Harold and Maude  
5. Bergman (Swe.) – The Touch  
6. Brook (UK) – King Lear
7. Cacoyannis – The Trojan Women  
8. Cassavetes – Minnie and Moskowitz
9. De Sica (It.) – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis  
10. Eastwood – Play Misty for Me
11. Hiller – The Hospital
12. Lear – Cold Turkey   
13. Losey (UK) – The Go-Between
14. Lumet – The Anderson Tapes  
15. May – A New Leaf 
16. Newman – Sometimes a Great Notion
17. Nichols – Carnal Knowledge  
18. Ophuls (Fr. – Doc) – The Sorrow and the Pity 
19. Pakula – Klute 
20. Parks – Shaft 
21. Polanski – Macbeth 
22. Preminger – Such Good Friends
23. Rohmer (Fr.) – Claire’s Knee
24. Russell (UK) – The Boyfriend 
25. Siegel – The Beguiled  

Vintage Sand Episode 26 on SoundCloud

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Episode 25: Election Day Special: Our Favorite American Political Films (November 2020)

With the most important election of our lifetimes upon us, Team Vintage Sand celebrates its Silver Episode by exploring our favorite political films Made in USA, AS JLG SAID. “Political film” is a very difficult term to define, and we try to examine the idea through a number of different lenses. After all, one might argue that in a sense, all films are political. There are films that deal with specific historical figures, from Lincoln to Huey Long to W. There are films that focus on the political process, from Mr. Smith to Advise and Consent to The Candidate. You have more conventional comedies and dramas that use politics as a background, from State of the Union and Born Yesterday to The American President and Eastwood’s Absolute Power or Murder at 1600. Occasionally, the political film takes the form of satire, in works ranging from Duck Soup to Dr. Strangelove to Idiocracy. Politics also frequently appears under the umbrella of genre, particularly horror and science fiction, as exemplified by films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Get Out. And finally, there’s what we refer to as the Gatsby Films, which don’t focus explicitly on politics but more on who we are as Americans and the nature of the American character. Don’t forget–the working title for Citizen Kane was, simply, American.

Any way you look at it, politics has made a great topic for American filmmakers (we exclude foreign filmmakers simply in the interest of brevity; after all, we could, and probably should, do an entire episode on the sociopolitical allegories of Bong Jun-Ho). We hope it makes great listening for you as well, as we brace ourselves for the Election of 2020 and its aftermath. And whatever happens, we’ll all probably end up saying the same thing that the surprise electoral victor Bill Mc Kay (Robert Redford) says at the end of The Candidate: What do we do now?

FEatured Films:

(Note–we know that these categories are arbitrary and that many of the films listed could fit into several of them. Like our current president, we accept no blame).

films featuring actual or fictionalized depictions of historical figures

All the King’s Men (Rossen, 1949)

Nixon (Stone, 1995)

Primary Colors (Nichols, 1998)

Thirteen Days (Donaldson, 2000)

Hyde Park on Hudson (Mitchell, 2012)

Lincoln (Spielberg, 2013)

And check out some of the obscure ones, like Tennessee Johnson (Dieterle, 1942) or Wilson (King, 1944). Still patiently waiting for the James A. Garfield biopic…

Best Appearance by an Ex-President: Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams in Amistad (Spielberg, 1996)

Procedural Politics

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, 1939)

Advise and Consent (Preminger,1962)

Seven Days in May (Frankenheimer, 1964)

The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972)

The Contender (Lurie, 2000)

The Paranoid style in american politics (thanks to richard hofstadter) 

The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962)

Three Days of the Condor (Pollack, 1973)

The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974)

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)

All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976)

Blow-Out (De Palma, 1981)

conventional comedies/dramas with a political setting

State of the Union (Capra, 1948)

The Last Hurrah (Ford, 1958)

The Best Man (Schaffner, 1964)

The Front (Ritt, 1976)

Dave (Ross, 1993)

The American President (Reiner, 1995)

Murder at 1600 (Little, 1997)

genre film as political allegory

The Thing (Nyby/Hawks, 1951)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956)

Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1975)

The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1982)

White Dog (Fuller, 1982)

The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013) and its sequels

White House Down (Emmerich, 2013)

Get Out (Peele, 2017)

The Hunt (Zobel, 2020)

And most dystopian films, from Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 to Hunger Games and Divergent

Political Satire

Duck Soup (Mc Carey, 1933)

The Great McGinty (Sturges, 1940)

Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964)

Bob Roberts (Robbins, 1992)

Wag the Dog (Levinson, 1997)

Bulworth (Beatty, 1998)

Idiocracy (Judge, 2006)

In the Loop (Iannucci, 2009)

The “Gatsby” Lens: Films that focus on the American Character

Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937)

The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940)

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)

A Face in the Crowd (Kazan, 1957)

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)

Nashville (Altman, 1975)

Election (Payne, 1999)

Bamboozled (Lee, 2000)

Vintage Sand Episode 25 on SoundCloud

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Episode 24: Doing the Right Thing, Volume II (October 2020)

In this episode, the second part of our exploration of African- Americans in film, Team Vintage Sand shifts its focus to the people behind the camera. Remember that it was not until Gordon Parks directed his autobiographical The Learning Tree in 1969 that Hollywood released a major film by a black director. What followed in its wake was the mixed blessing of “Blaxploitation” in the early 1970’s, which in turn inspired the first major wave of Black directors, led by Spike Lee and John Singleton in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Now, at the turn of a new decade, we are witnessing a golden era for Black filmmakers, led by the commercial and artistic successes of artists like Ryan Coogler, Ava Duvernay, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele and many others. And we are also beginning to see, especially through the efforts of Tyler Perry the first major studios created and owned by African-American artists and financiers.

Our goal in this episode is twofold. On one hand, we talk about some of the lesser-known and forgotten work by some of these major directors. At the same time, we try to call attention to more obscure films, such as Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Ivan Dixon’s one-of-a-kind The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) and Julie Dash’s incomparable Daughters of the Dust (1992, obscure no longer, thanks to Beyonce’s Lemonade film). Our hope is simply to open and perhaps reopen some doors for our audience. As with our previous episode, we are hoping that our listeners will share our experience in having the opportunity to re-examine their own assumptions and to look for different lenses through which to view this rich and complex history.

Recommended Films:

Oscar Micheaux: Within Our Gates (1920); Body and Soul (1925)

Spencer Williams: The Blood of Jesus (1941)

Gordon Parks – The Learning Tree (1969)

Melvin van Peebles – Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971)

Ivan Dixon – The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)                                                                        One reviewer called this once-lost film the bridge between Blaxploitation and Spike Lee

Charles Burnett – Killer of Sheep (1977); To Sleep with Anger (1990)

Spike Lee: Jungle Fever (1991); Crooklyn (1994); He Got Game (1998); Bamboozled (2000); The 25th Hour (2003) Chiraq (2015); Da 5 Bloods (2020)

John Singleton: Poetic Justice (1993); Higher Learning (1995); Rosewood (1997)

Marlon Riggs: Tongues Untied (1989)

Leslie Harris: Just Another Girl on the IRT (1991)

Julie Dash: Daughters of the Dust (1992)

Mario van Peebles: New Jack City (1992)

Carl Franklin: One False Move (1992); Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

The Hughes Brothers: Dead Presidents (1995)

Dee Rees: Pariah (2011)

Ryan Coogler: Fruitvale Station (2013)

Ava Duvernay: 13th (2016 – Doc); When They See Us (2019 – TV)

Justin Simien: Dear White People (2015)

Boots Riley: Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Melina Matsoukas: Queen & Slim (2019)

Gina Prince-Blythewood: The Old Guard (2020 – Netflix)

Radha Blank: The 40-Year-Old Version (2020)

Vintage Sand Episode 24 on SoundCloud

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Episode 23: Doing the Right Thing, Volume I (August 2020)

Team Vintage Sand is composed of three middle-aged cisgender White males who happen to be old friends and happen to have a passion for Film. In spite of these boundaries of perspective, however, we could not let this moment of social activism and (hopefully)progress go unnoted. Because perhaps more than any other cultural institution, Hollywood’s treatment of Black people both in front of and behind the camera has shaped the nation’s perception of race relations over the past century.

We have no claim of expertise on this history based on lived experience. Our goal in creating this episode (the first of two parts; in Episode 24, we will examine the work of Black filmmakers over the last 100 years)was to simply and briefly trace the changing history of the Black experience in American film. Our aim is to open some doors to artists, trends and films that even film fans may not know well. In doing so, we are hoping that our listeners will have the same experience we had in creating this episode; to re-examine our own assumptions and look for different lenses through which to view this rich and complex history.

A Very Brief History of the Black Experience in American Film

I. Separate but Unequal (Early 1910’s through Mid-1940’s)

Recommended Films:

Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

The Blood of Jesus (Spencer Williams, 1941)

II. Crumbs from the Table (1929 through 1945)

Recommended Films:

Hallelujah (King Vidor, 1929)

Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli, 1943)

Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone, 1943)

III.  The Age of Stereotype (1930 through Mid-1940’s)

Recommended Films:

Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)

Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (John Ford, 1935)

Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

IV. Passing (1930’s through 1940’s)

Recommended Films:

Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934 and Douglas Sirk, 1959)

Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949)

V. The Barrier Starts to Crumble (1955 through 1968)

Recommended Films:

The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958)

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)

On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959)

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)

VI. The Blaxploitation Era (1969 through 1977)

Recommended Films:

The Learning Tree (Gordon Parks, 1969)

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)

Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)

Superfly (Gordon Parks, Jr.)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974)

Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)

VII. Tellers of Other Stories (1985 through 2000)

Recommended Films:

Everything by Spike Lee and John Singleton

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash)

New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991)

Just Another Girl on the IRT (Leslie Harris, 1992)

One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992)

Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995)

Dead Presidents (The Hughes Brothers, 1995)

Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)

VIII. A New Golden Age (2010 through the present)

Recommended Films by Director:

Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther)

Ava Duvernay (Selma, 13th, When They See Us [TV])

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk)

Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us)

Justin Simien (Dear White People)

Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You)

                                1976-2020

Vintage Sand Episode 23 on SoundCloud

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Episode 22: Notes on Hitchcock’s Villains (July 2020)

For Episode 22, Team Vintage Sand returns to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, for the first time since Episode 5. In that one, we promised (or threatened) to devote a whole episode just to Hitchcock’s villains, characters who often end up stealing the films they’re in and are often more compelling than his heroes. Reaching all the way back to “The 39 Steps” (1935) and continuing through his penultimate film, 1972’s “Frenzy”, our intrepid team discusses what makes a great Hitchcock villain, which actors best fit the mold and which succeed by breaking it entirely. So listen in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts/iTunes and SoundCloud, check us out at www.vintagesand.com, and we know you’ll say about us, “Why, they wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

Some Bad Guys to Look Out For

The Villains Who Steal Their Respective Movies

Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains in Notorious, 1946)

Tony Wendice (Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder, 1954)

Bruno Antony (Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, 1951)

The Suave Charmers with the Evil Master Plan

Phillip Vandamm (James Mason in North by Northwest, 1959)

Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle in The 39 Steps, 1935)

Doctor Hartz (Paul Lukas in The Lady Vanishes, 1938)

Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall in Foreign Correspondent, 1940)

Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger in Saboteur, 1942)

and though he has has almost no screen time…

Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore in Vertigo, 1958)

The Gloriously Unhinged

Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, 1943)

Mrs. Danvers (Dame Judith Anderson in Rebecca, 1940)

Bob Rusk (Barry Foster in Frenzy, 1972)

The Not-So-Quietly Desperate

Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr in Rear Window, 1954)

Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse in I Confess, 1953)

Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka in Sabotage, 1936)

For Discussion: Who’s The Villain In…

Psycho (1960)?

The Birds (1963)?

Marnie (!964)?

Vintage Sand Episode 22 on SoundCloud

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Episode 21: Alternate Oscars – 1950’s Edition (June 2020)

Third time’s the charm, as we turn once again to Danny Peary’s amazing 1993 book Alternate Oscars, This go-round, Team Vintage Sand focuses on the 1950’s, a decade with some questionable Best Picture choices (to put it politely). Still can’t believe that The Greatest Show on Earth beat the unnominated Singin’ in the Rain, or that Around the World in 80 Days beat The Searchers, also not nominated? Join us on our alternate history as we set things right, start laughin’ at clouds, and mete out justice in our usual cruel-but-fair Vintage Sand style. Our only ground rule? No foreign language films, because otherwise it would have been a four-hour episode. And if you disagree with our choices, well, as Osgood Fielding III memorably put it, nobody’s perfect. Zowie!

1950: All About Eve (Mankiewicz)

What Should Have Won:

Josh and John – Sunset Blvd.  (Wilder)

Michael – All About Eve 

Sleeper Picks: The Asphalt Jungle (Huston), In a Lonely Place (Ray), The Third Man (Reed) and Adam’s Rib (Cukor)

1951: An American in Paris (Minnelli)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock)

Michael and John – A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan)

Sleeper Picks: Ace in the Hole (Wilder), The African Queen (Huston), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise)

1952: The Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Singin’ in the Rain (Donen/Kelly)

Michael and John – The Quiet Man (Ford)

Sleeper Picks: High Noon (Zinnemann), Pat and Mike (Cukor)

1953: From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Big Heat (Lang)

John and Michael – The Band Wagon (Minnelli)

Sleeper Picks: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks), Pickup on South Street (Fuller), The Little Fugitive (Engel)

1954: On the Waterfront (Kazan)

What Should Have Won: 

Michael, John and Josh – Rear Window (Hitchcock)

Sleeper Picks: Johnny Guitar (Ray), Sabrina (Wilder), Salt of the Earth (Biberman)

1955: Marty (D. Mann)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Rebel Without a Cause (Ray)

Michael and John – No Pick

Sleeper Picks: Night of the Hunter (Laughton), Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich)

1956: Around the World in 80 Days (Anderson)

What Should Have Won:

Josh, Michael and John – The Searchers (Ford)

Sleeper Picks: Bigger Than Life (Ray), Attack! (Aldrich), The Killing (Kubrick), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel)

1957: The Bridge Over the River Kwai (Lean)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Paths of Glory (Kubrick)

Michael and John – The Bridge Over the River Kwai

Sleeper Picks: The Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick), Twelve Angry Men (Lumet), A Face in the Crowd (Kazan), Funny Face (Donen)

1958: Gigi (Minnelli)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh, Michael and John – Vertigo (Hitchcock)

Sleeper Picks: Touch of Evil (Welles), The Defiant Ones (Kramer)

1959: Ben-Hur (Wyler)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and Michael – Some Like It Hot (Wilder)

John – North by Northwest (Hitchcock)

Sleeper Picks: Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger), Rio Bravo (Hawks), Shadows (Cassavettes)

Vintage Sand Episode 21 on SoundCloud

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Episode 20: The Next Auteurs (May 2020)

In the midst of the pandemic, many have turned to the art of the past, finding understandable comfort in nostalgia. Team Vintage Sand, in its usual charming and curmudgeonly way, has decided instead to look to the decade to come. In this episode, we discuss the directors that we think will become the next great voices in Film. Some obvious candidates are here, including Ryan Coogler, Damien Chazelle, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins and genre folks like Ari Aster and Denis Villeneuve. But there are some surprises as well. So we hope you’ll join Josh, Michael and John as, via Zoom, they buck the general trend by seeking comfort in the future. Plus, any opportunity to post a picture of Florence Pugh (who plays major roles in the films of two of our directors) is always welcome…

Top 20 Directors to Watch, with Recommended Films (in Alphabetical Order):

1. Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar)
2. Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land)
3. Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther)
4. Ava Duvernay (Selma, 13th [doc], When They See Us [TV])
5. Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman)
6. Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs [TV])
7. Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women)
8. Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace)
9. Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete)
10. Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk)
11. Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut [doc], Diane)
12. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, The Nightingale)
13. Hirokazu Kore-eda (Like Father Like Son, Our Little Sister, Shoplifters)
14. Steve Mc Queen (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, Widows)
15. Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us)
16. Jesse Peretz (Our Idiot Brother, Juliet Naked)
17. Celine Sciamma (Girlhood, Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
18. Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049)
19. Olivia Wilde (Booksmart)
20. Chloe Zhao (Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider)

Vintage Sand Episode 20 on SoundCloud

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Episode 19: The Best of the 2010’s Part II: #’s 5-1 (March 2020)

Well, Vintage Sand listeners, we’ve reached the top. Join us at the summit, where the air is thin and the trees are stubby, as John, Michael and Josh take you through their five favorite films of the decade recently ended. Some real surprises, some total non-surprises, and an overall sense that the early reports of the death of Film-with-a-capital-“F” were a bit premature. Seize the moments, or let the moments seize you!

Josh’s Complete List

1. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

2. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

3. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)

4. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

5. La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2017)

6. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers, 2013)

7. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

8. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

9. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

10. Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

John’s Complete List

1. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron, 2018 – Mex.)

2. The Tree of Life

3. Parasite (Bong Jun-Ho, 2019 – S. Kor.)

4. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018 – Jap.)

5. Phantom Thread (P.T. Anderson, 2017) and Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012): TIE

6. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2018)

7. Carol

8. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) – TIE

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel – TIE

10. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018) – TIE

Michael’s Complete List

1. Phantom Thread

2. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar, 2019 – Sp.)

3. Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)

4. Lincoln

5. Roma 

6. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012 – Fr.)

7. Parasite (Bong Jun-Ho, 2019 – S. Kor.)

8. Inside Llewyn Davis

9. The Kids Are Alright (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

10. Ida (Pawel Pawilkowski, 2014 – Pol.)

Vintage Sound Episode 19 on SoundCloud

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Episode 18: The Best of the 2010’s Part I: #’s 10-6 (February 2020)

Yes, fans, it’s the episode ten years in the making as Michael, John and Josh present the first half of their countdown of their ten favorite films of the newly-ended decade. For a period in film history that has already been mercilessly dismissed as a greed-driven, witless descent into endless sequels, remakes, CGI and superheroes, the 2010’s gave us some of the greatest films in our history, ones that will surely stand the test of time as “classics”. Ah, but which films are those, you ask with baited breath? As always, there is both lots of agreement and disagreement, and that’s where it gets interesting. Come join us for the ride, like Llewyn Davis taking that cat along on the subway…

Josh’s List

6. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers, 2013)

7. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

8. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

9. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

10. Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

John’s List

6. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2018)

7. Carol

8. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) – TIE

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel – TIE

10. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018) – TIE

Michael’s List

6. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)

7. Parasite (Bong Jun-Ho, 2019)

8. Inside Llewyn Davis

9. The Kids Are Alright (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

10. Ida (Pawel Pawilkowski, 2014)

Vintage Sand Episode 18 on SoundCloud

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Episode 17: The Irishman: It’s What It Is (December 2019)

When our Greatest Living Director puts out a new film that feels like a capstone to the major themes of his incomparable career, you know that Team Vintage Sand is on the case. Thus, Episode 17–The Irishman: It’s What It Is. Martin Scorsese’s 3 1/2 hour epic reunites all of the director’s major players (and adds in Al Pacino for good measure) to tell a sprawling organized crime story whose scope and range have not been seen in 35 years, since Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (which Josh thinks is a better film than The Irishman, over Mike and John’s strenuous objections). The Irishman will probably not be Scorsese’s last film, but it seems to be a final statement regarding both his ideas on the human impact of the male-centered world of organized violence (from Mean Streets through The Departed) and, in its brilliant final half hour, the spiritual searching prominent in some of his most underrated films (Last Temptation, Kundun, Silence). While we disagree slightly on The Irishman‘s place in the Scorsese canon, it’s a must-see for even the casual film lover. And in the end, the only hitman who can never be stopped is Time…

Our Top Five Underrated Scorsese Films

5. After Hours (1985) – Ever have one of those bad dreams where nothing makes sense and yet the “narrative” is held together by a kind of circular, nightmare logic? That’s After Hours, a film that sees Griffin Dunne’s Paul leave the relative safety of his midtown office and, in pursuit of a woman he just met (Rosanna Arquette), takes an unforgettable journey to a very Abstract Expressionist mid-80’s NYC Downtown. Every little thing that might possibly go wrong does. The $20 bill Paul was going to use to pay the driver flies out of the taxi window, and the fun begins. He scrapes together enough to take the subway home, but that very night, the fare goes up and he’s short. He is mistaken for a neighborhood burglar and pursued by an angry mob led by a vengeful ice cream truck driver. And so on. Dunne’s Paul is not a riveting presence at the heart of the film, but the characters who wander in and out of the nightmare are wonderful and unique, in particular the astonishing first major film appearance of Linda Fiorentino, here playing a sculptor. A dark and twisted comedy but a real treat, particularly for those who never got to experience the romantic and dangerous Downtown NYC of four decades ago, as well as for those of us who experienced it and miss it.

4. Hugo (2013) – One of the most inexplicable flops of the past decade, this is Scorsese’s adaptation of the already-classic children’s novel by Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It is a film that has some major things going for it: fantastic performances, including those by Asa Butterfield as the title character, Sasha Baron Cohen as the chief of security at the train station in which Hugo has carved out a place to live, Jude Law as Hugo’s genius of a father and the ever-reliable Ben Kingsley as the long-forgotten film pioneer Georges Melies, who by the end of the film receives a long-overdue rediscovery thanks in large part to Hugo. Some of the individual moments in the film are nothing short of breathtaking, especially the moment where Hugo, through an unusual and moving set of circumstances, finally gets his father’s greatest invention, an automaton, to work. The use of 3-D in creating a recognizable yet fantastical post-WWI Paris is immersive and gorgeous. But the best part of Hugo is that every frame of this film tells us that it is crafted by a most gifted artist who is hopelessly, utterly and completely in love with the movies and their power over our imagination.

3. Kundun (1997) – It’s not surprising that the man who once felt he was destined for the priesthood has made a series of interesting and unique films centered on spiritual concerns. 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese’s adaptation of the controversial Kazantzakis novel, is a film I happen to love, but is too (in)famous for this list. 2017’s Silence was mostly ignored, but if you check back in a decade, I would not be surprised if it’s reputation has grown substantially. That leaves this gorgeous, moving film, a biography of the current Dalai Lama from childhood to his nail-biting escape into India in 1959 with Chinese forces in hot pursuit. Shot by the legendary Roger Deakins and featuring a score by Phillip Glass, Kundun is not for everyone, especially considering how slow and episodic the story feels at times. The other issue is that perhaps more than any Scorsese film, it demands to be seen on a theater screen, which is an extremely rare occurrence. Sadly, the film is more relevant than at any time since its release, with  reports that China is perpetuating the same kind of “re-education”-style oppression against the Muslim Uighur population of the formerly autonomous Xinjiang province that forced the Dalai Lama to flee his native Tibet six decades ago.

2. The Age of Innocence (1994) – I have always maintained that only two great American films have been made from great American novels: The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird. Many, myself included, might add Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women to the list, and I have tried to make the case, with little success, for Jonathan Demme’s much-scorned 1998 adaptation of Beloved. But if there were any other film that deserves to join this exclusive group, it would be Scorsese’s ever-surprising take on Edith Wharton’s classic novel. In response to doubters who suggested that this was a very “un-Scorsese-like” topic to do, the director pointed out that this was actually one of his most violent films; it’s just that the violence isn’t physical. Featuring the usual masterful work from Daniel Day-Lewis, Age of Innocence also offers us not one but two of the great female performances in all of Scorsese’s work: Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess Olenska and Winona Ryder as May Welland.

1. The King of Comedy (1983) – Barely qualifies as underrated anymore, especially after Todd Phillips and company appropriated so much of the flow and feel of this film for Joker. The film was a complete disaster when it was released, and it initiated the decade-long commercial ebb that dogged Scorsese between Raging Bull and Goodfellas. We maintain that the only reason it failed was that it was about a quarter century ahead of its time, and we’re just starting to catch up with it now. One of DeNiro’s finest performances, a brilliant, obnoxious turn out of left field from a perfectly cast Jerry Lewis, and featuring one of the most memorable female characters in all of Scorsese’s work in Sandra Bernhard’s Masha. The story of Rupert Pupkin, the viciously untalented stand-up comedian who will stop at nothing to appear on the talk show of his idol, Jerry Langford (Lewis), King of Comedy saw our current obsession with fame for the dangerous pathology it is. A truly uncomfortable film in the best possible way and…Hey! Shut up, Ma! We’re doing a podcast down here…

Vintage Sand Episode 17 on SoundCloud

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Episode 16: Reopening the Book on Eyes Wide Shut (October 2019)

Join Team Vintage Sand as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of one of the most polarizing films ever created by a major filmmaker: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, his final work. Released to mixed reviews in 1999, the film has undergone a critical reappraisal in recent years, as such film luminaries as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh have recently expressed how their views on the film have evolved over the years. Hear the sparks fly as Michael (generally) likes the film, John’s willing to consider both sides and Josh hates it even more than he did two decades ago. Cool, cerebral, erotic thriller? Pathetic softcore (non-) porn by an erstwhile genius who by then was hopelessly out of touch? Your call, dear listener. And the password is Fidelio…get it?

Vintage Sand Episode 16 on SoundCloud

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Episode 15: “End of Film, End of Cinema” (September 2019)

In a perfectly symmetrical bookend to Episode 6, this episode finds our intrepid heroes of Team Vintage Sand exploring our favorite movie endings of all time. Creating a perfect conclusion to a movie is an extremely challenging task; even our greatest filmmakers have occasionally found it to be problematic (rat crossing a balcony railing, anyone?). We go around the world, and all the way back to silent film, to tip our collective hats to those we feel have gotten it just right. Plus, you get Michael and John presenting East Village Dinner Theatre, Josh trying to sing, and the first annual There Will Be Blood Imitation Contest. Forget it, Jake–it’s Vintage Sand.

Our Favorite Endings (All films from the US unless otherwise indicated).

Michael:

1. Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962)
2. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
3. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962)
4. Nashville (Robert Altman,1975)
5. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

John:

1. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
2. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953 – Jap.)
3. The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
4. Rome: Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945 – It.)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Josh:

1. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1953 – Jap.)
2. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
3. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
4. TIE: Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), The 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) and La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2017)
5. TIE: City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931), Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) and Monsters, Inc. (Pixar Studio, 2001)

Honorable Mentions, in No Particular Order

1. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943)
2. J’Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919 – Fr.)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
4. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
5. Se7en (David Fincher, 1995)
6. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972 – Ger.)
7. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
8. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959 – Fr.)
9. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
10. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949 – UK)

Vintage Sand Episode 15 on SoundCloud

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Episode 14: The Episode 14 Fists of McCluskey (August 2019)

Love him, hate him or both, the arrival of a new movie by Quentin Tarantino is an important event for anyone even remotely interested in film. In this episode, Team Vintage Sand takes a deep dive into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, QT’s love letter to the LA of his childhood. Can the brilliant performances by Brad Pitt and Leonardo Di Caprio overcome a meandering script and yet another controversial ending that rewrites history in a way that some have found trivializing and offensive? Where does the film fit in the Tarantino canon? The answer to these and other burning questions are contained in our latest episode, which is brought to you by the good people at Red Apple Cigarettes. Red Apple–we smoke ’em…

Ten Top Moments in Tarantino

1. Inglourious Basterds (2009): Opening Sequence. Although this is an uneven film, the extended sequence at the dairy farm is quite possibly the best set-piece he ever shot. It’s a textbook example of how to build tension quietly and inexorably, and our introduction to the invaluable genius of Christoph Waltz. The scene in the café and the extended sequence in the bar are fun, but M. La Padite’s farm is the reason to come back to this one over and over. Au revoir, Shoshanna!
2. Pulp Fiction (1994): Ezekiel 25:17. Everything brilliant about Tarantino as a writer and director encapsulated in one scene. The glowing briefcase tribute to Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. Check out the big brain on Brett. Big Kahuna burgers, and some of your tasty beverage to wash them down. Flock of Seagulls. Do they speak English in What? And, of course, the eponymous, pseudo-Biblical quote that ultimately appears on Nick Fury’s tombstone…
3. Reservoir Dogs (1992): “Like a Virgin”/”I don’t tip.” Has an American director ever announced his or her arrival in such a distinctive, hilarious and powerful way? From the somewhat misogynist set-piece analysis of Madonna’s song to Mr. Pink’s refusal on moral grounds to leave a gratuity, it was immediately clear in the first minutes of his first film that this was a voice unlike anything we’d ever heard before.
4. Jackie Brown (1997): “Are You Afraid of Me?” Jackie Brown is unique in QT’s work in that it is an adaptation of a book (Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch). More importantly, it is the only film of his that features fleshed-out, whole human beings involved in complex and interesting relationships. More than the friendship between Rick and Cliff that holds Once Upon a Time in Hollywood together, the relationship in Jackie Brown between the title character and Robert Forster’s bail bondsman Max Cherry is most honest and believable human-scale interaction in all of his work. When Jackie invites Max to escape with her to Spain, he declines, possibly because he is (with good reason) more than a bit afraid of her. Follow this with the final shot of Jackie headed to the airport in her car, singing along with Bobby Womack’s “Across 110^th Street” and you have the perfect ending to QT’s most underrated work.
5. Kill Bill II (2004): The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei. Beatrix Kiddo’s quest for revenge often feels like a cartoon or a video game, but this flashback gives the films their first moment of unexpected depth. Gordon Liu’s multilayered performance as the ageless rotten bastard Pai Mei puts this sequence over the top, as we see Beatrix learn, among many, many other skills, what to do if her enemy is only a couple of inches away from her. This will ultimately enable her to escape from the lonely grave of Paula Schultz. Later, Beatrix’ discovery that Elle has killed her master gives a huge jolt of power to their battle in Budd’s trailer. And that will be the story of her.
6. DeathProof (2007): Ship’s Mast and “I’m OK”: The first half of DeathProof is almost unwatchable and culminates in a scene of gratuitous and graphic violence. But the second half, featuring Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, the incomparable Zoe Bell and the insane “Ship’s Mast” stunt on an honest-to-goodness 1970 “Kowalski” Challenger (from Vanishing Point, a clear inspiration along with Two Lane Blacktop and other road films of the early 70’s) on the backroads of Tennessee, is QT at this best. With the arrival of the murderous Stuntman Mike, the scene evolves into one of the greatest car chases ever recorded on film, especially when, as in Bullitt, the prey becomes the hunter. The high point arrives when the Challenger crashes but Zoe is somehow, of course, very much alive and well.
7. Django Unchained (2012): Blood on the Cotton. There are many memorable moments (another brilliant opening sequence, for example) and performances (Samuel Jackson playing a character the likes of which we’ve never seen before in a Hollywood film, for one). But of all of these, one stands out in particular. During one of the many gun battles in the film, Tarantino gives us a slow-motion shot of bright red blood spraying over snowy white cotton plants. And there is the entire history of slavery in America encapsulated in one perfect image. It’s what great directors do.
8. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction: How About a Little Fire, Scarecrow?/You Give Her the F****n’ Shot. Essentially, two variations on the same idea. We remember the cutting off of the cop’s ear and the adrenaline injection into Mia Wallace’s heart as being unwatchably brutal. Yet we never actually see these two things happen on screen. The point is, it really feels like we do. Add the very Scorsese-like mix of comic elements in with the violence, and you get two examples of brilliant storytelling through editing that are worthy of Eisenstein. And when you contrast these two moments with the endless, almost childish brutality that puts a damper on the endings of Django, Hateful 8 and Once Upon a Time, one sees how much Tarantino has lost his way as a storyteller.
9. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019): The Wrecking Crew. By a whisker over Brad Pitt’s shirtless antenna repair and DiCaprio’s encounter with an 8 year old wunderkind, this may be the most memorable and human scene in Tarantino’s latest. Margot Robbie, as Sharon Tate, goes into a movie theater playing The Wrecking Crew, which turned out to be one of Tate’s last films. Much to her delight, the audience completely adores what Tate is doing on screen and appreciates her comedic gifts. The look of pure joy on Robbie’s face is simply unforgettable. As someone who has only ever been recognized for her physical beauty, her sense that she has real talent that other people acknowledge is simply the best movie theater reaction shot since Anna Karina cried at Falconetti’s performance in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc in Godard’s Vivre sa vie. The fact that the clip of Wrecking Crew is the original one featuring the real Sharon Tate took some people out of the film, but for many, it was a poignant reminder of how much potential we lost when she died.
10. The Hateful 8 (2015): “Jim Jones at Botany Bay”. Along with the beautiful, tension-building opening in the snow and the score that finally won Ennio Morricone his Oscar, this is one of the few things in the film that make it more than a waste of good 70mm stock. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the criminal Daisy Domergue, is given precious little to do in the film. But the moment where she takes over the screen and sings this plaintive folk ballad about an Australian convict somehow ratchets up the tension in an most unexpected and interesting way. Listen as JJL menacingly shifts the last line of the song to predict her own future and that of Kurt Russell’s sheriff. Soon enough, many people will be shot in the testicles in slow-motion close-up…

Vintage Sand Episode 14 on SoundCloud

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Episode 13: Alternate Oscars – 2000’s Edition (July 2019)

Turning once again to Danny Peary’s amazing 1993 book Alternate Oscars, Team Vintage Sand focuses on the 00’s, a decade with some questionable Best Picture choices (to put it politely). Still can’t believe that Crash and A Beautiful Mind won? Join us on our alternate history as we set things right, drink other people’s milkshakes and mete out justice in our usual cruel-but-fair Vintage Sand style. And while you may not be able to figure it out,you will be responsible for it on the mid-term.

2000: Gladiator (Scott)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Almost Famous (Crowe)

Michael – Traffic (Soderbergh)

John – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (A. Lee)

Sleeper Pick: Wonder Boys (Hanson)

2001: A Beautiful Mind (Howard)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Memento (Nolan)

Michael – Gosford Park (Altman)

John – Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)

Sleeper Pick: Moulin Rouge (Luhrman)

2002: Chicago (Marshall)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – The Pianist (Polanski)

Michael – The Hours (Daldry)

Sleeper Pick: Far from Heaven (Haynes)

2003: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Big Fish (Burton)

John and Michael – School of Rock (Linklater)

Sleeper Pick: Lost in Translation (S. Coppola)

2004: Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood)

What Should Have Won: 

Michael, John and Josh – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry)

Sleeper Pick: Before Sunset (Linklater)

2005: Crash (Haggis)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – Good Night and Good Luck (Clooney)

Michael – Brokeback Mountain (A. Lee)

John – Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Aardman Studios, UK)

Sleeper Pick: A History of Violence (Cronenberg)

2006: The Departed (Scorsese)

What Should Have Won:

Josh – Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro)

Michael and John – The Queen (Frears)

Sleeper Pick: Letters from Iwo Jima (Eastwood)

2007: No Country for Old Men (Coens)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh and John – There Will Be Blood (P. T. Anderson)

Michael – Sweeney Todd (Burton)

Sleeper Pick: Eastern Promises (Cronenberg)

2008: Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh – The Dark Knight (Nolan)

John and Michael – Milk (Van Sant)

Sleeper Pick: Rachel Getting Married (Demme)

2009: The Hurt Locker (Bigelow)

What Should Have Won: 

Josh, Michael and John – A Serious Man (Coens)

Sleeper Pick: White Ribbon (Haneke, Ger.)

Vintage Sand Episode 13 on SoundCloud

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Episode 12: Trainwreck, or What Happened to Film Comedy in the Teens? (June 2019)

Whatever happened to Hollywood film comedies? Setting aside action comedies like the Deadpool films and Thor: Ragnarok, as well as animated comedy, why have there been so few great film comedies in the 2010’s? We’re talking films where the humor arises organically from dialogue, setups and punchlines, and situational as well as physical humor; you know, like all those good ones from Duck Soup through The Hangover. With few exceptions, like Spy, Bridesmaids and Trainwreck (some controversy on that last one), the kind of comedy that Hollywood became famous for seems all but gone. In this episode, our intrepid heroes from Team Vintage Sand try to figure out if and why this is so.

Ten Film Comedies of the 2010’s that May Stand the Test of Time

Spy (Paul Feig, 2015) 

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011)

Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, 2015)

What We Do in the Shadows (Waititi and Clement, 2015)

Booksmart (Wilde 2019)

Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)

Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon, 2011)

The Dictator (Larry Charles, 2012)

Paul (Greg Mottola, 2011)

Vintage Sand Episode 12 on SoundCloud

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Episode 11: Hidden Gems, Volume I (May 2019)

What makes a film a classic? As with any art, the best answer is simply time. So many of the films we revere today were both critical and popular failures when they were released, and many successful films have likewise faded into obscurity. In this episode, each member of Team Vintage Sand champions a lost film that they feel merits a reappraisal. And where else would you get Bertrand Tavernier, Alan Rudolph and Dennis Hopper hanging out in the same room? Plus, we say goodbye to John Singleton, and use the names Agnes Varda and Doris Day in the same sentence.

John: Safe Conduct (Bertrand Tavernier, 2002 – Fr.)

Michael: Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997)

Josh: The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971)

Vintage Sand Episode 11 on SoundCloud

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Episode 10: Film’s Greatest One-Hit Wonders (March 2019)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of some of the greatest albums of the rock era: Abbey Road, Let It Bleed and Tommy are but a very small sample. Yet in that year of Woodstock, what was the most popular song of the year? That’s right, trivia fans: “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies. That got us to thinking about one-hit wonders, who have a place of pride in the history of film as well as music. Some of these films were made by directors who made many films but had only one hit, while some were made by artists who only had the chance to make one film. Some were completely ignored upon release, but their reputations have grown steadily in the years that followed; others were commercial and even critical successes upon release, but have faded somewhat over time. One-hit wonders in all endeavors are often dismissed out of hand, but let’s remember that 99.9999999% of all artists never even have the one hit. So join us this month as Team Vintage Sand gives some sugar to the “Sugar Sugars” of the film world as we celebrate the cinema’s greatest one-hit wonders.

Everybody’s #1:

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

John

2. Billy Budd (Peter Ustinov, 1962)

3. Boys Don’t Cry (Kim Pierce, 1999)

4. Boyz ‘n’ the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)

Michael

2. The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, 1980)

3. The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves, 1989)

4. The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley, 1997)

Josh

2. The Rapture (Michael Tolkin, 1991)

3. Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

4. Risky Business (Paul Brickman. 1983)

Vintage Sand Episode 10 on SoundCloud

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Episode 09: The Best of 2018 (January 2019)

For a while there, it looked as though 2018 might go down in history as one of the great years in film in recent memory. In the end, it was something of a split decision. The big, highly anticipated studio entries were mostly enjoyable but forgettable (think Ocean’s 8 or A Star Is Born). But it was a truly outstanding year for the small film, for the movies that told intimate stories in fine detail. The year will also be remembered as the year that black directors finally achieved a prominence in filmmaking of all sizes that was long overdue. Led by the likes of Ryan Coogler and Ava Duvernay, their success hinted that some day soon, “black directors” may simply be thought of as “directors”. (Now, as Wesley Morris pointed out in his brilliant Times article, let’s just hope that the Academy chooses not to repeat the fiasco of rewarding so-called “white savior” movies about racism by giving Green Book any major prizes). All in all, 2018 proved that the reports of television taking over as the predominant form of visual storytelling in our time may have been a bit premature…

Our Top Ten Lists

Josh:

1. Leave No Trace (Granik)
2. Black Panther (Coogler)
3. Roma (Cuaron)
4. Blackkklansman (Lee)
5. First Reformed (Schrader)
6. Eighth Grade (Burnham)
7. Isle of Dogs (Anderson)
8. Sorry to Bother You (Riley)
9. Annihilation (Garland)
10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coens)

Michael:

1. Roma
2. Cold War (Pawlikowski, Pol.)
3. (tie) First Reformed/Juliet Naked (Peretz)
4. Blindspotting (Lopez-Estrada)
5. Capernaum (Labecki)
6. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Heller)
7. The Death of Stalin (Iannucci)
8. Eighth Grade
9. Blackkklansman
10. The Favourite (Lanthimos)

John:

1. Roma
2. Blackkklansman
3. First Reformed
4. Isle of Dogs
5. (tie) Blindspottng/Leave No Trace
6. Private Life (Jenkins)
7. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
8. Eighth Grade
9. The Death of Stalin
10. Black Panther

Vintage Sand Episode 09 on SoundCloud

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Episode 08: Alternate Oscars – 1980’s Edition (December 2018)

In 1993, the great film writer Danny Peary published a book called Alternate Oscars. In it, Peary realized the silent (or quite vocal) wish of every film fan by going through the Oscars year by year, listing who won and then arguing who should have won and why. To celebrate the silver anniversary of Peary’s book, the Vintage Sand team takes Peary’s approach and applies it to that most underrated of decades in American film, the 1980’s. Look out, Miss Daisy; no one’s taking you to the Piggly Wiggly today…

1980: Ordinary People (Redford)

What Should Have Won: Raging Bull (Scorsese), The Shining (Kubrick) or The Stunt Man (Rush)

Sleeper Picks: Just Tell Me What You Want (Lumet) and Resurrection (Carlino)

1981: Chariots of Fire (Hudson)

What Should Have Won: Reds (Beatty), Atlantic City (Malle), Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg) or Body Heat (Kasdan)

Sleeper Pick: Cutter’s Way (Passer)

1982: Gandhi (Attenborough)

What Should Have Won: ET (Spielberg), Blade Runner (Scott), Tootsie (Pollack), My Favorite Year (Benjamin) or Sophie’s Choice (Pakula)

Sleeper Pick: Shoot the Moon (Parker)

1983: Terms of Endearment (Brooks)

What Should Have Won: The Right Stuff (Kaufman), Tender Mercies (Beresford), Zelig (Allen) or Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)

Sleeper Pick: Local Hero (Forsyth)

1984: Amadeus (Forman)

What Should Have Won: A Passage to India (Lean) or Places in the Heart (Benton)

Sleeper Pick: The Bostonians (Merchant/Ivory)

1985: Out of Africa (Pollack)

What Should Have Won: Back to the Future (Zemeckis) or Prizzi’s Honor (Huston)

Sleeper Pick: Brazil (Gilliam)

1986: Platoon (Stone)

What Should Have Won: Platoon. It’s the one year they got it right. But we also would have been happy with Hannah and Her Sisters (Allen), Blue Velvet (Lynch) or Something Wild (Demme)

Sleeper Pick: Sid and Nancy (Cox)

1987: The Last Emperor (Bertolucci)

What Should Have Won: Empire of the Sun (Spielberg), Babette’s Feast (Axel), Radio Days (Allen), Raising Arizona (Coen Brothers), Moonstruck (Jewison), Au Revoir les Enfants (Malle) or Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring (Berri)

Sleeper Picks: Prick Up Your Ears (Frears),  Barfly (Schroeder)

1988: Rain Man (Levinson)

What Should Have Won: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Zemeckis), Bull Durham (Shelton) or Dangerous Liaisons (Frears)

Sleeper Pick: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Almodovar)

1989: Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford)

What Should Have Won: Where do we begin? Do the Right Thing (Lee), Dead Poets Society (Weir), sex, lies and videotape (Soderbergh), Henry V (Branagh), Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen), Field of Dreams (Robinson), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg), My Left Foot (Sheridan) or Say Anything (Crowe)

Sleeper Pick: Drugstore Cowboy (Van Sant)

Vintage Sand Episode 08 on SoundCloud

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Episode 07: The Other Side of the Windbags (November 2018)

After four decades of anticipation, Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side of the Wind, was finally released in a handful of theaters and for streaming on Netflix earlier this month. Was it worth such an epic wait? Team Vintage Sand discusses the film both as a work in and of itself and in the context of the rest of Welles’ unique, brilliant and ultimately heartbreaking career. Was Welles a victim, the embodiment of what happens when art comes into conflict with commerce in Hollywood? Or was his troubled career due, at least in part, to his own immeasurable streak of self-destructiveness? You decide.

Ten Must-See Films by Orson Welles

10. The Third Man (1949) – Though directed by Carol Reed, Welles’ unforgettable turn as the evil profiteer Harry Lime fits perfectly into his pantheon of men of dark mystery who reside at the center of so much of his work

9. F for Fake (1975) – A unique, at turns brilliant and infuriating “film essay” where Welles uses multiple formats to explore the idea of illusion

8. The Trial (1962) – Welles’ film of Kafka’s unfilmable book has two things going for it: the animated opening “Before the Law” sequence and Anthony Perkins’ performance as Josef K

7. The Stranger (1945) – Welles’ most conventional (and profitable) film, a for-hire job. He plays an ex-Nazi posing as a professor in a small New England town, where he is tracked by Edward G. Robinson’s Nazi hunter

6. Othello (1953) – Under stressful filming conditions that are the stuff of legend, Welles took four years to complete this version of the Shakespeare tragedy that, as is typical with him,  seems to provide more insight into Welles himself than Othello

5. The Lady from Shanghai (1948) – Allowed to direct it only through the intercession of his then-wife Rita Hayworth, who stars in the film, this is a complete and glorious mess that was eventually taken away from him by the studio. Worth seeing for the concluding hall-of-mirrors sequence, one of the most phenomenal set-pieces ever captured on film

4. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) – Welles’ second film, and the beginning of his epic decline in Hollywood. Butchered by RKO and released hurriedly while Welles was out of the country, the miracle of Ambersons is that it’s still startling and beautiful despite the meddling. And if you stumble across the missing hour of footage from the film, the Holy Grail of film preservationists, please give us a call

3. Chimes at Midnight (1966) – Welles first played Falstaff, Shakespeare’s portrait of humanity in all its messy glory, on stage when he was only 24 years old. This conflation of several Shakespeare plays puts Falstaff at the center of the story, and it’s clear that this lovable embodiment of decay was the role Welles was born to play. It is Welles’ favorite among his own films

2. Touch of Evil (1958) – The happiest of happy accidents. Hired at first just as an actor, Welles took over the film when co-star Charlton Heston essentially called the producer an idiot for not letting Welles direct as well. Welles rewrote the script and created this gothic, twisted baroque masterpiece about the goings-on in a Mexican border town. And oh, that often-imitated but never-duplicated opening sequence…

1. Citizen Kane (1941) – The one and only. If you’ve never seen it, try to approach it without the burden of expectations that necessarily accompany a work often called the Greatest Film Ever Made, and enjoy it for its own wonderful sake. If you’ve seen it many times, watch it again for all the many new things this miraculous work seems to reveal with each new viewing. My personal favorite: Bernstein talking about the girl with a parasol on the Jersey City ferry back in 1896…

Vintage Sand Episode 07 on SoundCloud

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Episode 06: Another Show, Another Opening (October 2018)

In making movies, perhaps the only thing as difficult to create as the ending of a film is an unforgettable opening. A great opening is not just a hook; a truly amazing one (think underwater camera and two notes on a double bass in Jaws) can set the tone for an entire picture. Here, our nerdy-yet-lovable trio of film geeks looks at some of their favorite movie openings of all time, ranging in time from the silent era to this decade. Settle in, and don’t be late!

FEATURED FILMS:

Josh: The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928); The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964  – Fr.); La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016); 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963 – It.); Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958); The Player (Robert Altman, 1992); and Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959 – Fr.)

John: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990); Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958); All the President’s Men (Alan Pakula, 1976); The Godfather (Francis Coppola, 1972); and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Michael: Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950); Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Brian Forbes, 1963); The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969); Nashville (Robert Altman, 1976); and Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Vintage Sand Episode 06 on SoundCloud

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Episode 05: Our Favorite Year (September 2018)

Conventional wisdom tells us that the greatest year in the history of film was 1939. And if you add Renoir’s The Rules of the Game on to the long list of Hollywood classics that year (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr.  Smith Goes to Washington, Young Abe Lincoln, Wuthering Heights, etc.) one could certainly make the case for that year. The Vintage Sand team begs to differ, however. In this episode, we make the case for our own favorite years in film history. Josh lands on 1960; Michael opts for 1972 and John goes with 1974. Let the arguments begin!

FEATURED FILMS:

1960: L’Avventura (Antonioni, It.); Breathless (Godard, Fr.); Peeping Tom (Powell, UK); La Dolce Vita (Fellini, It.); Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, Fr.); Psycho (Hitchcock); The Apartment (Wilder); The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa, Jap.); The Virgin Spring (Bergman, Swe.); Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut, Fr.); Spartacus (Kubrick); Black Orpheus (Ophuls, Fr.)

1972: The Godfather (Coppola); Cries and Whispers (Bergman, Swe.); The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Buñuel, Sp./Fr.); Fat City (Huston); Cabaret (Fosse); Frenzy (Hitchcock); Sleuth (Mankiewicz); Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog, Ger.); Solaris (Tarkovsky, Rus.)

1974: The Godfather, Part II (Coppola); The Conversation (Coppola); Chinatown (Polanski);  Lenny (Fosse); Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Scorsese); Blazing Saddles (Brooks); Young Frankenstein (Brooks); Murder on the Orient Express (Lumet); The Parallax View (Pakula)

Vintage Sand Episode 05 on SoundCloud

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Episode 04: Top 5 Moments in Hitchcock (August 2018)

It’s August, when a middle aged-film lover’s dreams turn to Hitchcock. For Episode 4 of Vintage Sand, Josh, John and Michael discuss their favorite moments in all of Hitchcock’s work. Some will be exactly what our listeners might expect, but we promise a few surprises in there as well.

FEATURED FILMS: All films below directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The Lady Vanishes (1938); Shadow of a Doubt (1943); Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954); To Catch a Thief (1955); The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); Vertigo (1958); North by Northwest (1959); The Birds (1963); Frenzy (1972)

Vintage Sand Episode 04 on SoundCloud

Vintage Sand Episode 03 on SoundCloud

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Episode 02: The Glorious Black-and White ’60’s: American Edition (June 2018)

When you think of film of the early 1960’s, the first things that come into your mind are European and Asian films. In Episode 2 of Vintage Sand, our intrepid trio make the case for the beauty and importance of black and white American films of the period by focusing on the work of three very different directors: Billy Wilder, John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick.

FEATURED FILMS: 

John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and Seconds (1966)

Stanley Kubrick: The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Billy Wilder: The Apartment (1960), One, Two, Three (1961), Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and The Fortune Cookie (1966)

Vintage Sand Episode 02 on SoundCloud

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Episode 01: Hitchcock Obscura

While “obscure Hitchcock” may be a contradiction in terms, there are some films by the master that the Vintage Sand crew feel do not get their just desserts from critics and fans. In our inaugural episode, we make the case for three of Hitchcock’s lesser-known works of the 1950’s.

FEATURED FILMS: 

Alfred Hitchcock: Stage Fright (1950), I Confess (1953) and The Wrong Man (1957)

Vintage Sand Episode 01 on SoundCloud