You've read the new Supporting Actress Smackdown. Now hear its companion podcast. Our panel widens its view from the supporting nominees to talk about the unique cinematic landscape of the late 1970s, the women's lib movement and concurrent movie gender wars, and which movies give the best period punch and which we've misremembered completely.
Host: Nathaniel R
Special Guests: KM Soehnlein, Kristen Sales, Bill Chambers, and StinkyLulu.
Contents
- 00:01 Introductions and memory vs. reality w/ Breaking Away
- 03:20 Gender Wars of 1979. Misogynistic or merely non-coddling and complicated?
- 09:00 Cynicism and Optimism in Starting Over and Manhattan, which is particularly self-critical and discomforting
- 15:50 Contextualizing the movies. 1979 versus what was to come with shifting tastes. Do people still make movies about "how we live now?"
- 21:00 Meryl Streep's command of subtext and Kramer vs. Kramer as a film
- 28:00 The oddity of Starting Over's comedy - we recommend
- 31:30 Movies we wish we had had to watch for the Smackdown: Alien & All That Jazz and non-nominated supporting actresses
- 36:45 Final random observations: valium, money in 1979, and new actors who weren't yet famous
- 39:00 Meryl Streep then vs Meryl Streep now. Of course we spend the last five minutes on Meryl Streep.
And because we joke about it - Here is Candice Bergen's off-key hit single "Better Than Ever" from Starting Over.
Please to enjoy and continue the conversation in the comments. You can listen at the bottom of this post or download from iTunes tomorrow. THE NEXT SMACKDOWN IS AT THE END OF JUNE. WE'LL BE LOOKING AT 1948 SO ADJUST YOUR QUEUES ACCORDINGLY.