Podcast: A Beautiful Day, Knives Out, Waves, Atlantics
Tuesday, December 3, 2019 at 10:00AM with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R
Index (61 minutes)
• 00:01 Happy belated Thanksgiving
• 02:01 Marielle Heller and Tom Hanks offer catharsis with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• 14:30 Knives Out and that yummy cast: Chris Evans, Toni Collette, etc...
• 21:30 Film Bitch Awards / Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers tangent
• 23:00 Exciting new voice: Senegal's Mati Diop and Atlantics
• 29:20 Waves divides people, including Nathaniel and Murtada, and we also discuss the rush to judgment on first screenings among pundits
• 38:00 Spirit Nominations - What did we make of them?
• 48:20 Best Cinematography - Roger Deakins for 1917... but who else?
• 59:00 Can you believe it's December already?
Related Reading
Murtada's interview with Mati Diop
Monica Castillo's Knives Out essay
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Reader Comments (9)
These podcasts give me something to do at work... Bless you!
I live for this.
Every time I hear Murtada gush over J-LO in HUSTLERS it makes me all warm and giggly. lol. It's so cute to listen to his enthusiasm each time :-)
And yes, she does deserve to be placed into MULTIPLE Film Bitch categories!
I really loved Knives Out, but the cinematography is indeed quite ugly. Not so much the composition or camera choreography, but the lighting. Especially the outdoor night scenes.
Also, I rewatched it yesterday and was surprised by how great the screenplay worked a second time. I expected it to feel endless because of how long it is and because I already knew its twists, but it worked really well. I believe it's the synergy of a good structural screenplay and sharp editing. The fact Ana de Armas was my favorite performance sure helped me not feel like the other characters were being shortchanged.
Although, I must confess I've always loved whodunnits, so I'm sort of the ideal audience for this thing.
Regarding Atlantics and Jennifer Lopez, I completely agree with everything Murtada said. Wonderful podcast, by the way. Thank you for all your great work.
Really nice podcast, guys. I just listened to it while working late in the office. Very intrigued to see Atlantics and Knives Out!
A few thoughts:
Uncut Gems is not a pleasant experience if you're hypersensitive. It's a constant assault of people talking over one another, intense lights and a very abrasive tone that makes it a very uncomfortable experience (which may be a Safdie Brothers thing, since I felt the same thing watching Good Time). Adam Sandler is terrific, even though his character is wholy irredeemable (which the film is aware of). I can understand why it's getting so much love, but man did I not enjoy it.
I hated the first half of Waves and loved the second half, so I'm torn. A lot of it has to do with Taylor Russell, who emerges as a major presence in the second half, or just that I had an easier stomaching what the film was presenting, but man, was that first half a real chore to get through (and I definitely would never want to award a Screenplay that has a scene that consists of two character simply saying "Fuck you" over and over for two minutes).
I was one of those people who was raving about Knives Out coming out of Toronto, and a second viewing just highlighted everything that worked for me (the way it plays with information, how it subverts your expectations of a murder mystery, how entertaining Daniel Craig's version of Hercule Poirot meets Foghorn Leghorn was, Ana de Armas being the heart of the story), and how those 130 minutes just breezed by. I think it's worth a second viewing.
I also love A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I did see the show when I was a little kid, and while Tom Hanks certainly does not look or sound like Mr. Rogers, he gets so many things right about his cadence and mannerisms that it does feel like Mr. Rogers is speaking through Tom Hanks (even if we're always aware we're seeing Tom Hanks). I disagree with Murtada about Matthew Rhys, I thought he was perfectly cast, since he brought some of the same energy he brought to Phillip Jennings (his character on The Americans), which made him perfect for Hanks' Mr. Rogers to play off of.
You know, Hanks is a lead, me thinks.
Give Me Liberty was released, fyi. It played at the IFC Center for a week or two... maybe a month ago, I think? It is a sharp little film though, like Murtada says, and I hope more will seek it out.
About Knives Out, I'm a huge whodunnit fan and I appreciate that this one had more on its mind politically than the average whodunnit, but I found the actual mystery and explanation rather unsatisfying. Totally agree with Nathaniel as well that it's quite ugly. Way too saturated in the coloring. It looks drab.
LOVED Knives Out, but I wholly recognize it is mostly because I love the whodunnit genre, which is a very underrepresented genre. It's no wonder that my love of that genre + my love of Altman is why Gosford Park was #2 for me in 2001.