Podcast: Hillbilly Elegy, The Life Ahead, and Gotham nominations

with Nathaniel R & Murtada Elfadl

We're back !

Index (60 minutes)
00:01 Gotham Award Nominations. There is lots to discuss including First Cow, The Assistant, Nicole Beharie, Riz Ahmed, and longshots in Oscar races
28:00 Sophia Loren's star vehicle The Life Ahead
35:10 Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy. Amy Adams stars. We still think Glenn Close as "Mamaw" has a good shot at a nomination despite the rough reviews
54:30 Randomness to wrap up + Nathaniel finally saw Mulan 

Related Reading:
• Complete Gotham nominations
• Murtada's review of Miss Juneteenth
• Jason's review of First Cow
• Time interview
• Claudio's review of The Life Ahead

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? 

Hillbilly, Gothams, Life Ahead

"First Cow" leads the Gotham nominations

by Nathaniel R

This year's Gotham Awards have fully embraced the female gaze. In fact, the entire Best Feature nominee list is female-helmed films with First Cow leading with 4 nominations. Unfortunately that means Lee Isaac Chung's Minari was shut out for the top prize (it only received one acting nomination), which is a shame but you can't have everything. Though the Gotham Awards are not a traditional "precursor" to Oscar (they rarely align) we tend to like that kind of precursor best. Groups with their own personality are the only ones that have a reason to exist! 

Full nomination list with a few comments after the jump...

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20:20 (Pt 3) Mind games, mood pieces, and Spanish winners

Since the year will soon wind to a close we're surveying the films of 2020 here and there -- terrific, terrible, and anywhere in between -- based on what's available to stream by freezing them at the 20th minute and 20th second. (Though please note that some services' time stamps make this difficult to get exactly right). What comes up? That's the fun of it. (Here are Part One and Part Two if you missed 'em).

Does this captured moment make you wanna investigate any of these 20 films?

Oh, and there's a murderer in the woods, so stay close.

FIRST COW  (Kelly Reichardt, US)
A24. Original release date: March 6th, 2020. Streaming on Showtime

I must confess that I have never jumped on the Kelly Reichardt bandwagon. Other than Wendy & Lucy I haven't yet been blown away but this is on my list to catch up with. Especially after reading the pieces right here about it from Jason, Claudio, and Daniel. 

This is a total great piece. Absolutely.

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Kelly Reichardt and the "Roads to Nowhere"

by Cláudio Alves

With First Cow, Kelly Reichardt reaches an apotheosis in her career. Watching the director's filmography, one wouldn't suppose she was building up towards a monument, a grand summation of an auteur's cinematic idioms and preoccupations. Yet, here we are. While Reichardt has a very characteristic style and collection of favorite themes, one of the main elements of her oeuvre is a conspicuous lack of grandiosity. She's one of the great voices in contemporary American cinema, but her works seldom underline their mastery or call back to the films that came before, their predecessors in the Reichardt canon. 

Because of that, it feels like a good time to meditate on Kelly Reichardt's cinema, to revisit her features' wonder and, perchance, reevaluate what each one was trying to say. It's also an opportune moment to examine how those films were made, the methodologies of the artist. The way something is created imbues it with particular qualities, both aesthetic and ideological, thematic, and even spiritual. Helping us through this odyssey of discovery on the films of Kelly Reichardt, we now have Seventh Row's latest e-book, Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt's broken American dreams, as a handy guide… 

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The Furniture: First Cow and the Architecture of Settlement

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

First Cow is a mossy and melancholy tragedy. Kelly Reichardt makes the failure of her protagonists clear from the start, showing us their skeletons before introducing them in the flesh. There’s a morbid air to everything that follows, though it’s softened by an atmosphere of tremendous beauty. It’s the best ASMR video of the year.

Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) clearly think that they are in a land of endless possibility: Oregon Country in the 1820s. Decades before a settled border, the USA and the British Empire “jointly occupied” the Pacific Northwest, in accord with an 1818 treaty agreement that did not even acknowledge the presence of indigenous people.

This is the context for King-Lu’s utterly false observation:

This is still new - more nameless things around here than you could shake an eel at… History isn’t here yet.”

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