Adjust Your Tracking

As it is Christmas we've decided to celebrate the festive season on the podcast by watching a largely forgotten Disney film from 1985. One Magic Christmas positions itself as being a wonderful tale of Christmas but it is northing short of a depressing horror story. Where Santa decides, in order to teach the message of Christmas to a mother played by Mary Steenburgen, he needs to take some rather extreme and drastic steps. By showing her just how tough Christmas can actually be. This is all watched over by the most unlikely angel possible Harry Dean Stanton. After you've experienced One Magic Christmas you'll never quite experience Christmas in the same way again.  
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Man's atomic age is here, horrifying hordes appear! Exo-Skeleton armor, Exo-Skeleton might, Exo-Skeleton horror, Exo-Skeleton bite. Beware of them! Gordon Douglas' Them! is a 1954 horror movie that started the trend for 'big bug' movies, which became a huge trend in horror combining a fear of invasion, nuclear power and insects which summarised 50s fears. Staring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, and James Arness, the plot is simple, a nest of gigantic irradiated ants become a national threat when two young queen ants escaped to establish new nests. Filmmaker James Raynor joins us to talk about this horror classic which has some of the most amount of flamethrower action in any picture ever!
 
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In 1953 trailblazing director Ida Lupino made the first ever Hollywood film noir shot by a woman. The Hitch-Hiker tells the story of two fishing buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) who pick up a paranoid hitchhiker (William Talman) during a trip to Mexico, who turns out to be a psychopath who had committed multiple murders. The film was based upon a true crime story of Billy Cook and it shocked audiences with it's grittiness and hard-hitting story and bizarre claustrophobia of the desert backdrop.
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MGM and Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful is an unblinking look at hubris and ego in Hollywood's Golden Era. Kirk Douglas stars as Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields, and we see his career through the three peoples personal experiences; director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), movie star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), who explain how he both destroyed their personal lives but made their careers.  It's a visually splendid picture that is a great example of studio film making with John Houseman bringing personal experience and applying a Citizen Kane like structure to Hollywood. Filmmaker Brandon Kahn helps us dissect this classic.
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When it comes to a name in British comedy, Ealing Studios is a name that has persisted throughout the years. Alec Guinness had made his name for these comedies and in 1951 he was teaming up with Alexander Mackendrick to make a strange science fiction comedy about an unassuming scientist who makes a fabric that is both indestructible and doesn't stain, and the fall out which occurs when both the textile mill owners and the trade unions realise this will put them out of work. The Man in the White Suit, is not one of the better known Ealing Comedies but it is certainly one of the most cynically unique of them.
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It's new miniseries time! We've jumped back in time again to the 1950s. The decade where the Cold War started, rock-n-roll was a scary new music form, home television for the first time became commonplace and also the decade where Japanese cinema was introduced to the world. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura, introduced such a strong framing device and narrative style where four different people recount different versions of the story of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife. The film is an investigation of the idea of objective truth. Easily one of the most significant films ever made. There is also a surprising tangent into the world of professional wrestling.
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We're back from hiatus! Just a quick bonus episode this week to wrap up our 70s miniseries. Brandon Kahn joins us to help present our Trackies, awards for the films we watched in the last miniseries, rank the ten films and also also allows us to bookend and chat about what we learnt about 70s cinema. 
All ready for next week where we will dive into the 1950s.
We had a bit of a technical issue with audio on the record but we hope it's not too distracting.
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In 1978 they said 'you'll believe a man can fly', and we wanted to see if that was still the case. We chose Richard Donner's classic Superman for our 1970s rewatch to close out or 70s miniseries, starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, plus many more. It's a superhero epic. Everyone knows the story, Kal-El, thanks to Jor-El, is the last survivor of the planet Krypton, who is raised by a kindly couple in Smallville, Kansas. Later moved to Metropolis where he lives as Clark Kent and falls in love with Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane whilst battling the Lex Luthor. It's an incredibly nerdy episode as we are huge Superman fans and this film has so much to talk about. So buckle up and enjoy the flight.
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In 1970 one of the most influential animators of all time, Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies), directed his only feature film The Phantom Tollbooth, based on a novel by Norton Juster,  tells the story of a bored young boy named Milo. Unexpectedly receiving a magic tollbooth and, having nothing better to do, Milo drives through it and enters a kingdom in turmoil following the loss of it’s princesses, Rhyme and Reason. We talk all things animation and Chuck Jones before diving into this rather unusual film.
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No guest this week as we found off the final film of our 1970s series. Time After Time is an adventure film which see HG Welles travel through time to 1970s San Francisco to stop Jack the Ripper. Directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, and Mary Steenburgen, it's a surprisingly romantic adventure film which gained a large cult following after it's release. We also discuss Disney's Mulan and Alien.
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