The Letterboxd Show 3.12: Mitchell Beaupre
[clip of Blue Velvet plays]
JEFFREY There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience. Sometimes it’s necessary to take a risk. I got to thinking, I’ll bet someone could learn a lot by getting into that woman’s apartment. You know, sneak in, hide and observe.
SANDY Sneak into her apartment?
JEFFREY Yeah...
SANDY Are you crazy? Jeffrey, she’s possibly involved in murder. This is giving me the creeps.
JEFFREY No, just settle down. I have a plan which I think will work. There’s very little for you to do but I do need your help. Don’t you want to hear the plan?
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Hello and welcome to The Letterboxd Show, our podcast about the movies people love watching from Letterboxd: the social network for people who love watching movies. As always, your hosts are Gemma—that’s me—and my neat-girl, Slim. Today, our guest comes from inside the Letterboxd ranks. They are a film quiz queen and the king of essays about gritty cinema, co-host of Weekend Watchlist, senior editor of our online magazine Journal... We are excited, thrilled, humbled to have Mitchell Beaupre to answer crucial questions such as: why are there people like Frank? And why is there so much trouble in the world?
SLIM Mitchell has brought a gigantic, four-quadrant collecsh of movies to the conversation this week. Your four Letterboxd faves are Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur. It’s at this point, I think Gemma and I are just lining up the Heinekens and turn-off our microphones and let you go for it. Welcome to The Letterboxd Show, Mitchell.
MITCHELL Thanks for having me. I mean before we start, let’s just say, pretty good, pretty good four movies right there. Honestly, you know, I’m not going to be the one to say it myself... I think it’s a little gauche to say it myself, but word around town is, maybe the best four that anybody’s ever had on the show. That’s what I’ve been hearing... [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Interesting. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Name names. Who are you hearing this from? I want names on this podcast! I’ve had enough!
MITCHELL It’s on Letterboxd Slack, I don’t know where you guys are looking at, but... [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, except I already have a bone to pick, because I looked at your Letterboxd and I thought I was gonna get to rewatch Desperately Seeking Susan based on your current four faves on your and then you come through with these four...
MITCHELL I’m a slippery one. I’m a very slippery one. I’m one of those people that—you know, Letterboxd, you got to two groups of people, the people who keep a solid steady four forever, which you, Gemma and Slim, you both kind of have a pretty steady, you don’t really change it up too much. Or there’s me, I go the other way, where each month I tend to filter out my top four with, usually it’s the four that I watched for the first time within the last month that I liked the most. So right now I think it’s, yeah, Desperately Seeking Susan, Snake Eyes, Valley Girl and Eureka are my top four right now. But then I’ve also got my Letterboxd list of my top 250 of all time, which is where these four are coming from. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM You’re senior editor, you’re Weekend Watchlist co-host, you’re Acting Out co-host, so is this a good change of pace to take a break from your current season of Acting Out where you’re focusing on Tom Hanks’s filmography—now we’re in a whole different ball game right now.
MITCHELL Yes, Tom Hanks. Weirdly, you know, maybe I think there was a rumor somewhere that he was supposed to be in Blue Velvet, seems a little bit odd. I think the Laura Dern character maybe it was originally supposed to be Tom Hanks, so we thought about covering it on Acting Out, thought about doing a Blue Velvet episode. But thankfully, it has been saved for this instead.
GEMMA What if The Conversation, it was Tom Hanks instead of Gene Hackman. It would be a totally different film. And yet... the same film!
MITCHELL I could see him doing it in the early-2000s or something, kind of like Road to Perdition-era Tom Hanks, where he was doing a little bit darker stuff. He could maybe fit in that suit with that little mustache. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Do you think he would have as long fingernails as Gene Hackman does in The Conversation? [Mitchell laughs] If Tom Hanks was playing the role?
MITCHELL Yeah, it’s a crucial part of the character, is getting the fingernails. That’s how you get the sax in there.
SLIM Francis told him to grow out fingernails as long as possible for this role, please! [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Well, we will get to The Conversation, one of the pinnacles of pants-down cinema, but shall we start with—[Mitchell & Slim laugh]—the number one film in your top 250 personal faves? Let’s take a ride downtown, with a twenty dollar note, at 11:34pm to... 1995, Martin Scorsese, After Hours, written by Joseph Minion. This is a four stars out of five average on Letterboxd, and a pretty decent two thousand fans have this in their four faves along with, well, not you, not at the moment.
MITCHELL True, yeah.
GEMMA It is your number-one film out of your top 250 films. I mean, Slim, we are in uncharted waters here. I don’t think I could even get to 250 films if I was starting to make a list like Mitchell’s.
SLIM My god. Does Tom Cruise have 250 films for me to populate a list? [Gemma & Mitchell laugh] Gonna have to do some research on this and get back to you.
MITCHELL Samm and I were actually looking at Tom Cruise’s Letterboxd page yesterday and he’s got 81, at least on his Letterboxd page, so you can get a solid list out of that for sure. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Make a top 100 with twenty other movies. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Nineteen other movies that are Tom Cruise adjacent. Oh my gosh. So okay, and Samm being your partner who we may hear of several more times through this episode, for anyone who has not yet heard Mitchell on any of our other shows. [Mitchell laughs] But so, okay, After Hours... now, this film, when did it first come into your life and why? And how? Where were you? How old were you? Were you at home? Were you at a cinema? Was it Jack Moulton?
MITCHELL No. So After Hours was not—there is one on this list that we will get to that is a Jack, Jack Moulton from Jack’s Facts recommendation for me. But After Hours, the earliest that I can seeing it was when I—so I think the first time I saw was when I was 21. I was working at a movie store called Movie Stop... RIP. And I—Scorsese was one of those directors who I’d seen a bunch of his films, kind of the obvious ones, GoodFellas, Raging Bull, that kind of stuff. And I liked them but wasn’t, I didn’t really get the whole Scorsese thing. He was maybe a little bit too macho for me in a way that I didn’t connect with quite yet, or I could appreciate the explorations of masculinity in his films. And they felt just a little bit too like, oh, these are men movies to me at that age. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Men movies—Mitchell’s Top 250 Men Movies List, coming soon! [Mitchell laughs]
MITCHELL And so After Hours, I think I just kind of randomly spotted when we were, I was stocking it at the store and I noticed that it was Scorsese, and I hadn’t heard of it yet, I don’t think. And I was like, “Oh, this looks like odd for Scorsese.” So I brought it home and watched it and it blew my mind. But also at the same time, it was like, the other three films out of these four favorites are ones that the first time that I saw them, they were instantly in my top five of all time, which is, you know, a wonderful thing to experience watching a movie and knowing right away that it’s kind of one of your favorites. But After Hours was a different journey for me, which I think is also a really fun and rewarding journey where the first time that I saw it, it was already my favorite Scorsese. But it wasn’t in my top 250 or whatever. It wasn’t a film that I considered one of my favorites of all time. I think I gave it a four out of five on Letterboxd the first time that I saw it. And then like a year later, I watched it and it when into my top 100. And then a year later, it was in my top 50. And a year later, it was in my top ten. And then, you know, a year later, it’s my number one favorite of all time. And it was one of those kinds of movies that I watched and I really liked it, but it created a kind of kernel in my brain where the next day I was thinking, “Oh, I really want to watch that again...” And for a year after that, like every week at some point, I was thinking like, “Actually, I really want to watch After Hours again...” And I would try to find movies that gave me a similar kind of feeling to watching After Hours and nothing quite did it. And eventually it’s just like, “Oh, well let’s just watch After Hours again.” [Gemma laughs] And it just embedded itself in my soul. And I think there’s a lot of reasons why it did that, a lot of reasons why I love After Hours. I love movies that take place over the course of one night, there’s a lot of Letterboxd lists for movies that take place over the course of one night and kind of that escalation of, you know, one small moment that then cascades into another, into another and it’s just an avalanche over the course of an entire night. Movies like Good Time or like Collateral kind of do stuff like that as well, Mikey and Nicky, which you talked about with Mia is another one that takes place over the course of one night, with just these dudes having a bad time together. And—
GEMMA Can I just at this point call out Amaya’s Letterboxd review which says: “legend has it that if you double-feature this and Good Time you develop a cocaine addiction on the spot.” [Slim laughs]
MITCHELL Yeah, it’s true. I’ve never done it because I’ve been afraid! [Gemma laughs] I’ve been afraid that exact thing happening. You can’t watch them too close together.
SLIM This is a cocaine-free podcast. [Mitchell laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, exactly. Calling up an eight-ball five minutes later. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM I do want to read the current synopsis on Letterboxd: “An ordinary word processor has the worst night of his life after he agrees to visit a girl in Soho whom he met that evening at a coffee shop.” Just the phrase “word processor”... [Gemma laugh] 1985, my God, how far we’ve come!
GEMMA Look, I had a crack. I had a crack at a synopsis.
SLIM Let’s hear it.
GEMMA Okay, there’s two. Number one: “That’s what you get for performatively reading Henry Miller in a diner.” [Mitchell & Slim laugh] There was with a whole Instagram , do you in the days before the pandemic when people, you know, wantonly caught the subway without masks on and read books, there was an entire Instagram where you could submit photos of men on the subway reading Henry Miller. [Gemma & Slim & Mitchell laugh] Okay, I know. Number two, synopsis number two: “Or: the feature-length version of the text message ‘up to?’”
MITCHELL Right. Yeah.
SLIM Question mark...
GEMMA Question mark...
MITCHELL Exactly. The two of my favorite lists on Letterboxd both have After Hours as the number one film on the list—and I don’t know what this says about me, the fact that this is my favorite movie of all time, and After Hours is the first movie on these lists. The first one is Help! I Got Too Horny and Now Everything’s Bad. [Gemma & Mitchell laugh] And another list is Horny Nerd in a Suit’s Worst Night (or Weekend, or Month) Ever. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And I mean, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly the vibe of After Hours. This guy who, this word processor, you know, this pencil-pusher, clearly not the kind of guy who goes out and has these, you know, raunchy debaucherous nights out on the town, you know, getting into adventures. He takes a chance, he goes out, he meets this young lady who, you know, he strikes up a fancy to and then she mentions her roommate Kiki Bridges, played by Linda Fiorentino—
GEMMA Oh my gosh.
MITCHELL Which is a great character named, Kiki Bridges, I just love that name. She sells what bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights. She makes them out of papier-mâché. [Gemma laughs] And, so under the pretense of going to her apartment for one of these paperweights, he heads to Soho, he gets in the cab, immediately loses his twenty-dollar bill out the window...
SLIM Night over.
MITCHELL The worst, I mean, the worst thing that could possibly happen!
GEMMA Yeah, the worst thing that could possibly happen but some of the best cinematography in the film, is that—
MITCHELL Gorgeous.
GEMMA That twenty-dollar note flying in the air.
SLIM I thought that was CGI when I watching that. [Gemma laughs] That’s how unbelievable it was.
GEMMA It’s 1985, Slim. [Slim & Gemma & Mitchell laugh] That is a real twenty. That is real twenty.
SLIM Jack had put together some facts, this doesn’t even rank in Martin’s top ten most popular, it’s at number fourteen. And I think that might be why I have never watched it until this past week, After Hours.
GEMMA A first!
SLIM First viewing and I might have even been just because I saw the lead actor. I was like, wait a minute, that’s not De Niro, who is this goober? Griffin Dunne? [Gemma & Mitchell laugh] I’m not watching this movie! I don’t know this guy, he’s not in the mob.
GEMMA I was like, Slim. Lay it out! First watch for you, what did you think?
SLIM First watch. I mean, I’ve had these nights. So I was extremely uncomfortable watching this movie. You go out, some some night in the city, I don’t know, you go to the wrong house to party. You’re like, “This party sucks. But I’m stuck here all night. I don’t have my car. I’m screwed.” And those are just some of the worst nights of my life. I do want to call out a Griffin Dunne’s watch in this movie. I wanted that watch immediately. I loved his watch. It’s gorgeous. But yeah, but it is a gorgeous movie. And it’s, for me, it’s hard to love because of those kind of like nights that I’ve had. And it is one miserable night that he exists in. I mean, it was funny, when he goes into that bar from the subway, and he’s like soaking wet, it’s pouring rain. And he’s just kind of like, “Can I just hang out here?” In my head, I was like, “Man, you’re gonna get kicked out of this bar, you’re gonna get punched in the face.” In this New York bar, why would anyone let you stay there? [Gemma laughs] But he does! And then that waitress wants to like buddy-up with him.
MITCHELL Teri Garr.
SLIM I was actually pretty surprised that he was just so turned-off to the idea of talking with this board waitress. In any other movie, I would think that that would be the next course of action for the film, he would befriend this—I mean, he does in a manner of speaking later. But he was like really turned-off to even becoming friendly with that waitress, which I was surprised by.
MITCHELL Well yeah, I think at that point in the movie he—especially a guy who doesn’t do this often. You know, Slim, I’m the same as you, I definitely used to have nights like this where I was just out getting into like wacky shenanigans all hours of the night and this movie brings me back to that, but in a way where I’m like, oh, I don’t miss doing that. I’m very happy to be 31 at home at two in the morning watching After Hours instead of experiencing it. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Oh, I don’t know after two years of being shut-in, I am so ready for wacky shenanigans.
SLIM You’re ready for After Hours in real life again. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
MITCHELL Yeah, I think Scorsese described the movie as this Greek myth, and that’s part of why he was into it, was this idea of this guy descending into Hades, as he says, and that twenty-dollar bill represents the ferry that he can use to pay the boatman to get out of hell and back to his home, you know, his cozy little apartment, but then he loses it immediately and then spends the rest of the movie just wanting to go home, basically. He gets involved with Rosanna Arquette’s character, Marcy, and, you know, he goes through the flirting process, but things are just a little bit off, you know, a little bit off and he’s just this guy who’s afraid, he’s very buttoned up, he’s this yuppie, this word processor.
GEMMA And yet, that opening scene in the office with Bronson Pinchot, like it is evident that he is also bored with his, you know, Uptown life, his day-to-day life. In fact, I think we’ve got some live audio footage of me pitching the idea of Letterboxd Journal to the owners of Letterboxd. Slim, if you could just play that now... [Mitchell & Slim laugh]
[clip of After Hours plays]
Okay, because what I really want to do is, I really would like to get into publishing, you know, there just aren’t any openings right now. But what I would love to do is just create a magazine, my own magazine, which would be like a forum for writers and intellectuals who can’t get into print anywhere else, who could, you know, I’m not into like editing it or trying to reach a particular audience, getting it out there, they would get some momentum going, you know, and do, you know, do something with, y’know—
GEMMA My first time in New York was a 24-hour period, immediately after SXSW, on my way to Connecticut to see my sister. And, yeah, it was 24 hours, I booked myself into the Chelsea Hotel, because I heard that’s what you did. And... I don’t much else... I believe I possibly only spent about two actual hours in that very, very expensive scody hotel room. And it felt like, that 24 hours felt like six months. My god. Then later, I moved to New York. And this film, After Hours, came to me through a friend who was born and bred in New York, lived up on 61st Street her entire life, right next to Lincoln Center. And she said, “Right, if you’re going to live here, you need to watch three films. The Landlord by Hal Ashby,” which is that 1970s film about gentrification in Park Slope, “Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, 1988, and Scorsese’s After Hours.” It was really interesting, because the reason she said you need to watch all three of these films if you’re going to live here, is because as an Uptown girl herself, she felt that it was really important that people understand things below 14th Street. It’s some some New York thing where, you know, whatever happens below 14th Street, like you never go below 14th. [Mitchell laughs] And then I moved to Brooklyn and discovered that basically people in Brooklyn try to avoid going above 14th if they can. Which means that things like the New York Film Festival happening at Lincoln Center are just a, you know, wonderful pain in the ass, because it’s a very long way away. It’s like the equivalent of going to another state. I don’t know. Anyway, so that’s when this film came to me. And it was just that trio of films were such an entry into understanding how New York works and how, you know, to outsiders, New York is New York. But to insiders, Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island are, you know, as different from each other as below 14th if from above 60th.
SLIM How much did that apartment cost, do you think, that loft? [Gemma & Mitchell laugh]
GEMMA Oh my god! That enormous Soho loft!
SLIM That looked like it cost thousand of dollars, even back then. Can’t imagine what it would cost now.
MITCHELL However much the cost of a papier-mâché bagel and cream cheese is, honestly. [Slim laughs]
SLIM That’s true!
GEMMA I quite liked when he goes, when he’s in that bar, when he’s seeking respite or sanctuary in that bar and he goes to the restroom and there’s that little piece of graffiti, that doodle of the shark by showing a guy’s penis. I was like, “Yeah, that’s it right there.”
SLIM Classic moment.
GEMMA Also, this watch was the first time, sorry, this watch was the first time I noticed Scorsese himself. I hadn’t seen the cameo first time around. And he’s like in this wild underground club dressed as Gestapo, shining, you know, sending a searchlight around the dance floor.
MITCHELL It’s definitely one of the best Scorsese cameos in a movie, I think. And the level of detail in the movie is so impressive. The production design that they put together for it. I read that the script, I think was—or maybe it was in like the DVD commentary on the movie—that the script was originally like 130 pages. But so much of that was because in the script they specifically detailed all of the production elements, as minute as a pubic hair being on a toilet seat was in the script.
SLIM My god.
MITCHELL And Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson just took all of that from the script and just gave it to the production designers and were like “Here, we can’t use any of this for the shooting script but use this to, you know, figure out what you’re doing with the set.” And it feels, I mean, it feels like such a world and such a lived-in world that, you know, the graffiti or the sketching on the bathroom wall and all that kind of stuff, like everything—even just the kind of low-angle shot of Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette going to this diner together, and it’s like this low-angle shot following them through the streets and we see like the fog, the smoke, coming off the wet streets. Every element of the movie is so tactile and you just feel it the entire time.
GEMMA So grimy.
SLIM Let’s go from pubic hair to severed ear in our next films.
MITCHELL Natural, natural.
GEMMA Wait... Slim, are you stealing my segue crown? [Slim & Mitchell laugh] This is amazing...
SLIM It only took pubic hair for me to take the crown. [Gemma & Mitchell laugh]
MITCHELL Slim hears pubic hair and his ears just perk up! [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM I woke right up after I heard that! Blue Velvet, 1986, written and directed by David Lynch. 4.1 average, 5.2 thousand fans. “The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious, nightclub singer and a group of criminals have kidnapped her child.”
GEMMA I have no notes on that synopsis.
SLIM No notes, it’s hard to top that one. David Lynch—have we ever covered David Lynch on this pod before?
GEMMA Yes! We did Wild at Heart.
SLIM Did we? Oh that’s right. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
MITCHELL Oh Slim...
SLIM That was like last week, sorry, Wild at Heart...
GEMMA This is my second David Lynch this year on of our guests and I just—uhh, we’ll get to it.
SLIM You loved Wild at Heart!
GEMMA I did!
SLIM You loved Wild at Heart. That was like your “thank you” movie, if I correctly.
GEMMA Yes! It was my “thank you” movie.
SLIM So this was a first watch for me. But our guest, Mitchell, when was this a first watch for you? And did it immediately jump to your faves on that first viewing?
MITCHELL Yeah, so Blue Velvet is the first movie I can recall being a movie that I was like, “This is my favorite movie.” I was about fifteen, which is a young, young-ish age, to be discovering Blue Velvet, I think. But I was, like at that age, I was really—I had always loved movies on kind of a surface level. I was always a kid who loved going to the movies and everything. But it was around fifteen where I started to really get into movies more on like a critical level and discovering IMDb message boards—RIP to them as well. [Gemma laughs] And getting, just like following what people were talking about on there, looking at the Top 250 on IMDb and all that kind of stuff. And just finding these movies that I had never heard of that seemed really interesting. So Blue Velvet, came to me through that. And I, for some reason I vividly ordering the DVD of it from Best Buy’s website just without having seen it. I just thought it looked interesting. And I watched it and had never seen anything like it. And, I mean, immediately it was like, what in God’s green Earth is this? I need this injected into my veins, like I don’t know what is going on here but I am obsessed with it. And that only continued to happen, like doubled every ten minutes as the movie takes these turns and turns and turns. It starts off as this frolic-y, you know, Norman Rockwell, Reagan-era suburbia. Kyle MacLachlan playing Jeffrey Beaumont, the main character, this college kid who comes home because his dad’s sick, and he starts this little flirtation with Laura Dern’s character, Sandy. And it’s this sweet, little romance with the two of them. He’s doing his chicken-walk on the street to impress her. [Gemma & Slim laugh] But yeah, the severed ear! I mean, it’s right there at the beginning, and going from Lynch focusing on, zooming-in on this perfectly-mowed green lawn and then going underneath to see the bugs crawling, you know, underneath it. The rot and the decay right underneath the surface. And yeah, that severed ear. So you’re having this fun, little moment of them having this little adventure of, oh, you know, where did this ear come from? Who’s this lounge singer Dorothy Vallens played by Isabella Rossellini, like what’s going on with her? How is she involved? Let’s spy on her and investigate it and have a fun time. And then Jeffrey goes into her apartment and hides in her closet and is watching her come in. And then Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is introduced and I mean, from the second—I really can’t think of a character introduction in a movie that immediately changes the tone of the movie as drastically as Frank Booth’s introduction here, where he comes in, and it’s like, oh, it’s not fun and games anymore. We are not having a good time anymore. I don’t know who this dude is... [Gemma & Slim laugh] But...
GEMMA Okay, so that right there, was exactly my feeling on this watch. I know that I saw this on the TV, late at night, with commercial breaks, yeah, when I was about sixteen and was like, “What the eff am I watching it? No thanks, not for me.” At the time, I was into things like Casablanca and Rear Window, you know, like classic, classic. And this was like... this is too new, too weird, too contemporary, too kooky, too much effing. [Mitchell laughs] But also, it was, I started watching it and twenty minutes in, exactly that moment, I was like, “I gotta get up. I feel queasy. I don’t know if it’s what I just ate. Or if it’s David Lynch. Either way, I need to take a break.” I had to get up. I had to get some fresh air, walk around. And then I came back and, you know, it was fine from then on. I don’t know what it is—
SLIM You made it.
GEMMA Yeah, I made it through. I made it through. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM This was my first watch and Colin the dudes review: “Plays like a Hitchcock film, if Hitchcock was possessed by a demonic incubus.” [Mitchell & Gemma laugh] And that was kind of, I mean not that exact thought, but my overall thought was like, going in... David Lynch, I’m not like a mega David Lynch fan, but David Lynch has this kind of mystique that he makes weird shit, you know, like weird movies. Like Twin Peaks gets really weird and everything, yada, yada, yada. So going in, I was like, okay, what am I gonna—what roller-coaster ride is this going to be. But I... I liked this! I thought that this was kind of like, not crazy out there David Lynch, where it was kind of like almost Hitchcockian, but like slightly weird enough for me to raise my eyebrow and not get totally confused or blown out of my seat like, “Man, this is too weird for me.” So I had a great time watching this!
MITCHELL I think Blue Velvet, especially as somebody who this was my first David Lynch movie, I do think that it’s kind of the perfect entry point for David Lynch, because it is—
GEMMA And exit point. Entry and exit. [Mitchell & Slim laugh] In and out!
MITCHELL I mean, you can’t any better than this! [Gemma & Slim laugh] As Gemma’s, you know, clearly saying here, you can’t get any better than this. So watch Blue Velvet. You don’t need to watch any other movie after Blue Velvet, honestly! Just keep watching Blue Velvet. It’s good. It’s good for the kids. It’s good for the grandparents. You know, any family events, you can watch, just put on Blue Velvet. Everybody’s having a good time.
GEMMA It’s got singing, it’s got chicken-dancing. It’s all good!
SLIM The love-making at knifepoint... What do you need for a family viewing? [Gemma laughs]
MITCHELL What more do you need?
SLIM I agree. It wasn’t like, knock-my-socks-off insane. But if I was fifteen, like you, my whole worldview of film also probably would have been changed. Like I might have become one of those David Lynch converts if I had seen this at a young age and had been like, “Whoa, this is freaky. They make movies like this?” That probably would have opened up my eyes.
GEMMA Yeah, we ask—in our interviews on Letterboxd Journal, as many filmmakers as we possibly can, what was the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? So not the film that turned you into a cinephile, you know, the film that that you liked watching the most, but the film that made you go, “Oh, someone’s made decisions here. And I’d quite like to make decisions about films myself,” you know, in the way that they’re made. And this one comes up a lot! It comes up a lot in our Life in Film surveys as the answer to this question. Prano Bailey-Bond, who made Censor, and James Ashcroft, both credited as the film that made them want to make films. So there’s something, there is just definitely something about Blue Velvet that... that makes you go, “Okay, this has been constructed.” And you can make these decisions and you can cast people like Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, the wonderful, luminous, Laura Dern—oh my gosh. One thing I found interesting, I had to look up the age-difference between Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini because it felt like, it felt like decades of age-difference. It’s like six years...
SLIM What?!
GEMMA She’s only six-years older than him. I know... [Gemma laughs]
SLIM How old was MacLachlan? Sixteen in this movie? Seventeen?
GEMMA No, he was about 26—oh, in real life about 26. But in the movie, he’s maybe like second or third year of college.
MITCHELL He plays younger. And it’s interesting because this came out a couple of years after Dune, and I mean so much of it for Lynch was born out of the frustration and failures of Dune. But Dune has MacLachlan in the lead and he plays, he’s definitely playing younger here but there is kind of that quality, that innocence, that naïveté of Kyle MacLachlan. But also this, I mean, it’s the reason that he ended up being Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, you have this trust in him for whatever reason, even as he is creeping on this lady and hiding in her closet, which is obviously not a cool thing to do... [Mitchell laughs]
GEMMA What did Laura say to him? She says, “You are—”
[clip of Blue Velvet plays]
SANDY I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.
JEFFREY Well that’s for me to know and you to find out...
MITCHELL It’s so gross. But you’re also like, “Aw, he’s so sweet!” [Slim laughs]
GEMMA He’s just adorable...
MITCHELL He’s got this little cowlick on the front of his hair. You just want to give him a hug. [Mitchell laughs]
GEMMA Ah man, I just—I wanted to know, why did I feel like Laura Dern’s dad felt like the bad guy all along? There’s something about that character, you know, the police detective who just—I don’t know, maybe it’s because he seems suspicious of Kyle MacLachlan, because, you know, he was dating his daughter. I don’t know. But I was just like, he’s the bad guy! He’s gonna be the one... both times!
MITCHELL I mean, that’s cops for ya! Don’t trust cops. [Gemma & Mitchell laugh]
SLIM So let’s talk about Dennis because, you know, you’ve written—we’ll have a link in the episode notes—great article you’ve written for Paste magazine, The Controlled Chaos of [Dennis] Hopper. So is this officially your number-one Hopper performance? Or are there others out there that really speak to you?
MITCHELL This is my favorite for sure. I love, yeah, as you know, I adore Dennis Hopper. This is like the perfect distillation of why Dennis Hopper is such a unique gift and a unique persona on screen. That piece is specifically about his year in 1986, where he had Blue Velvet, River’s Edge, which you talked about with Sean Baker on this podcast, which is another one my favorite movies—
GEMMA Love that film.
MITCHELL Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Hoosiers, which is a very different kind of movie than any of these other ones. And is the one that appropriately is the only film that he ever got an Oscar nomination for acting was for Hoosiers, in the same year as Blue Velvet. And it really is... He’s a guy who went through such a tumultuous personal life with addiction and struggles in the industry too, he was a difficult guy who was often kicked off of sets or, you know, directors never wanted to work with him or he was kind of shut out of the industry. And then he had to work his way back just through his instinctual talent. He’s just such a talented guy, that people would still want to work with him. And coming into Blue Velvet, he wasn’t the first person in mind for Blue Velvet. I know Harry Dean Stanton was offered it who would work with Lynch often after this, but he turned it down because he just thought the roll was too violent and too deplorable for him to play. He was too scared of it. And I know Michael Ironside discussed, said that the roll was apparently according to him written for him, which, you know, plenty of actors say that and who knows how true that is. But—
GEMMA The role of Laura Dern was written was written for me, so, I mean...
MITCHELL There you go! [Mitchell & Slim laugh] But I know Hopper was like third or fourth on kind of the list of who was offered it. And all these other people were scared of it. But when Hopper was offered it, he said, “Oh, yeah, I have to play Frank. I am Frank.” [Gemma laughs] And like, seeing his character and knowing that this guy has said, “I am this character, I have to play him” is horrifying in so many ways. But he really is—he brings all this personal, his personal history into it, but then also our understanding of his personal history and what he’s been through and kind of that like, rough, rebellious side of him. And I think that it charges the character in a way that you wouldn’t get with any other actors. He also brings in his expertise. I know in the script, one of the things if you watch on YouTube, you can find the full Inside the Actor’s Studio episode with Dennis Hopper. And one of the stories that he tells on it when they’re talking about Blue Velvet, is that in the original script, the gas that Frank Booth is huffing on was originally helium. David Lynch wrote it as helium. [Gemma laughs] They were—and it was supposed to be helium so they shot, the first day, his introduction scene with Isabella Rossellini is the first scene that him and Isabella shot together. It’s the first scene that he shot on the movie, the first day that the two of them even met, which is unreal to think of. But they shot it originally with him actually huffing helium. And so he’s looking, you know, in-between her legs, she spreads her legs open, which Rossellini actually wasn’t wearing anything under her robe, so she spreads—which Hopper didn’t even know about—so she spreads her legs open. He’s seeing everything there, and he sucks on this helium and then with, you know, this high, squeaky voice is saying, you know, [Mitchell raises voice] “Daddy wants to eff.” [Gemma & Slim laugh] And he just, he tells David, “This isn’t gonna work. This is absurd.” Also, this isn’t gonna get like, if the idea is the character’s getting high, this isn’t gonna get him high—
GEMMA Yeah, get me on the nitrous. Get me on the nitrous. [Gemma laughs]
MITCHELL Yeah, exactly. So he’s the one who like, from his personal history of knowing these kind of... enhancements he knew to switch it to this other thing to bring this reality into the character that wouldn’t have been there without him.
SLIM Wow.
GEMMA Loved a lot about it. Glad I don’t have to watch David Lynch again for a while. [Gemma laughs] I mean, I don’t know who’s on next week. But anyway, hey, so you mentioned Hoosiers, also in that film—there’s a lot of links throughout this episode.
MITCHELL There’s a lot of links, yeah.
GEMMA Between all of the films, there’s a lot of links. And the link here is Gene Hackman, who, in the same year as Blue Velvet was in Hoosiers with Dennis Hopper and plays the lead—and played the lead a decade earlier in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation from 1974. Such a good film. Such a dad film. Can I say that? [Slim laughs]
MITCHELL Yeah!
GEMMA One of the ultimate dad films. Yeah, in fact, I watched this, this is one of the ones I watched with my dad back in the ’80s on VHS from Video Ezy. Did you have Video Ezy in the US?
MITCHELL No, I don’t think so.
SLIM Sounds illegal. I don’t know what that is.
GEMMA Ah man, Video Ezy. What till you hear how it was spelled... E-Z-Y... [Slim laughs]
MITCHELL Oh, E-Z-Y. Okay, going wild there. Why not?
GEMMA Oh yeah. [Mitchell laughs] Not e-z. Anyway—
SLIM Was not expecting video easy.
GEMMA Video Ezy. The first time I watched The Conversation was on VHS from Video Ezy with my dad. When was the first time you saw this film?
MITCHELL Yeah, for me, it was around the same time as, I guess in between Blue Velvet and After Hours. I was working at Movie Stop already, so I was like seventeen or eighteen. And it was another one of those ones that I just, the cover intrigued me, I was a fan of Gene Hackman already. I had seen The French Connection I think a little bit before this. So I was kind of getting into these movies and just seeing Gene Hackman, I was like, alright, this looks interesting. And around that time, I was really getting into this era of ’70s paranoia-thrillers, movies like Marathon Man and Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View—shout out to Dom Corry’s favorite movie. I just love—I think this is still kind of maybe my favorite era and subgenre of movies. There’s something in the air at this time that people were just making these kinds of paranoia-thrillers in America.
GEMMA Do you think it was Nixon? Was Nixon in the air at the time?
MITCHELL Well, yeah, yeah, maybe. [Gemma laughs] And that’s that’s kind of one of the interesting things about The Conversation because it is about a surveillance expert who records this titular conversation and he hears what may sound like a plot to murder and so then he starts to investigate it, because he has this guilt. We learned that there was a former event that happened where he did a job that uncovered a... you know, information that got some people killed. And as much as he pretends like he’s not responsible for that, you can clearly tell that he feels responsible for it. And so he goes on this mission to try and uncover, you know, what’s going on here and save some people if he needs to save some people. But the interesting thing is that it came out in 1974, in April 1974, and it came out a few months before Nixon resigned from office after the whole Watergate scandal. And so people watching the film at the time and, you know, even now, obviously, it feels really loaded into that era, really, you feel the weight of Watergate and everything surrounding that while watching the film. But Coppola is like, a little bit mad that that’s the interpretation of it, because he originally wrote the script in the mid-’60s. He was inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-Up, to write something like that with incorporating surveillance and where surveillance was going at the time. And he ended up using, through research and tech advisors and everything, finding this equipment that the characters would use, which ended up being the same kind of equipment that the people, you know, who bugged for the Watergate scandal use. So he had this idea in mind long before Watergate and all of that happened, he just couldn’t get it financed and couldn’t get it made because nobody wanted to make this movie until after The Godfather happened. And similar to Scorsese with After Hours and Lynch with Blue Velvet it’s like once he did [The] Godfather and had this huge success for them, it was having these, you know, failures that they then were able to make kind of this ion project for them. For him, he had this huge success, and then was like, “Okay, now I can finally make this ion project of mine.” And so it came out at this heightened era where it was perfectly positioned to be, you know, getting right into the core of what Americans were very afraid of at the time. And—
GEMMA Like accidental Zeitgeist-cinema, right?
MITCHELL Yeah, yeah, exactly. It has this huge prescience to it. But yeah, it was totally by happenstance that that happened, but it’s unmistakable that it’s there now. And I think that one of the things things that is most haunting about the movie is the fact that it’s not, it’s not political in any kind of way. I think Hackman’s character Harry Caul is and what’s going on with him is so unnerving because of the fact that it’s not this grand political conspiracy, like it’s not a movie like The Manchurian Candidate or something like that, where you can kind of remove yourself from the reality of it because it is this heightened, you know, governmental-conspiracy trying-to-assassinate-somebody-in-office kind of thing. What we discovered here is that Harry Caul—
GEMMA Well we don’t know that for a while. I guess we don’t want to get too far into spoiler territory. I want to say that, because for a while, we don’t know who the director is... for quite a long while. The director being the person who was paying Harry to—
MITCHELL Who hired him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GEMMA Hired Harry to spy on this couple. And so it felt... and I guess because of the era that it’s set in, it felt to me like, you know, it could be political. We don’t know why this couple is being spied on for the longest time. And that’s part of the brilliance of the film, as is, you know, how it unfolds and who ends up being involved. And yeah, it speaks to Jamal’s Letterboxd list, which is quite a long title, but here we go: Movies which you are at first not sure where they are going but in the last 30 minutes or so everything comes into focus and you realize how brilliant they have been all along. So I would caution about going too far into plot because that is part of the brilliance of this film. You know, there’s half of the film is just one long kind of random post-conference party scene up in Harry’s enormous loft, you know, the size of which rivals the loft in After Hours.
MITCHELL Connections! [Gemma & Mitchell laughs]
SLIM Oh my god, the loft in this movie! The equipment in that loft! I would want to be buried in his audio loft. It’s so amazing!
GEMMA I started watching this film, and my first thought in those opening scenes was “Ah, Slim, how about that reel-to-reel porn?”
SLIM It was gorgeous! And one of the things that struck me too, he’s not even wearing headphones when he’s doing this work. The audio was just percolating in that entire loft in that giant speaker above him.
MITCHELL Yeah, because the rest of it is empty. You’ve got that ambiance going, yeah.
GEMMA There’s a palm tree, it’s not entirely empty. There’s a palm tree.
MITCHELL Fair. Very fair. Very fair. Thank you for the correction. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Probably got it from Palm Sunday, going to the Catholic Church.
GEMMA Should we talk about this?
SLIM We have to talk about this. The first time I watched this was maybe last year or the year before and I loved it. And one of my first notes was “He’s a wiretapper and his last name is Caul.” Caul.
GEMMA Wait—oh I just got it! [Mitchell laughs]
SLIM His last name is Caul and he’s a wiretapper. I thought that was so hilarious. [Gemma laughs] But this time around, I wrote in my review, “Forgotten profession; Catholic wiretapper.” You know, the Catholic guilt that has riddled him in this movie from his last gig and this one. You know, he talks about how you don’t use the Lord’s name in vain. And it was just, that’s what struck me on this viewing was that you would assume that he’s a devout Catholic, but, you know, he’s recording people’s private conversations. So he seems to be pretty—
GEMMA And going to confession for it—
SLIM And going to confession—
GEMMA Going to confession for it. Which always—can I just say, it’s—can I say it? As a former, as a recovering-Catholic, I always feel very... very squeamish when I see scenes that are set inside confession booths, because that shit is so private. And yet, without it, this film doesn’t work. Because it hinges around that and I love—I mean Coppola obviously, you know, Italian American, deeply sort of Catholic roots. It’s all—it’s hard to explain to a non-Catholic. I don’t know what other religions, Mitchell, maybe you know, that come with this level of guilt, even long after you’ve left the church. You know, to the point where, I don’t know, Slim could say, “Hey, Gemma, I need to talk to you about something.” And I’m like, “What have I done? Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.” And all he’s saying is, “Can we move the record like ten minutes?” [Slim laughs] That’s how deep it goes!
MITCHELL Yeah, I mean, I think Coppola, he even said that the confession was such like a big part of this because he sees confession as like the original kind of surveillance, the original kind of breach of privacy is—
GEMMA Oof, I love that.
MITCHELL You know, telling your secrets to somebody who is saying that they are going to keep your secrets but you’re still revealing your secrets with this pretense of trust.
GEMMA Yeah! And the notion of having faith is having a direct relationship between yourself and your God. There shouldn’t have to be anybody in the middle.
MITCHELL Exactly.
GEMMA Like it is... It is religious surveillance. Oooh, I like that a lot.
SLIM That was Gemma that said that, that was not me. I’m Slim. I did not say that. [Gemma & Mitchell laugh] That was Gemma. If you want to direct any kind of hate mail, from your church to Gemma...
GEMMA I just... Okay. Shall we step sideways from talking about Catholicism to talking about pants-down representation in movies because... [Mitchell & Slim laugh] Honestly, that is the first thing I do when I get in the door from of a long day of Catholic surveillance. [Mitchell & Gemma laugh] No, but seriously, there is Harry Caul comes home from quite a big day of, you know, surveillance of this couple, takes off his pants, gets his saxophone and starts noodling. And that is just so real to me. Am I... Am I alone here? Am I the only person who takes off—
MITCHELL I mean, I think we all know what it feels like to drop the pants and start noodling, right? [Slim & Gemma laughs]
GEMMA That was Mitchell who said that. Not Slim... Not Gemma.
SLIM I wrote that in my first review, too. I thought it was—I was so struck by, you know, we’re not that far away, far gone, but it’s like a different time. You come home, you’re wearing slacks all day, you’re wearing a suit, a tie, you just want to unwind. Take those slacks off—
GEMMA It’s the bra ladies, am I right?
SLIM I want to go through my mail—
GEMMA The bra is actually—if Harry Caul were a woman, the bra would be the first off and yeah, but slacks, whatever. Ah man, when Harry shows up to the trade show, the surveillance wiretappers trade show, which also, the existence of such a thing... so genius. [Mitchell laughs]
SLIM We need to have representation at the next wiretapping tradeshow from The Letterboxd Show.
GEMMA Actually, The Card Counter, right? The Card Counter has a trade show. The Paul Schrader movie.
MITCHELL Yeah, yeah, mhmm.
GEMMA Yeah, yeah. Has a security trade show. And I’m just like, wow, that’s a good double feature. But the other film I thought would make a great double feature with this, which we’ve also discussed on this show, is No Way Out. And I feel like—which also stars Gene Hackman—and I feel like Roger Donaldson, you know... borrowed a lot from The Conversation. The opening, that long, long, long opening shot that pulls-out or zooms-in, whatever it does. And yeah, just that sort of sense of unfolding and taking time to figure out who is who. The one thing I struggle with whenever I watch The Conversation is the idea of Gene Hackman as a vulnerable character, because he is such a badass across over a hundred films. He’s just such a masculine presence. And I mean that in a good way. He is the opposite of Dennis Hopper. He is, when you know Gene Hackman is in a movie, you know we’re in for some serious conspiracy. So yeah, we get the conspiracy, but I wasn’t expecting the, I guess, pants-down, saxophone-noodling, Catholic vulnerability we got here and I love it for that. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
MITCHELL Yeah. Gene Hackman is one of my favorite actors. I just recently did an episode of the podcast the B-side with Dan Mecca and Connor O’Donnell from The Film Stage where we just talked about Gene Hackman for like two and a half hours. And he’s... he’s kind of like Harrison Ford, he’s an actor who people love. Obviously, he’s got two Oscars, he’s very well appreciated. But I think at the same time, he’s such an underrated actor. And I think part of it is people not recognizing the kind of vulnerability that he has in roles and, yeah, the layers that he can bring to something like this or Scarecrow, or even I mean, Unforgiven that’s like a villainous character. But there is something so much more layered to that character. And he’s spoken a lot in interviews about masculinity. He had a really difficult relationship in his personal life with his father who left him and his family when he was like, very young. And so his relationship with masculinity is really just complex and interesting. And he has always felt like a real man is not afraid of femininity, and not afraid of bringing that vulnerable side out into the world and not afraid of crying and not afraid of, you know, holding that within you. And I think that’s part of why Harry Caul is such an interesting character, even though he is like, I mean, at his heart, he’s a guy who is spying on people and doing it for maybe not the right—I mean, he’s doing it for money, right. So like, you kind of don’t want to like this guy, but you still root for him. And you still, I mean, this is—out of all of these movies, this guy is like the saddest dude I’ve ever seen. Those glasses, that suit that he wears, that trench coat that’s like kind of see-through, which is like you’re seeing into his soul...
GEMMA Oh my gosh, what is with that—
SLIM Plastic bag.
MITCHELL His little mustache. He just goes home and he drops the pants and plays the saxophone. It’s like, come on, man. Let’s just hang out.
GEMMA There’s so many great links across this episode. As I said, Isabella Rossellini, who was in Blue Velvet was married to Scorsese for a minute. Gene Hackman was in movies with Dennis Hopper. And then Martin Scorsese and this next director were besties and he really championed her films and the preservation of her films. We are talking about Agnès Varda, the great, the absolute GOAT when it comes to directors of cinema;. And her 1965 film, Le Bonheur, otherwise known as Happiness, which is just—my god. Synopsis, in capital letters: “ONLY A WOMAN COULD DARE TO MAKE THIS FILM.” [Mitchell & Gemma laugh] Wow! What?
SLIM We should mention, we’ll probably get into spoiler territory, I think probably for this one. Maybe—
GEMMA Might...
SLIM We might. So just a slight warning that we might get into, because I feel like it might be a big part of our conversation.
MITCHELL It’s a harder one to discuss, maybe, without getting into some spoilers.
GEMMA It definitely is. So let’s look at—so the Letterboxd synopsis says: “Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse, young husband and father François finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker.” That’s the Letterboxd synopsis. I understand, Slim, that you had a bit of a synopsis drama...
MITCHELL Slim very upset about HBO Max’s synopsis.
SLIM If any of our friends listening right now work at HBO, DM me, let’s fix this. We can solve this issue. So I read the Letterboxd synopsis and then I drifted over at HBO Max, which is where I watched it—it’s also on Criterion—and I just briefly looked at the synopsis. And this is where we drift into spoiler territory. So if you want to fast forward or come back to this, please do. The HBO synopsis: “When his wife dies, a man takes his children and goes off to live with his mistress happily ever after.” [Gemma & Mitchell laugh] That’s literally the end is the end of the movie! That is the end of the movie! So when I first read—
GEMMA That is the synopsis for the last like, four minutes... [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Yes! So when I read that, I actually thought like they had wrong metadata. And I was like, man, that’s really wrong. Alright, I’m gonna fire up this movie. So and then as I was finished, I was like, oh shit, that synopsis needs to get removed.
GEMMA Wow.
SLIM So yeah, it didn’t really hinder my enjoyment of the film. So full disclosure, I was blown away by this movie.
GEMMA Ah, man.
SLIM Like, this is an incredible film. I refer to it as like French Horror Wave.
GEMMA Yeah!
SLIM You know, we talked about French New Wave on this podcast before and it was my first introduction to that. But I was not really prepared for the direction that this movie went.
GEMMA Me neither. Like that line, “Only a woman could dare to make this film.” And I start watching it, and I’m like, what... I know, this was my first watch for this particular Varda film. And I was like, I don’t understand what’s going... I just... What does that mean? And so then I took a quick glance at some non-spoilered Letterboxd reviews where they all started talking about daylight-horror. And I was like, okay, we’re in Jeanne Dielman[, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles] territory here probably. So... Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. Let’s go there. What. A. Film. How many different iterations of physical media do you own this on, Mitchell?
MITCHELL Just two. Just two for this. Just the DVD and the Blu-ray, just the DVD and the Blu-ray for this one. [Mitchell & Gemma laugh]
SLIM Do you what your first experience was for this film?
MITCHELL Yeah, so this one actually as teased earlier, this is a film that was introduced to me through Jack Moulton from Jack’s Facts at Letterboxd here. Jack and I have been friends for probably close to twenty years now. And so I know Jack as somebody who has very... Jack is very particular with his ratings. It’s one of the reasons that Jack is like the data guy at Letterboxd. He’s very particular with his ratings. And Jack does not give out five-out-of-five-star ratings on Letterboxd very often, especially not to films that he has seen for like the first time, it’s pretty rare for him. So in 2018 he logged Le Bonheur for the first time and in his review, he specifically mentions that it was his first five out of five in a very long time on a first viewing. And I had never heard of this movie. I knew Varda but I hadn’t seen any of her films yet. And so him watching it put it on my radar, I put it on my watchlist and then not too long after that he DM’d me and said like, “Hey you need to watch this movie. I think that you are really going to love this movie.” And so I watched it that night on FilmStruck, RIP FilmStruck, thank you for Criterion Channel existing but... [Gemma laughs] But so I watched it on FilmStruck that night that Jack recommended it to me and yeah, I had a very similar experience that you had Gemma, where for the first hour—it’s a short movie, it’s like 80 minutes long—for the first hour of it, I was like, I mean this is gorgeous. It’s very, you know, technically well made, the costumes are amazing, the colors, the pastels, I love it. But as far as the plot goes, this is just some like scummy dude cheating on his wife and getting away with it. And you know, the mistress is like totally chill with it and—
GEMMA And his wife is really nice. He’s got no reason to leave...
MITCHELL His wife is so nice.
GEMMA They’ve got a healthy sex life. He’s a lovely dad. He’s got a good job. Like what is going on here?
MITCHELL Yeah, so I was just like, why would Jack say that this was perfect for me? [Mitchell & Slim laugh]
SLIM What is Jack saying?!
MITCHELL I was just confused... And then the last 30 minutes or so happened, the last twenty minutes or so happened that are in the HBO Max synopsis for the movie. And I’m like, ohhh, okay, this is—Varda is, she’s laced something in here. It’s basically like a Trojan horse of a movie where you’re watching this guy getting his male-wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the movie is basically portraying that almost as like a fairy tale, like everything’s going great for him, everybody’s happy, everybody’s frolicking and having a lovely time. And then almost—it’s like this pin drop, like almost like a sledgehammer really, that just like hits you and just immediately turns it. And you’re like, oh, okay, she’s completely subverting those kinds of movies which happened plenty, you know, still to this day, movies about guys cheating on their wives and things end up perfectly happy, he either regrets it and goes back to his wife and she’s, you know, completely chill, or he lives happily ever after with, you know, the other woman and nothing—
GEMMA No consequences...
MITCHELL Yeah, no consequences, no consequences for any of it. And she—only a woman could make this movie. It is this complete, scathing critique of toxic masculinity, I think and I mean, it’s incredible. And she uses her form, her craft to kind of lace in the fact that like, when you’re watching it a second time and you know kind of where it’s gonna go, you can feel that sense of unease throughout the movie. She uses these really jarring flash-cuts mixed with long takes and visual motifs, throughout the movie to give us an understanding that things aren’t quite right. And so even though this guy François is living the life and, you know, he thinks everything is great, we get a sense through the form of the film that something’s off, this is not gonna go his way and keep going this way. I think she described the film as a “beautifully ripe peach with a worm lurking on the inside of it,” which I think is perfectly said. Also speaks again to a connection with Blue Velvet, is a very similar thing, where everything on the surface is, you know, all roses and white-picket fences but there’s this rot at the core of what’s going on here. And yeah, when I first watched it I had that experience for the first hour of like, I don’t understand why Jack thinks that I would like this... [Gemma laughs] And it’s well made but like story wise, I don’t like this at all. I really do not—I don’t approve. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Oh man.
MITCHELL But then those last twenty minutes happened and I’m like, okay, this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen like this. This blew my mind.
GEMMA I have to call out a review by Raul on Letterboxd, you know, speaking to Varda’s use of form and structure and technique: “Me, watching a Godard film with unorthodox editing: fuck off you pretentious asshole. Me, watching a Varda film with (somewhat similar) unorthodox editing: nothing in the history of the world has shown a better mastery of the cinematic medium as this movie.” [Slim & Gemma laugh]
MITCHELL There you go.
SLIM I mean, there’s even that conversation where—they have the conversation towards the end of the movie, where he’s like, “I got to be honest. I don’t like lying, I gotta tell you, like, yeah, I have met someone else. But she’s not as good as you. But, you know, I’m still very happy. It’s different with you.” And I’m like thinking to myself, like, “Oh my god, is this working?” Like am I being fooled by this guy too? Because it almost feels like she’s going to accept it in this moment, and you’re like, wow, I cannot believe that this is working. And then, you know, he’s with the kids and they, I think it’s presumed that they make love, or at least lay together in that moment.
MITCHELL Samm was a little bit uncomfortable. Samm was like, “They’re having sex with the kids, like, right there...” [Mitchell laughs]
SLIM I know, yeah. I love that, I mean, just also, I was like, the free nature of the ’60s at this point, too. Like, I guess this is the ’60s! This is the French ’60s.
MITCHELL I’m not a parent! When you’re a parent, you know, you gotta—
GEMMA You’re not a parent... And Slim, your kid is a little bit more grown up now. I’m just saying, I got a six-year-old in the house and you got to take your moments. [Slim laughs] And I was like—
SLIM And also, who cares if there’s 6,000 other people in this park that you’re making-love in, at any given moment, someone could walk by. Who cares? It’s the ’60s.
GEMMA It’s fine! The grass is long! [Mitchell laughs]
SLIM When he goes to find her and she goes missing, I started to feel like physically ill at that moment where I’m like, oh, no... no... And then there’s like that quick-cut of her in the water. And then, oh my god, I was just like chilled to the bone in that entire scene. And then it just continues, really, with like the fallout of the HBO synopsis... [Gemma laughs] Becomes real on screen. So it was like honestly chilling. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Like if this had come out today, this would be like an A24 movie—
GEMMA Oh yeah.
SLIM By someone with some named director and people would be crapping their pants.
GEMMA There’s just so many different takes on Letterboxd, you know, in of the way that this unfolds. I love Kambole Campbell, who’s one of our writers, writes: “The ‘I love nature’ part has to be one of the most gloriously stupid lines a dude has uttered in a film.” [Mitchell & Slim laugh] So true. RiverJordan: “Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur is an impressionist painting with razor blades buried beneath its brightly colored oils.” I was thinking, Mitchell, about your beautiful interview recently with Céline Sciamma about Petite Maman. I mean, I couldn’t stop, obviously, they’re quite different stories, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Petite Maman as I watched this, because of those beautiful autumnal colors. And then, I guess the sort of exploration of family and notions of family. And I was thinking about that moment when Céline is talking about audiences, about how she makes her films for audiences. And she’s like, “You should watch this!” I’m going to find the quote for you. So she talks about, Céline talks about Portrait of a Lady on Fire and how much she got on the impact of the film, and so how she is always thinking about audiences when she makes her movies. And she’s like, “I couldn’t act like I didn’t hear all of that. So for this film, Petite Maman, I was like, oh, it should be short.” And Le Bonheur is also short. “Families should be able to go—” I mean, for the most part, families could watch this. The kids are really cute.
MITCHELL The kids are so cute in this.
GEMMA The kids are so cute in this. Kids should be included, and then, “Straight men, you’re super welcome. You were always welcome, but come on, you’re on screen.” But unlike Petite Maman, when she says, “and the straight-man character is really cool.” This straight-man character is not. I just was loving that. I was thinking there parallels here are so spooky. And they’re kind of perfect to watch mirror-image of each other, in of, eah, French explorations of family and... I love nature! [Slim laughs]
MITCHElL Yeah, that’s certainly, I think, a better and easier double feature than the After Hours, Good Time one. [Mitchell laughs] Where you’re just probably sweating by the end of that one.
GEMMA Yeah, or Le Bonheur and Jeanne Dielman[, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles] which obviously go together so beautifully well.
SLIM Oh yeah, wow.
GEMMA Because they sort of, I was gonna say, they’re sort of cinephile secrets, aren’t they? It took me until The Letterboxd Show to watch Jeanne Dielman[, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles] because I just kept hearing, “You should watch it. You should watch it.” I’m like, it’s three and a half hours long, whatever it is... But then they were absolutely right. But you can’t really tell people why they should watch it. And it’s kind of the same with this, except for HBO’s spoilery synopsis. It’s like I can’t tell you why you should watch it, ou should just watch it!
SLIM Cinephile secrets is a great list.
GEMMA Oooh.
MITCHELL That’s another, that’s a third podcast, maybe, Cinephile Secrets. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA I just searched Cinephile Secrets, there is no Letterboxd list called Cinephile Secrets, so if you’re listening...
MITCHELL Slim, there you go. Put it right next to Man Ass.
SLIM I would love to. I do not have the time for Cinephile Secrets. I’ll the baton from my faltering hand.
GEMMA He’s too busy with Man Ass... to society. [Slim laughs]
MITCHELL Man Ass is honestly a full time job. [Slim laughs] It really does... Man Ass—and you got to put in the work, you got to put in the elbow grease for that Man Ass.
GEMMA Hang on. How did we get through an entire conversation about Blue Velvet without mentioning Slim’s Man Ass list?
MITCHELL True. Very true.
SLIM Oh my god. Funnily enough, the reason I even made the Man Ass list is because of Kyle MacLachlan in Showgirls.
MITCHELL Right, right, right!
SLIM His stunt-double’s ass in that movie is a religious experience for anyone that can see it. I mean, you’re forever changed by seeing those ass cheeks.
GEMMA But this is surely Kyle’s own ass.
MITCHELL It’s gotta be!
SLIM That looks like real Kyle ass.
GEMMA Was this a religious experience? Was this a religious experience for you?
SLIM No, that was like an uncooked hotdog, his ass cheek back there. [Mitchell & Gemma & Slim laugh] Nothing to inspire, it would not inspire me to make a list. I’ll say that much.
GEMMA Oh my gosh...
MITCHELL Kyle! The shame! [Slim laughs]
SLIM Sorry, Kyle.
GEMMA Mitchell, we have made it through all four and we are still probably only just cracking an hour which is some kind of miracle. So let’s take a few minutes to dive into your stats. But first, to get to your stats, I had to sort through all of these incredible lists: your 4K Blu-ray collection, your Criterion collection, your Blu-ray collection, your DVD collection… My god, how big is your mansion that you house this physical-media collection in? Is it as big as Gene Hackman’s loft?
MITCHELL Unfortunately though, it’s—I can’t think of a an equivalent. It is a very small, maybe more the size of Rossellini’s apartment in Blue Velvet. It is not big enough to house all of the movies that I have. My bedroom is where I have all of my movies and it’s slowly taking over the stack, the weight of it is becoming more and more. It’s going to be taking up, it’s going to be hitting the bed at some point soon. I’m going to be one of those people with just everything scattered around. I mean, most of them at this point are on the floor because I don’t have shelves, space for them anymore. It’s... it’s a problem. But I can’t I can’t stop doing it. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Two questions. What’s your most recent purchase for physical media? And do you have like a fave recent purchase? Like, oh my god, this is probably one of my most prized collections. Or a set that was like re released that you’re just absolutely in love with?
MITCHELL Weirdly, we started this a little bit of, you know, behind the scenes, we started this podcast recording a little bit later than we planned it because I had a package dropped off before we started which was—
GEMMA You’re like, “I need to bring it in, it’s raining, it’s raining.” I just want you to know that I just had a package dropped off, and it’s my next month’s worth of toilet paper... [Slim laughs] So like... that’s what I’m dealing with in my household. What was your package?
MITCHELL So I got a package of, yeah, a few movies. Witness on Blu-ray, Harrison Ford being brought up again. Very good movie.
GEMMA The underrated Harrison Ford.
MITCHELL Very, very good movie. I also got the Heaven’s Gate Criterion. Michael Cimino is kind of being talked about a lot on Twitter right now, so I picked up a couple of their films. Hi, Mom! The early Brian De Palma, Robert De Niro movie, I picked up because I hadn’t seen that before. So that’s my most recent literally just came in.
SLIM Just arrived... [Mitchell & Gemma laugh]
MITCHELL But yeah, as far as like big ones recently... the Wild Things 4K Blu-ray just came out last week from Arrow Video which I got like a week or two early. They sent me a copy of it and I watched it. I mean, that was a big one for me. Criterion also had honestly a really big—Mississippi Masala just came out, actually, the day that we’re recording this, the Blu-ray from Mississippi Masala just came out. And that’s, I mean, that’s one of my favorite movies of all time. So I mean, I highly recommend people check that out, especially with the new restoration, like it’s not been available, really, for a long period of, a long time. I had an old DVD of it that I got for like $80 on Amazon, used, like eight years ago. And that’s how I’ve been watching it for so many years until they just, Janus films just did this 4K restoration that’s absolutely gorgeous. And yeah, I mean, that’s just an incredible movie, Denzel Washington...
SLIM Speaking of the physical media, Gemma reminded me of our episode with Jenni Olson and one of their movies Times Square, at the time we were recording Kino had not released the physical one, and we were trying to track down—
GEMMA We were trying to track it down. That soundtrack is so good.
SLIM Yes! And I follow Sean Baker on Instagram and he posted that he had it, I think he had like two copies in his hands. So I think it’s officially out and about and for purchase.
GEMMA Oh my gosh, such a good film. Speaking of, speaking of grimy New York in the ’80s...
SLIM Yeah...
GEMMA Times Square, a must-watch. I mean, you know, we’re talking about some quite a high-quality, high-tier, cinephile fare and so while we’re on that topic, let’s dive into your Rated Higher Than Average. And hear about the—
MITCHELL I think I know where this is going. I think I know where this is going. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, the important, pivotal, cinematic-arts pieces of art that you have rated higher than the Letterboxd average that are [The] Slumber Party Massacre and Hot Tub Time Machine.
MITCHELL Yeah. Yeah! Great, perfect movies, honestly. Great, great movies, both. [The] Slumber Party Massacre—Gemma, have you seen [The] Slumber Party Massacre?
GEMMA I have not. Do I need to see it? Is it like a Jeanne Dielman[, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles] cinephile-secret-level film?
MITCHELL I wouldn’t say Jeanne Dielman[, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles]... but [The] Slumber Party Massacre is a movie that was written and directed by Amy Holden Jones, co-written by Rita Mae Brown. And it’s a film, it’s an ’80s-horror film. It’s kind of like exploitation-y horror, but it came about at this time where horror was mostly being directed by men, at least in mainstream kind of ways. And the treatment of women was not particularly great. You know, there was a lot of lurid, kind of, treatments of women in horror. In horror, but also in comedy. I mean, this is like Porky’s era, you know, where spying on women and showers was seen as, you know, funny, just a thing that guys do and should be celebrated kind of thing. And [The] Slumber Party Massacre really turns that on its head by being so direct about its gross, kind of skeezy masculinity, but having it filmed through this female gaze, gives it this understanding of like, the moments where there’s a shower, kind of bathroom scene, where we are just panning over the body of this naked woman and it just like holds on her bare ass for like, 30 seconds, to the point where you’re watching it and in a different movie, you would hold on that for like five seconds, so people could get their kind of, you know, thrill out of seeing a woman’s ass and we just kind of move on. Like, there’s no point of that being in there. But they hold the camera on it long enough to where you can kind of be like, ‘Oh, why is this holding on this for so long? This has like, no context or anything.’ And then you think like, ‘Oh, why is it—other movies do this without it being pointed.’ And so it has that throughout the entire movie. I mean, the killer in the movie uses a massive, massive, massive phallic drill to kill.
GEMMA Oh my god.
MITCHELL And I mean, it’s hilarious, but it’s also super, super smart.
GEMMA I... have seen this film in the ’80s... at a slumber party.
SLIM What!
MITCHELL There you go. I mean, it’s perfect! It’s perfect!
GEMMA Wow!
SLIM What was your young Gemma rating at that time, at that slumber party?
GEMMA Ah, at that time, I think I was possibly... more interested in talking about the boys... that we were interested in.
SLIM Tiger Beat magazine?
GEMMA No, Dolly magazine. It was all about Dolly magazine, where I came from. It was a UK magazine. Anyway, what was my rating at the time? Ah, at the time, it probably would have been what it is now, a solid 3.5. The best rating.
SLIM 3.5, the fabled Gemma rating. Doesn’t get any better than that. [Gemma laughs]
MITCHELL Yeah, I mean, [The] Slumber Party Massacre, I think I give it a five probably. And I mean, I genuinely think it’s a perfect movie. Hot Tub Time Machine is where I assume that you are going with this and is the one that I think I get the most kind of sideways glances for. But Hot Tub Time Machine has a very, very special place in my heart. And it’s a movie that—so I have like a personal connection—
GEMMA Wait, you gave it a four-and-a-half stars versus the Letterboxd average of 2.7. It must be said.
MITCHELL Criminal! 2.7—criminal! [Gemma & Slim laugh] Letterboxd jail for everybody who gives it less than four. I mean, I think it’s a genius movie. It is incredibly—it’s humor is just very smart, very well-timed. It’s very, it’s got this like subversive humor, where it is not going for the easy jokes, it’s going for jokes that you have to stop and think for a second before you get them or you’re just like, “This is so weird. It can’t be anything less than hilarious to me.” But it also—I think I’m a big John Cusack fan. I’m a big John Cusack ’80s-comedy fan. Better Off Dead... is one of my favorite movies…
GEMMA Oh my god.
MITCHELL …and that’s another movie that just has like, really bizarre humor in so many different kinds of ways. There’s a dancing cheeseburger in Better Off Dead... at one point. And Hot Tub Time Machine really harkens back to that style of humor, which I think, as we can see by the fact that two of my four favorites that we’re talking about here are ’80s films, the ’80s is my favorite decade for cinema. And I think the sense of humor in the ’80s in cinema was at a height that we moved away from for some reason, and I can’t possibly understand why. [Gemma laughs] And Hot Tub Time Machine, out of all these broad, you know, comedies that have been coming out—it came out in 2010, so around that era where Apatow movies were, you know, really the rage, Apatow directed and produced and whatever, whatever, whatever. Hot Tub Time Machine just had, it fell into that same category, but I think is so much more elevated than those kinds of movies. And yeah, I mean, it’s a great movie. And it’s also—I... [Gemma laughs] when it came out on—I was working, I was working at Movie Stop when it came out on Blu-ray and when it came out on Blu-ray, I had gone through a really, really tough breakup. And I had seen the film already in theaters so I already loved it. But when it came out, I was going through this super rough breakup and I literally just put the Blu-ray—because I mean, it’s a comfort movie for me in so many ways. And I just, for literally two or three months, I just had Hot Tub Time Machine—this is maybe sad actually—I had Hot Tub Time Machine just playing on a loop in my apartment. So I would come home and from work and wherever I had stopped it, I would just start playing it again. And just keep going. And so it’s lucky that Letterboxd didn’t exist in 2010, because if it did, my most watched movie would probably be Hot Tub Time Machine at like 140 or something, like 140 views or something like that... [Gemma laughs]
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
SLIM Thank you to Mitchell Beaupre for ing us neat girls on The Letterboxd Show this week. You can follow Journal as well as The Film Stage, Paste and more good places. Hope you like the sound of their voice, because maybe, just maybe, Gemma or I will be taking a little break and have Mitchell step into The Letterboxd Show Four Faves hot seat once in a while... Stay tuned, Gemma, stay tuned.
GEMMA Excited.
SLIM Thanks also to our crew, Sophie Shin for the episode transcript, Moniker for the theme music and to me, for editing this thing.
GEMMA Did you just thank yourself? [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM Get used to it, Gemma, get used to it!
GEMMA Thanks to me for co-hosting this episode. You can find links to all the s and lists and other things we mentioned in the episode notes. Be sure to queue up our other podcast Weekend Watchlist, new episodes drop on Thursdays, just in time for the weekend with Mitchell, Mia and me... Hopefully Slim will have watched RRR by the time you listen to this... We would love it if you left us a review or a rating for any of our podcasts. The Letterboxd Show is a Tapedeck production. Thanks for listening. You have The Letterboxd Show disease in you now...
SLIM Let’s make that t-shirt, ASAP...
[clip of After Hours plays]
Now I have forgotten the number... [woman laughs] What is wrong with you? [woman laughs] Are you alright? I have had a terrible, terrible night. Do you understand?
I’m just trying to entertain you.
I don’t want any entertainment! I’m sorry I did that. I’m sorry. I’m just, I’m under—oh god. I’m unable to get home tonight. You know? I can’t get home. And I’m trying desperately to find a place where I can stay tonight, just sleep! All I want to do is sleep! There was a place on Spring Street, I could stay there but I don’t want to.
Yeah, why not?
Why not what?
Why aren’t you there? There’s a place on Spring Street—go.
Because the bartender who lives there girlfriend killed herself tonight. And I think it’s because of me.
I see, that’s out then.
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.