Junk Filter

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122: Aftersun (with Rafa Sales Ross) Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

This episode contains major spoilers and deals with difficult subject matter, so please watch the film before you listen to this discussion.

Freelance film critic and programmer Rafa Sales Ross joins me from Scotland to discuss Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, starring newcomer Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in an Academy Award-nominated performance as Calum, a Scottish single father who takes his 11 year old daughter Sophie on a trip to a resort in Turkey in the late nineties, a story told partly through the use of MiniDV holiday footage but more importantly refracted from the perspective of a grown-up Sophie, now at the same age her father was on this fateful vacation and reconsidering her memories.

As a film critic who saw Aftersun at its tear-soaked screening at Cannes and as part of the programming team that later selected the film to open the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Rafa is uniquely equipped to speak about this powerful drama about what gets captured in the “mind camera”; parenthood, loss, depression, empathy, memory, nostalgia and the hard-won wisdom children experience when they transform into adults and finally start to understand their parents as people.

There are over three dozen premium episodes of the show available exclusively to patrons: some notable previous Patreon guests include Jared Yates Sexton, Jacob Bacharach, David Roth, Bryan Quinby and Sooz Kempner. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Rafa Sales Ross on Twitter and visit her website.

Trailer for Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)

Rafa’s interview with Charlotte Wells on Aftersun, for “Little White Lies”, November 15, 2022

121: A History of Canadian Pay TV (with Ed Conroy) Feb 01, 2023

Show notes

Ed Conroy, a Toronto-based cultural historian and the creator of Retrontario, joins the show for a look back at the 40th anniversary of Pay TV in Canada.

On February 1, 1983, Canada’s first Pay TV channels arrived on the airwaves to great fanfare: Competing movie services First Choice and Superchannel offered subscribers blockbuster movies "uncut and commercial free" while the more refined C Channel offered more highbrow fare: world cinema, opera, theatre and concerts. First Choice distinguished itself from the other services by offering adult entertainment (softcore nudity on the soap opera “Loving Friends and Perfect Couples” and late night Playboy Channel programming, co-productions that controversially qualified as Canadian Content).

But Pay TV was not a success out of the gate, leading to C Channel going off the air within weeks and First Choice eventually having to merge with Superchannel (Canadians know the service now as Crave).

Ed and I take the listener on a tour of this chapter in television history, when uncut movies in your home were a novelty in the days before VCRs were commonplace, and the thrill of being exposed to exciting illicit programming, bringing Canadian teenagers in the eighties an at-home crash course in high and low film culture.

RIP Noah Cowan, veteran programmer and artistic director for TIFF who brought us Midnight Madness at the Festival and whose father Edgar brought us C Channel, a service ahead of its time.

Follow Ed Conroy on Twitter and visit his wonderful found local video repository Retrontario

First Choice commercial, February 1983

Superchannel commercial, March 1983

C Channel commercial featuring Gordon Pinsent, February 1993

TEASER - 120: The Singing Detective (with Ted Mills) Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

Access this entire 87 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/120-singing-with-77990062

The American writer and filmmaker Ted Mills, now living in Wellington New Zealand, joins the program for a discussion of the television playwright Dennis Potter’s greatest achievement, his 1986 series for the BBC, The Singing Detective.

One of the earliest examples of what we would now call “Prestige TV”, The Singing Detective was acclaimed for the breakout lead performance from Michael Gambon and for how it told a difficult story in a complex manner taking place over several planes of time, reality and fantasy. In 6 epsiodes, an unpleasant pulp novelist hospitalized with a ghastly and paralyzing case of psoriasis begins to put the pieces of his life together with the help of the hospital’s psychiatrist, starting to comprehend that his horrible mental and physical condition may be related to unresolved traumas from his childhood.

We talk about Dennis Potter as a tv playwright, critic and advocate for public television’s power to both entertain and emancipate the viewer, the controversies in the UK when the program first aired, the show’s positive portrayal of psychotherapy, the self-conscious blurring of autobiography and fiction in Potter’s work, and how the experimental structure of The Singing Detective influenced modern prestige TV like The Sopranos and Twin Peaks.

We also (briefly) discuss the (bad) American remake from the early 2000s with Robert Downey Jr.

The Singing Detective is currently available to view at the Internet Archive and on YouTube.

Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive episodes a month: some of our notable previous guests include Jared Yates Sexton, David Roth, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Ted Mills on Twitter and Instagram and visit his website.

TEASER - 119: YMO Part 1: Those Naughty Boys (with Isobel from pet wife) Jan 25, 2023

Show notes

Access this entire 83 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/119-ymo-part-1-77692321

Isobel from the Brooklyn-based electronic group pet wife returns to the show for the first of a two-part series on the pioneering Japanese electronic music supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra: keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, bassist Haruomi Hosono and the drummer, Yukihiro Takahashi.

Part one of the series is about how YMO changed the world, with a discussion of highlights from their span of albums as a band from 1978 to 1993, music that provided the blueprints for many genres of modern music including hip hop, electronica, house, techno and video game soundtracks. We talk about the parallels between YMO and the Four Lads from Liverpool, their style, wit and technical innovations, and we mourn the stunning recent passing of Yukihiro Takahashi, a hero of ours.

A second episode, on the solo careers of those Naughty Boys, is coming soon!

Follow pet wife on Twitter, Spotify and Bandcamp

YMO’s appearance on Soul Train, performing “Tighten Up” and “Firecracker” for a mystified Don Cornelius, 1980

YMO back together performing "Rydeen", 2007

Music video for “Ongaku”, 1983

TEASER - 76: Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear (with pet wife) Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

Access the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63667721

Isobel and Noelle from the experimental electro pop group pet wife join me from Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss the life of Marvin Gaye and his 1978 concept album Here, My Dear.

There’s nothing like Here, My Dear, the result of a divorce settlement between Gaye and his first wife Anna, where it was agreed that he would record his next album for Motown and give to her the entire advance and half the royalties. He delivered a two record set that chronicled the story of their marriage and divorce. A commercial failure at the time, which hastened his all-consuming drug abuse and eventual death (at the hands of his own father), it has since been re-evaluated as one of his greatest achievements and hugely influential on contemporary r&b.

Follow pet wife on Twitter and visit the group's website!

Music video for pet wife’s B.L.O.O.D.O.R.A.N.G.E. (2020)

Television commercial for Here, My Dear (1978)

118: Star Wars: Andor (with Roxana Hadadi and Corey Atad) Jan 06, 2023

Show notes

Roxana Hadadi, a TV critic for New York magazine's culture site Vulture. and returning guest Corey Atad join me for an enthusiastic discussion of Tony Gilroy’s ambitious new Disney Star Wars streaming series Andor.

Gilroy, who had been brought in by Lucasfilm to rescue the troubled production Rogue One in 2016, recently returned to the franchise for a series that provides a backstory for the character Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) who sacrificed his life to steal the plans for the Death Star. But Andor the series is not really a Space Opera with the typical fan servicing Disney has provided Star Wars fans in recent years. Instead it’s a program built as a series of mini arcs that analyze how fascist rule is systemically maintained (through private police, colonial rule and the prison industrial complex) and how people living under such a system can either become radicalized, victimized or complicit. It’s Star Wars fused with Blade Runner, The Battle of Algiers and yes, Michael Clayton. We discuss the show’s intelligent design and impeccable vibes, and we wonder, for a show that is so clearly sympathetic to antifascism, why it hasn’t enraged the culture warriors on the right who are usually always angry about Star Wars.

Follow Roxana Hadadi and Corey Atad on Twitter

Roxana’s interview with Andor's creator Tony Gilroy, for Vulture, November 23, 2022

Tony Gilroy speaking from the picket lines in support of the 2008 Writer’s Guild strike.

Trailer #2 for Star Wars: Andor(Season 1, 2022)

TEASER - 116: Straub, Sight & Sound (with Ben Nash) Dec 12, 2022

Show notes

Access this entire 65 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/116-straub-sight-75792117

Ben Nash returns to the podcast from Colchester England to say farewell to the influential French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who with his wife Danièle Huillet produced several decades worth of formally controlled yet fiercely radical works.

We offer the listener an introduction to the relatively obscure films of Straub-Huillet by concentrating on three of them: their controversial first film Not Reconciled (1965), perhaps their most widely-seen work, The Chronicle of Anna Magdelena Bach (1968) and 1979’s Italian drama From the Clouds to the Resistance.

Ben and I also discuss the results of this decade’s Sight & Sound list of the Top 100 Films of All Time as voted on by filmmakers and critics, like the works of Straub-Huillet these results raise questions about the overall “accessibility” of anti-commercial arthouse cinema in the modern streaming age, and how 'the canon' reflects the changing tastes of a changing audience.

Subscribe to our Patreon to access dozens of additional episodes: some notable previous Patreon guests include Jared Yates Sexton, Jacob Bacharach, David Roth, Bryan Quinby, @ReclinerNotes and Sooz Kempner. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Ben Nash on Twitter.

Trailer for Mubi’s retrospective of the films of Straub-Huillet, 2019

114: Jurassic Musk (with Jacob Bacharach) Nov 22, 2022

Show notes

The novelist and essayist Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod to discuss the Elon Musk era of Twitter in relation to another cautionary tale about what happens when you fool with Mother Nature, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park. It turns out there are unintended consequences to messing around with systems you didn’t understand when you first altered them!

We talk about Jurassic Park as a perfect example of blockbuster filmmaking, and how to get over one’s snobbery about Spielberg as a great cinema craftsman, and then we go to town on Twitter's new CEO; "Comedy is now legal on Twitter" proclaimed Musk shortly before discarding the verification system by making a bluecheck available to anyone with a credit card, and just like Jurassic Park, no one in control anticipated what could possibly go wrong.

We talk about his misunderstanding of what Twitter is, his new parasitical friendship with Cat Turd 2, and how his lack of knowledge about comedy, technology and humanity has created this perfect storm, chasing off employees, users and advertisers in what is turning out to be the most expensive 420 joke ever told.

Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive episodes a month: some of our notable previous guests include Jared Yates Sexton, David Roth, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Will Sloan. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Jacob Bacharach on Twitter and visit jacobbacharach.com

Teaser trailer for Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)

TEASER - 113: Diego Maradona (with Conrado Falco) Nov 18, 2022

Show notes

Access this entire 70 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/113-diego-with-74800431

On the eve of what looks like the most cursed World Cup yet, the host of the Criterion Project podcast Conrado Falco joins the show to discuss Asif Kapadia’s 2019 football documentary Diego Maradona, the Get Back of sports documentaries, assembled from hundreds of hours of video filmed for an abandoned documentary project in the eighties that captured the years Maradona played for SSC Napoli in the Italian premier league.

When Maradona arrived in Naples he was considered a superstar and when he left 7 years later he was the most hated man in Italy. In between Maradona dragged his team to Serie A championships, won a World Cup for Argentina with a mixture of cheating and genius, and got mixed up with the Neapolitan crime family and descended into drug abuse and personal chaos. It’s of a piece with Senna and Amy, Kapadia’s earlier documentaries of remarkable lives destroyed by celebrity told with the skillful use of rare personal archival material.

Plus: Conrado and I wrestle with the moral dilemma of rooting for Messi and Argentina in a World Cup being held in the human rights hellscape of Qatar.

Follow Conrado Falco on Twitter.

Conrado has two podcasts: The Criterion Project and Foreign Invader.

Check out Conrado's webseries Wormholes on YouTube.

Trailer for Diego Maradona(Asif Kapadia, 2019)

111: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (with David Moscrop) Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

The writer and podcaster David Moscrop, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, returns to the pod from Ottawa to discuss a Spooky Season classic, Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a film that turned 30 years old this year but like a vampire has barely aged a day.

Coppola followed up The Godfather Part III with an ambitious gothic horror with an all-star cast, filmed entirely indoors on sets and soundstages. His visual effects supervisor was his son Roman Coppola, and they decided use techniques from the early days of cinema to adapt a novel from the same period.

We discuss the film’s “naive visual effects”, the over-the-top aesthetic from sets to costumes to performances, the film’s horniness which greatly influenced future vampire stories, and we try to mount a defense for the enduring knock against this film, the mannered turn by Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker.

Plus: we discuss Ontario Premier Doug Ford trying to weasel out of having to testify at the Emergencies Act inquiry in Ottawa.

Sign up for the Junk Filter Patreon to support the show directly and access dozens of bonus episodes! https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow David Moscrop on Twitter, listen to his podcast Open To Debate, and subscribe to his new Substack!

From Den of Geek, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic”, an in-depth discussion with Roman Coppola of the film’s visual effects, by David Crow, October 16, 2020

Trailer for Bram Stoker’s Dracula(Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

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