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0:00:00 - 0:13:41 - To grease the gears a little bit, we start off talking about how much we hated --The Revenant (2015), directed by Alejandro Inarritu, starring Leonardo Dicarprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Lukas Haas, and several racial caricatures.
Also discussed in this section: Deliverance, Carol, Defiance, Training Day, John Flynn, John Boorman, Jan Michael Vincent, Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained, Major Dundee, Birdman, John Milius, Michael Mann, Blackhat, and There Will Be Blood.
0:13:42 - 2:16:11 - Movies discussed/ in contention for our Best Of The Year Lists (in alphabetical order):
Anomalisa (2015), directed by Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman, starring David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan.
The Assassin (2015), directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, starring Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Zhou Yun, and Fang-yi Sheu.
The Big Short (2015), directed by Adam McKay, starring Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, John Magaro, Finn Whittrock, Rafe Spall, Vinny Strong, Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, Stanley Wong, Karen Gillan, and a bunch of cameos.
Blackhat (2015), directed by Michael Mann, starring Chris Hemsworth, Leehom Wang, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, and William Mapother.
Bone Tomahawk (2015), directed by S. Craig Zahler, starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Sid Haig, Lilli Simmons, David Arquette, and Zahn McClarnon.
Bridge of Spies (2015), directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Scott Shepard, Amy Ryan, and Alan Alda.
Carol (2015), directed by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacey, Corey Magaro, and Carrie Brownstein.
Creed (2015), directed by Ryan Coogler, starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, and Wood Harris.
Furious 7 (2015), directed by James Wan, starring Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, The Rock, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster, Djimon Hounsou, Jason Statham, and Kurt Russell.
The Hateful Eight (2015), directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir, James Parks, Channing Tatum, Dana Gourier, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsely, Gene Jones, Keith Jefferson, and the triumphant return to westerns by ENNIO MORRICONE!
Heaven Knows What (2015), directed by Ben & Joshua Safdie, starring Arielle Holmes, Buddy Duress, and Ron Braunstein.
It Follows (2015), directed by David Robert Mitchell, starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, and Jake Weary.
The Lobster (2015), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Jessica Barden, Olivia Colman, Michael Smiley, and Ben Whishaw.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), directed by George Miller, starring Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Zoe Kravitz, and Nathan Jones.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015), directed by Guy Ritchie, starring Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Jared Harris, and Hugh Grant.
The Mend (2015), directed by John Magary, starring Josh Lucas, Stephen Plunkett, Mickey Sumner, and Lucy Owen.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), directed by Christopher McQuarrie, starring Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Simon McBurney, Alec Baldwin, and Tom Hollander.
Mistress America (2015), directed by Noah Baumbach, starring Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Heather Lind, Cindy Cheung, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Matthew Shear, Kathryn Erbe, and Michael Chernus.
Phoenix (2015), directed by Christian Petzold, starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, and Michael Maertens.
Queen of Earth (2015), directed by Alex Ross Perry, starring Elizabeth Moss, Katharine Waterston, and Patrick Fugit.
Results (2015), directed by Andrew Bujalski, starring Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan, Giovanni Ribisi, Brooklyn Decker, and Anthony Michael Hall.
Sicario (2015), directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, and Jeffrey Donovan.
Steve Jobs (2015), directed by Danny Boyle, starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, and Katharine Waterston.
Wild City (2015), directed by Ringo Lam, starring Louis Koo, Shawn Kue, Simon Yam, Phillip Ng, and Tong Liya.
2:16:12 - 2:20:05 - Movies we're excited about in 2016!
2:20:06 - 2:25:40 - David Brothers has kindly allowed us to feature segments from his long-running podcast on the movie Blade, DEACON'S CORNER!.
GUEST BEST OF THE YEAR LISTS
Past guests from the Bicklicker family have graciously sent in their best of the year thoughts/lists. Check em out:
Still The Water (Naomi Kawase)
Set on the island of Amami Oshima, Kawase holds a lens up to the power of the ocean and the unique spiritual connections the young and old islanders have with the sea. The ocean's ability to shift from violent to quiet at chance mirrors the volatility of youth, that subsuming tension of holding together a fragile new relationship and the abruptness of death, rolling unstoppable forward. The ebb and flow of gaining and losing loved ones dances between mothers and daughters and sons, husbands and wives, the spiritual and their medium. Still The Water is a distinctly compassionate tale, jumping from grief to sensuality, weaving together these small quiescent experiences and reveling in the tender moments between people and the sublime energy of nature.
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Mark Lee Ping Bin bring this subdued wuxia drama to life with gilded court intrigue offset by the cool tones of China's wilderness, slowly humming and swaying within a fixed frame. Shu Qi, as Nie Yinninang the troubled assassin, moves through the film with a quiet lethality. Her presence like the small curved blade hidden neatly in her palm. Often she is positioned out of the frame with our only connection to her being the expressions of other characters, victims or loved ones, watching and waiting for her next move. The distance between us and her, this pocket of emptiness and heavy sense of inner emotional conflict, turns her into something mythological, like a brooding wraith, wandering through the story like smoke in the rafters, an inky looming shadow in the periphery. Following after this reticent phantom as she struggles with her next assigned victim, her silence reverberating out from her, is fully engrossing.
Field Niggas (Khalik Allah)
Khalik Allah's dreamy slow motion documentary explores the people living in the famously rough crossing of 125th Street and Lexington in Harlem. The shallow focus and piercing clarity of his images as he meanders the summer night hoodscape is mesmerizing, each subject relating their experiences, regrets, sorrows. The impoverished voices throughout the film are out of sync with their speakers, allowing you to freely disassociate the two in a way that helps you fully enjoy the lush moving portraits along with the casual, sometimes funny and sometimes profound, conversations Khalik has with his subjects. Drifting among the speakers are the cops, silently staring or posing for the camera, a blue threat in the night. The subjects, most victims of injustice and violence, many high and suffering through homelessness, ring clear in this documentary, focusing in and out of despair and hope, slowly freezing this time in their lives in sound and light.
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan)
An atmospheric noir whose slice of life approach makes for a startling contrast to the gory crime the story circles around. Black Coal, Thin Ice is set in the coldest city in China, a desolate landscape, and is startling when night falls and the industrial metropolis is thrown in an array of neon lights, casting the ice in blues, purples and pinks. The strong color composition and unique blend of absurd and mundane human routine punctuated by brief bursts of violence makes for a strange and unexpected atmosphere, one unconcerned with the audiences emotions and instead focused on allowing these characters to move and feel at their own pace.
Horse Money (Pedro Costa)
Ventura, a partly real partly fictive character from Costa's earlier film Colossal Youth, recalls his life through Portugal's Carnation Revolution era and the lives of others, wandering through halls blocked in by bold shadows. Rich darkness is painted in harsh lines and soft edges, creeping inward and forcing Ventura through a maze of memories. He freezes his subjects in vignetted tableaus where often the only hint of movement is the shifting eyes, the rising and falling of their chest. Costa's cathexis on cultural genocide, on the dispossessed,
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
Like his friend and fellow director Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Sissako is exemplary at constructing layers of human experience in a way that feels exceptionally real but in a powerfully harmonic non-linear manner. The exploration of the inner moral struggle of some characters as they inflict their own perception of morality on others is presented from polite albeit intimidating confrontations to horrifying executions. Originally planned to be a documentary, Sissako soon realized the jihadists present in Timbuktu would warp the film as the residents were not free to express themselves and moved the production back to Mauritania. Instead this fictionalization, inspired by real events, shows a harsh series of Islamic extremists violence inflicted on the common people in their everyday life and the complex process of occupation and subjugation.
1. Fury Road
2. Fury Road
3. Fury Road
4. Fury Road
5. Fury Road
Because
Honorable Mention: The Hateful 8.
1. Heaven Knows What - Burzum and a Ninja star. My favorite performance of the year. Hot black metal dudes lighting themselves on fire.
2.
Mad Max Fury Road - Grandmas.
3.
Queen of Earth - That scene where Elizabeth Moss blames that one dude for everything evil in the world.
4.
Hard to Be A God - Mud.
5.
It Follows - The opening scene.
6.
Deathgasm - Lotsa blood.
7.
Cinderella - Amazing dress.
8.
Goodnight Mommy - I like their house.
9.
Horsehead - Fun dreams.
10.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - Tom Cruise.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
2. The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)
3. Kung Fu Killer (Teddy Chan)
4. Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler)
5. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
X. (amount of regret over having missed The Forbidden Room in the theater merits an item here)
David Brothers, host of Deacon's Corner
Sicario: Your government hates you, everything you don't know about is bigger than everything you care about, and you're not even a cog in the machine. At best, you're the lubricant in a machine that claims it'll keep you safe. Sicario is an action movie plot viewed through a horror movie lens, where the Final Girl loses because the monsters always win. I loved Sicario the first time through, the best feel-bad movie of the year.
Creed: I sat next to a guy who was into the movie to the point of frustrating me, reacting to every line and blow as if he were the one in the ring. It made me mad at the time, but I get it. Creed updates Rocky for Black America, showing us a modern underdog story from the point of view of a young black male desperate to prove his own worth, to prove that his birth has some type of value, to accept his own existence. The four-wheeler moment was straight out of a Ruff Ryders video and the dinner scene powerful. Both scenes taken together suggest that what makes us different isn't a separation or division but an opportunity. Old-school Italian dudes like greens too, and young black dudes respect the hustle. Coogler came up with a movie where every character feels so human that you wonder what Creed from their perspective would be like, but you know it'd be a grand time.: I sat next to a guy who was into the movie to the point of frustrating me, reacting to every line and blow as if he were the one in the ring. It made me mad at the time, but I get it. Creed updates Rocky for Black America, showing us a modern underdog story from the point of view of a young black male desperate to prove his own worth, to prove that his birth has some type of value, to accept his own existence. The four-wheeler moment was straight out of a Ruff Ryders video and the dinner scene powerful. Both scenes taken together suggest that what makes us different isn't a separation or division but an opportunity. Old-school Italian dudes like greens too, and young black dudes respect the hustle. Coogler came up with a movie where every character feels so human that you wonder what Creed from their perspective would be like, but you know it'd be a grand time.
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Next Week: In honor of Jojo McCulloch, BENGHAZI
Our outro music this week: "Jim Jones At Botany Bay" by Jennifer Jason Leigh from The Hateful Eight. And our intro, as always, is from Escape From New York. The interstitial music is "Fresh Aire" by Delia Derbyshire.
You can download episodes directly from itunes and rss. For a quick look at who has been on the show before and what movies have been discussed in each episode, look at our one-page episode guide. This is a Patreon-supported podcast, subscribing to the show can give you access to monthly criticism from Sean, Tucker, and Morgan.
You can follow the show on twitter, tumblr, letterboxd and facebook. If you like this show, please check out Tucker’s other podcast Comic Books Are Burning In Hell (also located at TFO and here), TFO's music podcast Beat Connection with Marty Brown and Nate Patrin (at TFO and here), and Katie Skelly & Sarah Horrock’s Trash Twins (located here and here), which Sean edits.
GOODBYE DAVID BOWIE YOU WERE TOO GOOD FOR US
Did anyone see Buzzard? It's really great.
Posted by: J | 2016.02.01 at 00:05