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Some movies are violent, some are disturbing, and others are just plain wrong. Paul W. S. Anderson’s Death Race is a fun ride with some gnarly crashes, but it can’t hold a candle to its demented predecessor, Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 (1975).
Cinema’s favorite weirdo, Cripsin Glover, is taking his film across the country, personally hosting a series of screenings. The film, What Is It?, is dense and provocative filmmaking, but not necessarily in a good way. Glover describes his opus as a critique of corporate-controlled studios’ fear of taboo. It’s either that, or just a whole lot of snails being killed, mixed with porn, mixed with possibly exploitative uses of actors with downs-syndrome.
For a more upbeat take on the absurd, we take a look and some the fun being had in Spout’s Movie Games group. Specifically, what happens when scenes from our favorite movies are digitally translated to another language, then back into English. The result: surreal hilarity. Our dramatic reading proves that The Big Lebowski could have been a whole lot weirder.
(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro
3:05 - Death Race, then and now
16:30 - Crispin Glover’s What Is It?
31:29 - Fun with online translators, Big Lebowski style
Kevin Buist
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Christopher Campbell
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Brandon Harris
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Kevin Kelly
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Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog, Now Available in Book Form
Paul Moore
October 31, Karina’s Last Day
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I am a fan of your site and thought you may find this movie review interesting.
http://sexyeinstein.blogspot.com/2008/08/hamlet-failed-actor-turned-drama.html
My apologies to the late Steven C. Stewart for repeatedly mispronouncing his name.
I’ve only been listening to your podcast for a couple months now, so I had no idea until you mentioned it in your last episode that you were based in Grand Rapids, or G-Rap as the cool kids (and Tim Allen, in a lame PSA) call it. I grew up there and am excited this level of film conversation is coming out of my hometown.
I actually saw Crispin Glover’s film/reading/performance art show in Ann Arbor a couple years ago, and I had a similar reaction to the film. As with your show, he waited around to talk with everyone afterwards, but there must be a few more Crispin junkies in AA because we were in line for five hours. Now, you might think we would have given up long before that, but you reach a point where you’ve been in line for so long that to leave would mean facing the hard truth that you wasted 2.5 hours for nothing, so we stuck it out. Definitely a surreal experience. People were sleeping on the floor, the theater manager, who was responsible for transporting him to his hotel and very early flight, got so drunk she started loudly berating people in line for waiting to talk to CRISPIN GLOVER, and the crowd got very restless. All the while, he chatted happily away with everyone, and my wife and I continued to wait with our felt pen and our poster of Shirley Temple doing an unspeakable thing with a whip. Finally, it was our turn, and though it was 3 a.m., Mr. Glover was very gracious, signing our poster (which I will never display) and thanking us for coming, even posing for a picture. But I still left vaguely disappointed, because all I had wanted to say when he shook my wife’s hand was, “Hey you, get your damn hands off her!” Even after five hours, I chickened out.