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What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

TGTPTU Season 13’s 4x4 continues with the second half of its first Robert Aldrich pairing, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962).

Like last week’s entry, WEH2BJ is another black-and-white film adaptation of a novel, this one truer to the source material, at least to cohost Thomas who read Henry Farrell’s 1960 novel of the same title (in other words no changing out a briefcase of drugs for a nuclear weapon or the star of your book series an unlikeable asshole as had happened in Aldrich’s adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly). Outside minor changes in date and storytelling, both novel and film follow the story of the two sisters in their autumn years: Jane Hudson, a child actress of stage fame whose star dimmed well before her sister Blanche Hudson’s movie career was on its meteoric (to keep with astronomical idioms) ascent until a car accident with a drunk Jane driving left Blanche in a wheelchair and in her sister’s care. While acrimonious, their relationship turns horrific when reruns of Blanche’s films lead to fan mail and her sottish sister Jane to exact a lifetime’s worth of revenge on her housebound sibling.

Yet the meta story of the film separates it inexorably from its source material as Aldrich casts, and to his credit completes a film, with both divas alive with both eyes, most their hair, and out of jail: Bette Davis as the nostalgic Jane and Joan Crawford as Blanche. TGTPTU hosts cover the Oscar shenanigans and personas of these two great ladies of early cinema. Speaking of, WEH2BJ was nominated for five Academy Awards. This was Davis’s tenth nom, and at the time she would have had the most Oscar wins for Best Actress if the picture had won her her third. Unfortunately, the film won only for an obsolete category (Best Costume Design, Black-and-White). And (strikethrough as appropriate one of the subsequent adverbs after listening to the discussion) deservedly/somehow garnered Victor Buono a nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Stans of the pod are forewarned that a Season 1-3 bit returns thanks to the evils of Davis’s character’s choice of dishes to feed her sister. Other listeners are forewarned that there will be much discussion of the can’t-believe-it-exists films Trog (1970) and Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1972).

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Kiss Me Deadly

Welcome back to TGTPTU, and welcome back in Season 13 to both former cohost Jack and to the 4x4, the latter making its third season appearance! For TGTPTU stans reading this, able to recite the following explanation by heart, go ahead and save yourself half-a-minute and skip the rest of this paragraph. But for you sad majority of population Earth, a 4x4 is where the crew of TGTPTU covers four films (two pairings) by four different creatives. Simple. And with the return of Jack and the recent promotion of (although still provisional) cohost Ryan, for this season each host will be selecting one director to (strike as appropriate: introduce to / impose upon / reunite / endear) the other three hosts (to / with).

This third iteration of the 4x4 kicks off with Ken’s choice of director Robert Aldrich, pairing this episode’s KISS ME DEADLY (1955) with next week’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (whatever happened to our style guide? should I end this sentence with a second punctuation mark after the question mark? when did “what ever” become one word? Ken, cut all this out. Thanks, buddy. Editor of the Year.).

Liberally adapted from the Mike Hammer novel of identical title by A.I. Bezzerides (yes, AI was writing fiction before ChatGPT) that doesn’t even include a nuclear device, Aldrich’s version of KMD helped put the nail in the noir era’s coffin by giving the viewing public an unsympathetic protagonist driven by greed and the need to break things. This film relatively early in Aldrich’s career would earn the respect of, and help inspire, Aldrich’s contemporaries in the French New Wave, although the all-American, not-quite-nepo baby Aldrich would balk at their reasoning why the film he made was important.

Listen to this inaugural episode’s rough start as last season’s bits are retired, Thomas confronts Ryan on his pronunciation of “noir,” Ken remembers fondly when this talkie came out while Jack finishes watching the film during mic check, and Ryan lists off an impressive amount of homages to KMD before the foursome debate whether the “h” is silent.

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PAPRIKA

For the final episode of Season 12 Nolan Void, the TGTPTU gents get timey-wimy as they repeat last season finale with another film from anime director Satoshi Kon also allegedly plagiarized by the season’s director, this time Kon’s final flick PAPRIKA (2006) and Nolan’s Inception rather than Black Swan stealing from Perfect Blue (Kon’s first film, almost as if TGTPTU were considering a temporal pincer movement on the Japanese director who tragically died far too young after only four films).

This week, rookie host Ryan tries his hand at his first 60-second summary of this simple, straight-forward, extremely grounded plot of Paprika based on the 1993 novel of the same name. In short, the film takes place in an unexplained near future with technology that allows its cast of characters to share dreams and their experience therein blurs the waking world with a plot involving corporate espionage and a Japanese CEO, but in all the ways that Nolan’s Inception does not.

After their PAPRIKA discussion finding no merit in the accusations of Sir Chris ripping off Kon, TGTPTU roundtables to rank Nolan’s dozen flicks from folly to finest (although all four find all twelve quite good). Former host Jack returns from hammer murder accusations to join in the fun, counterbalancing fellow aspiring-Zoomer Thomas’s rankings with an alt take for their entire generation. Ken has the boys contemplate future Nolan franchises, Ryan offers an astute comparison between Miami Vice vs Heat for two of Nolan’s films, and we get the first mention of Mike, Thomas’s side piece. And if that weren’t enough, the “you may know us from other podcasts” bit gets officially retired.

Oh, and there’s more: Weird AI presents its original Oppenheimer composition two weeks past deadline and the next season of the pod is announced (which, if no one promises to listen, will cover Bryan Singer’s oeuvre; otherwise, we’ll return later in the summer for another 4x4).

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The One With The Dream Stuff Inside Oppenheimer

INCEPTION

This week TGTPTU reaches the timey-wimey center of Season 12 as the Nolan Void temporal pincer pairing movement ends with INCEPTION (2010), Sir Chris’s studio-backed super-successful non-supes cinema experience and his first Oscar nom for Best Picture--and finally winning pod-fav Wally Pfister his Best Cinematography trophy after being nominated for his previous three Nolan flicks.

Inception tells the story of blah-blah-blah, some (too many?) rules, not really all that dreamy, but hella cool. And to tell that story, Nolan brought in no one. Just himself, his first (and his second Oscar-nominated) solo screenplay since Memento and, since guerilla shooting on the mean (and friendly) streets of London for Following, his first property that’s entirely original (not based on another’s idea, unless the late-80s, two-season TV series Freddy’s Nightmares counts).

Fall asleep with cohosts Ken and Ryan as Thomas’s synopsis goes too long, wake up with their proposed needle-drops, trace when DiCaprio’s Dom isn’t wearing a wedding band, and wonder at the terror posed by the children’s song with the eternal question of Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat: What if life is but a dream?

Just like Dom’s ageless kids, we’ll be lurking around for a dramatic conclusion next week, which we welcome you to join us for discussion of Paprika as we wrap Season 12 like we did Season 11.

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TGTPTU reaches the beginning of the end of Season 12 as the team covers THE DARK KNIGHT (2008), the penultimate NOLAN VOID film in our temporal pincer pairing movement.

Rebounding from the only moderate success of The Prestige, Sir Chris creates a mega-blockbuster with The Dark Knight, his follow-up to Batman Begins and a film that compresses at minimum two movie’s worth of story into one film in order to prevent promising Warner Brothers another sequel. (Spoiler for last week’s episode, Nolan makes a third Batman film that 75% of TGTPTU hosts think is great.) The Dark Knight is also a film that changed how the Academy compiled its Best Picture Oscar category.

Oddly, this season’s final pairing matches last season’s release years for Aronofsky’s pincered final middle pairing with The Wrestler released the same year as The Dark Knight and Black Swan the same as Inception. (No comment back from Darren’s people on his feelings for having developed so much of Batman Year One for the Warners only to be led into making his The Fountain for the Bros in 2006.)

Unfortunately, further research this episode was stymied by Jack stuck in France fighting extradition back to the States and unable to make our final The Dark Knight trilogy episode. Fortunately, our three consistent hosts are pretty good about guessing facts about flicks, like this pairing the first the entire season both shot by the great Wally Pfister (what? hardly even know her) with The Dark Knight being Nolan’s first film with scenes shot on Imax (but ignore Thomas’s misinformation about Inception also being shot on Imax; he’s like a dog chasing a car or a British colonialist burning down a jungle or brunch.)

Listen close, take lots of notes, and discover what words The Joker finds funny; how to make visual art summaries for an auditory medium; and why TGTPTU remains the Pacific Northwest’s still least listened to film podcast.

Why so serious?

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This week, the TGTPTU’s untrademarked “temporal pincer movement” catches up with the boys as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012), Sir Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy, gets covered before his penultimate The Dark Knight. Sir Chris has been quoted as saying, “There are no good third sequels, basically—Rocky III maybe,” and this week Ken, Ryan, and returning former host and editor Jack gang up to defend the film against Thomas’s lackluster appreciation for the film that ends the Nolan franchise.

Additional to Sir Nolan and Dame Emma Thomas expressing feelings that they were content with where and how The Dark Knight ended, production of a sequel was complicated by the death of Heath Ledger as Joker, a major draw of the preceding film and the basis for a rough idea Sir Nolan had if he decided to make a third film. Instead of whatever might have been, the Brothers Nolan wrote a movie about Batman’s retirement inspired by the French Revolution as told by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities that brought us Nolan-versions of Catwoman (Anne Hathaway who will star in Interstellar, Nolan’s next film and part of TGTPTU’s previously pairing) and Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt who had starred in Inception, Nolan’s previous film covered in TGTPTU’s next and final pairing).

It’s a race against the calendar clock as Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has to heal himself from a back broken by big baddy Bane (Tom Hardy) in order to escape an underground prison-hole in the desert by making a leap of faith and back to Gotham before an atomic bomb set to explode in a mere five months can go off and destroy the city he’s sworn to protect, a city with the majority of its police squad trapped underground, a city judicially administered by a kangaroo court presided over by Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) while Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is laid up in a hospital bed working with the Boy Wonder who consults the Gotham permitting office and discovers Bane’s nefarious plan. Or, as Jack suggests, the plot is simply a proper British gentleman with stiff upper lip seated cross-legged on the plush carpet of his country manor smashing action figures together.

Listen for technical difficulties band-aided on mic by the show’s former editor Jack; to Ken lose his cohosts with American football jokes; and bat scrotum. Also for your ears’ pleasure, each host cycles through their impersonation, allowing the listener to judge who does the best Bane impression… for you.

See you next week for the exciting concluding pincered pair of Dark Knight and Inception. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.


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TGTPTU Book Club returns this week with Sir Christopher Nolan’s first and only adaption, i.e., THE PRESTIGE (2006), with bookworm and repeat guest Shannon joining from The Bunker.

Post-Batman Begins, Sir Nolan returned to his love of puzzle-box stories to bring to life the work of another Chris (Christopher Priest) while casting a third Chris (Christian Bale) as a rival magician to a non-Chris (Hugh Jackman) to make one of top three magician rivalry movies wide-released in 2006.

Sir Nolan omits the present-day framing story around Priest’s novel to focus on the period and the rivalry between magicians Angier (Jackman) and Borden (Bale) as the former seeks revenge on the latter for his wife’s death (yes, it’s another rare Nolan movie with a dead wife but you actually get two dead ladies—BOGO (Bury One, Get One)—for your money ). Keeping with the novel, each magician has a secret that allows him to perform a teleported man trick, with Borden’s secret seeming to be the anticipated, singular trick of the movie until the rug-pull at the end when the Great Sir C. Nolan the Magnificent abracadabras Angier’s clone-killing conclusion for a prestige of his own .

Uncontroversially, Scarlett Johansson is poorly used as the rivalling magicians’ assistants while David Bowie gets one of the best entrances in cinema history portraying Nicholas Tesla, a man with his own bitter professional rivalry and a last name that is impossible to say 18 years after this movie premiered without thinking of the car, much like what once beset my great-grandmother Edsel and our uncle PT “Cruiser” Koral.

Listen along as Jason Statham pops in, award-winning thespian Michael Caine is put on blast by our special guest, and the hosts break down why this might be the most “Nolan-y” Nolan film Sir Chris has made.

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INTERSTELLAR

In this week’s episode of TGTPTU, director-writer-producer Sir Christopher Nolan adds space to his repertoire of time-bending narratives as we venture deeper into The Nolan Void with INTERSTELLAR (2014).

The Nolan brothers return with cowriting credits, Nathan Crowley on production design, and Lee Smith as editor on this tale of global dust bowl devastation and human hope through American derring-do as the U.S.’s secret space program saves the planet (or at least itself, or perhaps only some of its elite, it’s not clearly defined) by reaching again for the stars (celestial bodies, not celebrities). But new this time to the Nolan crew (at least in this entropy-forward timeline of your hosts’ dimension, that being the same in which these notes are composed), the making of Interstellar brings on a new cinematographer, replacing pod fav Wally Pfister who’d been part of the creative team since Memento with the bear of a man and no slouch himself: Double Hoyte (aka Hoyte van Hoytema). Hoyte will stick with Nolan from this film on through the remainder of the later films already covered this season (again, frame of reference being an entropy-forward continuum) and who’ll provide this week’s Nolan innovation to shooting on IMAX when he lifts the somewhere just short of 100 lb (45 kilo) camera to film handheld.

With Interstellar, Sir Nolan becomes the marketing of the flick and a multidimensional threat as he joins hard-ish science fiction with his timey-wimey narratives. His rewrite of Jonah’s script, which was owned by Paramount and originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg (a notable, still-living, Boomer American director; see our Season Six for further info on this influential movie brat), introduced into the story sacrifices of duty and fatherhood, the vagaries of time, and Matt Damon and omitted the original version’s People’s Republic of China robots and the discovery of fractal alien creatures who absorb sunlight to instead have its protagonist Cooper return to his daughter (and their farmhouse rebuilt as a museum on a spaceship playing unused Ken Burn’s documentary footage, it’s a whole thing) as a man-out-of-time with his robot (actually, Sir Nolan prefers the term “machine”) ex-soldier buddy TARS. Oh, and possible predestination with interdimensional book-nudging and coded dust.

Special for this week’s ep, listen to hear first-time pod guest Champlain Amy’s hot takes before they’re censored by the alphabet soup of the deep state; host Ken’s longest Tarantino rant to date; other host Ryan fake it ‘til he makes it; and third host Thomas stump hard for CASE in that ongoing, friendship-ending, family-shattering, international debate between Team CASE or Team TARS.

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