Around the Podosphere #13: Podcasts of Note for June 24
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted one of these. Since the Skiffy and Fanty crew collectively listen to more podcasts than there are episodes of our show (totally scientific, promise), it’s about time we brought the Around the Podosphere back to share some of the goodness worming its way into our ears. So, here goes:
A Book by Its Cover: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
Morgan Filchberger is the last 911 Dispatcher to be promoted to Detective after floppy-armed robots replaced the entire workforce. Anyone else might be bitter about that, but Morgan has failed the Department of Uniformed Detectives Exam five times. Now, he’s living the dream: the pay is good and he gets to tell his high school buddies that he’s a real badass. That is until members of the Irradiated Blue Man Group start showing up dead and partially digested in the streets of Orlando. With Captain Northrup Wilkinson and the union representative of the IBMG breathing down his neck, Morgan wonders if he’s really cut out for the detective life… Enter Felicia Guffman, a smartmouthed rookie slash amateur thespian with a penchant for unfinished Greek tragedies and Morgan’s new partner. If there’s one thing Felicia does well, it’s propping up mediocre (male) members of law enforcement to make them look good. Call it a gift. Or a curse. Whatever you call it, Felicia has been putting her talents to use since graduating from the Louisiana Academy of Detective Youths four years ago. And a bunch of dead glowing blue guys aren’t going to keep her from making a name for herself, even if she has do it by making Morgan into a hero before exposing him for the fraud that he is.
Retro Nostalgia: Mortal Kombat (1995; dir. Paul W.S. Anderson) and Ruining Your Childhood
I’ve just re-watched Mortal Kombat, the less-than-stellar 1995 video game adaptation directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The same director who would two years later direct a far better film, Event Horizon (2007), which has the unfortunate reputation of being a movie most people hate. Why did I watch Mortal Kombat…again? Two reasons. First, I needed something to write about for this column, and it just seemed fitting that a 20-year-old film from my childhood happened to be streaming on Netflix. Second, I wanted to re-experience something from my childhood to see how well it would hold up. An experiment, if you will. And while other films from the 90s (and 80s) have not so much held up as become interesting in other ways as a result of age, Mortal Kombat is one of those gems that, frankly, has always been ridiculous. I just couldn’t see it when I was 11.
Around the World: Ms. 45 (1981; dir. Abel Ferrara); Trauma, Gender Violence, and Revenge Fantasies
(Trigger warning: this review involves discussion of sexual assault, trauma, and gender violence.) Two years after the release of his gritty and noisy murder-fest, The Driller Killer (1979), Abel Ferrara returned to the director’s helm with Ms. 45 (1981), a revenge “fantasy” film. Though Ms. 45 still demonstrates some of that rawness present in Ferrara’s first feature film production, it is by far a smoother film, making excellent use of its mostly unknown and untested cast, especially Zoë Lund, the protagonist from which the title, Ms. 45, gets its name. Of Ferrara’s early films, Ms. 45 is certainly the most compelling, if not because it is a tighter, thematically expedient production, then because of its somewhat brutal (and uncompromising) exposure of the sexist underbelly of NYC — a common theme, it seems, in Ferrara’s work.
Mad Max: Beyond Patriarchy — On Fury Road’s (2015) Visual Rhetoric and Apocalyptic Social Rebirth
If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; dir. George Miller) yet, I highly recommend it. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a film I didn’t know I wanted. There are a lot of things worth discussing here, but in particular, I want to explore two elements of the film that I think make it a significant work of cinema. Visual Rhetoric and Mad Max (in Brief) In my review of The City of Lost Children (1995), I argued that Mad Max : Fury Road is primarily interested in storytelling as visual versus a story funneled to us through narrative proper. The point I want to make about the visual qualities of Mad Max — an idea that also applies to The City of Lost Children, albeit mobilized for different purposes — is that there is so little in this film that is told to us as a narrative (i.e., in exposition, dialogue, or in literal narration) that it compels us to focus not on the narrative (the plot), but on the conveyance of meaning within its visual landscape, both in the straight symbolic sense and in the characters-doing-things sense.
Retro Nostalgia: The City of Lost Children (1995), Visual Rhetoric, and the Critic’s Confused Apparatus
May 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995). It is perhaps the most recognizable example of contemporary surrealist cinema, and it remains one of Caro and Jeunet’s most well-regarded works.* The surrealist nature of the film is fairly evident from even a casual viewing, as it embodies just about every layer of the film’s plot, characters, visuals, and underlying “myths.” It’s chaotic, moody, and, at times, bewildering. The City of Lost Children‘s, in other words, is not simply a fantasy; rather, it is a fantasy which has been divulged of its realistic undercurrents.
