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4X4 III: TSAI MING-LIANG: REBELS OF THE NEON GOD

It's the beginning of our four film dive into Queer Asian New Wave master Tsai Ming-liang. Released in 1992 and made shortly after Taiwan's "quiet revolution" from a dictatorship to democracy, Rebels of the Neon God stars the director's muse, Lee Kang-sheng (who would go onto being in every one of his films and the two live together in... interesting circumstances) as a Cram Student who becomes obsessed with a small time hood after a brief act of violence in the street, who drives around on a scooter in Tai Pei, smoking cigarettes, playing video games, walking around his partially flooded apartment and being on the outside of polite society. It sounds like a crime film but, trust us, it is not. Tsai Ming-liang has the eye of an artist and the patience of Rip Van Winkle in holding some of his compositions - something he will go deeper into as his career grows.

Picked by S13 guest host Jack, we get a tutorial on Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang's career and antecedents to his slow cinema masterpiece before next week's STRAY DOGS.

WARNING: Due to the difficulty of being able to see Rebels by a few hosts, we do talk about access to foreign or obscure films in the streaming era (spoiler: we are not fans).

WARNING II: Co-host Thomas is not on this episode because he was in Europe legally watching Matthew Barney films at the Louvre when we recorded. He will return in two weeks.

Special guest Annabel also shows up and slow cinemas us all.

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THE LONGEST YARD

This week, the TGTPTU boys return to prison for more fun and games, this time stopping this 4x4 season’s first round drafted director Robert Aldrich’s run with inches to go. For the final film of the first four and to cap the Aldrich coverage, Ken drafted THE LONGEST YARD (1974).

Following Ryan’s fumbling the intro and benched as provisional cohost, this season’s four host run the tape back to explore Aldich’s plays in prototyping the sports underdog movie and somehow manage to avoid speaking too ill of the Sandler 2005 remake.

The first of the four initial films of Season 13 not to be based on a novel, The Longest Yard was a smashing success and a standout in an era of cinema that defined both the sports underdog and spirited prisoner genres. As Ken and Thomas cover this ep, Aldrich needed the win after the failure of Aldrich Studios (introed last episode).

For your amusement this episode, Ken spits fresh lyrics during his Burt Reynolds Rap (hopefully not censored by the parole board) before providing summations on Aldrich’s career and films accompanied by odd ambient squeaks this week provided by Thomas’s dog.

Note that next week will not be the start of four films by Lars von Trier but will instead be Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Tsai Ming-liang’s feature film directorial debut.

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THE DIRTY DOZEN

Season 13’s 4x4 marches on with the most ill-mannered, ill-disciplined hosts that it’s ever been you’re your displeasure to meet, sergeant. That’s right, the dirtiest voices in the TGTPTU’s army are getting filthier covering Robert Aldrich’s THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967).

It’s a story of twelve convicted army men, who don’t bath, until they do and the man chosen to whip them into shape: Corporal Lee Marvin fresh off an Oscar win in the role of Major Lee Marvin a.k.a. Major Alcohol a.k.a Major John Reisman. Their mission: to kill Nazi officers, women, and, if you got them, children and cute puppy German Shepherds too.

The WWII picture was immensely successful for Aldrich. Wade through episode commentary and takes about the movie’s plot structure and whether this is secretly a sports movie and how Aldrich recast around actors who were leaving the film and declining scenes to get to a teaser at the end of the episode for a further discussion of Aldrich Studios, the endeavor this film allowed Robert Aldrich financially when he sold his stake in The Dirty Dozen for an endeavor that will run (and run into the ground, spoiler!) in the interval between, and be cause for, next week’s film, The Longest Yard. And then wait a week for more information. (Or use the internet, ya geek. Or get a book from your local library {shout out}!)

For those familiar with the bit, famously Francophobic Jack takes exception to the line “free the French, kill the Germans.” Meanwhile, the boys snicker and make references to Ernest Borgnine’s secret to eternal youth (available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I_PeLNzxNQ). And for major stans of the cast, Ken pulls back the curtain to reveal the pre-record ritual rhyme the hosts chant as a mnemonic to execute a perfect show.

And where is Donald Duck?

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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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