Midday Movies: Films To Be Thankful For

Speaker 1: 00:00 Old films, new films, and a holiday week ahead here with some good reasons to mingle movies with your Turkey day is midday edition host Jade Heinemann. Speaker 2: 00:13 As we headed to Thanksgiving midday movies decided to ask our critics to talk about films they are thankful for. Once again, we have KPBS film critic Beth Armando and movie Wallace, his critic Yazdi Pathar Villa on hand to talk about films. Welcome you both. Thanks. Thank you. So let's start by discussing a pair of films to be thankful for that are currently in theaters. Becky recently had directed Speaker 1: 00:35 dear Robert Eggers on your cinema junkie podcast to talk about his film, the lighthouse. You said this film will make your a 10 best list and it is a current release that you are thankful for. Yes. So Robert Eggers also directed the which, which is another film that I love and the thing about him that I really like is he has this amazing ability to transport you to a different place in time. I like to think of it like that film somewhere in time where Christopher Reeve transports himself through self hypnosis to a different time. In the past and he's able to stay there until he sees this modern penny. So Robert Eggers creates this way to go back in time, but you'll never find that thing that's out of place. Everything is just perfect. So for the lighthouse, which is his new film, he takes us to 1890s new England where two men keep a lighthouse on this isolated rock of an Island. Let's hear a little from the trailer, Speaker 2: 01:30 from the lighthouse or major last to police. He believed that there was some enchantment in the light Speaker 3: 01:43 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 01:44 when Maddie did call tails. So why are you thankful Speaker 1: 01:49 for a film like this? I think what I'm most thankful for is a filmmaker who has this meticulous sense of craft. So he talks about how you need to feel the musty, crusty, rusty, dusty newness of the lighthouse of Willem Defoe's beard of everything that's going on. And you really do. And for people who don't know, this is a film shot in black and white. It's shot in an old boxy kind of movie tone aspect ratio. So everything about it transports you to someplace else. And it's an amazing film that has this kind of hallucinogenic quality, but also this kind of gritty realism. And I just highly urge people to go see it in a theater and appreciate that. You also liked the film I did. It's just so odd. We don't really see something so different these days in the cinema. It's truly unexperienced. And like Beth said, you get sucked into this world, into this time and to displace with these people and not just with the people but with their heads. And the movie kind of at one point just completely dissolves between what's real and what's imagined. And that's, that's the, and Yazdi. Speaker 4: 03:00 You also have a recent film you're grateful for parasite. Tell us about this film. So parasite is a South Korean film from director bong Joon hall. This is a movie which won the top prize at the Cannes film festival. It is from South Korea and it has a good chance of winning a best picture nomination this year. Mind you not for best foreign film, best pitcher. And I just love it when a movie comes out of nowhere. And just by virtue of being so extraordinary, it just kind of blows all the doors away. And you know, I, I hesitate to say much about the film, but it works primarily as a thriller and even as it's so busy trying to make sure that you have the right of your life, it's making all this, all of this commentary about nothing less than human beings as a species about greed and disparity in wealth but never at the cost of amazing you in terms of what you're seeing visually on the screen and being thoroughly entertained. What more can you ask for? I know Beth, you liked the movie too. Speaker 1: 04:02 Yes I did. And you know it's funny cause we had a week where all the films were amazing. It was the lighthouse, it was parasite, it was Jojo rabbit, the Irishman. I mean we had them all packed into one week. And yeah, the parasite is amazing. This is by the director who also did the host, which was kind of a horror, horror film monster creature film. And what he's so good at is kind of blending all these genres together, but he just slips in and out of different kinds of storytelling tropes. And just when you think you've got it figured out where this thing is going, it makes a complete left turn. And again, he too has this real sense of craft and, and also just that you feel like you're in the hands of a master that someone who has great assurance that he knows where he's taking you. Speaker 1: 04:51 You know there's some films that feel ambiguous and you feel like the filmmakers don't know where they're going. But with this you, you're willing to go wherever it takes you because you know you're in the hands of someone who is just crafting a amazing experience. And then another thing about the South Korean films is that I really find even in there like pop entertainment films, you get this real sense of social commentary and politics going on. And this real sense of what really informs a lot of their films to me is the sense of it's a country divided and that the people on the opposite side are not necessarily villains are evil. And you know, we have a lot of films recently like ready or not, we're rich people are the villains and they're out to kill you and they're just despicable and evil. And in this you have a much more layered and kind of complex way of looking at that. There's a real sense that it's more complicated layers and textures to that when it sounds like you can still find parasite and the lighthouse in theaters this weekend. So go check them out if you want to hear more films. Our critics are thankful for. Look for the midday movies podcast@kpbs.org.