Out There in the Dark

The Academy Awards are a reliable exercise in celebrating some of the worst tendencies in modern, capitalist society. A bunch of privileged, back slapping industry folks handing out trophies to each other is perhaps the height of egotistical "cringe", but still we watch them. Often, with the same passion as one might watch, say a "Real Housewives" or a "Big Brother", essentially, a hate watch. Azed and Tom weigh in on this year's Oscars which, surprisingly, was not as awful as expected. The movies up for best picture were all coherent and highlighted the power of good cinema to reach a wide audience. The show itself, usually an over the top mixture of boredom and extreme embarrassment, actually had some heartfelt and understated moments. No Will Smith assaults either! Best Picture noms: OPPENHEIMER: Christopher Nolan, AMERICAN FICTION:Cord Jefferson, ANATOMY OF A FALL:Justine Triet, BARBIE: Greta Gerwig, THE HOLDOVERS: Alexander Payne, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: Martin Scorsese, MAESTRO: Bradley Cooper, POOR THINGS: Yorgos Lanthimos, THE ZONE OF INTEREST: Jonathan Glazer

In this episode, Azed & Tom delve into the captivating world of acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese and the resounding critical acclaim surrounding his latest masterpiece, "Killers of the Flower Moon." In this episode, we explore the widespread praise and recognition that this film has garnered, exploring its profound impact on both critics and audiences. "Killers of the Flower Moon" has captivated viewers and critics alike, provoking widespread acclaim for its compelling storytelling, breathtaking cinematography, and outstanding performances. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and the wonderful Lily Gladstone, the film transports audiences to the 1920s, immersing them in the chilling true story of the Osage Nation murders. Critics have lauded Scorsese's impeccable direction, praising his ability to create an immersive and unsettling atmosphere. The film's evocative cinematography, helmed by acclaimed cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, captures the era's social and cultural context with stunning precision, enhancing the narrative's tense and mysterious elements. Azed & Tom also take a deep dive into Scorsese's illustrious career, discussing his unique style, thematic preoccupations, and his knack for creating mesmerizing cinematic experiences.With a career spanning over five decades, Martin Scorsese has cemented himself as one of the most influential and celebrated directors in the history of cinema. Known for his visceral storytelling and impeccable attention to detail, Scorsese has crafted an impressive portfolio of timeless classics, including "Taxi Driver," "Goodfellas," and "Raging Bull".

It's has been said that the 70's were the last golden age of cinema. it's hard to disagree when you realize how many auteurist directors that era birthed. A modest list would have to include; Scorsese, DePalma, Bogdanovich, Coppola, Lynch and William Friedkin. Friedkin's career is an enigma. His third film The French Connection won multiple Oscars (Including Best director), catapulted him to fame. Friedkin's next film, The Exorcist remains one of the most frightening horror films ever made and one of the most financially successful movies of all time. At the top of his game and at the height of his power as a director, Friedkin released Sorcerer, which was a massive failure at the box office and with critics. Although he made quite a few excellent movies after, it seems he never fully recovered from the consequences of "flying to close to the sun". Friedkin passed away August 7, 2023. In this episode, Azed and Tom discuss the odd career of William Friedkin and dive deep into his masterpiece; The Exorcist, a film that marked us both to become grown ass men who are shit scared of a little girl.

In a series we are calling Criminally Forgotten, we pluck out discarded, overlooked or misunderstood gems from the past. In this episode, we unearth a relic from the archives, Bill Gunn's 1973 art/horror/vampire movie Ganja & Hess . Gunn, a literate, smart, cultured person who came from the Theatre and the literary arts was tasked with replicating the immense success of the iconic African-American vampire film, Blacula (1972). What he produced instead was a complete departure from the tropes of the vampire genre, creating a meditative, artistic, dream like movie that utilizes what some critics have called, "Haptic visualization". The writer Donato Totaro describes Haptic cinema as; "... unlike Western ocularcentrism, which values sight as the greatest epistemological sense, intercultural cinema embraces the proximal senses (smell, taste, touch) as a means for embodying knowledge and cultivating memory” (Donato Totaro, Canadian Journal of Film Studies) Ganja & Hess has been cited as an important film in the African-American canon, as it dispels stereotypes of Blaxploitation and African-American culture promoting an art house, experimental style more notable in Foreign cinema at the time. Join Azed and Tom as they discuss this unique horror film...just in time for Halloween!! "If Shaft is Barry White and Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is the Sex Pistols, then Ganja & Hess is John Cage". Jaime N. Christley, Slant Magazine

The recent internet phenomenon of creating a portmanteau out of two blockbusters, Barbie (Greta Gerwig) and Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan), marks a first in cinema history. This is probably the first time the usual cage-match between competing films was usurped by a non-competitive organic marketing scheme. Social media, usually a cesspool of kindergarten style competitiveness, actually created an event that celebrated seeing both films. it wasn't Barbie folks against Oppenheimer folks, but a call to action to see both films, one right after the other. Marketing execs are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to replicate such a random movement that boosted both movies' box office performances. Although the two films couldn't be more different in terms of tone, genre and style, nonetheless, there are fascinating similarities between Barbie and Oppenheimer, thematically they are oddly tied together. Azed & Tom discuss both movies, and argue that the third film that belongs in this group is Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, which shares a lot with both films. Join us for this fascinating conversation about the way cultural anxieties are reflected in films regardless of genre. NOTE: Everything goes really well until Azed tries to include Book Club: The Next Chapter in the club. Azed loves any movies about saucy old ladies trying to get laid. Don't ask.

increasingly, the court of public opinion through social media has the power to make or break a film. and the ubiquitous exposure of artists' personal foibles now serves as a legitimate form of film criticism. "Bad" people, so the argument goes, are not deserving of our attention, regardless of the quality of the work. Some questions that arise in this discussion are: -is it fair or right to equate the artist with the art? -Does the art stand on its own, despite the biography of the artist? -Can a film that has ideologically questionable aspects, still be a worthwhile work of art? -Is the censoring of artists, because of their personal flaws, a form of social control, limiting what we can see, enjoy or find meaningful, or is it a necessary corrective to toxic masculinity, racism and cis conformity that has been allowed to run rampant for many decades? Azed & Tom, discuss these questions and more, while focusing in on two specific films, Louis C.K. unreleased I Love You, Daddy and Andrew Dominik's much maligned, Blonde. In Louis C.K.'s case his movie was cancelled following the news that- without consent-he exposed himself to numerous women. Dominik's Blonde, a surreal meditation on Marilyn Monroe, was perhaps the most derided film from 2022, citing it's apparent misogyny, social media mobs ripped the film to shreds. Listen in and join the conversation or don't and just cancel us based on Azed's continued defense of The Dukes of Hazzard and their Confederate flag topped car named The General Lee. Just leave Tom Wopat alone!!

For our second episode of Out There in the Dark, Azed & Tom take a look at the films honoured by this year’s Academy Awards. Yeah, we know it’s months after they aired but hey, this is largely a vanity project for Azed and Tom, so shut it! As much as we find the Oscar’s an increasingly cringe-inducing affair, we figure if you’re going to do a movie podcast, you can’t avoid talking about them at some point. Everyone seems to have a love / hate relationship with the Oscars, and Azed & Tom are no exception. From an industry perspective, they have an incalculable effect on box office, peer recognition and they can make or break careers; from a cineaste’s perspective, they invite endless debate and controversy around the films that win, lose or are completely neglected. Listen in and take a deep dive into why these films were honoured this year; if they deserved their awards or not; and what made them connect with audiences: the level of excess in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the pointed narcissism of the titular character of Tar, the empty pleasures of Top Gun: Maverick, the polarizing profundity of Triangle of Sadness, problematic representation in The Whale and the beauty and intelligence behind The Banshees of Inishirin - think on all of these as well as many other films and ideas. The Oscars are and always will be a cracked mirror, giving us a skewed, shattered reflection of cinema both as an industry and as an art form. Note: Tom slapped Azed during the recording of this episode, in honour of last year’s best Oscar moment.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Out There in the Dark. In this episode, Azed & Tom discuss Sight & Sound's decennial poll of the Greatest Films of All Time and the seemingly out of nowhere elevation of a little known, 1970's experimental French feminist film to the number one spot. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was released in 1975 to quiet acclaim within the halls of critical film discourse. A comfortable in-crowd of elite cineastes wrote, discussed and championed the 3+ hour film as a major artistic breakthrough in feminist cinema. But whereas previous S&S top spot films, The Bicycle Thief, Citizen Kane and Vertigo are all accessible narratives, Akerman's film is not. A 3+ hour film where there is very little dialogue, the camera is mostly still and the "story" unfolds through a highly structured look at the domestic chores of a largely inscrutable protagonist isn't necessarily going to appeal to the Marvel crowd. While the synopsis of Jeanne Dielman may make it sound like a chore, it really isn't. Akerman's masterpiece holds the viewer in a state of hypnotic suspense. it is almost impossible to make a film that captures the audience's attention to this degree, it is a miracle when it is achieved by a 24 year old female artist. As Jessica Winter wrote in the New Yorker, "The Sight and Sound tabulations are a striking turn of events, representing a consensus that one of the pinnacle films ever produced in an overwhelmingly male-dominated art form was made by a young woman, with a crew mostly made up of women, starring a middle-aged woman, about women’s work."

The recent release of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune got us Preverts thinking back to a simpler time. A time when neo-liberalism was just a babe in the crib, when rap was a mere novelty genre and getting laid was in the realm of possibility. Yes, 1984! The year that David Lynch's version of Dune was released. Long pilloried as a colossal flop, Azed and Jay find a lot to admire in Lynch's mess of a movie, and also a lot to admire in Villeneuve's solemn, faithful update. Luckily, Azed's son, Ishmael (Recent U of T graduate-BSC with High Distinction and the only one among us who has read the source material) is along to school us on the whole Dune ethos and to set us straight on how recent accusations of "White Savior" syndrome miss the mark of Herbert's Magnum Opus. Still, while Villeneuve's film is a beautiful spectacle, some of us prefer Sting in a leather diaper to Timothy Chalamet attempting to act tough. It's a question of which is more believable?

We have a special treat for you Mutiny of Preverts listeners who have long grown tired of the format and are now only listening as a result of A) losing a bet, B) being related to the hosts, or C) out of the sheer ecstasy you feel from hate listening to us and fantasizing about what incredible horrors the Devil will reign down on Azed and Jay when they are inevitably banished to Hell. We will not only be discussing an excellent new film called Drunk On Too Much Life, but for the very first time, we have the makers of the very film we are discussing, Michelle Melles and Pedro Orrego, on the show to discuss it with us. The film is a very personal one about their daughter Corrina and her experience with "madness" or what she referred to as being "drunk on too much life." We go deep with Michelle and Pedro on their family's search for something more than the biomedical diagnoses and medications that proved inadequate for Corrina and discuss everything from the history of mental health through the centuries, the influence social power has on mental health and the central role that art, poetry and music has played for Corrina, Michelle and Pedro in the healing process. We also dig into a few of the greatest and/or most notorious examples of madness portrayed on film including Titicut Follies, Warrendale, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Grey Gardens, Crumb and others and discuss some of the ethical considerations that have often been ignored, especially in the case of documentaries.

The first in our series called Our Lives in Movies where we revisit different stages in our lives and choose movies that impacted us at that time. In this the first of the series, we explore a movie from childhood that made an impression on us. Azed & Jay, being from different generations, have very different selections but, as often happens, there are overlapping thematic tropes in both of their individual choices. Azed, being a child of the 70's, remembers the impact of Ken Russel's film adaptation of The Who's Tommy, while Jay being a child of the 80's remembers the impact of Robert Altman's Popeye. Other topics covered here: How VHS changed the whole game with movies, How kid's today just don't get it, Shelly Duvall in the Multiverse, and Anne Margaret as Azed's 12 year old masturbatory fantasy woman.

Welcome to the sequel to our wildly popular episode on the most underappreciated comedies of the 2000s except with a radical new twist; instead of the 2000s we cover the 1990s! Upon writing that sentence I recognize its probably not that radical, BUT WE DID IT ALL THE SAME! Joining us is the crew from that 2000s episode, filmmaker Omar Majeed and Mongrel Media bigwig Tom Alexander with films ranging from Clifford (yes, that Clifford), The Watermelon Woman, Joe vs the Volcano and The Butcher Boy (yes, that The Butcher Boy). So strap on a scrunchy, pull out your Reebok Pumps, tell an authority figure to "eat your shorts" and let's all go back to that bygone era when MTV still played actual music and Leonardo DiCaprio played second fiddle to boob tube superstar Kirk motherf***ing Cameron.

If you're anything like the Mutiny of Preverts crew, and you've spent decades watching and appreciating all the great cinema of the world, there is one question you find yourself returning to time and again: What exactly does it look like when Rip Torn has vigorous, athletic coitus with a coed? Well, lucky for you the films of Nicolas Roeg have the answer. And they also have the answer to similar copulatory questions about Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Theresa Russell, David Bowie, Candy Clark, James Fox, Mick Jagger, Rutger Hauer... We could go on. Despite the wealth of boning related topics, Azed, Jay and unofficial third host Omar Majeed also make time to discuss many of the formal and thematic elements of Roeg's films that make him one of the all time great directors. Azed, in particular, makes an astute connection between Roeg's fragmented visual and auditory style and the deeply alienated and traumatized characters that inhabit his films that you will not want to miss.

“He’s More a Painter, Maybe, Than a Director”: Jean-Luc Godard on Jerry Lewis Jerry Lewis, as a filmmaker, entertainer and celebrity persona, was constantly polarizing. In America, he was loved by audiences, hated by critics. In France he was placed alongside such filmmakers as Howard Hawks, Hitchcock and Chaplin. New Wave luminaries such as Godard, Resnais and Chabrol, cited Lewis as a cinematic genius, while in America the critics maligned him as puerile, infantile and vulgar. In this episode, Azed & Jay discuss the work and persona of Jerry Lewis and argue that his work is best understood by re-contextualizing him as an experimental artist who used cinema as his personal psychoanalytic couch. From the early Martin & Lewis days through to his increasingly bizarre but fascinating auteurist films, Lewis is the embodiment of a fragmented psyche searching for a coherent subjective position. A project which both in front of and behind the camera, Lewis consistently, but interestingly, fails to achieve. Speaking of using media as a personal therapy session, hopefully this episode will finally put to rest Azed's concerning obsession with Jerry Lewis and finally free him to concentrate on his other obsession: the music of John Tesh.

On this episode of Mutiny of Preverts we discuss something quite rare indeed. Along with our special guest, filmmaker Sean Cisterna, we talk about the very best Canadian films of all time, including Hard Core Logo, Dead Ringers, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Begone Dull Care and a bunch more. We also dig into the inner workings of the Canadian film industry itself. What works? What doesn't? Are we as a country really producing the best cinema we could be? What's holding us back? After...

Here we are at episode 50 for the Mutiny of Preverts podcast! A milestone that neither Azed nor Jay bothered to even mention while recording. Is it because they switched from milk to lead based paint in their breakfast cereal? Or could it be the result of too little grey matter in their temporal lobes? The latter would certainly be fitting since lack of grey matter is one of the signs of psychopathy. And that very mental disorder (and sociopathy too) is the topic for this episode. In particular, Azed and Jay discuss how the loneliness of our times may be particularly fertile ground for the proliferation of sociopathy and the values of the post-Thatcher/Reagan era have been disturbingly kind to the psychopathically inclined. Some of the films discussed are Mike Leigh's Naked, No Country for Old Men, A Clockwork Orange, In a Lonely Place, Man Bites Dog, The Vanishing, Gone Girl and Titanic. *Disclaimer: Any murderous ideation resulting from the listening of this episode is not the responsibility Mutiny of Preverts. Should you decide to act on this ideation you do so at your own risk. P.S. But if you do commit murder please don't just hide the bodies in your crawl space. It's been done. Have a little respect for your craft.

In the first of our new series of "micro-episodes", MoP favourite, Omar Majeed defends the much maligned Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison (1995). The conceptual reasoning behind these micro-episodes is to up our production output by doing, what the kids call, a "hot take" on a movie or topic within the cinematic discourse. Less work, less impressive but a hell of a lotta fun! And these days, don't we all just want a little more fun in our lives? Still, it wouldn't be an MoP episode without some random Lacan references and some unnecessary psychoanalytic cultural theory thrown in there to impress the elites! So don't panic pseudo intellectuals, we will never forget about you, as we are one of you! NOTE: MoP highly recommends that you re-watch the film in question while high, with multiple shitty snacks, wearing either a "onesie" a "slanket" or just in your underwear, as long as you've been wearing them for at least three days straight. ENJOY!

We're back with Part 2 of our discussion with Omar Majeed, Tom Alexander and Raul Pinto on our favourite films of 2020. In this part we discuss categories like The Film You Wish You Made, Biggest Disappointment, Most Original Film and Best Old Film You Watched. Same rules apply as last time, no biting, pinching or hair pulling, but crotch shots wholly encouraged! We hope you enjoy.

If there's one thing that Mutiny of Preverts prides itself in is our ability to read the cultural moment. And what do people want to do now more than reminisce about what a splendiferous and joyous experience that was the year 2020? But what might be hard to believe is that after looking back we realized that a lot of bad stuff happened and 2020 wasn't really that splendiferous after all. Maybe even the opposite of splendiferous which I'm going to say is something like drinking a big puddle of dog water filled with napalm and used bandaids. So we decided to have some fun with this one and instead of doing a simple best of list we mined the Preverts back catalogue and used the same format that we did for our best of the decade by organizing the episode around a series of unusual, but hopefully insightful categories including The Crypto-Fascist Award, Most Original Film, The Film That Made You Skip Pornhub and a bunch more. To help us ensure that we didn't miss any hidden gems we also invited three of our favourite guests from past episodes, Omar Majeed, Tom Alexander and Raul Pinto to join us. With these three devoted cinephiles we ended up with a diverse and sprawling discussion on everything from Mank to Another Round to First Cow and a whole lot more. So much more that we had to break the episode into two parts. But we won't leave you hanging for long. Part two will be out in a week.

The authorship of Citizen Kane has been the subject of much debate ever since Pauline Kael's essay Raising Kane which put forth the strange notion that Orson Welles was less of the driving force behind Kane and naming screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as the unsung hero who deserved sole credit for one of cinema's greatest achievements. Fincher seems to be using this template for his bio pic of Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman as a shambolic court jester much in demand among the Hollywood elites until his own self-destructive tendencies bring it all down. As with all Hollywood lore, the characters that populate this myth are well known epic figures from Irving Thalberg to Upton Sinclair, but the underlying themes of movies as propaganda and the political machinations of the media machine bely a certain unconscious irony for Fincher, who seems to be trading in the very same myth making by upholding the idea that Welles was a megalomaniacal credit hog and not the brilliant filmmaker who would go onto make many superb films.