The MacGuffin

Nostalgia has been a major theme this year in films. With Midnight in Paris, about a man who thinks culture was at its peak in the 1940s, and Hugo and its honoring of an early filmmaker, this is the year of recognizing the past. Now there is The Artist, a silent film in black and white, about the silent age of film and what the onset of talkies did to those who did their best work in silent pictures. While it is a homage to silent films, it is also a reintroduction to how silent movies can work as a medium.

Another Top 5 segment from The MacGuffin. This time Allen and Brandi share their top 5 character actors.

This segment is also available on Stitcher and iTunes. The audio version can be downloaded directly from here. After you’ve watched the video please vote in our poll and share which one you think is the best.

Movies

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

I always thought of Fast Times at Ridgemont High as being in a line of films examining the life of high schoolers. It started with American Graffiti for the fifties, Dazed and Confused for the seventies, and then Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the eighties. That descending order concept fit even more so in terms of quality, Fast Times at Ridgemont High being easily the weakest all around. I found it to be utterly ridiculous, and not in a funny way. To give it the feel of high school, they make everything as random as possible, but it seemed they were pushing so hard to make it random that their stories ended up being uninteresting. I was not expecting a great deal of depth, but I wanted something to latch on to. All the characters have their little side plots, which is all well and good, but nothing leads anywhere interesting. Sean Penn, who gets a lot of early notice for his work as the stoner Spicoli, isn’t really that funny. It is all in how Mr. Hand, his teacher, reacts to his antics, it is never Spicoli himself. Without Mr Hand, who I would say is the best part about the film, Spicoli is just the token stoner character. That is the problem with the rest of the cast. They are all token characters that are never really developed nor made interesting. Beyond that, the dialogue gives them nothing to work with. Scenes are intermixed with random nudity and foul language to make it seem edgy, but that is mainly distracting, trying to give us something when they see the story isn’t doing enough to keep interest. All together, a very disappointing experience.

Spencer and Greg look back at Brad Pitt’s career in advance of Moneyball, discuss John Goodman for Red State and give their DVD picks of the week.

Every Saturday night the Tomb of Terror opens, unleashing reviews of the obscure and the classic in horror cinema.

I hate spiders. I’d rather be mugged than see a large spider in the same room as me. They are awful, alien-looking things that need to be stopped. “What’s the big deal?” You ask. “They kill insects for us…and the circle of life…blah, blah, blah.” I don’t care. Did you know that in Africa there are spiders the size of dinner plates? Fuck that. I think that the various nations of the world need to stop fighting amongst themselves and rally against the real enemy, the spider. Tonight’s film, Arachnophobia, shows just what can happen if we are to allow these terrible creatures to live. I don’t know about you, but I’d feel pretty bad knowing that a swarm of spiders attacked Jeff Daniels, all because we didn’t man up and wipe them out. Destroy the ecosystem, you say? You’re damn right I would.

Spencer is joined by Rich Wasserman (A Random Walk Through Film) to review Red State from director Kevin Smith, following the film tour’s stop in Seattle.