This week’s Film Seizure discusses the Beatles and their second film Help! as well as talk about their favorite things about the fab four.
This week’s Film Seizure discusses the Beatles and their second film Help! as well as talk about their favorite things about the fab four.
Film Seizure 
How did this not post last year?
You know, one of the downfalls of some podcasts is the hosts becoming connected with a growing listenership, a kind of fandom, and making the show more and more about them, rather than whatever the show is supposed to be about. There is a lot of self-celebration, more drawn out, ‘hilarious’ laughter at their own quirks and cutenesses, and more community management. I’ve dropped a few shows, shows I otherwise really liked, because that stuff just became too much to wade through.
I think this episode is what they’re aiming for when they do that stuff, or it should be. This happened naturally, all three of you setting aside show management (which can be another podcast killer itself) and letting this Not Exactly The Topic conversation, much more about your relationships with The Beatles than the movie, happen organically. It is easily one of your very best episodes.
And the great thing is, some day you can still do one covering the movie HELP!
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Thanks! It’s funny, in a sort of a way, this is kind of an example of some of the formatting shifts we wanted to do after our break. Maybe the movie itself doesn’t necessarily need to be discussed top to bottom, side to side. Maybe we just need to connect with what we feel about the movie/topic. In a sort of a way, our Psycho episode coming Feb 1 is sort of similar. What more could we possibly add to the discussion of Psycho? Well, we can talk about what we were thinking while watching it for the umpteenth time. Or where we think the movie doesn’t live up to its status because most people shut it off or tune it out after a particularly important scene. But yeah. Help was a different type of episode and it still produced good content I thought.
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“What more could we possibly add to the discussion of Psycho?”
I sort of get that, but it only really applies if you’re just introducing the film and its history as if no one’s heard about it, like a wikipedia entry, which you guys wouldn’t do. I mean, look, Citizen Kane is in the running for the top of a Most Covered Movies list. In 2002, in addition to smaller special features, its DVD release had two commentaries and a feature length documentary. A year later, the UK DVD had another commentary and another hour long documentary. Then just last year, after everything that can be said about Kane has been said, Criterion’s new set pulled up long interviews with cast & crew from 1966, 1975, 1979, 1988, 1990 and 1996, recorded their own brand new new interviews with a critic, some film scholars, Craig Barron and Ben Burtt, and a bunch of people who knew Welles personally, and then topped all that off with a brand new, 4th commentary and another feature length documentary. I’ve watched all of that and read a Making Of book a few years ago, and yet, just last week, an episode of a British show called In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg had an hour long round table about the film, and I kid you not, I heard new observations and details.
So don’t sell yourselves short on these seemingly over-discussed pictures. Does the movie still work? How and why? Those can always be interesting conversations. I didn’t even like Psycho until the second time I saw it. As a young kid, I’d seen Richard Schickel’s hour long interview with Hitch, which cut in the three big scenes, so when I finally saw the movie, still a kid, I couldn’t get past my “When’s this scene coming, and that one” thing. On rewatches, it’s been easier to fall into its spell as a movie about a lady who, on impulse, embezzles some money, carelessly, and gets out of Dodge, all the while rethinking her actions, and going along with that journey of hers. It’s like how, for 30+ minutes, Star Wars is not a movie about The Force or anything mystical. For longer, The Matrix isn’t about an alternate reality. Knowing that those movies are about those things, I don’t watch their first sections waiting for them to get to the point.
Anyway, Yeah. I’m not on your show.
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Then I do think you’ll like our episode. We definitely get into some of those things you mention.
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