The Pink Smoke podcast

Aleksei German month at The Pink Smoke kicks off with this primer spearheaded by Martin Kessler of the Flixwise: Canada podcast. Kessler is one of the English-speaking world's leading authorities on German - this episode is intended as an entry-point into the filmmaker's work, a titan of Russian cinema who remains surprisingly unknown outside of his native land.

Hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs dig into the work of the Belgian author Georges Simenon via his crime novel La tête d’un homme, featuring his wildly popular character Inspector Maigret. The ultra-prolific Simenon wrote 11 novels in 1931, the year that he wrote La tête, and rarely slowed down during his legendary career - even at the reduced pace of his later years, he would purportedly write a novel in 11 days. La tête d’un homme (also known as A Man’s Head or Maigret’s War of Nerves) begins with the story of a prisoner escaping from prison... with the unexpected help of Maigret. From there, it builds to a confrontation with a criminal whose manner & belief system disturbs the detective on a profound level. It’s a classic of detective fiction - we discuss its place in culture, the film adaptations, and how to approach Simenon’s work even as a total novice. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

How do you solve the aesthetic-philosophical problem of Michael Ritchie, the not-quite-auteur/not-quite-journeyman director of satirical social comedies like The Candidate and Smile and such eccentric comedy classics as The Bad News Bears and Fletch? Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs decided to go at it the hard way by diving into Prime Cut, Ritchie's sort-of second feature (it debuted a day before The Candidate) - hands-down his weirdest and nastiest movie. What on the page seems like an easy grand slam - a 70's crime thriller that pits an M76-packing Lee Marvin against Gene Hackman under the vast and gorgeous Kansas sky - is in practice more an outlandish curio with its scenes of mob rivals fed through a slaughterhouse, young naked women auctioned in pens like cattle and extended set piece featuring Marvin and rookie star Sissy Spacek running from a deadly combine harvester that threatens to harvest them. Is it a case of Ritchie tripping himself up, finding his sensibilities as a filmmaker at odds with the gritty material, or is there more to it than that? Join us in appreciating the clear merits and murkier demerits of this bizarre tale of meat and machine guns. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"Bright blazing intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind, swifter and more terrible than lightning, flashing over a landscape that seems clear in every detail. Then they go out, and there is only a greater blackness." Nothing is what it seems - unless everything is what it seems - in the account of an eloping couple's ill-fated voyage from New York to Vermont. What strange fate befell this Amish-raised lollapalooza and her gabardine suit-garbed coxcomb on a backroad in the Berkshires? And what does it have to do with a freckled-faced city surgeon, a refugee Basque surrealist artist, the author of an arduous text on psychopathology and the postmaster of Whippleville? Joel Townsley Rogers's The Red Right Hand is a cipher of crime fiction, a phantasmagoria of molds, tramps, ration books, brain surgery, eyeless houses, sawdust sinkholes, red-eyed rattlesnakes, prewar crepe-soled sports shoes and the beautiful dance of the corkscrew and the bottle. Confused? That's only to be expected when you make the turn onto the old Swamp Road and find yourself transfixed by the chimerical logic of what seems like a straightforward story of murder until it distorts and disorients the narrative into a truly unique reading experience. In this episode, Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs veer into this Bermuda Triangle of murky prose - is it all pulp and circumstance or a meticulously fathomless work of art? Together they wade through Rogers's curious cast of characters, casual allusions to alternative history and obsessive repetition of superficially trivial details to reach the elusive epicenter of this crazy book, the very definition of a cult classic. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs are joined by Professor of Sociology John Balzarini to discuss the latest installment in the Marvel Comics Universe.

“Don’t gush over the sea. It’s always been there.” It's a “Jean Gabin is getting too for this shit” double feature! On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss two unforgettable French crime films: Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Henri Verneuil's Any Number Can Win (1963), both starring the grandfather of quiet cool, M. Jean Gabin. Playing aging gangsters intent on making off with that last big score, the legendary leading man slipped into these late-career roles like a comfy pair of silk pajamas - and looked amazing in those pajamas, too. Eyeing longtime Pink Smoke favorite Grisbi like a coveted bar of gold, the guys question why it's so difficult to contextualize such an obvious masterpiece, its director's place in cinema history and what the movie is really about. They compare it to Verneuil's later film, which also features Alain Delon as a (gorgeous) young thug enlisted by Gabin to heist a seaside casino. Both movies are fun, sad, sexy and poetic as any great French crime film, but most importantly they help establish the difference between a gentleman and a pimp. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 
www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” 
Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”

“The more you struggle, the more new passages you make in the labyrinth, the more the box is like another layer of outer skin that grows from the body, and the inner arrangement is made more and more complex.” On this episode, hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg climb into a corrugated cardboard nightmare and explore Kobo Abe’s delightfully bizarre The Box Man. Best known for his work with Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film adaptation of his novels (including The Face of Another and Woman in the Dunes), Abe was one of the most brilliant and original novelists of the 20th century. The conversation covers the book’s elliptical, elusive, free-flowing structure and evasive narrative truth, whether Abe is unfairly overlooked due to his association with Teshigahara, and where the book fits into the history of literature (in the context of Abe’s aggressive rejection of Japanese culture). Listen as Funderburg, a total Abe novice, discovers a new favorite author and Cribbs offers suggestions on how to approach Abe’s intimidating oeuvre. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” 
Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”

Join hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg for a deep dive into Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and its cinematic adaptations. The story of a naive governess & her innocent charges is the quintessential ghost story, a metaphorical exploration of abuse, theodicy and the ways in which adults let down the children around them. Some of the adaptations discussed include Jack Clayton’s 1961 masterpiece The Innocents, Michael Winner’s surprisingly erudite and unsurprisingly tasteless prequel The Nightcomers and the recent work of irredeemable stupidity The Turning (which reimagines the story as a grunge-era Stephen King knock-off.) The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter:
 twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/CFunderburg Intro & outro music by Marcus Pinn of Pinnland Empire.

“Nostalgia is one of our saving graces.” On the latest episode, hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg take things back to their heroic bloodshed drenched pasts to discuss John Woo’s ne plus ultra of Hong Kong action cinema, Hard Boiled. Like many a greasy teenage malcontent in the early 90s, their exposure to the films of John Woo was key in setting them on a life-path of undeviating film nerd-dom. Join them as they discuss their shared love of Tequila, rice like family, one corrupt cop, one vicious hitman and 10,000 bullets - it’s a celebration of John Woo’s golden age with a focus on Hard Boiled, the film that took an extreme sub-genre to its extremes, the extremity of extremity. Their conversation touches on the importance of melodrama and big emotions in heroic bloodshed films, the surprising similarities of the careers of John Woo and Wong Kar-Wai, and the sheer joyful awesomeness of massive action sequences. It’s as purely celebratory as the show gets. Support our Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 

www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 

twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:

 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter:

 twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”

 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs are joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss RICHARD JEWELL. The latest film director by Clint Eastwood, it's the true story of an Atlanta security guard falsely accused by the FBI and Atlanta-Journal Constitution of planting bombs at the 1996 Olympics. The discussion turns from Paul Walter Hauser's astounding performance (and checkered Juggalo history) to the media environment surrounding domestic terrorism in 1996 to how Eastwood's unadorned style impresses without going in for the big show-off moments. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/CFunderburg Intro & outro music by Marcus Pinn of Pinnland Empire.