The Pink Smoke podcast

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss (possibly) their favorite film of the year, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters. This episode, recorded in 2018, was released from behind our Patreon paywall. Enjoy it. Think about it. Perhaps someday... learn to love it.

The Pink Smoke is coming in from the cold to debrief our listeners on 100 years worth of espionage thrillers. Starting in the 1920's, we chose one notable spy movie (as well as a few alternate picks) for each decade leading to our present day in order to decode how they reflect the history and pop culture of their respective epoch. From the years leading to World War II through the Cold War and up to the modern age of counterintelligence in the time of domestic terrorism and the internet, we recruited agents John Arminio (co-host of Popcorn Eschaton!) and Bill Scurry (co-host of I Don't Get It) to analyze these cloak-and-dagger tales and what they have to say about the excitement and morality of the spy profession. In Part One, we cover the 1920's through the 1970's which includes one epic silent masterpiece, various adventures set behind enemy lines during the war of nations, intimate stories of British citizens who exploit governments for personal gain, human dramas about moral degradation behind the Iron Curtain and post-Watergate paranoid thrillers. Support our Patreon! All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most open-minded and good-natured of all audiences: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke Popcorn Eschaton! https://soundcloud.com/zebras-in-america/popcorn-eschaton-1 I Don't Get It Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-get-it-podcast/id1205228194 The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

PSP: Pulp Fictions covers the "Bond Novel That Never Was" - crime writer Donald Westlake's FOREVER AND A DEATH! Westlake is a favorite author of hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs so they're at full force in discussing this curious posthumously published work that on the surface seems to have nothing to do with 007.

Over a decade after his high-octane cyber-punk metal mutilation fetishism monster debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), director-producer-writer-cinematographer-editor-star Shinya Tsukamoto truly discovered himself as an artist and filmmaker with the blue-tinted, rain-drenched fever nightmare A Snake of June (2002). His seventh feature film, it follows three characters: a sexually-repressed telephone counselor, her hygiene-obsessed husband and a mysterious, spying interloper who will disrupt and upend their domestic sterilization. Hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs revisit every monochromatic corner of this beautifully strange film, which is somehow persistently cruel yet deeply empathetic to the three characters who find themselves trapped within the oppressive confines of their urban surroundings. How much of this is a self-critique by Tsukamoto (who also plays the creepy, disembodied voyeur) on the exploitative nature of cinema itself? Is there a safe middleground between cultural subjugation and unrestrained liberation? There's a lot to discuss about this deceptively short masterwork. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most open-minded and good-natured of all audiences. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"There's no such thing as an unfashionable hero or an unsuitable heiress." Hot off their five-hour excursion into Swishbuckler Cinema, hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg trace the sordid subgenre's origins to George MacDonald Fraser's expansive series of novels featuring Harry Paget Flashman, a self-described "scoundrel with no proper feelings" who often finds himself cowering miserably in the middle of some of the 19th century's greatest military disasters. For this episode, our hosts randomly selected Flashman's Lady (1977), the sixth book of the 12-part "Flashman Papers," to see how successful the author was at mixing rousing adventure with rakish humor. From performing the first hat trick in a cricket match to crossing swords with East Indies pirates and being enslaved in Madagascar, unscrupulous cad and insatiable lecher Flashman never misses an opportunity to represent all the worst elements of colonial Victorian England...yet somehow comes off as delightfully roguish? The discussion digs into the series' multi-layered parody of historical texts, MacDonald Fraser's irreverent razing of cultural myth and how a morally repugnant character can still be appealing as a narrator and leading character within the framework of picaresque fiction. Support our Patreon! All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most sophisticated and noble of all listeners: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by Martin Kessler to finally settle the debate of "what is art?" and "what is trash?" in cinema! Using the similarities between a Tales from the Crypt episode and a Patricia Highsmith short story as a jumping off point, the duo digs into the differences between artists and artisans, art and entertainment, high and low, product and artwork - not as a value judgement distinction but as a way of exploring the meaning of the categories into which films and literature are shifted. Superhero movies, John Carpenter, Thomas Mann, Robocop, Jaws, and Godard - what does it mean to differentiate between Art and Trash? Who's to say if Tarkovsky is better than William Castle? And why would you react negatively to drawing (or not drawing) a distinction between them? Join us for this open-minded, good-natured discussion of a highly fraught subject! Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most open-minded and good-natured of all audiences. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Movie Kessler on Twitter: twitter.com/MovieKessler The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

On this episode, we're joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss some of his favorite moments of bittersweet love in the movies. Having made One Day Since Yesterday, a documentary about Peter Bogdanovich's unsung sleeper They All Laughed, Teck knows something about cinema's most achingly romantic, heart-wrenchingly complicated relationships and crafted a list of some of the most unforgettable. We follow Teck through his picks, which include fairy tale connections and acrimonious separations set in New York, Los Angeles and an idyllic Greek Island, in the worlds of art, business and sports - even the dangerous and freewheeling streets of scenic New Jersey! Whether it's new love, love in pieces, or love in retrospect, the 24 films covered in this episode are a testament to how susceptible we are to the pitfalls and upturns of love on the big screen. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Here it is. Our massive exploration of one of the most disreputable genres imaginable: The Swishbuckler. A loose collection of movies created in the mid-70s through the mid-80s parodying the classic swashbucklers of yore, swishbuckler films like Zorro The Gay Blade, Pirates, Yellowbeard and Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers are marked by their terrible comedy, penchant for grotesquerie, extreme campiness and even more extreme poor taste. This might be The Pink Smoke's most massive podcast undertaking yet: from the genre's roots in Richard Lester's Musketeers films to a send-off into the swashbuckler revival of the 90s ignited by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it's an improbably in-depth look at an utterly ridiculous genre for which hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs have an almost inconceivable enthusiasm. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke (Still need an explanation of what the hell is going on here? Here ya go: At the dawn of cinema, there was The Swashbuckler: intrigue, romance and derring-do that swept audiences into the colorful royal courts and handsome pirate ships from the pages of Dumas and Sabatini. Even after its post-war peak, the Swashbuckler remained the most popular of Hollywood entertainment, having made international stars of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn and modern legends of mythical heroes like Zorro, Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers and Captain Peter Blood. By the 1970's, the legacy of Fairbanks and Flynn had devolved into what we loving term the Swishbuckler: a subgenre of comedy that borrowed the same tales of adventure and romance mixed with a healthy dose of modern irreverence. For a solid decade, raunchy satires placed in historical settings marked a trail of flatulence and queasy sexual politics across American screens to an overwhelmingly hostile critical and poor commercial response. We at the Pink Smoke are so fascinated by this odd epoch of cinema that we recorded a nearly five-hour episode in which we chronicle 14 Swishbuckler "classics," trying to understand how this wave of mediocrity managed to stay afloat for 10 years in spite of marked indifference to outright derision from critics and consistently sinking box office returns. How did these always weird, sometimes nasty exercises in Golden Era grave robbing reflect the styles and attitudes of comedy of the time? How did they deal with huge movements like women's liberation? Was the heritage of the Swashbuckler respected, even while the outmoded ideals of gallantry and romance were being purposefully disrespected? If you ever asked for an in-depth analysis of this bizarre trend of parodying a bygone era of film, you've come to the right place!) The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

In 1986, NBC debuted the series Crime Story, co-created by former Chicago cop Chuck Adamson and produced by hot-off-Miami Vice Michael Mann. The show adapted an unconventional serial format in order to span three decades in the conflict between MCU detective Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and rising mobster Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). The ambitious approach proved the downfall of the show, which was canceled after two seasons, but Mann & co. managed to create over 30 hours worth of network drama that for the first time in American television felt like one very long movie. On this episode, host John Cribbs welcomes editor/filmmaker and Über-Mann fan Eric Pfriender to discuss the feature-length pilot episode of Crime Story, directed by Abel Ferrara. In addition to revisiting the epic scope, stellar cast and pioneering direction of the pilot, they talk about the recent Michael Mann career revitalization including the debut of his new series Tokyo Vice, publication of his novel Heat 2 and promise of his upcoming $90 million biopic about Enzo Ferrari. They also get off track and talk about Heat...a lot. Midnight in the Guest Room: midnightintheguestroom@substack.com Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter:
 twitter.com/TheLastMachine

All episodes of The Pink Smoke podcast are made available to Patreon subscribers a week before their general release. Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are joined by Martin Kessler to discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally digs into their favorite films of the year, everything from an animated French adaptation of a Japanese short story collection to the travels of Mrs. Harris to the big guns everyone is talking about by filmmakers like Mr. Play Mountain and Park Chan-wook. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Movie Kessler on Twitter: twitter.com/MovieKessler 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"