The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

Mikey and Nicky is unmistakably an Elaine May film and yet it stands out compared to her other directorial efforts as far less comedic and far more openly tragic. If her comedies drew criticism for their brutality, here the brutality is the star alongside Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. It is a film about the difficult of letting go and, as often was the case with Elaine May’s productions, one she went to extreme lengths to hold onto. To make sense of Mikey and Nicky, a dark gangster drama, and its place in the Elaine May body of work, we’ll hear from Lindsay Zoladz, Elizabeth Alsop, and Carrie Courogen.Check out Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; and Carrie Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Tune in next week for our episode on Ishtar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If A New Leaf was a romantic comedy with a tinge of attempted murder that ultimately gave way to sweetness, The Heartbreak Kid is a murderless romantic comedy that is much more brutal. Directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon, The Heartbreak Kid tells the story of Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a newlywed who falls out of love with his wife Lila (Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon, only to become infatuated with the beautiful and unattainable Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). What ensues is maybe the earliest example of what today we might call cringe comedy. And, despite the film attaining a classic status, good luck finding it by traditional means.Today’s show features insights from Elizabeth Purchell, Carrie Courogen, Ethan Warren, and Matt Singer about the film’s production history, bizarre distribution purgatory, and legacy. Purchell is currently working with theaters around the country to bring The Heartbreak Kid back to the big screen from a newly discovered print. Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th. Warren wrote about The Heartbreak Kid in his Bright Wall/Dark Room essay “Still Heartbroken After All These Years.” And Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever. Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Tune in next week for our episode on Mikey and Nicky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does a genius make the worst film of all time? Well, she doesn’t. She didn’t. And the world is finally ready not only to embrace Ishtar as a worthwhile movie, but Elaine May into the pantheon of American auteurs. And in light of her ongoing re-evaluation, we are launching a four part series on the films, life, and legacy of May. In this first episode, we’ll hear from Carrie Courogen, author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th.Then The New Yorker’s Richard Brody explains the genius he finds in May’s first film, A New Leaf—something he wrote about last year. And finally we hear from Maya Montañez Smukler, head of UCLA Film and Television Archive Research and author of Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema about the legacy of May’s debut both in its initial context and today.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.Tune in next week for our episode on The Heartbreak Kid.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s not unusual to laud a channel or a production company for cultivating a unique brand. HBO runs on brand reliability. A24 promises counterprogramming to the familiar and safe. Cartoon Network supplies family friendly content for kids. That is, until their bedtime. Starting in 2001, evenings on Cartoon Network have increasingly become a new channel with entirely different sensibilities known as Adult Swim. If Cartoon Network provides reliability, Adult Swim has cultivated years of programming unreliability and unpredictability—truly some of the strangest content to ever come out of a traditional media company. It’s about as close to punk rock as cable can get in the 21st century, whether the myriad shows from Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or the edgy animated ensemble Aqua Teen Hunger Force to its recent mainstream turn in Rick and Morty.There is perhaps no way to convey the strangeness of so many of these shows, the avant-garde silliness and experimentation with form that has become popularized in internet content today. Meme culture, Tik Toks, and YouTube are the Wild West, uncensored and free from traditional corporate oversight, and they may exist because of the true experimentation and goofing around that manifested on Adult Swim. So how did Adult Swim manage to do all of that before internet culture found itself and under the umbrella of a cable channel? This is the subject of Michael Walsh’s Nerdist article, “Why Adult Swim’s Strange Early Days Can Never Be Replicated.” We hear from him about the miracle that is Adult Swim.Later in the show, Adult Swim personalities Tim Heidecker and Joe Pera discuss their craft and process. Heidecker created and starred in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, Beef House, On Cinema at the Cinema, and Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. He now runs the Hei Network can can be heard in The People’s Joker, which is playing in limited engagements now. Pera created and starred in Joe Pera Talks With You, Adult Swim’s answer to Mr. Rogers that ran from 2018-2021. He is currently performing the Peras Tour around the country. Both of these interviews originally aired on Riverside Chats, where you can still hear the full conversations wherever you get podcasts.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is ostensibly a parody of the Batman universe, but it’s also a personalized reinterpretation of the characters and themes to tell a love story, a coming of age story, and a story about gender. Though Warner Brothers, who holds the rights to Batman and the related characters, has not made a public comment on the Vera Drew’s parody of the universe, it seems fair to say that they’d rather you didn’t see The People’s Joker, which is currently playing around the country in limited engagements. The movie’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 was cancelled due to copyright concerns. It’s just now that the movie is rolling out in limited engagements around the country.In today’s episode, Drew talks about the path to making The People’s Joker, why a personal story made sense to be projected onto the Batman universe, and the long road to its release. And later in the show, film historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell discusses the queer history of the superhero genre as well as how The People’s Joker may shift that landscape.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from The People’s Joker, Joker, Batman Forever, Blond Venus, and Batman and Robin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today’s media landscape, one thing I bet you’ve never wanted more of is choices. A 2016 survey by Rovi suggested that the average viewer scrolls through streaming apps for at least 20 minutes before settling on something to watch—or in other words, the average length of a sitcom episode. I’ve certainly spent longer checking all of the different apps and then re-checking, desperate to find the exact right thing. This is what Barry Schwartz calls “the paradox of choice,” where the more choices presented to a consumer often lead to a less satisfactory outcome. So how do we parse through endless entertainment? Well, the solution may not need to be something new at all. This is what critics have been trying to do since the profession began.What is worth your time? What is worth seeking out? How do we process what it means? A good critic answers all of these questions rather than simply working through a checklist of subjective qualifiers. And the best critics are as entertaining as a lot of the entertainment they assess. If you follow film criticism at all, it’s impossible not to have some awareness of two titans of the industry: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. So in a time where culture reporting is seemingly more precarious than ever, we thought it would be worth doing a show looking into the role of criticism in our media ecosystem both in the past and present—and how the two most successful critics navigated these questions. All of this is the subject of Matt Singer’s new book, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever, which is available now wherever you get books.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, On Cinema at the Cinema, The Critic, and The Tonight Show.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Though our screens are the inescapable way in which we experience stories today, nearly all of the conflicts on screen pre-date the screen itself. Take, for example, one of Northrop Frye’s four archetypal narrative structures in Anatomy of Criticism: the marriage plot. Frye writes that “The literary mode of romance deals with the marvelous and the uncommon, and, under its influence, events turn into symbols and characters into types.” He identifies the marriage plot as a recurring motif in narratives that typically involve a quest for love, union, and resolution.People like romance. It’s fun to watch the formation of a bond, the chemistry, and the highly dramatic path toward commitment. But while many of the marriage plots focus on the moments of young love, of the early days leading up to the marriage itself, there’s another tradition in contemporary marriage plots that we’re focusing on today: the mom-and-dad-are-fighting plot. If the classic marriage plots revel in the bliss of two people getting to know each others, the mom and dad are fighting plots dwell on two people who perhaps know each other too well. You can find variations of this plot all over the past half century of cinema from Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road to Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life to Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and many in between. But it’s nearly impossible to look at contemporary marriage plots, particularly in American media, and not see the shadow of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In today’s show, we hear from Philip Gefter about his new book Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and then director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center Dennis Lim discusses the enduring appeal of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy—in particular the way Before Midnight does and does not adhere to the tradition of Woolf. You can read Lim’s Criterion essay on the trilogy, “Time Regained,” here.Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Before Midnight, Marriage Story, The Princess Bride, Pride and Prejudice, and Closer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Fincher's latest film, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender as a kind of archetypal Fincher protagonist: a methodical control freak, cynical and arrogant and finding some mixture of success and failure based on how he navigates the complex world around him. In many ways, The Killer is explicitly about his method, his earned confidence as a contractor-assassin in a meaningless world. What gives him meaning is his impeccable craft. Until he misses. More than a few critics couldn’t help but view The Killer as a kind of autobiographical work, a self-reflective tale of a control freak trying to come to terms with the limits of his talent. Beyond the narrative boldness of Seven, Fight Club or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the intelligence of Zodiac or Gone Girl or even the confident swings-and-misses of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Mank, Fincher is known for being such a control freak that he sometimes even alienates actors—like Jodie Foster and Jake Gyllenhaal—and would rather blow up a project than see it through without being true to his singular vision. The result of this approach has been several great movies, a few classics even, and also several long stretches where Fincher couldn’t line up what he considered the right budgets or creative control and thus made nothing. The implication has always been that he proudly would not make a movie if the alternative would be something that wasn’t his.But to what extent, if any, might The Killer be a self-portrait? The world may never know, but what we can understand is how the auteur's filmography helps explain the man behind them. So who better to talk to than Adam Nayman, the man who wrote the book on David Fincher? Today's episode is a re-edit of Nayman's 2022 interview on Riverside Chats promoting his book David Fincher: Mind Games. Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review.The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from The Killer, Fight Club, Zodiac, Mank, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today’s show, we thought we’d invite you to what may be your first day of camp—but not the Wet Hot American Summer variety. We’re talking about the kind of camp that Susan Sontag described as blurring the line between high and low culture in its appreciation of artifice, exaggeration, and stylization. This is the sort of thing that often gets called so bad it’s good, embracing the silly and over the top in place of obviously recognizable emotion.This is murky territory, especially in a time when genres are often very clearly delineated and follow recognizable conventions. It’s often not difficult to decide whether a movie is in on a joke—or if the movie is operating with jokes at all. But one movie stood out last year for sparking a debate often on the grounds of its categorization as much as its thorny subject matter: Todd Haynes’s May December. May December is a story about unethical behavior as it manifests in a few dimensions. You have Elizabeth, played by Natalie Portman, as an actress looking to find authenticity in her new role playing a dramatized version of the life story of Gracie and Joe, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Their life story is itself a dramatization of the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, in which then-adult Letourneau had an illegal affair with one of her twelve-year-old students. May December, written by Sammy Burch as something inspired by but not beholden to the Mary Kay Letourneau story, imagines them decades after the incident blew up their lives. Still together, Gracie and Joe are about to become empty nesters as their children graduate high school and they are left to face the life they’ve lived together—provoked by Elizabeth’s attempt to understand them as the subject of her new film. Much of the movie exists in a space of discomfort and unethical decision making, something made even thornier in its employment of a real life scandal as the basis for the story. Is it ethical to use a real life crime as the inspiration for a film that seems, at times, to be poking fun at the idea of its characters and the way their traumas manifest? All of this has been further complicated by a persistent debate over tone and genre: would a more reverent tone help? Is the movie laughing at these people? If it laughs at these people, are you unethical for laughing at them, too? To try to understand what to do with May December, both on its own terms and as part of broader trends in media literacy, we turned to perhaps the real experts on media today: YouTube personalities. We hear from Izzy Custodio from the channel Be Kind Rewind about the ethical considerations of Todd Haynes’ new movie and storytelling in general. Then Maia Wyman from the channel Broey Deschanel discusses the implications of the camp debate over May December for our culture’s media literacy.Check out each guest’s video essays on May December and the themes of this episode—Custodio’s The Collaborations of Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes: Masters of Genre and Wyman’s May December and the Melodrama of Film Twitter. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Today’s show featured music and clips from May December, Wet Hot American Summer, Miller’s Crossing, and Darkman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s show is an exploration of the paradox that is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that was ignored, seemingly forgotten, and yet has influence all over our popular media. How is it that Michael Mann’s Ferrari shares an iconic line with Walk Hard, as Dan Kois asks? Could it possibly be that Joaquin Phoenix was intentionally mimicking John C. Reilly in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon? Will we ever, as Brianna Zigler writes, learn the lessons of Walk Hard? Jake Kasdan’s parody of the musical biopic came out in 2007 with the full support of Sony and a $35 million budget that allowed the production to look every bit as legitimate as the movies it poked fun at. Its cast, from John C. Reilly to Jenna Fischer to Kristin Wiig and all sorts of comedy legends, music legends, and Judd Apatow’s friends is something to behold all on its own. The entire enterprise stands out as perhaps the last big budget parody of its kind. And it may remain the last for one key reason: it made no money and it certainly didn’t win anybody any Oscars.By winter 2007, it looked like Dewey Cox would never amount to more than a blip on the radar of popular culture, a goofy comedy that audiences didn’t know what to do with. But here we are in 2024 and, if you’ve seen Walk Hard before, there’s a good chance you still see it everywhere. We’ll hear from Brianna Zigler, Dan Kois, “How Walk Hard Almost Destroyed the Musical Biopic” writer Alan Scherstuhl, and Walk Hard’s oral historian Alan Siegel about the often surprising and persistent legacy of what might be the last big budget parody in Hollywood history.The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork is created by Topher Booth. Today’s show features music and clips from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Bohemian Rhapsody, Ferrari, and Napoleon.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.