W100M: 88 – Bringing Up Baby — 87 – 12 Angry Men
Christiana and Mike discuss their write-in candidates for the AFI’s Top 100 Movies with…
Number 88: Bringing Up Baby
Number 87: 12 Angry Men
The Many Works of Christiana Ellis
Christiana and Mike discuss their write-in candidates for the AFI’s Top 100 Movies with…
Number 88: Bringing Up Baby
Number 87: 12 Angry Men
Love this podcast and all of your podcasts, Christiana. The discussions and rapport between you and Mike work really well. I’m in awe of your creativity and your wit.
Re: Do The Right Thing
Spike Lee makes allegorical films. And in general, he has had a tendency to make allegorical films of the ‘Black Experience in America’. Even as a kid watching his movies (I saw Do The Right Thing in the theatre), there was always a kind of mythic feel to everything. I think he’s into stylized, mythopoeic kinds of stuff.
The point here is that the characters seem to represent trends, archetypes, and themes in the contemporary and historical experience of the community.
But Lee doesn’t do this in a very straight-forward way. He likes to do it in a highly stylized way. He’ll take, for example, elements of a Greek tragedy, like the chorus, for example, and drop those into his movie (disguised as a group of youths, or as some men sitting on the sidewalk).
He’s definitely influenced by both Greek plays and Shakespeare.
So the characters are more than just individuals, they represent social and cultural currents in the community.
Anyway, thanks for a wonderful podcast.
I like what Mike said about Bringing Up Baby; it nicely summed up my feelings about it in words better than what I could come up with I watched it a few weeks ago. I’d actually watched it with the intention of asking to be the guest co-host for that one, but I realized that I probably would’ve just spent most of my time explaining why Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (the movie I talked to Christiana about at Dragon*Con) should’ve been on the list instead of Swing Time. Had I been with Watching 100 Movies from the start that one most likely would’ve been my own write-in. Either that of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Hear me out; I’d put it on the list on account of both it’s influence on/staying power in popculture as well as it pretty much setting the gold standard for the movie subgenre known as “So Bad It’s Good.” Be honest; when you hear the phrase so bad it’s good, what’s the movie you’re most likely to think of first? Exactly.
Just out of curiosity, is W100M on hiatus, or just podfaded. I hate to sound impatient, but it has been almost 3 months.