Wednesday, September 14, 2016

F This Movie! - Rear Window

Patrick and Mark Ahn are spying on you.



Download this episode here. (85.8 MB)

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Also discussed this episode: Green Room (2016), The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), The Bronze (2015), Primal (2010), Inequality for All (2013), Batman (1989)

15 comments:

  1. Another interesting twist on this is the 1978 John Carpenter TV movie Someone's Watching Me. With is basically a reverse Rear Window - a killer is peeping on a lone woman. I think Patrick would enjoy it.

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  2. Shadow of a Doubt....oh, you eventually got it. :)

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  3. Anybody else feel like The 'Burbs is sort of doing a Rear Window takeoff?

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  4. Hey Disturbia is a solid thriller. To correct your assumption about the neighbor, he hadn't just moved in. He had been there a long time and they find blueprints from when he added on to the house. Bad actress for the girl next door, but everything else I thought was great about that movie. Loved this episode.

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    1. My years-old memory of the movie is faulty. Sorry about that! The movie is entertaining.

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  5. Finally and coincidentally watched Rear Window for the first time a few weeks ago. In a world of twists and turns and turns and twists, I was actually surprised by the ending.

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  6. The favourite film Patrick could not remember is Xtro

    Cheers guys, great fun, this week because of Anthony Perkins Birthday I watched all 4 Psycho movies and Robert Galluzos Documentary The Psycho legacy, and Part 1 is so amazing

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  7. One more variation on Rear Window, since you were looking for a woman-led variation, is the interesting Robin Tunney movie "Cherish." Coincidentally, she also has an ankle bracelet after she's been framed for drunk driving/manslaughter. It's not great, but it has a certain interesting charm and some fun thriller aspects. Also, it has Tim Blake Nelson, never a bad thing.

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    1. I remember seeing Cherish and liking it, but I remember nothing else about it except the ankle bracelet and that Liz Phair is in it. Time to revisit!

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  8. Yay, a Hitchcock movie. So, is Invisible Genius the idea of directing a movie so well that it looks easy taken to the nth degree?

    I'm excited about this little streak of foreign movies. Any chance of you guys one day doing a Wong Kar-Wai movie?

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  9. Great podcast, guys! I'm so glad you picked this movie; I recently (if you can call over a year ago recent) saw it when it was re-released in theaters, and I went expecting to enjoy the same thriller I always did but instead came away seeing the movie in a completely new light.

    You both talk (especially around the 45 minute mark) about many of the things I finally recognized after all these years, like the film's mediation on romantic relationships and how romantic strife (or bliss) defines pretty much all the tenants' lives. It seemed to me that collectively their stories kind of play out a standard cycle of romance: falling in love, followed by bliss, then marriage, strife, and, ultimately, murder. By the end of the film, all the characters that were in romantic relationships have moved on to a different stage in their relationships; the dancer's boyfriend came home, the previously inseparable newlyweds have started fighting, Jeff and Lisa finally made it official (or whatever you want to call it), and Thorwald's been captured for the murder of his wife. Thus, it seems the next stage of the cycle has started, and the newlyweds are dangerously close in their relationship to where Thorwald and his wife were was before she was murdered. I think Mark (at least I think it was Mark, sorry if I'm wrong) was totally right when he said the ending is ambiguous: is Lisa's taking out a magazine just a cute ending, or does it forebode negative times to come?

    Miss Lonelyhearts, depending on your interpretation, either falls into this cycle or is the only one to escape from it. She also moves to a different place by the end of the movie; once suicidal at her ability to find a date, she now has instead found meaning in her neighbor's music. I think her ending is ambiguous as well--I always assumed she hooked up with the musician, but, if you accept that the film has a fundamentally negative view of the cycle of romantic relationships, is Hitchcock instead suggesting that she's now happy because she's found fulfillment not in romance, but art?

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