Notebook on Cities and Culture
(Formerly The Marketplace of Ideas.) Colin Marshall sits down for in-depth conversations with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all around Los Angeles and beyond.
S2E5: The "Kiss Me, Stupid" Date with Karina Longworth

Colin Marshall sits down in Sliver Lake with Karina Longworth, film writer at the LA Weekly, co-founder of the film-culture blog Cinematical, and author of the upcoming Masters of Cinema: George Lucas. They discuss the public fascination with criticism versus blogging; J. Hoberman's notion of criticism as reporting what it feels like to be in the screening room; how she promoted a version of herself in her blogging days, and what she regrets about doing so; the pre-YouTube video essays she would create in school about Moonlighting, Judy Garland's apocryphal marriage proposal to Frank Sinatra, and Maury Povich; whether it makes sense to ask if we live in an interesting time for cinema, and whether she can even tell through the fog of writing about movies every week; time travel films and the oft-fumbled promise thereof, especially in the shadows of Back to the Future's pop mainstreaming of scientific devices; what she's learned about making Claire Denis and Sion Sono quickly relevant to readers who may well never have heard of them; how New York gets more movies than Los Angeles, how moviegoing means something different in the two cities, and her cover story about the whole dichotomy; her book on George Lucas, and the looming question of what, exactly, happened to him; her fears about her favorite directors getting too much budget, power, and freedom, and her greater fears about the Dodgers falling victim to the same; the strange fate of the rental collection at Kim's Video; her experience of cinematic burnout, and the subjectivity to which is may lead; Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess, which is actually about computer chess; pictures like Sans Soleil and Kiss Me, Stupid, which so formed their cinematic consciousnesses as to become their representations in film form; and the magical, destructive, entrancing, awful myth of old Hollywood.

Direct download: NCC_S2E5_Karina_Longworth.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 9:24pm UTC