This month on the pod, special guest Adam Nayman—Toronto-based critic, lecturer, and author of David Fincher: Mind Games—joins us to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Seven.
JoinedJune 4, 2023
Articles60
Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman are the co-hosts of The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast, engaging with the business of being alive, one movie at a time.
Hello, champagne. This month we welcome back Michael Koresky—MoMI’s senior curator of film, Reverse Shot’s co-founder and editor, and the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness—to discuss Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.
For a taste of summertime sadness, we're looking at Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010). We get into: the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as metaphor for life.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: film critic Bilge Ebiri—the man, the myth, the legend—joins us to bookend our discussion of all things Mission: Impossible from a couple of summers ago, on the occasion of the final film (?) of a nearly 30 year franchise.
On this month's bite-sized episode, we're zooming in on a snappy/passionate moment from Ernst Lubitsch's effervescent screwball comedy, Trouble in Paradise.
Pop quiz, hotshot: BWDR veteran and De Palma completist Travis Woods joins us for a special conversation on one of our all-time favorites, Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). We get into: repetition compulsion and classical Hollywood storytelling, Keanu’s peak hotness, Speed’s existential lessons, does Jeff Daniels close his eyes?, Mark Mancina’s love theme, what it means to “become bomb,” and more.
This month’s micro-episode takes us inside the mysterious, sensual brilliance of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 film, The Passenger. We get into: slow cinema that doesn't feel slow, style & aesthetics, the virility of 70s'-era Nicholson, existential malaise, the unique intensity of traveling relationships, and more.
This month we sit down with Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién, author of the newsletter Madwomen & Muses. In honor of “cinematic sensuality,” we chat about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s ode to ahistorical melodrama and doomed romance.
On this month's bite-sized episode, we're zooming in on the spectral perspective of Thomas Vinterburg's debut film, The Celebration.
This month on the pod, we're analyzing Aaron Schimburg’s Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man, with critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi.
Our first mini-episode of 2025 is all about Billy Wilder’s subversive farce Some Like It Hot. We get into: the unlikely modernity of Hot’s sexual politics, Orry-Kelly’s naked dresses, Wilder’s collaboration with I. A. L. Diamond, is this the greatest comedy of all time, and more.
For our final podcast of 2024, we did your Gladiator II homework for you: rewatching Ridley Scott's original Gladiator (2000) with amateur Russell Crowe historian and podcast extraordinaire Blake Howard.