As I write this, I’m surrounded by unread magazines. Big stacks of guilt-inducing unread magazines. Well, I don’t feel so guilty about not reading Entertainment Weekly, but I feel like I really need to get to work on all those issues of New York and Film Comment. The backlog was getting so severe that I had to cancel my subscription to The New Yorker—but that’s such an “important” eat-your-spinach publication that now the absence of a stack of New Yorkers, even unread ones, is making me guilty.
The problem is that the time I used to spend reading magazines is now filled by listening to podcasts, especially film podcasts. And this post is a plug for my new favourite in the genre: Show Me Your Titles, which is hosted by Cathy De La Cruz and Erin Donovan, two young film enthusiasts based in California.
Here’s the thing: the vast majority of film podcasts are hosted by men, most of them in their 30s. Many of them are good at their job and work very hard for no money to give their podcasts a professional-sounding sheen. But almost all of these thirtysomething men, for all their swagger, all the pride they take in their iconoclastic, shoot-from-the-hip opinions, have exactly the same titles in their canon of all-time classics. The Godfather. Fight Club. Star Wars. Spider-Man 2. Apocalypse Now. Trainspotting. GoodFellas. A Clockwork Orange. Se7en. Batman. Raging Bull. Taxi Driver. Blade Runner. And so on. They’re predominantly recent films, they’re all about violence or violent heroes (or superheroes), and almost none of them feature any significant female characters. I like a lot of those movies, but to hear them cited time and again, to the exclusion of almost all other titles, as the epitome of film artistry, is unbelievably tedious. (As much as I admire the production values of The Hollywood Saloon, I've never made it through a single episode.)
I became a loyal lifetime fan of Show Me Your Titles when I heard one of the hosts—I think it was De La Cruz—mention that she had never seen Star Wars and has no intention to, no matter what the male film geeks she talks to thinks: “As if my opinion on film can’t possibly be valid because I haven’t seen some shitty sci-fi movie made for four-year-olds!”
Right on!
A typical episode of Show Me Your Titles—and how great is that title, by the way?—contains reviews of one or two current films, as well as one or two older titles, chosen with little regard for film-geek cred or hipster cachet. De La Cruz and Donovan are interested in feminist readings of film, so their choices tend to reflect that fact: last year’s Halloween episode featured discussions of The Slumber Party Massacre (the first installment of the only horror franchise to be written and directed exclusively by women), Audrey Rose (the mid-’70s reincarnation flick), and Cujo (which both Donovan and De La Cruz unexpectedly raved about, in large part due to its sharp portrayal of a failed marriage). And then they interviewed Stacie Ponder, whose Final Girl blog is an essential source of fun, intelligent analysis of classic slasher movies.
De La Cruz and Donovan are both blunt, funny, and insightful, and while their show doesn’t quite have the well-rehearsed polish of a show like Filmspotting, their opinions are fresher and more unpredictable and their interplay more sparkling and lively. I only started listening to old episodes of their show a few days ago, but already they’ve joined that small group of critics whose opinions on certain movies I can’t wait to hear. They always show me something new about movies I thought I knew.
I’ve added Show Me Your Titles to the list of links on the right; you can also look for them on Facebook, Myspace, and iTunes. They’ve just added Episode #20 (There Will Be Blood, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and 3:10 to Yuma), which sounds like a blockbuster to me. It’s the perfect time to catch up with them.
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