DVD Afternoon Podcast #81: Are You A Ghost Or Are You A Cat?

The podcast is called DVD Afternoon, but Heather Noel and I found ourselves wishing that we'd seen both of this week's movies in the theatre instead. How we wished we could have seen Kevin Smith do one of his live presentations of Red State, for instance, and heard him stick around after the movie to explain what the hell he was trying to say about violence and religion in America when he wrote it. And how magical it would have been to have seen the 1968 Japanese ghost story Kuroneko on the big screen, in the company of a theatre full of moviegoers as spellbound by its poetic, eerie imagery as we were.

Maybe we need to get out of the house more often. But until then, we have podcasts to record, and in this week's edition, besides our reviews of Red State and Kuroneko, Heather reports on the impact last weekend's International Independent Video Store Day had on the Edmonton video store she runs and gives her mini-review of John Carpenter's surprisingly entertaining Escape From L.A., while I talk about Christophe Honoré's spoke-sung Parisian musical Love Songs. As always, we close the show with our roundup of the week's most notable new DVDs and Blu-Rays—idiosyncratic to the end, we ignore Bad Teacher and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie and spend all our time talking about Willy Wonka, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Trancers series.

Here's the breakdown:

0:00 — International Independent Video Store Day/Escape From L.A./Love Songs
17:16 — The Cure, "Lovesong"
18:15 — Red State
33:27 — Belle and Sebastian, "The State I Am In"
34:37 — Kuroneko
48:21 — Lalo Schifrin, "The Cat"
49:16 — Other noteworthy new DVDs and Blu-Rays/Outro

Here's the legendary surf scene from Escape From L.A.:



Here's "La Bastille," one of my favourite numbers from Love Songs:



And here's the (incredibly long) trailer to the first Trancers movie, from 1985:



You can subscribe to DVD Afternoon through iTunes, or you can download this week's episode directly by clicking here.

And if you'd like to comment on the show, respond to our reviews, or suggest other movies for Heather and me to talk about on the air, you can reach us at dvdafternoon [at] gmail [dot] com. Next week, we'll be reviewing the British hoodies-versus-aliens sleeper hit Attack the Block and the new Criterion edition of the pre-Code Bela Lugosi chiller Island of Lost Souls. If you've seen any of those films and want to send us your thoughts about them, or if you'd like to add to our discussion of Red State or Kuroneko, we'd love to hear your thoughts (and possibly read them on-air).