Steven Spielberg spent fifty years teaching us to look up. When the Pentagon released its real alien files, nobody blinked. His new film Disclosure Day marks the day the truth finally lands — this time his aliens look back at us, but the question is whether anyone still believes him.
Fresh from the Tuschinski premiere, Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom get into late Spielberg — shortcuts, or message over quality — empathy as the ruling emotion of the universe, and whether cinema’s great sentimentalist can still earn the tears. One of them cried twice. The other counted seventy FBI agents with no peripheral vision.
With a voice note from BBC film critic Ali Plumb on the night Spielberg crashed his pub quiz, and a listener’s hot take on thirty wet years of Spielberg’s cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.
For everyone who wants to believe, and everyone too tired to.
Spoilers from 18:06 — come back when you’ve seen it.
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Mentioned in this episode: The Backrooms, Explained: Kane Parsons & the A24 Feature.
A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam’s arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.
It’s the big bang of both our 10th episode and the origins of the summer blockbuster, although this episode is not quite like the high-end production of your usual Hollywood films! With Hugo at Venice film festival, Kiriko & Tom attempt to determine the definition of a (summer) blockbuster, is it more than just a “box-office hit”? In conjunction with the upcoming Suspicious Minds program, a retrospective of Denis Villeneuve’s work, we also explore what is a so-called “intelligent blockbuster”, skeptical of Christopher Nolan and his apparent pioneering of this heightened term. By exploring the history of the summer blockbuster, we attempt to resolve what the future of this historic marketing strategy has in an industry now dominated by streaming platforms.
Make sure to leave us your review of Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) at celebratingcinema@lab111.nl and expect to hear Tom read it out in one of his many film impersonations next episode!