Welcome back.
I guess technically speaking the Motion/Captured Podcast didn’t die. But we are restarting it today with a whole new attitude and focus, and I’m hoping that as we settle into the new format, we’re going to end up with something that features the best elements of the old podcast but plenty of things that are brand new to this format.
This is the ongoing series that takes the place of “The Essentials” or “The Basics” or “The Motion/Captured Must-See” or any other ongoing list. This is the collection of conversations about the rest of the great films out there. This is the ongoing curation of films I feel should be part of any film fan’s life.
Earlier this year, I picked number one through number twenty as a response to the Sight & Sound poll that was ongoing at the time. I wrote about those, and I’m really pleased with the shape of that list. Those are all films that mean something special to me. Those are the films that I’ve watched to the point of absorption. But I wasn’t kidding when I said that after those 20, there’s a tie between about 2500 films that I consider my “essentials.” Leave it to Scott Swan to ask me as soon as I was done with the list, “Well, what’s number 21?”
It’s a high-concept way of defining our taste and the boundaries of what we consider important and worth sharing. When I started this series under a different title, I published quite a few pieces, and I’ll be folding them into this series. For this of you new to the blog, here’s a reminder of which films we’ve already covered. These first five titles were published as part of “The Basics”:
The Basics started as an off-shoot of the Motion-Captured Must-see Project. What’s that? Well…
“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (3.06.09)
“High Plains Drifter” (3.11.09)
“Joe Versus The Volcano” (3.30.09)
“Q – The Winged Serpent” (4.15.09)
“Rush” and “Rules Of The Game” (5.01.09)
“Tucker: The Man And His Dream” (5.12.09)
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” (5.26.09)
“The Virgin Suicides” (7.09.09)
“Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (8.29.09)
“X- The Man With X-Ray Eyes” (1.7.10)
“To Live And Die In L.A.” (3.1.10)
And I’m going to also embed my gallery of my Top 20 Favorite Films as well, so you can refer to those. There’s a few of them that overlap with the list above.
So that leaves… a whoooooooole lot of movies. And that’s where we’re going to enjoy Number 21. I have no game plan for what order we’re going to use when picking these. In fact, I think we’ll end each episode with us drawing the next week’s title out of a hat. We couldn’t do that today, though, so I just picked a film off the list. I figured I’d pick something both Scott and I have seen a hundred times, something that would be easy to discuss off-the-cuff.
Today, we’re taking a look at “Fletch.”
You can find the podcast embedded here or you can download it from this article, and you’ll also find it on iTunes. I’ll be updating that page soon to reflect the title change for the podcast.
And next week, be sure to join us for our second episode, where we’ll be taking a look back at Phil Alden Robinson’s “Field Of Dreams.”