The great thing about doing a film podcast is that you never run out of classics. Case in point: This week, Someone Else’s Movie finally tackles Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the picture I believe might be Coppola’s single best work — and remember, he made The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II on either side of it.
Fortunately, Self Driver writer-director Michael Pierro holds the same opinion, so our conversation could expand to appreciations of Coppola’s filmography and the career of the late Gene Hackman, who does such a good job as Coppola’s paranoid hero Harry Caul that you could come away thinking this was the actor’s finest hour … until you saw him in literally any other movie, and realized how brilliant and versatile he was in, well, everything.
Sounds like something you want to hear, right? Get to it! Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen while you strip your apartment to the studs in a doomed attempt to figure out where everything went wrong.
And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where — as promised — I’ve spent the last week catching up to the Blu-rays of Queer, The Woman in the Yard and The Alto Knights, and diving into Warner’s glorious new 4K collection of the Connery Bond films. There’s more coming soon, and subscribers to the paid tier also get my weekly list of recommendations, so maybe try that out? I bet you like it.
Also, if you weren’t up to listening to me yammer on about the 50th anniversary of Jaws for an hour and a half on Eric Marchen’s Untitled Cinema Podcast last week, Eric just posted a half-hour version of our conversation on his Rogers TV show, Cinema Seen. It’s got film clips and everything! So that’s nice too.