Let’s Finally Watch This is a podcast for casual movie fans who have always meant to watch classic movies. Hosts Timothy Deal and Nick Hayden guide you through film history as they highlight one movie from each decade for the last century, exploring how each film sits in its time period, why it’s well-known, and whether it’s actually worth your time. We’re finally getting around to movie we’ve always heard about. Why don’t you join us?
It’s 1983. The blockbuster age has started, and the top-grossing movie of the year is The Return of the Jedi. However, another pivotal space movie is also released this year, The Right Stuff, a film examining the early years of the space race. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff follows the…
Read More
It’s 1993. Multiplexes have arrived, and there are plenty of movies to show—Jurassic Park, Tombstone, Schindler’s List, the original Super Mario Bros. movie…. Okay, not all are great, but it was a time of the blockbuster. In the middle of this comes Sleepless in Seattle, an iconic romantic comedy with the now-classic pairing of Tom…
Read More
It’s 2003–and it’s the holidays. Many of our standard Christmas movies were released in the 1940s, but since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of Christmas movies, creating a number of new holiday classics. Among those is Elf, directed by Jon Favreau, a movie nearly everyone has seen, except for Let’s Finally Watch This…
Read More
It’s 2013. The top-grossing film of the year is Disney’s Frozen, but that’s not the only important fairy-tale based animated film released this year. In Japan, Studio Ghibli released The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, a beautiful, compelling retelling of the Japanese folk tale, “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.” It’s a film that lets…
Read More
It’s time to wrap up another season of Let’s Finally Watch This. We start by making a few corrections, filling in a few gaps in this season’s discussion of film exhibition, and discussing how film continues to change up to the present. But, then, the heart of the episode–our Ranking of Essentialness for this season’s…
Read More
It’s 1904. French director Georges Méliès is at the height of his career, creating fantastic, creative movies in the early days of cinema. Like his earlier A Trip to the Moon, this film is about a fantastic voyage, but as the Institute of Incoherent Geography visits mountain villagers, the surface of the sun, and monster-infested…
Read More
It’s 1914. Out of Italy comes what many classify as the first film epic. In this silent film, the girl Cabiria survives an eruption from Etna, is kidnapped by pirates, nearly offered to the god Moloch, and spends years as a servant. Meanwhile, Roman soldier Fulvius Axilla and his Samson-like servant Maciste cross paths with…
Read More
It’s 1924. Buster Keaton, one of the cinematic greats of this era, is at the height of his career. Called “The Great Stone Face” due to his distinctive stoical expression, Keaton’s films include dangerous physical stunts and impeccable comedic timing. Sherlock Jr. is no exception. Keaton plays a movie projectionist who hopes to become a…
Read More
It’s 1934. It Happened One Night, a film nobody thought would do particularly well, sneaks in just before the Hays Code is enforced. The movie, directed by Frank Capra, follows pampered heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) as she tries to escape her controlling father and join her fiancé. She meets with ex-reporter Peter Warne (Clark…
Read More
It’s 1944. The Second World War is still raging, and the two top grossing films are musicals. However, Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, is a different sort of film, a seminal example of film noir. It begins with insurance salesman Henry Neff confessing to a murder, and it follows his involvement with unhappy wife…
Read More