The Pink Smoke podcast

"There's no such thing as an unfashionable hero or an unsuitable heiress." Hot off their five-hour excursion into Swishbuckler Cinema, hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg trace the sordid subgenre's origins to George MacDonald Fraser's expansive series of novels featuring Harry Paget Flashman, a self-described "scoundrel with no proper feelings" who often finds himself cowering miserably in the middle of some of the 19th century's greatest military disasters. For this episode, our hosts randomly selected Flashman's Lady (1977), the sixth book of the 12-part "Flashman Papers," to see how successful the author was at mixing rousing adventure with rakish humor. From performing the first hat trick in a cricket match to crossing swords with East Indies pirates and being enslaved in Madagascar, unscrupulous cad and insatiable lecher Flashman never misses an opportunity to represent all the worst elements of colonial Victorian England...yet somehow comes off as delightfully roguish? The discussion digs into the series' multi-layered parody of historical texts, MacDonald Fraser's irreverent razing of cultural myth and how a morally repugnant character can still be appealing as a narrator and leading character within the framework of picaresque fiction. Support our Patreon! All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most sophisticated and noble of all listeners: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by Martin Kessler to finally settle the debate of "what is art?" and "what is trash?" in cinema! Using the similarities between a Tales from the Crypt episode and a Patricia Highsmith short story as a jumping off point, the duo digs into the differences between artists and artisans, art and entertainment, high and low, product and artwork - not as a value judgement distinction but as a way of exploring the meaning of the categories into which films and literature are shifted. Superhero movies, John Carpenter, Thomas Mann, Robocop, Jaws, and Godard - what does it mean to differentiate between Art and Trash? Who's to say if Tarkovsky is better than William Castle? And why would you react negatively to drawing (or not drawing) a distinction between them? Join us for this open-minded, good-natured discussion of a highly fraught subject! Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most open-minded and good-natured of all audiences. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Movie Kessler on Twitter: twitter.com/MovieKessler The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

On this episode, we're joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss some of his favorite moments of bittersweet love in the movies. Having made One Day Since Yesterday, a documentary about Peter Bogdanovich's unsung sleeper They All Laughed, Teck knows something about cinema's most achingly romantic, heart-wrenchingly complicated relationships and crafted a list of some of the most unforgettable. We follow Teck through his picks, which include fairy tale connections and acrimonious separations set in New York, Los Angeles and an idyllic Greek Island, in the worlds of art, business and sports - even the dangerous and freewheeling streets of scenic New Jersey! Whether it's new love, love in pieces, or love in retrospect, the 24 films covered in this episode are a testament to how susceptible we are to the pitfalls and upturns of love on the big screen. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Here it is. Our massive exploration of one of the most disreputable genres imaginable: The Swishbuckler. A loose collection of movies created in the mid-70s through the mid-80s parodying the classic swashbucklers of yore, swishbuckler films like Zorro The Gay Blade, Pirates, Yellowbeard and Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers are marked by their terrible comedy, penchant for grotesquerie, extreme campiness and even more extreme poor taste. This might be The Pink Smoke's most massive podcast undertaking yet: from the genre's roots in Richard Lester's Musketeers films to a send-off into the swashbuckler revival of the 90s ignited by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it's an improbably in-depth look at an utterly ridiculous genre for which hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs have an almost inconceivable enthusiasm. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke (Still need an explanation of what the hell is going on here? Here ya go: At the dawn of cinema, there was The Swashbuckler: intrigue, romance and derring-do that swept audiences into the colorful royal courts and handsome pirate ships from the pages of Dumas and Sabatini. Even after its post-war peak, the Swashbuckler remained the most popular of Hollywood entertainment, having made international stars of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn and modern legends of mythical heroes like Zorro, Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers and Captain Peter Blood. By the 1970's, the legacy of Fairbanks and Flynn had devolved into what we loving term the Swishbuckler: a subgenre of comedy that borrowed the same tales of adventure and romance mixed with a healthy dose of modern irreverence. For a solid decade, raunchy satires placed in historical settings marked a trail of flatulence and queasy sexual politics across American screens to an overwhelmingly hostile critical and poor commercial response. We at the Pink Smoke are so fascinated by this odd epoch of cinema that we recorded a nearly five-hour episode in which we chronicle 14 Swishbuckler "classics," trying to understand how this wave of mediocrity managed to stay afloat for 10 years in spite of marked indifference to outright derision from critics and consistently sinking box office returns. How did these always weird, sometimes nasty exercises in Golden Era grave robbing reflect the styles and attitudes of comedy of the time? How did they deal with huge movements like women's liberation? Was the heritage of the Swashbuckler respected, even while the outmoded ideals of gallantry and romance were being purposefully disrespected? If you ever asked for an in-depth analysis of this bizarre trend of parodying a bygone era of film, you've come to the right place!) The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

In 1986, NBC debuted the series Crime Story, co-created by former Chicago cop Chuck Adamson and produced by hot-off-Miami Vice Michael Mann. The show adapted an unconventional serial format in order to span three decades in the conflict between MCU detective Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and rising mobster Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). The ambitious approach proved the downfall of the show, which was canceled after two seasons, but Mann & co. managed to create over 30 hours worth of network drama that for the first time in American television felt like one very long movie. On this episode, host John Cribbs welcomes editor/filmmaker and Über-Mann fan Eric Pfriender to discuss the feature-length pilot episode of Crime Story, directed by Abel Ferrara. In addition to revisiting the epic scope, stellar cast and pioneering direction of the pilot, they talk about the recent Michael Mann career revitalization including the debut of his new series Tokyo Vice, publication of his novel Heat 2 and promise of his upcoming $90 million biopic about Enzo Ferrari. They also get off track and talk about Heat...a lot. Midnight in the Guest Room: midnightintheguestroom@substack.com Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter:
 twitter.com/TheLastMachine

All episodes of The Pink Smoke podcast are made available to Patreon subscribers a week before their general release. Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are joined by Martin Kessler to discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally digs into their favorite films of the year, everything from an animated French adaptation of a Japanese short story collection to the travels of Mrs. Harris to the big guns everyone is talking about by filmmakers like Mr. Play Mountain and Park Chan-wook. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Movie Kessler on Twitter: twitter.com/MovieKessler The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"Nobody enjoyed having pie in the sky turn into pie in the face." Keenly aware of the 1988 Chevy Chase vehicle Funny Farm (the last movie directed by George Roy Hill), hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs only recently discovered its source novel written by sports columnist and humorist Jay Cronley. In this episode, they travel into rural life along with city slickers Andy and Elizabeth Farmer, who've just bought a seemingly idyllic country home complete with a pond with two ducks, a drunken mailman who hurls letters from his truck as he roars past, and a dead body buried in the garden. The Farmers soon discover that Redbud, Oklahoma, the would-be Acorn Capital of the World, is pretty much hell on earth and do what they can to suffer through their new existence in an episodic narrative that's incredibly funny and often surprising. The hosts delight in this world Cronley created and probably quote more lines than any other book-themed episode. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke Alternate summary: Elizabeth won't tell anyone she's writing a book about squirrels. She's middle-aged, pretty, and passionate - perfect for Andy, who just wants to write about casino heists. When they move to the country, she drops everything and her notebook begins to fill with poetry. But he's over-his-head and she's about to write two important words: The End. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

We get high-vallewton* with Tim Quirk, longtime cinephile and frontman of one of The Pink Smoke's favorite bands, Too Much Joy. At the height of the pandemic, Quirk initiated a binge of great movies that led him to Val Lewton's legendary run of low-budget horror films produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940's. Quirk was captivated by these deep philosophical explorations of darkness and isolation, which directly inspired songs on the latest Too Much Joy albums, Mistakes Were Made and All These Fucking Feelings. Focusing on The Seventh Victim and I Walked with a Zombie (both released in 1943), we tap into Tim's enthusiasm for the economical creepiness, profound purple dialogue and "the glitter of putrescence" that preoccupies those who inhabit the shadows of Lewton's screen. Are they the real monsters? Do we as a society have a collective death wish? Are these complex explorations of loneliness, fear and self-destruction even really horror movies? However you define them, there's no question that Lewton's films are unlike anything else. * Like, highfalutin.** ** We would at least task any other lyricists inspired by these movies to write a song that rhymes "highfalutin" with "Val Lewton." Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke Tim Quirk on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tbquirk Too Much Joy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TooMuchJoyHQ The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro/Outro Music: Too Much Joy "I Met a Ghost."

On our massive new episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs are joined by longtime friends of the show John Arminio and Bill Teck to discuss one of the greatest film series in the history of le cinema: the Indiana Jones tetralogy! Join them at their own podcasting Club Obi-Wan as they tackle Mr. Play Mountain’s brilliantly fun series the way Indy tackles one of Lao Che’s henchmen going after the antidote on the scattering and chaotic dance-floor. They delve deep into their shared Well of Souls to explore the role of Philip Kaufman in the creation of the character, the missed opportunity to have Danny DeVito in the series, the stunning stuntwork across the films, the moments when the comedy works or doesn’t work and why its vision of the Hebrew G-d is so powerfully beautiful. Maybe most surprisingly, as with their discussion of the most unloved film in the Star Trek series (William Shatner’s Star Trek V) the group rises to the defense of the much-detested Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Give it a listen. We have top men working on it right now. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck John Arminio on Twitter: twitter.com/QuasarSniffer The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

“Only pain and suffering will make you realize who you are.” A Halloween double feature! Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg look at a pair of re-marriage thrillers in which the new spouse turns out to be diabolically psychotic: Audition and The Stepfather. Director Takashi Miike and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (the respective creative forces behind each film) bring a masterful level of artistry and intelligence to the brutality (both physical and emotions) of the movies, taking genre filmmaking to its apex. The conversation compares the films’ depiction of the differences between feminine and masculine performance, their themes about abuse and exploitation, and what each one has to say about the nature of evil. Beware of your fantasies of a perfect family and a perfect spouse, they might kill you. All Pink Smoke Podcast episodes are made available a week early to our Patreon subscribers, the most decisive & thoughtful of all listeners. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"