The Last Thing I Saw

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. One of the year’s best films about culture is Listening to Kenny G, from filmmaker Penny Lane (who directed Hail Satan?). now available on streaming. If the name Kenny G sets off alarm bells in your head, rest assured that this is not a goofy movie about something “so bad it’s good” or that pushes a case for Kenny G as an unsung master. Instead, Lane’s fascinating portrait crystallizes a number of insights about the way culture and taste work, and it inspires further questions about the many assumptions and absurdities surrounding the subject. So last month I interviewed the director on the occasion of her film’s screening as opening night at DOC NYC and as a selection of IDFA, which all followed its world premiere at the Toronto film festival. As bonus, Lane also had a little to say about early reality shows. Listening to Kenny G is part of Bill Simmons’s Music Box series and can be seen on HBO MAX. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Paul Verhoeven’s hotly anticipated new movie, Benedetta, is set mostly in a convent in the 17th century, following its title character as she becomes a nun and rises in the ranks. The movie typically bold and provocative about the workings over power and organized religion and about Benedetta’s rich fantasy life. Margaret has long been immersed in Verhoeven’s world, and talked with the director at length as part of her book of interviews with him. As has critic Adam Nayman, another Verhoeven-head and author of It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls and books on Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher (out now). At the end I also can’t resist asking them about Licorice Pizza, another new release. Look out for Margaret’s review of Benedetta on Screen Slate and Adam’s forthcoming writing on the subject. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week we look at some outstanding documentary highlights premiered at IDFA(International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), including Sergei Loznitsa’s post-Soviet portrait Mr. Landsbergis and an exciting new voice in Diem Ha Le and her film Children of the Mist. Plus: 100-year-old Indian river boats, a Dziga Vertov premiere, egg collecting, and movies made entirely from living room windows. I’m joined by critic and journalist Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image and a regular on the podcast. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. Back in the spring, I watched The Scary of 61st through the Berlin film festival, where it had its world premiere. I had to watch it on my laptop, holed up at home, with pandemic anxiety in the air. Somehow the mood was appropriate for experiencing the film, which tells a wild story that’s lurid, funny, unnerving, and often over the top. All of which is a good match for the frenzied state of its main characters: two roommates who unwittingly move into a New York apartment once owned by Jeffrey Epstein. They end up being haunted by the Epstein saga of human trafficking and unfathomable corruption. One roommate undergoes a kind of possession, and her friend becomes obsessed with the Epstein case, after a stranger comes knocking talking of conspiracy theories. The director of The Scary of 61st is Dasha Nekrasova. She also plays the strange visitor, opposite her co-writer, Madeline Quinn, and Betsey Brown. You probably know Dasha already from her co-hosting Red Scare, the enormously popular podcast. Our talk focused on what she’s been watching during the pandemic, which tied in a little bit into The Scary of 61st. In that sense it’s a fairly traditional episode of The Last Thing I Saw, leading off with a perhaps surprising choice of director of comfort movies. The Scary of 61st opens in New York on December 17, after a run on December 2 at Los Feliz 3 in L.A. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Jane Campion’s new film The Power of the Dog first shapes up as a kind of Western family feud in the making. Two brothers, Phil and George Burbank, run things together peaceably, with Phil (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) the alpha male, and George (played by Jesse Plemons) more of a strong silent type. When George gets married and brings home his wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil gets all bent out of shape, and it becomes apparent that he’s keeping something secret in his private life, which the film slowly unravels. Campion filmed The Power of the Dog in New Zealand with her cinematographer Ari Wegner, whose previous films include Zola and Lady Macbeth. I spoke with them together to learn about their collaborative process and how they get into the right state of mind for creating the breathtaking film in pre-production. It was a pleasure just to bask in the flow between Campion and Wegner, who at times completed each other’s thoughts. The Power of the Dog opens in limited release on November 17 and is available on Netflix starting December 1. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. A while back I had a conversation with critic Nicholas Russell about the portrayal of law enforcement in movies. The general idea was that the demonstrations and marches for justice in 2020 seemed to open the possibility of a paradigm shift on many fronts. So we looked at movies featuring the police and thought about the different assumptions about culture, about society, about genre, that go into making and watching them. How does Training Day look today, 20 years on, or the 1970s drama Report to the Commissioner? What about the bizarro alternate justice system of Minority Report? Russell and I talked about a range of movies from different perspectives, without any grander goal than reflecting on what exactly is going on in each of them. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. This year marks the 20th anniversary of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a movie that has never been too far from best-of lists. But Inland Empire, Lynch’s three-hour digitally shot follow-up, which came out five years later, has sometimes gone overlooked. So it was great news to hear that the critic Melissa Anderson has devoted an entire new book to the movie, voyaging into its nightmarish depths. Anderson, who’s the film editor at 4 Columns, takes the opportunity to appreciate the unique qualities of Laura Dern and her multi-film collaboration with Lynch. Anderson joined me for this special episode, which partly found me in recovery mode after the movie’s haunted story about an actress who finds herself in emotional freefall and all kinds of uncharted territory while shooting a new movie. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. Right at the tail end of the New York Film Festival, I caught up with Jon Dieringer, editor and publisher of Screen Slate. We talked about highlights from the festival and also some terrific titles shown in a Screen Slate series at the Roxy Cinema that helped kick off the moviegoing season for a lot of New York movie-lovers. Jon has worked for years as an archivist so he also shares his expertise and opinion on how movies make their way through repertory and into film history, as well as a lovely anecdote about the late, great filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, director of Sambizanga among others. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw. I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. Todd Haynes’s documentary about The Velvet Underground is not just a musical feast, as one would expect, but it’s also a visually rich and polyphonic work. Haynes has explored the mythology of glam rock and the many faces of Bob Dylan in his fiction films, and he turns his first documentary into a kind of multichannel installation for the cinema screen, putting Andy Warhol’s Screen Test series of filmed portraits into dialogue with other pictures and people. The movie does the same thing with its sense of history, situating the Velvet Underground in relation to the avant-garde music and arts scene of 1960s New York. I recently spoke with Haynes about his use of Warhol’s films; the role of queerness in the identity of The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed; and which clip became a keystone for the entire film. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. The latest feature from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, is coming to the New York Film Festival, after premiering in Cannes this past summer. Memoria stars Tilda Swinton as a woman seeking to explain a strange noise that she keeps experiencing and, as you might guess, the movie is a change of pace in some ways for Apichatpong, shooting his first feature in Colombia. In July, I spoke with the critic Giovanni Marchini Camia, the official set chronicler of the making of Memoria. I discussed the making of Memoria with Giovanni, who shared some fascinating insights into Apichatpong’s filmmaking, and we also traded thoughts on what’s new and different about the movie. A book on Memoria, featuring Giovanni's set diaries and much more, is available from Fireflies Press. You can support this podcast and read show notes with links at: rapold.substack.com Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets Photo by Steve Snodgrass