Ben Whishaw – This Had Oscar Buzz

265 – Brideshead Revisited

We all know that Oscar fawns over costume dramas of literary adaptations… or so we tell ourselves when forming predictions and one with a whiff of prestige arrives. In 2008, director Julian Jerrold delivered a new adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with an up-and-coming young cast paired with Dame Emma Thompson as the devoutly religious Lady Marchmain. With Matthew Goode as the social climber Charles Ryder and Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell as the siblings he romances, the queer-inflected drama earned modest reviews and box office, with Thompson an outsider Supporting Actress contender through the season.

This episode, Thompson joins our six timers club and we discuss our love for the then-emerging Whishaw. We also look back at Goode’s career including the misbegotten Watchmen film, Atwell’s career outside of Marvel, and the surprising amount of time that has passed since Thompson’s last nomination.

Topics also include Brideshead riff Saltburn, pneumonia terminology, and 2008 queer cinema.

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BONUS – Sundancing On My Own

And we’re backbackback again with a special BONUS episode this week to talk about our experience will the films of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival! The big prize winner for US Dramatic Competition was A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, and Chris was wowed by it. We talk about our shared love for new films from our beloved Nicole Holofcener, Ira Sachs, and gnarly debut horror film by Laura Moss, birth/rebirth. We also get into the divisiveness of Magazine Dreams and Eileen, the crowdpleasing delights of Theatre Camp, Celia Weston LARPing in colonial garb in A Little Prayer, and lots more!

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124 – Suffragette

In 2015, the ongoing efforts to champion stories told by and about women placed large awards expectations on Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette. A fictionalized telling of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain, Suffragette stars Carey Mulligan as Maud, a laundress who begins as a passive outsider and becomes a passioned activist. But once it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival, its initial harsh reviews squashed audience urgency to head to the theatre when it opened nearly two months later.

This episode, we discuss Mulligan’s many great performances that have yet to yield a follow-up nomination to her breakthrough nomination for An Education – and we praise her upcoming work in the daring Promising Young Woman. We also discuss the heavy competition of the 2015 Best Actress race that failed to honor Mulligan among the major precursors.

Topics also include Meryl Streep’s much-buzzed performance as Emmeline Pankhurst (that ended up being little more than a cameo), the chaos of the current Globes comedy race, and another round of Alter Egos.

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075 – Cloud Atlas

We’re bringing 2019 to a close with another Listeners’ Choice, and our listeners have chosen perhaps what will be our most daunting title yet: 2012′s interconnected science fiction opus from Lana & Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, Cloud Atlas! This tale of several stories spanning generations, genres, and continents launched its Oscar hopes with a jaw-dropping, mega-sized trailer, and lost them just as quickly with an extremely divisive critical reception at TIFF. Led by Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, the film takes massive narrative and emotional leaps that were ultimately too much for Oscar and general audiences.

But you can consider both Chris and Joe as firmly in the positive for this film, while also accepting of its ambitious flaws. This week, we spend the majority of this episode unraveling the many threads and issues within the film (Yellow face makeup, its near three hour length, its dizzying construction), and just what stirs our affection for it (its spiritual convictions, general audacity, and of course “The Cloud Atlas Sextet”).

Topics also include Ben Whishaw’s whittle butt, Hurricane Sandy, and who would play our own personal Old Georgies. You true-true-ly chose a great movie for us, and we love you all the more for it!

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