324 – Devil in a Blue Dress (with Mitchell Beaupre!)

This week’s episode is a callback to our beloved 100 Years, 100 Snubs May miniseries: Mitchell Beaupre joins us to talk about 1995’s Devil in a Blue Dress! Carl Franklin emerged with the indie success of crime thriller One False Move and moved onto studio filmmaking with Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as a veteran hired to find a missing woman. The film was a smart noir exercise that nevertheless didn’t quite catch on with audiences, though critics were taken with an unpredictable supporting player, Don Cheadle.

This episode, we discuss the controversy over 1995’s all white acting nominees and the origin story quality of the film’s story. We also talk about Franklin’s unique awards haul for One False Move, Washington’s atypical lack of love interest costars, and how Cheadle’s performance feels like it has more screen time than it does.

Topics also include 1995 Best Supporting Actor, 2003 Entertainment Weekly as Oscar gateway, and Jennifer Beals as anti-femme female.

267 – Heat (with Roxana Hadadi!) (Patreon Selects)

This week, our first film selected by one of our sponsor-tier Patreon subscribers arrives, and we brought back Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi to celebrate. In 1995, audiences were hyped to finally see an onscreen showdown between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat. But what promised to be a standard actioner on paper (on top of a battle of titans) was in actuality an existential tone poem on masculinity, with audiences feeling let down by the lack of fireworks in Pacino and DeNiro’s brief but mighty scene. The film has since been reassessed, earning a vocal and devoted fanbase that hail the film as Mann’s masterpiece.

This week, we talk about Mann’s work studying the masculine mind and Pacino and DeNiro’s 1990s periods. We also talk about Val Kilmer’s Batman year, how the 1995 Oscars largely rejected darker material, and our thoughts on Mann’s Ferrari.

Topics also include bisexual eyebrow piercings, our diner orders, and the Nyad towel.

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