Nate, a friend of the pod, brings satirical romcom and Best Picture winner The Apartment to The Goods for consideration. Dan, Brian, and Nate cringe at Jack Lemmon’s snotty cold in the age of COVID, admire Shirley MacLaine’s modern sensibility, and debate the storytelling merits of the film’s dark turning point. Dan gushes over “Auld Lang Syne,” Nate wishes for more black-and-white movies, and Brian praises Fred MacMurray’s mensch-slimeball duality.
Music credits:
RetroFuture Clean by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4277-retrofuture-clean
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I saw this movie for the first time about a year ago and loved it.
I have to say, it feels fairly aggressive to do an episode of “The Goods” podcast on a selection from Roger Ebert’s “The Greats” list. You go through the film’s accolades, but still come down with a team-average rating of only 6-out-of-8. Well, my personal feelings about numerical ratings are well known from the very first episode of the Earn This podcast (http://earnthis.net/etcast-001/), but it still makes you wonder. I would’ve liked to hear more direct engagement with “Why we feel the lion’s share of critics overrate this movie relative to our own opinions.”
One aspect I’ll highlight: you all repeatedly refer to the film as, and treat it as, a rom-com or pure comedy. This film has substantial dramatic elements that, for me, make the “comedy” genre label erroneous and misleading. Compare Jack Lemon’s performance here to the slapstic of Some Like It Hot, and you get more of an appreciation for what he’s pulling off.
(Somehow this comment got caught in the filter for awhile.) Yeah, I think we probably could have more directly engaged with the film’s “canon” status and why the critics place it where they do versus our reactions. And we could have dug more into the dramatic elements of the narrative. But I think we did well enough reckoning with the film on our own terms.
I do want to talk more with you about our rating system. I think it works as something you can use strictly on numeric scale, but also as something that conveys a general attitude/reaction to the film: If I told you I thought a movie was “exceptionally good” you’d understand how much I appreciated it, even if you didn’t see the “7” attached to it! Come on the pod and let’s talk about it.