S1E7: Geographical Verisimilitude with David Bax
Notebook on Cities and Culture
English - March 06, 2012 20:23 - 1 hour - 28.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 124 ratingsPlaces & Travel Society & Culture Arts comedy business entrepreneurship interview culture news music finance fitness design Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Colin Marshall sits down in North Hollywood with film and television critic David Bax, co-host of the podcasts Battleship Pretension and Previously On. They discuss his fifth-grade shoving match over Ghostbusters; the difference between criticism and the assertion of one's opinions; being a film and television critic while living right near the heart of film and television production; Chicago's advantages as a filmgoing city, including but not limited to the Gene Siskel Film Center; discovering a cinephile community on the bus; St. Louis and other cities' loss of local critics writing with local sensibilities; whether the aspiring critic must first reject working in production; the sharpening of his critical perspectives on formalism and structuralism as revealed by Michael Mann's Public Enemies; if a critic should tell an audience why they like a film, why the audience should like a film, why the audience should pay attention to a film, or simply how a film works; why the internet offers a superior medium for television criticism; what television can do that film can't, and why to watch them differently; whether television shows labor under a corrupting business model; Treme, New Orleans and geographical verisimilitude; the askew real-placeness of many Los Angeles productions; the outdated marketing of television as evidenced by the Whitney billboards that once littered town; how and why to avoid approaching art as commodity; what he would say to those who who don't consider criticism a "real job" (and how he would agree with them); and the necessity of discussing film and television as if for posterity, just as a program like The Sopranos seems to have been created for it.
(Photo: Jenny Smith)