Overlooked Pictures
39 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 months ago - ★★★★ - 6 ratingsThe real-time, film commentary podcast about films (or film aspects) that may have been overlooked. This podcast is intended to be played alongside the film in question, as you watch.
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Episodes
The Ninth Gate (1999)
November 07, 2023 08:34 - 2 hours - 133 MBJules: Roman Polanski's least controversial film may be one of his densest when it comes to themes and messaging. Based upon a subplot of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel The Club Dumas, Polanski plays out a love affair with books, their physicality, and their mystery. Johnny Depp's muted Dean Corso encounters the gamut of Polanskian caricatures, from the mephistophelian Frank Langella, the vampish Lena Olin, and the angelic Emmanuelle Seigner. David: Unlike the claustrophobic 'Rosemary'...
SHORTS: Avatar: The Way of Water
March 13, 2023 09:20 - 15 minutes - 12.2 MBThe inaugural episode of Overlooked SHORTS. Ironically focussing on one of the longest feature films in recent memory, Jules and David literally phone it in with a short commentary whilst not watching the movie. David recalls and Jules interrogates, surveying the technological innovations, the water, whales, wokeness and 3D wonders of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Dune (2021)
February 10, 2022 06:34 - 2 hours - 99 MBDavid: Each manifestation of Dune, including Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, can be viewed as a product of its time. Dune (2021) appears sanitised to accomodate the social and geopolitical tensions of the 21st Century. It’s also a different take on the huge weight of world-building detail in the novel and the choice whether to cram it into a movie or leave most of it out. Here we set out to cram some back in for you. Jules: Is the tragedy of DUNE (2021) the same as the tragedy of DUNE (1984), ...
Babette's Feast (1987)
June 25, 2021 04:06 - 1 hour - 105 MBJules: Do we deceive ourselves when we attempt to distinguish the sacred from the carnal? A small film made in a small village in a small (for Scandinavia) country seeks answers, as do we. David: When a fortress of encrusted ascetic piety and propriety suffers an unexpected incursion of fabulous french cuisine, something more than its inhabitants' impoverished taste buds cracks open. Rather than the conflict against which the god-fearing community steels itself, Babette's state-of-the-art ...
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
April 20, 2021 02:44 - 2 hours - 119 MBDavid: The perenniality of the vampire genre derives from its capacity for reinvention. Its form mimics its content in similar fashion to the zombie genre, transcending death. Here, the immortality of Jarmusch’s vampire couple is a perfect foil for retrophile hipsterism. They are aficionados of a lapsed cutting edge – analog technologies, first edition guitars, a dash of Tesla tech for colour and in the garage is a perfectly-poised-between-eras XJS Jaguar. They disdain contemporary ephemera ...
Last Year in Marienbad (1961)
February 05, 2021 05:40 - 1 hour - 106 MBJules: Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'année dernière à Marienbad has astonished viewers for six decades and counting. Who, or what, are ‘A - la femme brune' (Delphine Seyrig), ‘X - l’homme à l'accent italien' (Giorgio Albertazzi, and ‘M - l'autre homme au visage maigre, le mari' (Sacha Pitoëff), and is this landmark of world cinema merely a film, or an initiatory experience akin to a rite of passage? David: This film, both modern is its experimentation and postmodern in its sel...
Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
February 05, 2021 05:40 - 1 hour - 106 MBJules: Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'année dernière à Marienbad has astonished viewers for six decades and counting. Who, or what, are ‘A - la femme brune' (Delphine Seyrig), ‘X - l’homme à l'accent italien' (Giorgio Albertazzi, and ‘M - l'autre homme au visage maigre, le mari' (Sacha Pitoëff), and is this landmark of world cinema merely a film, or an initiatory experience akin to a rite of passage? David: This film, both modern is its experimentation and postmodern in its sel...
The Hill (1965)
December 03, 2020 05:09 - 2 hours - 73.4 MBDavid: When a military prison devoted to regimentation, correction and the rebuilding of wayward units fails to manage its own, the hierarchy of power turns upon itself. As those who covet power scramble to avoid responsibility, repercussions twist and twist again into a Rubic’s cube of blame and counter blame. We salute the departing Sean Connery with this not-quite-obscure-but-lesser-known anti-Bond vehicle directed by Sydney Lumet. Jules: A rare pleasure for those interested in well-con...
Byzantium (2012)
August 08, 2020 13:11 - 2 hours - 112 MBJules: Is it possible to make a film about vampires that is not a vampire film? The genre is perennial, with familiar tropes that filmmakers endlessly adjust to achieve varied ends. Power, class struggle, sex, death, eternal life and eternal damnation; each theme intersects vividly across the genre. Neil Jordan seeks transcendence for his antiheronies, from their plight, and their genre within film, with some success. David: At the heart of many a vampire story sits the dramatic tension be...
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)
July 05, 2020 13:28 - 2 hours - 48.1 MBDavid: A black satire perhaps running overlong with other ideas. It presages a spate of dark, disillusioned and memorably bleak films from the following year 1969. What does this say about the realities of 1968? The swinging 60s was as dead as the Summer of Love and the young boomers came out of it a cynical lot. This telling of the famous doomed British cavalry charge overviews the production of cannon fodder, from street urchins to gold-buttoned mounties of imperial glory and, with one b...
Spirits of the Dead - Toby Dammit
April 29, 2020 14:00 - 1 hour - 32.8 MBJules: Many films depict deals with the Devil at the time the deal is done. Fewer - like Fellini's contribution to this anthology - depict the Devil arriving to collect. But does Fellini's contribution satisfy? David: Fellini, usually so generous, has rarely been so impenetrable. Is Toby Dammit’s flight to Rome hijacked and diverted to Hell? Or is he really in Rome and finds the experience sufficiently overpowering that he literally loses his head? What is the nature of his tryst with the ...
Spirits of the Dead - Toby Dammit (1968)
April 29, 2020 14:00 - 1 hour - 32.8 MBJules: Many films depict deals with the Devil at the time the deal is done. Fewer - like Fellini's contribution to this anthology - depict the Devil arriving to collect. But does Fellini's contribution satisfy? David: Fellini, usually so generous, has rarely been so impenetrable. Is Toby Dammit’s flight to Rome hijacked and diverted to Hell? Or is he really in Rome and finds the experience sufficiently overpowering that he literally loses his head? What is the nature of his tryst with the ...
Spirits of the Dead - William Wilson (1968)
April 09, 2020 10:46 - 42 minutes - 21 MBPart Two of the Vadim-Malle-Fellini moral ménage à trois. David: Does the shadow have its own shadow? Does a remorseless psychopath have a suppressed or intermittent conscience, or none at all? What if they were one day confronted by one? Jules: One is accustomed to thinking of oneself as having a dark side; implying that one is essentially good. But what if one discovers that one is the shadow, repeatedly assailed by the light?
Spirits of the Dead - Metzengerstein (1968)
March 30, 2020 04:13 - 49 minutes - 25.1 MBPart one of a 3-in-1 Poe anthology, baton passed between directors Vadim, Malle and Fellini. Jules: Are soulmates real, even if one or more of the parties behave soullessly? What is the price to save one's soul, once it it lost? Roger Vadim and his beautiful entourage seek answers beneath the surface of things. David: A tragic ghost myth? A seminal precursor to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? Or both plus a costume rehearsal for the immediately subsequent intramarital collaboration by Vadim ...
Matriculated (2003)
December 16, 2019 12:01 - 45 minutes - 10.9 MBJules: Whether or not machines can, should, or will become self-aware are perennial debates in the field of artificial intelligence. They are perfectly capable of performing any number of tasks without it, and it's unclear how one might go about installing or eliciting it in a machine. Peter Chung of Aeon Flux fame engages in these questions by way of the interaction between human agents and a killer machine that has been trapped in a virtual world. David: If a human can be shocked into aw...
The Parallax View (1974)
February 24, 2017 13:13 - 2 hours - 62.1 MBJules: If politics is theatre, and the public are the audience, and the affairs of the day are the script, who are the writers, and where do the actors come from? Can the actors perceive the truth they are playing a role in a work they have mistaken to be their own lives? What if they should? David: Considered part of Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”, along with Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View is a reporter cum detective story surveying the creation o...
Baraka (1992)
December 26, 2015 07:19 - 62.5 MBDavid: In this second part of our survey of the human condition, we move from HG Wells’ s 1930s to a voice from the 1990s with no words. Rather than an obvious narrative, Baraka paints a canvas, bringing into focus piece by piece an image that turns more and more of its facets to the light but doesn’t really progress. As if it were less a film than a mandala, a shrine or a temple, it could serve it's purpose equally well on an eternal loop with an audience free to come and go. Perhaps refere...
Things To Come
October 05, 2015 03:02 - 61 MBDavid: We embark on a two part examination of the human condition, beginning with the movie of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel of imagined future history. This modernist manifesto posits that humanity is distinguished from the animals by little more than ambition and the march of progress. There seems to be no alternative for us but onward, onward to the stars. Wells begins his fable with war, disaster and rebirth, perhaps meaning to describe the arc of civilsation from a fresh beginning, but also e...
Things To Come (1936)
October 05, 2015 03:02 - 61 MBDavid: We embark on a two part examination of the human condition, beginning with the movie of H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel of imagined future history. This modernist manifesto posits that humanity is distinguished from the animals by little more than ambition and the march of progress. There seems to be no alternative for us but onward, onward to the stars. Wells begins his fable with war, disaster and rebirth, perhaps meaning to describe the arc of civilsation from a fresh beginning, but also e...
Mad Max Fury Road (2015)
June 21, 2015 09:56 - 37.1 MBJules: Sequel, prequel, reboot, or mashup? Or just the logical conclusion of director George Miller's deconstruction of genre, gender, and guzzlene? David: We bookend our survey of 1979's Mad Max1 with our overview of the latest 2015 instalment. On Fury Road there’s lot to recognise from our own time. Much of the human degradation in it's murdered world seems to be with us now, already.
Mad Max (1979)
May 21, 2015 06:05 - 63.6 MBDavid: As Mad Max returns to cinemas after 20 years in the wasteland we look back further to Mad Max’s origins, as well as contexts like seventies oil shocks, road death tolls, bikie gang terror in the media and a director moonlighting as a doctor in an emergency ward. Jules: The most financially successful budget genre film (until 1999's Blair Witch Project) or something more? What does director George Miller deconstruct as he assembles his mythos.
Sunshine (2007)
December 21, 2014 05:33 - 69 MBDavid: Science fiction has been crowded from our movie screens by a plethora of comic strip adaptation. Sunshine raised the flag for serious sci-fi cinema in a very lean decade. It recalls Kubrick’s 2001 in positing space as a spiritual destination, with the sun, the source and nurturer of life, not unlike a god to its hapless progeny, who are on a precarious mission to keep its dying light alive. In the end one of Sunshine’s revealed truths is that a film cannot transcend its script. Much v...
The Night Porter (1974)
October 05, 2014 04:37 - 71.8 MBJules: Is there such a thing as essential human nature, or can we turn ourselves into whatever we think we ought to be, whenever and wherever it suits us? And if we can, are we still human? David: Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling must decide whether or not they (eachother) are literally to die for. Meanwhile a technical anomaly causes the Overlooked team to narrate the film with the second and third acts switched out of order. Hilarity doesn’t quite ensue but perhaps a revitalised perspe...
Performance (1970)
August 03, 2014 09:18 - 77.8 MBDavid: An art movie, a drug movie, Nicolas Roeg’s directing debut, a Mick Jagger acting debut, a late, post-swinging 60′s bohemian manifesto, but underpinning all that one of the best British gangster flicks around. It features a foulmouthed, thuggish, head kicking turn by the erstwhile toffee nosed James Fox as bovver-boy Chas, who comes in for some heavy deconstruction when, finding himself on the run, he chooses the dark cave of a retired rock-star recluse to lay low in. Not an atom of m...
Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Elevator To The Gallows) (1958)
June 29, 2014 01:22 - 53.1 MBJules: Louis Malle pre-empts Jean-Luc Godard’s advice about girls, guns, and movies, but also adds a stuck elevator, a forgotten grapnel, a shopgirl, a streetpunk, and a gull-wing Mercedes-Benz to the mix. We join Jeanne Moreau on her existential walk of shame as she waits for news from her special forces lover and his perfect plan to murder her wealthy husband. The ready-to-hand surroundings of late-Fifties Paris intersect in a kind of metaphysical perfection with the desolation of Miles Da...
Le Mans (1971)
May 10, 2014 03:20 - 63.2 MBDavid: Steve McQueen departs the sixties at high speed, driving for team Porsche. The Le Mans car race pushes the limits of endurance over a non-stop 24 hours as McQueen pushes the envelope of cool, shifting his schtick into the autistic spectrum uttering barely a word of dialogue for the first half hour and not much thereafter either. A racing manifesto and vérité documentary infused with the barest hint of plot somehow feels curiously innovative. Death hovers over the proceedings and the f...
Æon Flux : The Purge
April 05, 2014 01:42 - 20.7 MBJules: Our commentary expands to include the small(er) screen in this episode, namely the stellar Æon Flux series of MTV short films from the 1990s. Are we all the self-deluding victims of deterministic circumstance, or can we freely choose between possible outcomes as truly moral agents? We examine the cases brought forward by arch-provocatrix Æon, dictator-for-life Trevor, and gonzo-comedian-psychopath Bambara. David: We attempt to bring our rational thoughts to bear upon the mind-man...
Excalibur (1981)
March 09, 2014 03:18 - 71.2 MBJules: Not only an impossible love-triangle, but an impossible political romance unfolds in this robust and sinewy retelling of the ancient, troubadour-filtered tale of a God-given head of state who both physically and metaphysically unifies his island kingdom. The myth of the benevolent dictator finds its apotheosis in the overwhelmingly decent, occasionally-befuddled character of Arthur, whose innocence both makes and unmakes his dynasty. David: The legendary expounding of how, when your ...
Demonlover (2002)
February 08, 2014 06:25 - 55.2 MBJules: The best, late period William Gibson film adaptation not actually adapted from a William Gibson novel, Demonlover intersects oblique characters and narratives to produce an aesthetically integrated nightmare of Postmodern fragmentation. When unconscious entities (like corporations, nationalities, and religious movements before them) evolve djinn-like abilities to tempt, trap, and consume their human constituents in the sociopathic pursuit of marketshare, do they signal a future when i...
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
January 05, 2014 07:33 - 42.4 MBJules: If films are the means by which we collectively countenance the uncomfortable truths of what we are, and how that seems to override who we are, this film is both trauma and therapy. What is the relationship between desire, word, and action, and our collective sense of right and wrong? Last Tango ponders these questions (among others) and - crucially - acts upon them, in ways that sometimes seem lost to today's cinema. David: Fifty Shades of Grey meets The Wrestler – or is it King Kon...
Wake In Fright (1971)
December 26, 2013 10:21 - 81.3 MBJules: A high-noon nightmare collision between the vestiges of high-minded European culture and the alien landscape of inland Australia. Rationality is discarded as our Anglo-Australian everyman descends into an inferno of instinctual drives, unquestioned customs, and murderous violence. But, amongst the beer-swilling and paddock-bashing, is anything as it seems? David: A changing of the guard in Australian thespianism, featuring Jack Thompson in his first cinema role and Chips Rafferty in...
Play Misty For Me (1971)
December 15, 2013 07:04 - 44.8 MBJules: Like many first-time directors, Clint Eastwood turned to thriller/horror, via this story about the intersection of fame and obsession. The film is more interesting for the fact that the fame is moderate, and the obsession is feminine. Jessica Walter's anti-heroine somehow seems objectionable more for her actions than her sentiments in this rare example of a genre film dealing thoughtfully with uncontainable female mental dysfunction. David: A great popcorn-munching, psycho-watching, ...
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
October 27, 2013 07:27 - 99.6 MBJules: It seems Kubrick's last film (excluding conspiracy theories, or Spielberg public relations) disappointed, riled, puzzled, or otherwise stymied almost everyone who saw it upon first release. A publicity campaign that teased a salacious treatment of the hottest Hollywood couple at the time didn't altogether help. But has the passage of time, and the rumors that surround the film, suggested a re-reading? Is it a cynical, last gesture of a cool-minded technician? A plodding attempt by a b...
Black Narcissus (1947)
May 19, 2013 10:18 - 1 hour - 75.5 MBJules: The clash of cultures, faiths, races, and civilisations entire was hardly ever so agreeable as it is in this 1947, somewhat-forgotten classic. See vertiginous, mountain-perched bordellos revamped to serve as nunneries! See lanky actors in too-short short-shorts attempt to maintain their gravitas whilst riding Shetland ponies! See skin-tinted occidental girls reinvented as oriental firebrands! David: One ought not to rebel against nature, it seems. Nor the nature of things. A gaggle ...
Prometheus (2012)
May 19, 2013 10:02 - 2 hours - 94.1 MBJules: This film divided film viewers and critics to a surreal degree; but is it perhaps the film which most deserved overlooking in 2012? Despite its problems, however, what does it tell us about the ability of today’s filmmakers to revisit their own pasts? David: Plot tendrils snaking about like a grasping facehugger that’s drunk too much coffee. The franchise that inspired so many films borrows back from nearly all of them.
Triumph of the Will (1935)
May 19, 2013 09:36 - 1 hour - 92.3 MBJules: Leni Riefenstahl may possess the most problematic oeuvre in cinema history, famously combining technical and artistic skill with one of the most pernicious ideologies of the Twentieth century. Did she shape history as she shaped public opinion, via this outing? (Apologies for the sound issues: a time-travelling NAZI mosquito apparently infested the recording gear for this podcast.) David: Leni's innovative stylings offer our sensibilities a distraction from this forbidding vision of...
TRON: Legacy (2010)
May 05, 2013 09:39 - 2 hours - 74.5 MBJules: How late is too late for what might be the latest, late-to-market film sequel in the history of cinema? Problems of tone, story, and pacing pile up as the digital apocalypse approaches. But what are we to make of the mythic imagery and symbolic story elements accompanying this technical wonder-wagon? David: Nonplussed by narrative nonsense. Nice neon.
Prospero's Books (1991)
May 05, 2013 09:17 - 2 hours - 102 MBJules: What becomes of the book in the age of the moving image? Peter Greenaway considers this question, among others, in this sumptuous 1991 production featuring John Gielgud in (apparently) his dream role as Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest. David: Frames within frames, and naked dames. And who to blame?
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
March 18, 2013 07:00 - 2 hours - 80.2 MBJules: Problems (and beauty) abound in this characteristically Gilliamesque romp through the Enlightenment, and its cultural upheavals. Marvels to delight the eye accompany the misadventures of our titular hero as he attempts to establish how the war began. David: Beautiful ladies, beautiful ladies!