The French Dispatch (2021) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

01/08/22 • 86 min

A Wes Anderson double-header to close out Season 5 of Film Trace. Chris and I return to our roots as teenage film nerds. Wes Anderson was our first love as budding cinephiles, and despite the tumultuous last 20 years (Darjeeling anyone), we still get a jolt of excitement with every new Anderson film. The French Dispatch is Anderson's first portmanteau film, and the results are whimsically mixed as expected. We also cover one of Wes's best films, The Royal Tenenbaums as it hits the 20-year mark. The snowglobe world of Royal has aged incredibly well. It is a rich literary yarn woven of the finest pure cinema fibre, dyed millennial pink of course.

Joining us for the Season 5 Finale is Harry from the Trylove podcast, an awesome podcast dedicated to the wonderful The Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis.

Joining us for the Season 5 Finale is Harry from the Trylove podcast, an awesome podcast dedicated to the wonderful The Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis.

Previous Episode

The Cable Guy (1996)

At the height of Jim Carrey's fame in the mid 1990s, this bizarre pitch-black comedy was released as a summer blockbuster. The Cable Guy is a historical and creative anomaly, especially for millenials old enough to have seen it in the theater. For the last twenty-five years, we have all been trying to piece together and understand the strange feelings this movie put inside of us. The genre here is a white-out blend of gross-out buddy comedy, media satire, and exrotic thriller. The Cable Guy is truly the ideal film for Film Trace. It is so full of contradictions, oscliating successes and failures, that we can't help but try to make sense of this absurd attempt by the Frat Pack to parody The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In what world could this possibly make sense besides our own?

Special Guest: Great podcasters and friends of the show, Brigitte and Mark

Next Episode

Scream (2022)

We are back! We are doing something different this season of Film Trace. Instead of covering new and old films at random, we are choosing a theme for each group of episodes. Our first theme is Self-Aware Horror.

First up in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is Scream 5 aka Scream 2022. We are both huge Scream fans, so we felt like we had to do a deep dive on this requel. I hate that term, and we discuss why in this episode. What does it mean to make a love letter film? Are requels progressive or regressive? The Scream series has been surprisingly strong when compared to other horror series, but where can it go on the 5th film, coming out 26 years after the original. The surviving gang is all back with some fresh blood as leads, but it all feels like a theme park version of the original. It looks and sounds the same, but it just feels different, off even.

Also new this season, we are doing a 2nd film at the end of the episode as a chaser. In this episode, we wash down the requel swill with the peppy and perky slasher romp, Happy Death Day (2017).