Shut Up and Watch This

We're back and it's Ashley's choice! Joan Rivers was known in her later years for over the top plastic surgery and for participating in the celebrity bullying culture that was rampant in the early ‘00s. The documentary, JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK sought to look beyond this image to better understand River’s place as a groundbreaking comedian, and possibly the hardest working person in show business. The result is a compelling look at the effects of fame and the insecurity of trying to make a life and a living in the limelight. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

In what is turning out to be a very existential few months for the podcast, this month we take a close look at Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU, in which we follow a lifelong civil servant played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura as he comes to terms with his impending death, and maybe, just maybe figures out what the point of all of this is. And in the third act, Kurosawa, ever the keen observer of humanity, gives us a glimpse of the man’s legacy to those left behind. And so, can the living ever really learn what the dead have to teach us? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

If you're like Ashley and remember from the height of the blog era a Tumblr called “Sketchy Bunnies," then you might be a little intimidated by the hero of this week’s pic, a 6 foot 3 and a half inch invisible rabbit named HARVEY. But it turns out that Harvey and his best friend Elwood P. Dowd have a lot to teach us about what is important in life: like being kind to others, finding joy in simple things, and making sure there are strong policies in place to limit the powers of private mental health institutions. Check out John Green's moving podcast episode about the impact of Harvey on his life: The Anthropocene Reviewed: "Velociraptors and Harvey" Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

There are some who believe, and we’re among them, that the creative spark is what makes us human, but making art is frequently hard, emotionally taxing and the results often fall short of our ideal. So is it any wonder that some would-be creators might lose themselves in hedonistic pleasure seeking, rather than doing the work to find meaning? This is perhaps the central question of Dave's choice, Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA. Rife with symbolism and references to Dante’s Inferno, the soul of our hero is at stake. What choice will he make: to make his own meaning or be lost? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

Intriguing, enthralling, enigmatic and ultimately moving, words that go some ways towards describing this month’s pick, CERTIFIED COPY (2010). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami and starring Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel, the film depicts two people with an undetermined relationship to one another as they spend the day in Tuscany. And so questions arise: What is the exact nature of their relationship? Does objective truth exist? And does it matter if it does? ubscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

We're back from our hiatus with an all-new deep dive into Dave's pick. This week we're talking about TOOTSIE (1982) and we have questions: Can someone who disguises himself as another type of person really understand what it's like to be that kind of person? And more importantly, did the screenwriters of Tootsie actually intend to convey a subtle message that indeed you can not understand what it is like to be a woman in a patriarchal society by disguising yourself as one? Is Michael Dorsey, a.k.a. Dorothy Michaels (Dustin Hoffman), actually an anti-hero here? And what was up with that ending? Justice for Sandy and Julie! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2023 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

A LETTER TO THREE WIVES is an odd film; it begins with the film’s villain, who we never see, providing character introductions, then proceeds to tell the story largely in flashbacks. Flashbacks are introduced by what we can only describe as an early vocoder effect that seems strangely out of place in a post-war drama. But the actors and the script really draw you into the domestic drama, most notably, Linda Darnell and national treasure Thema Ritter. Writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz would go on to win Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars for this film, a feat he would repeat the next year for his masterpiece, ALL ABOUT EVE. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2022 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

There is a lot more to John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS than a synopsis or even first viewing can convey. First of all, what is it? Is it sci-fi à la The Twilight Zone or pre-Cronenberg body horror, or a thesis on man’s search for meaning? As it turns out, it’s a little bit of all of this, and maybe some other things too. Beautifully photographed and masterfully paced and edited, Seconds turns a relatively simple premise into a tense and multilayered examination of purpose, meaning and existence. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2022 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

To celebrate the changing of the seasons, we have an introspective look at how family death impacts the life of a young man, causing his retreat into a fantasy world that includes flying murder balls, corpse theft, slave labor on a mysterious red planet, and a tall man filled with what appears to be nacho cheese. Actually, maybe PHANTASM isn’t very introspective at all. This cult horror film is odd, plotless, dreamlike and yet somehow still compulsively watchable. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2022 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson

Can we ever be sure of the motives of others? Can we even be sure of our own? Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION explores how emotions like greed, pride and fear shape our actions through the eyes of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a professional wiretapper who wrestles with the implications of the information he is supplying. Lives are at stake, nothing is as it seems, and it may be Harry who loses his soul. Subscribe on Spotify. Apple Podcasts, or Android. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Visit our site: shutupwatchthis.wordpress.com Send your feedback to [email protected] Please consider leaving a review or a star rating on iTunes, so other folks can find us. © 2022 Ashley Carr & Dave Wilson