February 28, 2014
At A Glance
The venerable and exceedingly intermittent Plastic Podcast, which has outlived the two blogs with which it was intertwined, and whose audio archives were difficult to ...
The Plastic Podcast
An audio program about movies. Listen with your iPod or computer.
The venerable and exceedingly intermittent Plastic Podcast, which has outlived the two blogs with which it was intertwined, and whose audio archives were difficult to ...
Other Recent Podcasts
About
Daily Plastic is a Chicago-based movie
blog, a collaboration between Robert
Davis and J. Robert Parks, the same pair who brought you the wearable
movie tote, the razor-thin pencil pocket, and that joke about aardvarks.
If you know the whereabouts of the blue Pontiac Tempest that was towed
from the Plastic Parking Lot on the evening of August 7th, 2008, or more
importantly if you've recovered the red shoebox that was in its trunk,
please contact us at your
earliest convenience.
Davis was the chief film critic for the late, great Paste Magazine (which lives on now as a website) from 2005 through 2009, and he counts this interview with Claire Denis among his favorite moments. Every once in a while he pops up on Twitter. He's presently sipping puerh in Chicago, even at this hour. Meanwhile, Parks, whose work has appeared in TimeOut Chicago, The Hyde Park Herald, and Paste, is molding unsuspecting, college-aged minds in the aforementioned windy city. Media types are warned to stay clear of his semester-sized field of influence because of the distorting effects that are likely to develop.
The © copyright of all content on Daily Plastic belongs
to the respective authors.
Welcome back, guys! Great show, perfectly spot-on on several of the nominees, most notably The Hurt Locker and Up In The Air, whose failings amidst its appeal you really nailed. Why do so many people- especially certain pro critics- love the latter film so much? My theory is that it's this season's Sideways: it asks its audience to identify with a central character that for various reasons is particularly easy for the type of person who has chosen criticism as a career to identify with. I was going to parallel the various ways Clooney resembles a working film critic, but it started sounding like a bitter screed so I'm holding off; I don't mean it that way at all. But I do think when Reitman found this character he knew what he had, and his studio was able to position his film as a successful Oscar picture in no small part because of this critic-pleasing aspect of the film.