This summer, several of Warner Bros. classics have become available to stream on HBO Max. Among them are a good variety from the 1970s, including some of the best movies of New Hollywood's most underrated master of cinema. We're talking about Alan J. Pakula, a director whose pictures came to embody the mood of that decade, full of misanthropic discontentment and a sense that the world is diseased, people are out to get you and safety is unachievable. Alan J. Pakula was truly the king of cinematic paranoia…
You've read the new Supporting Actress Smackdown. Now hear its companion podcast. Our panel widens its view from the supporting nominees to talk about the unique cinematic landscape of the late 1970s, the women's lib movement and concurrent movie gender wars, and which movies give the best period punch and which we've misremembered completely.
00:01 Introductions and memory vs. reality w/ Breaking Away
03:20 Gender Wars of 1979. Misogynistic or merely non-coddling and complicated?
09:00 Cynicism and Optimism in Starting Over and Manhattan, which is particularly self-critical and discomforting
15:50 Contextualizing the movies. 1979 versus what was to come with shifting tastes. Do people still make movies about "how we live now?"
21:00 Meryl Streep's command of subtext and Kramer vs. Kramer as a film
28:00 The oddity of Starting Over's comedy - we recommend
31:30 Movies we wish we had had to watch for the Smackdown: Alien & All That Jazz and non-nominated supporting actresses
36:45 Final random observations: valium, money in 1979, and new actors who weren't yet famous
39:00 Meryl Streep then vs Meryl Streep now. Of course we spend the last five minutes on Meryl Streep.
And because we joke about it - Here is Candice Bergen's off-key hit single "Better Than Ever" from Starting Over.
Please to enjoy and continue the conversation in the comments. You can listen at the bottom of this post or download from iTunes tomorrow. THE NEXT SMACKDOWN IS AT THE END OF JUNE. WE'LL BE LOOKING AT 1948 SO ADJUST YOUR QUEUES ACCORDINGLY.
Sunday, August 30, 2020 at 5:00PM 
