In the rainy and smokey environs of the moral detective and noir's favorite stomping grounds, we tell ourselves it's a dog-eat-dog world. "What went wrong?" is one of the questions Robert Altman expertly poses in his 1973 mystery, where Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe (in an all-time performance from Elliot Gould) finds himself increasingly at odds with a corrupt and sun soaked Los Angeles. Celebrating the film's 50th anniversary, your hosts eagerly explore one of the most important links in ...
Jan 16, 2023•56 min
As we start off the new year, Dolly Back takes some time to reflect on the one that just passed us by. In a year that marked a return to widespread exhibition across the world, mass love letters to the movies, and the beginning of this podcast, your hosts are incredibly excited to spotlight some of their favorite releases of the year! In an episode where they share notes on what inspired them, which episodes helped boost their appreciation, and the ever-evolving cinematic experience, enjoy this ...
Jan 09, 2023•1 hr 55 min
What better way to close out the calendar year than a tip of the hat to one of the medium's most critical artists - meditating on one of the most critical icons in our cultural consciousness? In The Last Temptation of Christ , Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader interrogate the dual nature of Jesus, the man and the messiah, and the tribulations that torture him on the path to his destiny. Importing some New Wave flavor and dare we say transcendental tendencies into the desert landscapes of Morocco...
Dec 23, 2022•54 min
With jingle bells ringing and snowflakes falling, Stanley Kubrick gleefully frames the most wonderful time of the year as its most impotent. In Eyes Wide Shut, which his collaborators describe him as claiming as his most significant contribution to the art of cinema, the legendary director's swan song forces a wedge between one of Tinseltown's biggest marriages - Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Titanic movie stars in their own right, both of them provide a deeply vulnerable exploration of marital ...
Dec 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min
"I guess the rest of us really are just suckers" becomes a mantra for Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale Jr, a pilot, doctor, lawyer, cheque expert - and conman! In this ultimate fake-it-'til-you-make-it story, Steven Spielberg takes a telephoto lens to family discord, juvenile criminality, and 1960s America, elements which have recurred throughout his filmography and rings even truer on the heels of his 2022 biopic The Fabelmans . Don't catch yourself staring at the pinstripes too much, as your...
Dec 07, 2022•1 hr
CONTENT WARNING This episode contains discussion of intense sexual violence with regards to some of the film's scenes - a brief warning will also play before this episode's plot summary. Listener discretion is advised. If you have any feedback for our handling of sensitive subject matter, please let us know on any of our socials or email. Closing off Dolly Back's Noirvember is Satoshi Kon's masterful Perfect Blue (1997), an animated thriller that deals with existentialism, digital lifestyles, po...
Nov 30, 2022•56 min
Take heart dear old men and women, as Dolly Back takes a Noirvember sabbatical in post-war Vienna in Carol Reed's timeless The Third Man (1949)! As Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins watches water diluted by penicillin, fact by fiction, light with shadow, the city's underworld threatens to erupt as if it were a powder keg once again. Flanked by Alida Valli's resolute Anna Schmidt and Orson Welles' wicked Harry Lime, this acting triumvirate produce one of the most integral noir films ever made, deligh...
Nov 23, 2022•59 min
Let it be known that Dolly Back never misfiles ANYTHING! Your hosts are joined by the fantastic Morgan Beck, a fellow film and literary scholar, with a particular interest in disentangling “bad” art, and the master; Nicolas Cage. Back in the land of bloodsucking parasites, your hosts go to their “C” files and discuss Cage, Cult, and Camp in this unique horror/romance/black comedy marriage - here’s an episode that we hope has you yelling “I’M A VAMPIRE” down the streets as soon as possible! Susan...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 16 min
It’s not easy facing up when your whole world is Black - there could not be a more fitting surname and indeed director for Dolly Back to ring in their Noirvember! Shane Black’s 2016 neo-noir and buddy cop extravaganza The Nice Guys remains one of the film world’s most treasured sleeper hits, inspiring debate on the future of film exhibition and providing a potential template for the loveably sleazy filmmakers sure to follow in the footsteps of this dynamite script! Its self-deprecating and glitz...
Nov 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In this 80s horror extravaganza, only one rule is true - opposites attract. Whether they’re the sun and moon, science and religion, matter and antimatter, an ancient secret under a decrepit Los Angeles church threatens to swallow all of reality, and our understanding of time and space itself! Channeling his inner Michael Jackson, John Carpenter takes a look at *man* in the mirror - gleefully capturing the event horizon of our relationship with faith from its figurative accretion disc. In a film ...
Nov 01, 2022•57 min
Have no fear for your light switches - that's just the stark and shadowy world of German Expressionism! Dolly Back switches gears and tackles a canonical behemoth in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), now a centennial (and indeed timeless) tale of pestilence and the power of love. Famously part of scholar Siegfried Kracaeur's overview of Germany's film culture reflecting the anxeties of their political climate, its titular vampire is an outlier in its own genre and representation of Stoker's charac...
Oct 26, 2022•56 min
Watch out listener, this episode might chew you up! Dolly Back takes on Julia Ducournau's directorial debut Raw , revolving around the coming-of-age of a young veterinarian student developing new appetites. As your hosts get a taste of what this course has to offer, they explore Ducournau's many cinematic influences, incredible command of lighting and montage, and set the film against the recent debate around "elevated horror". In the blood-slicked, sanitized world of Ducournau, bodies undergo c...
Oct 18, 2022•58 min
Dream much, listener ? Joining Dolly Back this week on a filmmaker and film near and dear to our hearts is Anna Swanson, a film critic and senior contributor to FilmSchoolRejects, and fellow Manniac on the director's neon-soaked and transcendent Manhunter (1986)! In the earliest adaptation of Thomas Harris' novels, the film would overcome its initial reception and commercial prospects to become an enduring classic among crime fans, replete with synth rock needle drops and an all too real deep-di...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Ringing in the scariest month of the year, Dolly Back is mesmerized by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure , a 1997 detective thriller that is equal parts horrific and incisive. As a gruesome crime wave sweeps Chiba, Detective Takabe joins forces with the psychologist Sakuma to uncover the mysteries behind the distinct X pattern slashed into their neck and the amnesiac wanderer cropping up at crime scenes. What ensues is a prognosis on polite society, entangling memory, sound, national history, and the appa...
Oct 04, 2022•58 min
In the worlds of Alan J. Pakula, one thing is paramount - trust no one. Your hosts are happy to make an exception to that rule this week as they are joined by Saffron Maeve, a fellow UofT student, a writer with featured publications across sites such as ScreenSlate and MUBI, and most recently, the recipient of the Canadian Cinema Scope Reader's Choice Award! Much like Warren Beatty's shaggy-haired Frady, this episode follows their investigative odyssey jumping everywhere from its brilliant noir ...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Between Warholian pop art and Diego Velasquez, Jean Luc-Godard searches for a joie de vivre in perhaps his most astonishingly eye-popping and impressionist work. As iconic screen couple Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina hit the roads of Europe, this hallowed director and his characters make peace with their demons on love, life, and literature, breaking down screen barriers and the form's enduring practices along their way! This episode is in tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, a master and shepherd of...
Sep 20, 2022•53 min
As they brave the always-dangerous waters of Wong Kar-Wai's melancholy, Dolly Back is joined by Hannah Fleisch, a UofT graduate student with an extensive knowledge of world cinemas! Whether it's a sob at the end of the world or a family photograph at the center of yours, this famed Hong Kong filmmaker turns his viewfinder to every nook and cranny that conceals a piece of home - everywhere from a loved one and they food they make for us, all the way down to the ways we throw ourselves into work o...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Enter Bayhem - a world of impulses and entropy that has perhaps never been as potent and singular as it was in Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009)! To your hosts, it is a miracle this film exists - even moreso that it sustained commercial success in spite of its WGA strike affected script, IP origins, and near-total departure from its predecessor's setting. As Optimus Prime and Megatron dip their feet into the sense impressions of Operation Desert Storm, this episode examine...
Aug 30, 2022•56 min
In an odyssey into Douglas Sirk's black-and-white, melodramatic masterclass, Dolly Back is joined by Ryan Akler-Bishop, a UofT graduate student and film writer, on its 25th episode! Revolving around a toymaker who grows emotionally neglected by his family and reconnects with a coworker from his past, this German director explores the human condition through a focus on the American family, and as argued by Laura Mulvey, the moral contradictions inherent to melodrama. A swan song to one of cinema'...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 15 min
"If it bleeds, we can kill it" - this immortal affirmation of an unknowable foe's mortality uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, embodies not only the ethos of John McTiernan's classic sci-fi actioner, but indeed all the body builders who went on to fight the many villains who personified a post-Cold War America on the silver screen. In the depths of a Central American jungle, espionage quickly evolves into asymmetrical warfare, and true to its name, the Predator upsets the military food ch...
Aug 16, 2022•54 min
An examination of a dolce vita losing its vigor, Michelangelo Antonioni's efforts in this 1961 neorealist effort turns its viewfinder towards Italy's alienated upper class. Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti form one of cinema's most formidable acting trios as they meander through the claustrophobic downtowns and dysphoric villas of Milan; much as their passions threaten to burst from their sublimated seams, the film's form is an equal masterclass in inviting viewer interpreta...
Aug 09, 2022•55 min
Real life doesn't fit into little boxes that were drawn for it - and surely, the ambitions of this week's high concept exploration of the superhero by M. Night Shyamalan can hardly fit into this episode. In Unbreakable , Bruce Willis' David Dunn learns he is nigh-invincible following a deadly train crash, as Samuel L. Jackson's enigmatic Elijah Price observes his progress and guides him to use his gifts in the service of others. Speaking 22 years after the release of a film that was very much on...
Aug 02, 2022•55 min
It's groovy being insane - surely the modus operandi of Paul Thomas Anderson's hippie noir vision in 2014's INHERENT VICE, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's eponymous novel. A renaissance detective's odyssey through Los Angeles high life and cults reveals fissures in his own recollection of an ephemeral ex-girlfriend, aided in no small part by the filmmakers' intertextual connectivity, needle drops, and highly calculated camera work. Join your hosts as they knock down the proverbial door on this...
Jul 25, 2022•59 min
The lows of solipsism and the highs of stargazing - director Paul Schrader and Yukio Mishima indulge in both as they search for the purest forms of their respective disciplines. In this fierce 1985 biopic, Schrader marries his subject's facts and fictions, words and worlds, arts and actions, in order to resolve not only the dilemmas that plagued the late author and nationalist, but his own reach towards transcendental style in film. Join your hosts as they take to the atmosphere in a much more a...
Jul 18, 2022•55 min
We live in a podcast world, and there are no hot takes at dusk! Dolly Back passes through a turnstile to discuss Christopher Nolan's 2020 action sci-fi TENET , a palindromic puzzle box that now stands as one of the celebrated director's most confounding and certainly one of the most thrilling studies of his favorite subject - time. As John David Washington's Protagonist embarks on a globe-trotting, self-fulfilling prophecy, your hosts dive into Ludwig Goransson's immaculate score, Nolan's narrat...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Nearly a decade before his eventual directorial debut, writer Charlie Kaufman made a name for himself with his idiosyncratic, if not absurd, handling of characters in a surreal setting. His foray into self-identity and psycho-analysis shines through the weird and unnerving performances from the likes of a pony-tail sporting John Cusack and coloured-contact-wearing Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich . Join your hosts Erich and Krishiv as they journey down the mysterious Malvochian-wormhole and ...
Jul 05, 2022•51 min
"There are people throwing the money, and people doing the dance," as Jennifer Lopez's Ramona opines in Lorene Scafaria's 2019 smash HUSTLERS, an ostentatious and blistering look into the camaraderie of four strippers pushing back against the pressures of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis. Dolly Back is joined by Margaret Pereira, whose scholarly work dives into how exchange value, thing power, and materialism's ties to the body are central players in this new economy, everywhere f...
Jun 27, 2022•1 hr 35 min
As the era of athlete-turned-action star raged on with the likes of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, and Van Damme all committed to their respective franchises and filmmakers, one lone American football star dared to turn the spotlight from international talent to domestic. Unfortunately, his efforts resulted in little except the efforts of your hosts trying to piece together its successes and downfalls. So bleach your mullets and cut off your t-shirts as Krishiv and Erich are joined this wee...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr 22 min
As 1 million pounds of train barrels down Southern Pennsylvania, director Tony Scott captures tensions between man and machine, old and new, worker and corporation, with a stunning ferocity that cements his place as one of Hollywood’s greatest action auteurs. In this episode, Erich and Krishiv examine his roots in commercial filmmaking and the tendencies that define his adrenalized filmmaking using this uniquely mid-budget blue-collar thriller as a guidepost for modern production practices. If y...
Jun 13, 2022•54 min
In the world of John Woo, to reload is to wave the white flag! Renegades and outcasts, both cop and criminal alike, shower each other in gunfire in this fiery tale of a Hong Kong on the brink of change in Hard Boiled (1992) . Erich and Krishiv are joined by fellow UofT alumni and Hong Kong cinema aficionado, Thomas Chan, to discuss the filmmaker’s last hurrah for chivalry in his Hong Kong career before making the trip to Hollywood. Make a paper crane or get in your favorite convertible before tu...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 11 min
