Kill James Bond! - S4E1.5: Alps [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

This is a preview of a bonus episode. Listen to the whole thing on our reasonably-priced patreon! ----- It's Nova's Bonus so you'd better believe we're right back at it again with the Yorgos Lanthimos..., we're talking about Alps- a movie about a group of people who start a company where they impersonate bereaved people's deceased relatives to help them through the grieving process. ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devin. I am not Abigail Thorne, Abigail Thorne died in an accident, she died of too much rizz, and I am an actor that November and Devin have hired to play Abigail, to help them get over their grief in this podcast. The most played member of Kill James Bond. At least two people now have acted as you in production. in this podcast. So I'm wearing her clothes. The most played member of Kill James Bond.
Starting point is 00:00:45 At least two people now have acted as you in production. Yeah, we're gonna go back and we're gonna do the 60s episode of Kill James Bond, where Abby was played by like, six different people. Oh god, yeah, forward sizzle. God, that's the inverse of Casino Royale, I've got that completely backwards, and I've invented a better movie where James Bond in Casino Royale is played by a rotating cast of actors. That would be much funnier. Like that Bob Dylan film.
Starting point is 00:01:14 Yeah. But yeah, so thank you for subscribing to the bonus feed, I got to pick the next one, and this is Alps. It's a Yorgos Lanthimos film, would you believe? World's biggest Yorgos Lanthimos fan picks Yorgos Lanthimos movie to talk about. Yeah. Two for two on wearing merch of the films we're talking about, by the way. Yes.
Starting point is 00:01:35 I wore the Michael Mann heat shirt yesterday last time. And you've got the Yorgos hound. Yeah, I've got the Yorgos... I've got the Yorgos Lanthimos, like, Kinds of Kindness baseball cap on as we record this. Just to get really parasocial with it, you know? NICHOLAS But back to Yorgos, the Greek freak with the peak technique, he's back! ALICE Yeah, this is a great film to watch to alienate your friends.
Starting point is 00:01:57 I watched this on a big sofa with a number of clouted up transsexuals, and let me tell you, silence in that room throughout the length of that movie. And I was acutely aware that what I had done in that moment was go, hey, do you wanna watch this movie that I have to watch for work? And subjected my friends to, like, a two hour, pretty, um, difficult watch. RILEY This episode of the podcast can be best understood as you attempting to explain yourself to them. Yeah, and you! The post-hoc.
Starting point is 00:02:30 Right? Because I made you both watch this. And I quite liked it. I had some... I actually had a really good time with this, yeah. It resonated with me quite strongly. I had a lot of thoughts about acting and the business of being an actor, that it really sort of made me reflect in very powerful ways.
Starting point is 00:02:44 Thank you for showing it. ALICE Yeah, you're most welcome. I thought you would get something out of it on that basis, and I'm so glad you did. Because it is a movie about acting, and about sort of parasocial relationships, and- SEAN Parasocial relationships. ALICE Parasocial relationships. SEAN Parasocial relationships. ALICE Somethings in here don't react well to stalkers.
Starting point is 00:03:02 ALICE And about substitution, right, I read one of the things I'm maddest about in the history of cinema is I read an interview with this guy, Vasilis Mamatakis, who designs all of the posters for Yorgos Lanthimos' movies, and they asked him, like, did you have any ideas that you didn't get to do? And he said, yeah, the original poster for Alps was gonna be a photo of Everest with the title Alps on it. And no one would get it. Once you've seen the movie, or once you've had it explained to you, it's a really beautiful idea, but, like, because it's too deep of a reference, it doesn't advertise the thing,
Starting point is 00:03:39 so they wouldn't let him do it. RILEY We could put that as our episode art. We can have a picture of that. RILEY That would be very funny. Yeah, I would do a picture of that. Yeah, no, everyone would be so mad on Twitter for like, weeks. Weeks. This is another one of Jorgis' early movies, still with like, Greek actors filmed in Greece,
Starting point is 00:03:55 he hasn't made it to Hollywood yet. And it's kind of a sequel to Dogtooth, so if you haven't listened to the Dogtooth episode I recommend going back and watching that. Because Dogtooth is kind of like about breaking out of a system, whereas this is kind of the inverse, like breaking in, right? From the outside in. But they're both films about love and connection, and the kind of forms that that takes and the ways that can get distorted.
Starting point is 00:04:25 Let's dive in. Yeah, by all means. So we begin with Carmina Burana. You know the music, right? It's like cliche at this point. Yeah, exactly. And there is a woman doing rhythmic gymnastics in an empty gym to this. It's sick as hell, like she just ribbon twirls. And it's amazing. With a black ribbon as well. She's got the ribbon, I love the ribbon so much. And she does this set to this and is exhausted and so like panting for breath,
Starting point is 00:04:58 sits down on the mat, and her coach comes up to her. This is another thing about this movie, is you can summarize Alps unkindly as Yorgo Santhimos gets a reverse shot wrong for an hour and a half. Because one of the things that he loves to do is shoot something over someone's shoulder and then slip the focus back, so whatever is in the center of the frame is out of focus and what's in focus is the back of the shoulder. To convey sort of alienation, separation, sort of like viewing something out of focus. S Yeah, he does a lot of things, like, people
Starting point is 00:05:39 are very isolated in the frame, people have parts of their bodies cut off by the frame that you wouldn't expect, there's another trick he does later on where normally if you had an actor who was looking towards the right of the screen as the audience sees it, you would place them on the left and so they would have the actor's head on the left of the screen and there'd be some empty space to the right. There's a shot he does later on where he kind of gets that wrong. And there's an actor who is looking off the right of the camera, but who's also on the right-hand side. there's just, the consequences that you really notice, there's a lot of empty space around this person. Um, and it's, it's very, very effective. When
Starting point is 00:06:12 I first saw it, I was just like, fuck's wrong with you to fire a cinematographer. And then I was like, oh wait, no, this is a film. The empty space is so good. Like even from the first shot, right? Like we open with this long, like steady shot of the gymnasium and it's just like the gymnast is tiny in the middle of it and it holds for long enough. You're like, okay, all right, we're going to be seeing a movie that's shot. Yeah. Yeah. It's been shot. We're going to be doing things with the frame. This actress playing the gymnast, by the way, Ariane Lebert, I think she is married to Joris Anthemos, but she was also, I know her from another film called Attenberg, which I will have us do at some point, which is
Starting point is 00:06:49 kind of like a Greek coming of age thing. S This is a wife guy movie, this is a Look Out Hot My Wife. M- Joris is absolutely a wife guy, I think that's clear. S- God, I get it, yeah. S- I like it when filmmakers do that, I think it's always fun when male filmmakers make a Look Out Hot My Wife-esque movie. M- Yeah, and she is. S- Yeah. M- But so, she finishes this routine, she's exhausted and she's like frustrated
Starting point is 00:07:08 with her coach, this older man. She's like, I don't want to dance to Carl Orff, right? I want to dance to like pop music, something contemporary. And it's really striking because what he says to her is, you're not ready for pop, and if you raise your voice to me again, and crucially she has not raised her voice at all, I will break your arms and legs. And so we immediately get this like, sort of like, imposition of violence into the narrative, right, of like, this is a weird unhealthy relationship these two have going on. Right? Where he is like, very domineering and very threatening, and controls her routine completely.
Starting point is 00:07:52 LORRAINE Then we cut to one of Yorgos's favourite things to do, which is, so, listeners, the inside of a vehicle is a very difficult place to film, it's a very hard place to get shots and reverse shots, because it gets awkward and you can't climb over things, there's a lot of reflective surfaces is a very difficult place to film. It's very hard place to get like shots and reverse shots because it's like awkward and like you can't climb over things, there's a lot of reflective surfaces inside a car. So one thing that Yorgos loves to do is he loves to just like set up a closeup inside a vehicle and then just not cut away from them. The whole scene inside the vehicle,
Starting point is 00:08:15 we'll do it in one angle, I don't give a shit. We'll film that in half an hour, we're moving on baby. So we cut to the back of an ambulance, we assume because they're sirens. And there's a woman in there, Mary, who is in very bad shape. She's very bloodied, she's very... We don't know how she was hurt, but she is clearly in a very bad way, and she's talking to this EMT or porter, just off school.
Starting point is 00:08:37 ALICE Paramedic EMT, like ambulance crew, who is asking her questions, and it's a bit reminiscent of the opening of Dogtooth, sis, in that it's sort of like, you would expect, perhaps, to be asked questions in that situation, like, what's your name? And immediately, though, something goes wrong with this. It goes in a slightly surreal direction. Because he asks her, like, what's your name? Mary. Do people call you Mary or Maria? And when she says Mary he starts calling her Maria. He says
Starting point is 00:09:09 that. He says, I'm gonna call you Maria. This is like NHS care in year 2013. But so, he's asking her about, like, her favourite actor. And you could plausibly read this in the moment as like he's just trying to keep her conscious and talking and taking her mind off of it, but it's very very strange because he's... it's like an interrogation. He's like, who's your favorite actor? I will list some actors and you can tell me if you like them. Yeah, she's not going for it and he's just like, I'll list some actors for you, and he's
Starting point is 00:09:48 like, Brad Pitt, just like, make a sign or something, if this is your favourite by the way. Johnny Depp. He's very deadpan too. Ooh, going zero for two, I'm getting cancelled there as well. I was gonna say, yeah, my note is bleeding out waiting for him to say it, uncancelled actor. Well that's just the worst part, right?
Starting point is 00:10:05 It's like, let's name two of, you know, the two most famous male actors I can think of. Who's your favorite Hollywood producer? Stop me anytime. Harvey Weinstein. Who's your favorite filmmaker as you're lying there bloody in the Yorgos Lanthimos hat, wearing the Heat t-shirt? Not mentioning. That's the most, like, I loved a movie's fit, you can have every single item of clothing
Starting point is 00:10:29 you're wearing is a different, like, film thing. My dying breath is just like, oh, I thought Amandla Stenberg's performance in The Acolyte was, uh, underrated! Tom Hardy did the same thing in Legend and it was really good, but nobody liked it when they did it in Elf! Alright, that is quite enough of that. If you want to hear the rest of this episode about a pathetic European girl failure, you're gonna have to go to the Patreon and that's patreon.com slash killjamesbond all one word and sign up today for five pounds a month,
Starting point is 00:11:00 which is about what you'd expect to pay for a meal deal now of bloody days.

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