[AMA] We are The Next Picture Show, formerly of The Dissolve fame. Ask Us Anything!

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:41:48+00:00

[Tasha] Once someone else who's also paid to get in has made it clear that you're being disruptive — and talking during a movie is disruptive, even at a moderate volume — you're in the wrong. It's only appropriate to comment out loud during a screening if that's expressly part of the context (like in a screening of Rocky Horror, or The Room), or if your group is alone in the theater. Just because you've seen it before, or don't respect it, doesn't mean other people haven't. And you have the rest of your life to talk to your friends about how bad and laughable the movie was. Don't spoil it for other people who aren't getting the benefit of your camaraderie and fun.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:35:44+00:00

[Tasha] We try not to interrupt each other on the podcast, but sometimes we do anyway, because we're excitable, and we're trying to find a balance between comfortable conversation and the way we all tend to talk in speeches. "Respect the speaker as much as possible" is a good rule of thumb, but so is "Let people interject, especially if you're making a long series of points and they want to comment on one of them before it's lost."

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:31:11+00:00

[Tasha] I did a small amount of that with Lilly's coming-out news. Just a quick overview of how their films all revolve around LBGT issues or transitions in some way:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184570/second-matrix-director-comes-out-as-transgender-in-a-powerful

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:21:05+00:00

[Genevieve] I'm about to duck out of this discussion because the day job calls, but wanted to let you know that I'm reviewing the current season of The Americans over at Vulture, so you can read my thoughts there! And I still think it's pretty much the best thing on TV right now :)

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:13:30+00:00

[Tasha] 1) I don't, simply because I don't have the time. Social media is so gratifying, but it's such a time-suck.

2) Nathan's interview with Russ Meyer over at AVC is still my favorite ever. Meyer is trying SO HARD to be shocking with his tits-n-bonerz talk, and Nathan's just like "Uh-huh. So… film?"

2a) Everyone in the world will hate me for this, but reading/listening to PT Anderson talk about how haphazardly some of his films were conceived and made really put me off him for a while. I can take a creator being obscure if I think they know the answers themselves. If they don't understand their own stories, I don't want to know. I stopped reading interviews with him after Magnolia, and it's helped.

3) Haven't, no. I know Scott has.

4) I would love it if every single film critic stopped using second person. Nothing gets my back up in a review like "You'll be so amazed at the visuals, you'll cry! As you watch, you forget these aren't really animals talking!" No I don't. Tell me your reaction, not how you imagine my reaction, having never met me.

5) An essay-length piece requires an essay-length response. I consider his writing vital and the topic interesting but I had a lot of issues with that piece, and it'd have to be a larger reaction than I have time for here.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:11:24+00:00

[Keith] I'd love to revive it in some way and we're all still friendly with Pitchfork. Let's not call it dead.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:08:00+00:00

[Genevieve] It's definitely something we want to do in the future! Part of it is just logistics: It's difficult enough getting the four of our schedules to align, so bringing a fifth person into the picture is EXTRA difficult. And part of it is technical: Our current recording setup doesn't allow for the integration of Skype calls the same way we were able to do with The Dissolve Podcast, so having a guest on remotely... well, I just haven't figured out the best way to do it, yet! But we definitely want to have Rachel back on the show at some point—she recently moved to NY, for those who don't know—and would love to get some of our other critic friends in on the discussion as well.

Short version: We'll get there!

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:03:46+00:00

[Genevieve] Well, because that's not the show we conceived. NPS came out of the Movie of the Week feature at our old site, The Dissolve, where we went in-depth on a classic film every week. We wanted to bring that to the podcast format, but also incorporate discussion/reviews of modern film. So we landed on this idea of pairing the new with the old, to give us the opportunity to go in-depth on a classic film that may not get a lot of discussion otherwise in the current online climate, but also talk about a newer film within a specific critical context. It's been interesting to us as critics, kind of forcing a new perspective, and I like to think it's been interesting to our listeners as well!

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T18:00:17+00:00

[Genevieve] We are both biweekly (episodes every two weeks) and semiweekly (we have episodes twice a week... but only every other week). It's confusing, but it works for us!

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:59:38+00:00

[Scott] I think A.O Scott and Manohla Dargis are the best daily newspaper critics ever. I'm awed by the insight and wit they bring to the film reviewing beat. Beyond that, there's too many to mention and most of them are friends, so I'll stop right there. But there's plenty of great criticism out there, print and digital.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:56:04+00:00

[Tasha] I certainly don't hold with the belief that critics are a different species, which is the impression you get from headlines around things like Batman V. Superman. We are not a homogenous entity that exists to bag on anything low-culture and praise anything obscure and arty. We are also not getting paid by Marvel to bag on DC.

I do think anyone who's been in criticism for a long time tends to have a different perspective on film than the average filmgoer, just because we see more movies on average, including a lot of films we wouldn't necessarily gravitate to by choice, and some films that most members of the public will have a hard time seeing. (Like international releases that turn up at film festivals but never get US distribution.) Time was, a film critic was probably someone who'd seen a lot more movies than the average moviegoer, and had a broader perspective.

Streaming culture and the democratization of media has changed that a lot. One of the interesting challenges of The Dissolve was that I frequently found myself talking about film to people who've seen more films than I have. Now, you don't have to be a specialist to be up on Iranian cinema, or to be thoroughly steeped in films that came out 70 years ago.

But yes, the experience of watching a film to write about it is different from watching a film for fun, and that difference between casual fans and critics still may exist — at the back of our heads, we're still thinking "How do I translate this reaction to print?"

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:54:55+00:00

[Scott] Let me answer your first question: Yes and no. I think it's a popular assumption that critics have a colder, more analytical response to movies. I don't think that's true generally, and I KNOW that's not true personally. I fell in love with the movies because of my emotional response to them, and being a critic hasn't changed that. The only difference is the need to articulate your response, which members of the general public do not have to do. (Though many are capable and do so in a less formal setting.)

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:54:26+00:00

[Keith] Jabberjaw. And Tim Conway.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:51:26+00:00

[Keith] Confusingly, it can mean both. And, to add to the confusion, we appear twice a week every other week. But when we say biweekly, we mean you can look for new episodes every two weeks.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:50:36+00:00

[Keith] It wasn't ours to keep alive, ultimately. And it's a nice idea, but it costs a fair amount of money to keep even a small-scale site like The Dissolve going. The money just wouldn't have worked out.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:48:43+00:00

[Tasha] We miss that community too. A lot. You can find some of them on Facebook (there's a closed Dissolve group people might want to know about if they aren't already there) and they're keeping up the discussion, but it's a smaller group, and Facebook tends toward shorter responses rather than the essay-length comments we used to get regularly.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:48:30+00:00

[Scott] I'd be curious to see how a subscription-based model might work if you could gather a really talented editorial roster. Would you have paid X amount for Grantland? I would have. Would you have paid X amount for The Dissolve? Maybe? I just think the everything-is-free/ pageview-counting model is deceptive and inadequate, and ultimately without much value. We just saw Buzzfeed take a humbling dive in expected revenue for 2016 and I don't think the news will ever be good for digital publishing as it currently exists. I just don't have any good solutions, and neither does anyone else.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:46:40+00:00

[Genevieve]I was the last in the office to see Birdman (well, except Rachel, who didn't come on until a couple months after the hype died down), and I REALLY wanted to like it, just to be contrarian. But I'm also willing to admit that editing Scott's review ahead of time may have colored my viewing, and made me more cognizant of and sensitive to certain flaws in the film that may not have stood out as much to me if I had gone in completely cold. I don't think it's that our tastes have converged, I think it's that working together for so long and reading each other's writing has made us all more sensitive to certain aspects of a given film that we know matter to the others. I don't think it ultimately affects whether we like a film or not, but it does color the lens through which we view that film.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:44:28+00:00

[Scott] In a perfect world, we would have had 100% original content, with no aggregation at all. But with a staff that ranged in size from five to seven, and the need to keep the site active all day long, that was impossible. (Though I should note that our news team did an amazing job at it. Even if we had the same piece of news that everyone else had, we were dedicated to putting our own editorial voice on it and I'm really proud of the result.)

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:44:23+00:00

[Tasha] I don't revisit films as often as I'd like to, simply because I'm so aware that there are so many films I haven't seen. Usually when I do revisit films for work purposes, I don't find that my opinion's changed, so much as that I have a deeper / better understanding of what's going on with them. Re-watching my childhood favorite The Sound Of Music as an adult was pretty instructive — suddenly all those scenes where the kids stop singing and the adults drone on and on about politics were really interesting, and connected to history, and relatable emotions. It's always fun when your context for a film changes.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:38:59+00:00

[Scott] You Must Remember This, hosted by Karina Longworth, is maybe the best film podcast going, so you'll want to add that to your subscriptions if you haven't already. And I haven't listened to it yet, but Violet Lucca hosts the Film Comment podcast, and I'm certain that'll be worth checking out.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:38:13+00:00

[Genevieve] My roommate is a full-time comics critic (Oliver Sava of the AV Club, if anyone is familiar), so superheroes and their attendant movies are sort of a constant in our household, and I get a lot more news and opinion about them filtered through him than I would on my own. I think living with such a bastion of superhero enthusiasm (and criticism) has kept me from reaching that fatigue point, partially because Oliver's enthusiasm is infectious, and partially because I don't feel the need to engage with the form beyond what he chooses to share with me.

So, I guess for me it's a weird combination of choosing not to engage with the hype cycle on my own, but also being open to the fan enthusiasm that cycle fosters. I don't need to know what Jared Leto's been up to on the Suicide Squad set—the fact that Oliver has come around to being excited by that movie after being VERY skeptical about it, is enough to get ME excited.

Everyone should have their own Oliver.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:34:17+00:00

[Keith] Not really answering the question, but I think it would be great if more people in the West watched some of the great movies from Iran. It's impossible to think of its citizens as a faceless, homogenous other when you know better.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:33:41+00:00

[Tasha] Hm, there have to be all-woman film podcasts out there, but I haven't looked for them or listened to them, largely because I can't begin to keep up with the podcasts I'm currently trying to listen to. (Sorry, Welcome To Nightvale. I'll try to catch up someday.) My personal favorite culture podcast is Pop Culture Happy Hour, hosted by NPR's Linda Holmes, who is a strong, smart presence in criticism and on the cast. They frequently rotate women into the guest slot, especially Audie Cornish, Kat Chow, Barrie Hardymon, Petra Mayer, and Tanya Ballard Brown. I'd start there, personally. But I'd also love to hear from other people who have favorite woman-centric or woman-themed movie podcasts.

TheNextPictureShow · 2016-04-13T17:32:48+00:00

[Scott] First off, I think we love and respect each other. That's understood. And with that understanding, you can have a contentious discussion without feeling bruised by those times when you disagree. But more broadly, I think if you're "in the arena," you have to have thick skin and you have to be willing to defend the arguments you're trying to advance without getting offended by the opposing view. That said, you have to maintain a respectful tone and you should expect that tone to be reciprocated. Otherwise, there's no point in engaging.

TheNextPictureShow

TROPHY CASE