The Frances Farmer Show

On this very special episode, Sean and Mike make their third annual Top Ten Films of All-Time selections. Hitchcock, Hawks, Hong and much much more!

Wanting a break from all the weird and dour movies they've been watching lately, Mike and Sean celebrate the bright and colorful of Fox Cinemascope romantic comedies, with 1953's How to Marry a Millionaire, starring Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, and Down with Love, from 2003, with Renee Zellweger and Ewan MacGregor. Also, on the 150th anniversary of the birth of cinema pioneer Louis Lumière, they make their picks for Essential Early Film.

This week Mike and Sean tackle David Fincher's big hit Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike along with the late George Sluizer's 1988 film about a missing woman, The Vanishing. They'll also recap Sean's trip to the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival, celebrate Independent Video Store Day with their Essential Films You Can Only Get at Scarecrow Video, and discuss the concept of "It" while making their picks for modern day It Girls and It Boys on the 150th birthday of writer Elinor Glyn. All this and Mike finally watched Boyhood too.

We tracked him down and thawed Mike out of his carbonite prison for this special episode all about Star Wars and The Last Jedi. Topics include but are not limited to: Porgs, galactic capitalism and the flaws inherent in the Republic, Ron Howard, wipes, and Mike's dog.

We talk about many of the movies we saw at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Films discussed include: Maison du bonheur, Milla, Caniba, 24 Frames, Claire's Camera, The Square, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the Future//Present program (Fail to Appear, Mass for Shut-Ins, Still Night Still Light, Prototype, Black Cop, Scaffold, Forest Movie), Faces Places, Top of the Lake: China Girl, 120 Beats per Minute, Bad Genius, Wonderstruck, The Florida Project, and SPL: Paradox.

The 2017 Seattle International Film Festival has come to an end and Sean, Evan and Ryan get together to talk about what they saw, what they liked and didn’t like among the festival's archival presentations and new releases. Film discussed include: The Dumb Girl of Portici, Taste of Cherry, Love and Duty, Brainstorm, A Ghost Story, Nocturama, Columbus, Godspeed, Gook and Mr. Long.

Halfway through the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival, Sean, Melissa, Evan and Ryan get together to talk about what they've seen, what they liked, didn't like and are looking forward to as the festival moves into its final two weeks. Film discussed include: Yourself and Yours, Person to Person, Sami Blood, Searchers, Dawson City: Frozen Time, Knife in the Clear Water, Beach Rats, Maurice, Vampire Cleanup department, Cook Up a Storm, God of War, By the Time it Gets Dark, The Unknown Girl, Finding Kukan, and Bad Black.

After a lengthy absence, The Frances Farmer Show returns as Melissa and Sean take a quick look at some films playing on Seattle Screens, including a preview of Terence Davies's Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion, which opens here on May 5th. They also discuss Wong Kar-wai's mid-90s masterpieces Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.

This week Mike and Sean, for the third time, trek out to downtown Seattle to catch the opening night of the new Johnnie To film, the hospital-set thriller Three, with Louis Koo, Zhao Wei and Wallace Chung. Paired with it is another thriller set in a hospital, Samuel Fuller's 1963 Shock Corridor, about a journalist who goes undercover in a mental institution and comes unglued.

With the Seattle International Film Festival fast approaching, we discuss earlier films by two prominent directors whose films will be bookending this year's SIFF. Terence Davies will be kicking the festival off with his Sunset Song, while Kiyoshi Kurosawa will bring it to a close with Creepy, and so we talk about Davies's 1992 masterpiece of poetic memory The Long Day Closes and Kurosawa's 2008 surreal domestic melodrama Tokyo Sonata. We're joined as well by Melissa to preview this year's festival, running down some new obscurities, interesting documentaries, much-anticipated archival presentations and more. All that, plus cameo appearances from TS Eliot and Paul Verlaine.

With Mike on vacation his week Sean is joined by Seattle Screen Scene writer Melissa Tamminga to discuss Edward Yang's long sought after 1990 epic A Brighter Summer Day, which has just recently been released by the Criterion Collection, and Soi Cheang's action film SPL 2: A Time for Consequences, starring Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, which will be released here in the US as Kill Zone 2 in a couple of weeks. They also pick their essential Violent Youth films, take a look ahead to what's coming soon to Seattle (and Bellingham) Screens and talk about Prince's classic 1984 film Purple Rain.

This is the debut episode of The Frances Farmer Show. Each episode we talk about an older movie and a newer movie and a bunch of other things besides, with a special, but by no means exclusive, look at cinematic goings-on in the Seattle area. This week, we discuss Howard Hawks's 1946 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall film noir The Big Sleep and David Lynch's prequel to his acclaimed early 90s television series Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. We also take a look back at last week's Oscars, a look ahead to what's coming to Seattle Screens and a look all around the career of David Lynch.

We interrupt your Oscar weekend with a Special Announcement. The show is changing names and changing homes. Nothing else major will change. The show will still be in the same format and be found on the same podcast feed. But we're moving the show over to Seattle Screen Scene in an attempt to streamline our endeavors. Hopefully this will cause very little disruption in all of our lives.

In anticipation of next week's Academy Awards, Mike and Sean run down their picks in the top categories, both who they think will win and who should win the awards, out of all the films and performances from 2015. They also start their year-long exploration of the films of 1946 with one of that year's Best Picture contenders, The Razor's Edge, with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, and Jacques Tourneur's Western Canyon Passage, starring Dana Andrews, in some circles now one of the highly regarded films of that year, but which then received only one Oscar nomination (for Best Song).

This week, Mike and Sean tackle two harrowing films about revenge and economics from master auteurs. First up is Akira Kurosawa's 1960 The Bad Sleep Well, starring Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori and Takashi Shimura, that's followed by Claire Denis's 2013 film Bastards, with Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni and Michel Subor. They also pick their essential Capitalism is the Devil movies, discuss the career of Toshiro Mifune and check out What Mike's been Watching.

This week Mike and Sean take a look at an early work by the late director Chantal Akerman, her feature debut Je tu il elle, along with a 1965 film by director Agnès Varda, Le bonheur. They also put a cap on their discussions of the 2015 Vancouver International Film festival, with some thoughts on Jia Zhangke's Mountains May Depart, Corneliu Porumboiu's The Treasure, Sylvia Chang's Murmur of the Hearts, Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days and, yet again, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin.

On this very special episode, Sean and Mike make their fourth annual Top Ten Films of All-Time selections. Films noirs, Great Actresses, Silent Comedies, Hong Kong movies, terrible pronunciation of French words and much much more!

On the occasion of its single showing in Seattle this week, Mike and Sean talk about John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, with Chow Yun-fat, Ti Lung and Leslie Cheung. They also discuss Michael Mann's Blackhat, with Chris Hemsworth and Tang Wei, out now on video and one of the best films of the year so far. And they argue about Pixar's latest, Inside Out, celebrate Mel Brooks's birthday and make their picks for the Essential American Movie.

Mike and Sean take a look back at their month with the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival. Their discoveries, surprises, disappointments, the best, the worst and the most SIFF moments of this year in the world's longest film festival.

About midway through the marathon that is the Seattle International Film Festival, Sean and Mike take a moment to sit down and talk a bit about what's happened so far and what else there is to see. But mostly, this is the interview Mike did with Love & Mercy composer Atticus Ross.