Episode 33: 1982 with Jen Chaney
A podcast about the great movie years.
Vulture TV critic and author (buy her book As If: The Oral History of “Clueless” As Told by Amy Heckerling and the Cast and Crew here!) Jen Chaney was, like us, a young and deeply impressionable moviegoer in the year of our Lord 1982, when the Spielberg double-tap of E.T. and Poltergeist lit up our dreams and haunted our nightmares. We talk all about both of those movies, as well as the sex comedies, sci-fi bummers, and romantic comedies that made '82 feel like, really and truly, the first year of '80s moviemaking, and not some last grasp at the ol’ 1970s.
As mentioned in the headlines, Jason has a new piece up at the New York Times about the deaths on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie in the summer of 1982. You can read that here (gift link, no paywall).
E.T. is currently available for digital rental or purchase, but its 4K Blu-ray is really dynamite as well—and priced to move! And here is the full Martin Amis piece that we read from in the episode.
Poltergeist is also only available to rent or buy digitally, and it also has an A+ 4K. If you’d like to read more about the “who really directed it” controversy, there are plenty of places to do so, but we’d recommend this from Dread Central, this from MEL, and stars Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams addressing the controversy, and some of the other spooky stories from the set, for Vanity Fair.
Fast Times is currently streaming on TUBI, available for digital rental or purchase, and has a fab Criterion Blu-ray (which also includes the much-different TV cut, with many deleted scenes re-inserted to fill time).
Diner is available for digital rental or purchase, as is Tootsie, though the latter also has a very good Criterion Blu-ray. And here’s something Jason wrote about Tootsie when that disc was released (sorry about the giant holes where pictures should be on that now-dead site).
As always, if you’d like to log and review these yourself, head on over to our list page on Letterboxd.
And if you somehow haven’t yet subscribed to MUBI, click on over to mubi.com/averygoodyear and you can get a 30-day free membership to try out their curated streaming service. Our recommendations for MUBI movies this week were Cane River and Black Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp).
Oh, and hey, have you upgraded to a paid subscription yet? You can do that right here, and here’s Mike and I telling you what it’ll get you (spoiler: bonus episodes, bonus posts, and our undying love).