Episode 34: 1977 with Jordan Hoffman
A podcast about the great movie years.
Beloved film critic and niche culture aficionado Jordan Hoffman was wise enough to call dibs quite some time ago on not only one of the great years of the ‘70s, but great movie years, period—a game-changing 12 months for cinema, thanks to a pair of sci-fi smashes, a modest romantic comedy, and a big movie with a bigger soundtrack. And if you know Jordan personally, you won’t be surprise that his fifth pick is, well, jam-band-ccentric. Come for the high-profile flicks, stay for the tales of Jordan’s charming New Jersey youth!
If you’d like to watch NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell - a thing you should definitely do - you can do that here:
Star Wars is streaming on Disney+ in, of course, only the terrible, mucked-with “Special Edition” version. If you want to see it as it was seen (and embraced) in 1977, well, you can come over to Jason’s and watch it on laserdisc:
Or you can venture to one of the, shall we say, less legal corners of the torrenting world. We’re certainly not endorsing that, of course, merely noting that the phrase that pays is “Star Wars Despecialized.”
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is streaming on Tubi (in the director’s cut), and available for digital rental or purchase, though again, we highly recommend the Blu-ray or 4K editions that include all of the versions. Here’s the James Lipton clip that Jordan references:
Annie Hall is streaming on Cinemax and DirecTV and available for digital rental or purchase. If you’d like to know more about its very different original version, here’s a thorough overview.
Saturday Night Fever is streaming on Paramount+ and MGM+, and available for rental or purchase from the usual suspects.
The Grateful Dead Movie, as we discuss, is (astonishingly) legally available right there on YouTube:
You can also buy or rent it, if you’re so inclined. And here’s the 5/8/77 Grateful Dead show on Spotify that Jordan mentions:
Oh! And you can buy The Star Trek Book of Friendship, which Jordan co-wrote, here.
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 Between the Lines and Peppermint Soda (and here’s something Jason wrote for the latter at The Playlist.)
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).