Criterion reached out to me recently to talk about their new release of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. I was delighted to see them announce a 4K remaster of the film. My own copy is from so long ago that I’m pretty sure it was in 480p. At first, I was just interested in seeing the disc, but I saw them mention that François Girard was going to be available for a few interviews.

My thanks to Diana and the fine folks over at Criterion, who had to really work to pin the time down for my chat with Girard. The new 4K release is a thing of breathtaking beauty, so make sure you pick it up in stores now. My thanks to François Girard, who was every bit as interesting and erudite as I hoped he’d be. And my thanks to Craig and Aundria for continuing to indulge my efforts to try to turn The Hip Pocket into something special for film fans of all types.

We’ll be back with new episodes of The Hip Pocket on August 29, and we’re already watching movies, one after another, to get ready for the great guests we’ve got lined up. Here’s hoping you guys are enjoying all of this as much as we are.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

I’ve never met PETER FILARDI or had, to the best of my knowledge, any contact with him. I certainly know his work. Both Flatliners and The Craft were big movies when they came out, and Filardi was at Fantasia, the Montreal film festival I attended for several years, with his movie Ricky 6 the first time I went. He’s attending the Chattanooga Film Festival this year with his new short film, Damn Handy, and when they pitched him the basic premise of our show, he said he was interested.

As soon as we started communicating about his hip pocket choices, I knew we were in for a good show. Peter is thoughtful, a lifelong film fan who came to his craft (ha!) in a kind of odd sideways manner. We decided to talk about movies that he knew first as books because he didn’t live in a place where he had access to movies when he was young, and his three films are all big beautiful significant films.

First up, we talk about Roman Polanski’s brilliant and haunted adaptation of Macbeth. Next up, it’s The Black Stallion, a gorgeous piece of pure cinema. And finally, it’s the fantastic and feisty One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. All three of those films are incredible, and any one of them would be enough for a full episode, but to discuss all three in one conversation? Delightful.

Finally, we picked The World According to Garp as our response film, for reasons I explain in the episode, and it feels like it was a perfect punctuation mark to the larger conversation. While we may have started the conversation as complete strangers, by the time we wrapped things up with Peter, it felt like all of us had gotten to know each other a bit better, which is the exact point of the show.

A huge thanks to Dustin at CFF and to all the fine folks who work to put on such a great event for their audience every year. It is an honor to have been invited, and I suspect this is just the first in a series of festival appearances and live shows we’re going to do for The Hip Pocket. Here’s hoping the next time we work with CFF, it’s live and in person, all three of us together.

But wait! Would you like to actually watch this episode instead of just listening to it? Well, then, Chattanooga Film Festival has some terrific news for you. Visit their YouTube channel to see it!

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

BRIAN DUFFIELD is a writer/director who has been one of the most acclaimed (and busiest) screenwriters of the last decade. He has shown up on The Black List, the annual selection of the best-loved unproduced scripts in Hollywood, roughly 50 times in the last ten years, which is mathematically confusing but impressive. We talk about his unusual upbringing in this episode, and we dig into just how wild it is that he grew up denied of mainstream pop culture, only to become the creator of Spontaneous and No One Will Save You. His upcoming adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s wildly popular novel Whalefall is in production now, but he took some time to join us with one of the most personal line-ups of the season.

He chose three films that tell an unusual story about his desire to become a storyteller. First up, there’s the 1973 Christian exploitation film A Thief in the Night, a film that was new to all three of us. Then he chose The Prince of Egypt, the animated musical that kicked off DreamWorks Animation. Finally, he selected the sweaty Southern drama, Black Snake Moan, and he managed to tell us a story that tied all three of these films together in a way I found both surprising and completely logical.

Our reaction film for him is the Lars Von Trier feel-bad epic Breaking the Waves, one of the few films that ever stirred real feelings of faith in me, an avowed atheist.

And finally, for the last Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry for the season, I chose Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant, beautiful mediation on life, Ikiru.

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.
Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. 
It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.