Episode 267 – THE GREEN KNIGHT

Runtime90 minutes Show Contents 0:00 Introduction 2:41 Know Your Enemy with Guest Kurt Halfyard 20:42 The New Slang: THE GREEN KNIGHT 65:53 The Other Side: Kurt and Ryan talk further reading after David Lowery’s film Thoughts From Your Host… Funny – once upon a time, posting a ninety-minute episode would have come with a note about how my guest and I just couldn’t shut up about a movie and decided just to keep chatting until we were blue in the face. Nowadays it’s par for the course. “Podcast Creep” is real dear friends. Not only is it “par for the course”, but for today’s guest and me, it actually qualifies as a succinct conversation! I guess we were just so excited to be hanging out again that we wanted to get back to drinking before I had to get back home. I’m grateful for the invitation and the conversation…especially as a crazy month awaits. Pull up a chair and enjoy! Links mentioned in Episode 267… The dinner scene in BIG NIGHT: The RATATOUILLE “perspective dolly”: David Bowie in THE PRESTIGE, uttering Kurt’s line of choice at 39 seconds: Guillermo del Toro’s thoughts on monsters: In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable “The Buried Giant” by Kazuo Ishiguro on Goodreads Winchester Chronicles dispatch no. 8, where Kurt joined me to discuss THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER. Matineecast Episode 60, where Matthew Brown and I fawn over PROMETHEUS Kurt’s Twitter Instagram feed can be found here. Comments and feedback are welcome, and thank you very much for listening.  Enjoy!