Madeline
Movie Crush is my go to movie podcast to enhance my movie knowledge. One of the reasons I enjoy the podcast is that I have taken my limited movie knowledge and have enhanced it tenfold just by watching the movie and then listening to professional movie workers talk about it. Below are the movies I have learned the most from while listening to Movie Crush.
Barry Lyndon
I knew I loved Stanley Kubrick long before I knew much about movies or listened to Movie Crush. But it was not until I watched Barry Lyndon with Movie Crush that I understood why his movies were as good as they are. I started to understand how Stanley Kubrick works and what signatures of his movies are. As Kubrick is one of the greatest of all time movie makers, studying him along with experts absolutely enhanced my limited movie knowledge.
Force Majeur
The American version of this movie has ruined this Swedish version for most Americans. Although I never saw the American version of Force Majeure, I can not picture the same dark comedy being done well with Will Farrell. This movie was created with such care to take such a traumatizing subject and make light of it. It never would have landed on my radar of movies if it was not for Movie Crush. But this movie was very much full of very specific styling I had never seen before. I had come to my own conclusions about this movie, but as always, Movie Crush elevated what I was already thinking.
Marriage Story
When I watched Marriage Story I did not really understand the purpose of it. Why was it important? Why was this one of the biggest movies of the year? How did the makers attract such talent? How does this not fit into some of these chick flick movies? Movie Crush answered all these questions and more for me. The podcast was able to spell out why it was such an important movie in the movie industry. Why the layout of the story was so important and all the nuances of the different scenes.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles has been a childhood movie that has a special place in my memory. I watched it when it came out on VHS as a child and that is where this movie fits into my life. It does not strike me as a magical and important movie. It does not appear to be a film that would be brought up on a movie discussion podcast. Nor did I ever expect to watch it as an adult with intention. Instead, I see it as a great comedy from the legends Steve Martin and John Candy. But in true Movie Crush fashion, the subtlety of this movie is what makes it so great! Even learning about what appears to be sugar coated movies and what goes on behind the scenes enhances my movie knowledge.
Watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Paranoid Park
I cannot pretend that I had enjoyed this movie. The story was a bit bazaar, it was very slow, and the editing and style was very much of someone studying movie creation and was trying to play with and mix way too much style. But then the Movie Crush guys explained that although it seemed uneducated, it was actually more elevated than it first seems and in the end enhanced my limited movie knowledge. I’m still not going to pretend I liked Paranoid Park, but I can at least appricate it.
Margaret
Similar to many of the other movies on this list, I didn’t quite get it. I made a mental note of a few things that I thought were interesting, but it was not until listening to the podcast episode, all the details became clear as day and the movie suddenly became more elevated that I previously had observed. While listening to the podcast I had a lot of “ohh now I understand” moments. I thought the movie was entertaining but the podcast enhanced my limited movie knowledge by highlighting the aspects I did not see for myself.
