Latest news with #YouMustRememberThis
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guide #186: Five rules to keep your podcast feed Marie Kondo tidy
I regret to report that my podcast feed has been a bit of a state recently. Granted, this might not be the most pressing issue facing society right now, but still, it is the sort of persistent niggle that can make a day 0.01% less enjoyable, like a stone in your shoe, or the stubborn persistence of Piers Morgan in public life. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. For a long time things seemed to be working well: I was subscribed to a lot of podcasts, but these were a decent balance of shows I would listen to every week, or even every day, and ones I would periodically dip in and out of every few months. My feed was in perfect balance. I was a Zen listener, crouched in the lotus position while the latest episode of You Must Remember This wafted through the speakers. But at some point, something slipped. Maybe I had subscribed to too many podcasts. Maybe I had less time to listen to them. Or maybe the podcasts I listened to were getting longer (a persistent podcast gripe of ours on the Guide). Regardless, every commute I was greeted by a sea of excellent shows and I couldn't possibly listen to all of them. Take, for example, the dilemma I faced on Tuesday morning. Do I listen to one of the many news pods on my feed, all of which are trying to make sense of the still-blazing Trump tariffs bin fire? Should I plump for The Big Picture podcast, which is tackling the main story in cinema this week: the bewildering success of A Minecraft Movie. Or do I go with its sister podcast, The Watch, which is parsing the White Lotus finale? Or former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and ex-FT honcho Lionel Barber putting the press to rights in their Media Confidential podcast? Maybe I should try a new podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, off the back of a glowing review from Vulture's podcast newsletter, 1.5x Speed? Or should I just give up choosing, and opt for some music instead (which then creates its own distinct problem of what to listen to)? In the end I went with The Watch's White Lotus recap, to make sense of a finale that I had found slightly unsatisfying. But I must have spent a good four minutes agonising over that extremely minor decision, starting and stopping podcasts at random, paralysed by choice. And the same problem would present itself again the next morning, when a whole new cohort of enticing podcasts would drop into my feed. Enough! Something has to change. It's time to go full Kondo on my podcast logjam. A brutal cull is in order. Here are the Guide's rules for getting to grips with your podcast feed. You're not going to listen to all those daily news podcasts Yes, all of them are well researched and compellingly told. But there's about 570 of them and many are going to be tackling the same topic. Stick to two at most, one of which should of course be the Guardian's excellent Today in Focus. The same rule can be applied to business, politics or football podcasts. Especially football podcasts (listen to Football Weekly, of course, pictured above) – but how many variations of 'Manchester United are a complete laughing stock' do you really need to hear in one morning? (Answer: actually quite a lot in my case). Don't be a completist Obviously some serialised, narrative podcasts – like, say, Serial – need to be listened to from start to finish. But in the case of those shows without a set terminus, don't be afraid to skip the odd episode, when its hosts are talking about something you have little interest in (sorry Gastropod, but I'm not going to be listening to that 51-minute deep dive into quinoa), or when they have a guest you actively dislike. This latter point is particularly true of comedy podcasts, humour being subjective and all that – although the downside there is that in a future episode you will encounter a callback to a joke that sails miles over your head. Tackle the less pressing podcasts in one go Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion Yes, that Rest is History eight-parter on General Custer might look tantalising now, but you're not going to be fully engaged while listening to it in chunks on various commutes, are you? Instead, hold on to them for a single, glorious binge during a long drive or a big ironing pile – and then impress your friends in the pub with your detailed recounting of the battle of Little Bighorn. They'll thank you. (They won't.) When a series ends, unsubscribe Not every podcast goes on indefinitely. Sometimes the presenters run out of topics, or fall out, or a show just reaches a natural end point. But sneaky producers have a habit of adding a new, unrelated series from the same production house on to the feed of a dead or dormant podcast. Not only does that trick you into thinking that your favourite podcast has returned, but it adds to the clutter of your podcast feed. So make sure to click unsubscribe when a series shuffles off its digital coil. And don't be afraid to let go Sometimes a podcast that, for years had been a must listen suddenly becomes inessential: you go months without pressing play, and when you do, you hardly feel compelled to return to it. Maybe it feels like the show's remit has slowly changed. Or maybe the host's voice has just started to grate on you. Whatever the reason, it's probably better to cut ties entirely rather than leaving it to loiter in your already stuffed feed, then feeling guilty whenever you see the cover artwork. It's time to say goodbye. If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Dead white men are what I'm legitimately interested in': podcaster Karina Longworth on the forgotten work of Hollywood titans
'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' So runs the most famous line from John Ford's elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell 'the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century', as she puts it in the show's introduction. Its title is lifted from the jazz standard As Time Goes By ('You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss …') as featured in Casablanca. Hearing that wistful, timeworn lyric, it is easy to overlook the imperative hiding in plain sight. With each fastidiously researched and gloriously entertaining episode, Longworth seems to be telling us: you must remember this. To not do so, or to allow fact to curdle into legend, would be unconscionable. 'I don't want to be a schoolmarm scolding people for forgetting,' she says from a sunny upstairs room in the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out whodunnits and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 'But I think we can only understand where we are at and where we're going if we look to where we've been.' One reason she steers clear of modern topics on the podcast is the possible conflict of interest with her husband's career. Jamie Lee Curtis's appearance in the original Knives Out, for instance, precluded Longworth from ever making an episode about that actor's parents, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, even though they would be ideal subjects. As if further evidence were needed of her passion for the past, a framed poster of Marcel Pagnol's 1936 melodrama César dominates the wall behind her today. Later, she will dismiss several questions about modern Hollywood with the same bored riposte: 'I don't care about new movies.' That was one of the reasons she hung up her pen at the LA Weekly in 2012. Shortly before quitting, she mocked James Bond's backstory in Skyfall as his 'formative sads' and wrote the film off as 'Downton Abbey with cybercrime and shower sex'. She dismissed Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris as 'a Bill and Ted sequel for cultural studies majors', and said Joss Whedon was 'crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd' in the first Avengers movie. Film criticism's loss is cinema history's gain. Over 11 years of You Must Remember This, Longworth has covered in granular, invigorating detail everything from the anti-communist blacklist to the influence of Charles Manson and the Hollywood phenomenon of the dead blonde. She is a factchecker par excellence – a full 19 episodes were devoted to clearing up the scurrilous, spiteful untruths in Kenneth Anger's gossip bible Hollywood Babylon. She is also the ally any neglected genius would want on their side, as proved by her season on the late Polly Platt, a largely unsung figure in the careers of Peter Bogdanovich and Wes Anderson. The latest series, The Old Man Is Still Alive, addresses the declining years of 14 cinematic titans, among them Vincente Minnelli, whose visually groundbreaking The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sparked the idea for the season after Longworth saw it in Paris on a rainy Saturday evening in 2023. 'It's from the early 1960s but it feels proto-psychedelic. Seeing it reminded me why I started the podcast: to talk about things that have been forgotten.' With that in mind, she gives us the Hitchcock not of Vertigo and Psycho but of the astringent Frenzy and the meandering Family Plot; the John Ford of Cheyenne Autumn, a well-meaning if not wholly effective critique of the western's values; and the Billy Wilder drawn back to the mournful territory of Sunset Boulevard in Fedora. It's fascinating to hear Longworth charting the corkscrew turns these film-makers took as they twisted themselves out of shape trying to keep up with the times. But there's no escaping the fact that she has taken on a supremely unfashionable topic: dead white men. A deliberate provocation? 'No, it's what I'm legitimately interested in,' she scoffs. 'My podcast is really hard to make. I can only do it if I care about the subject. Sure, in the world right now there is anger at specific older white men. Part of it is an impulse to say: 'We should just burn it all down and start again.' But history makes us who we are today.' As a student, she was taught the importance of DW Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation. 'There was only a cursory conversation around whether the film was racist,' she recalls. 'It was primarily all about the technique. I don't think that's the way to do it either, but nor do I think we should burn all copies of The Birth of a Nation. That sets a dangerous precedent.' The phrase 'institutional memory' crops up in the new series, and it is this, along with the nuance of considered investigation over kneejerk reaction, that Longworth is fighting to defend. That said, people today are time-poor and inundated with viewing options. With the BFI Southbank hosting a month-long series of the movies covered in the podcast, some of which Longworth will be introducing in person, how does she think potential audiences will respond to the invitation to sample, say, The Only Game in Town, starring Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor? By her own admission, it is 'the least successful of the George Stevens films I've seen, [though] aesthetically it has its moments'. Hardly a ringing endorsement. 'I don't care,' she shrugs. 'I'm not trying to change the paradigm. I'm just reacting to movies the way I react to them.' Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion By and large, the age of 60 is the point at which these figures, many of whom began their careers in the silent era, 'got weird' as they struggled to adapt to cultural changes. When I suggest that ageism is no longer as prevalent now that Martin Scorsese is revered at 82, while Ridley Scott is whooshing along like a runaway train at 87, she disagrees vehemently. 'Look at Megalopolis and the way Coppola was treated as if he was a doddering old man foolishly spending his family's legacy. Even with Scorsese, there's this sense of: 'Aw, the old man is trying to do something else before he dies!' And that's the positive spin. The negative one is: 'Why won't he just make shorter movies?'' Along with erudition and tireless research, listeners of You Must Remember This get Longworth's shimmering writing (on William Wyler's How to Steal a Million: 'Dressed in a slip, a car coat and rain boots, Audrey Hepburn invents grunge') and plenty of shade (to anyone defending Otto Preminger's last film, The Human Factor, she says: 'You do you, babe'). It's all delivered in her alluring conspiratorial tones, which suggest a film noir schemer. Or, as one online fan put it, 'a sexy ghost'. When I ask how this exaggerated vocal style evolved from the chattier early episodes, she looks unimpressed. 'I'm not trying to do anything differently,' she says. One indisputable change in the new season is that, to adapt TS Eliot and Charles Dickens, she do the directors in different voices. Whereas she once hired actors, even enlisting her husband to play John Huston, she now takes on every role herself, including an amusing Hitchcock with a severe case of irritable vowel syndrome. Does this have anything to do with her own background as a would-be child actor in LA? 'I'm not acting,' she says firmly. 'I'm doing what I would do if I were telling these stories at a cocktail party.' It was her mother who steered her into auditions as a child. 'She wanted to be an artist and a model. When she had me, she stopped pursuing work outside of the house. That was not the right decision for her, and she killed herself when I was 11. She was in a situation common to many people of her generation: they had been told to want something and then, when they got it, it wasn't fulfilling and they didn't know what to do about that.' Longworth's acting career was short-lived. 'I had trouble controlling my body and my face. A lot of that came from nervousness at being looked at. I still don't like it. The podcast is the only way I can be free to do any kind of performance because nobody's watching.' Channelling Greta Garbo and providing our conversation with a natural end, she says: 'I want to be alone.' You Must Remember This Presents … The Old Man is Still Alive is at BFI Southbank, London SE1, until 30 April
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson review – a beautiful, terrifying portrait of dementia
Sean Wilson's short but searching exploration of dementia opens as Grace, an elderly widow, walks down the middle of a busy road. This episode reveals the ways in which Grace's world can be both deeply disorienting and uncannily beautiful: she mistakes the headlights of cars for torches carried by 'children, hand in hand, running at an impossible speed'. This near miss leads her daughter Liz to place her mother in a nursing home, where Grace struggles to come to terms with her new living circumstances. Wilson's decision to show us Grace in many forms and moments of time is what sets You Must Remember This apart: we see her not only as an elderly woman, but also as a girl, a daughter, a teenager, a mother and a wife. It's a detailed portrait, made all the more complex by Wilson's use of flashbacks; every part of Grace's life we see comes in the form of a memory that she experiences as the present. These past and present threads weave together melancholy, longing, regret, sadness – but also happiness and joy: 'The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind.' The access we get to Grace's interior state is beautiful, intimate and terrifying. The daily symptoms of her disease allow Wilson to use flashbacks in a way that isn't intrusive, for the past is also Grace's present. You Must Remember This is at once a novel about dementia, but also memory. Grace's state of being frustrates and alienates Liz, who constantly battles to get through to her mother. Only rarely do they connect. 'We've got to look on the bright side, Mum. We've got to keep moving forward, that's the important thing. Keep our spirits up,' she tells Grace, who muses: 'What a strange word. Spirits. The word seems to ring in her mind, repeating over and over, crowding her thoughts and pushing out all others until it's replaced by a sound.' Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning I've never read a novel entirely focused on dementia. To his credit, Wilson doesn't look away from the reality of something that affects the lives of millions around the world and it makes for a harrowing read. We feel Grace's frustration, her disorientation. Sounds, in particular, seem to create confusion in her. Time and again, different contexts clash – something someone says to Grace in the present links with something she is thinking about the past. At first, I found the discontinuous numbering of the chapters to be a kind of challenge to the reader – starting with chapter 10, then seven, 11, 12, eight, one, and so on. Was I supposed to reorder a fractured, scattered collection of memories? As the novel progressed, I gave up on trying. But Wilson is showing us Grace's confusion – the order of events isn't important. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Much of the book touches on Grace's difficult childhood and adolescence, particularly the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Initially, I struggled to understand the significance of Grace's early life in shaping her present. There's also an uneasy balance between the two major 'scenes' of this story; Grace's dementia defines her present, but she's also deeply troubled by the past, and I wanted to know more about it. Wilson's writing is often hauntingly beautiful and at its best when he deploys metaphors to immerse us in Grace's experience. 'Some days, yesterday is bright and full of colour, a picture in detail, tiny brushstrokes laid one beside the other. On other days, yesterday is like […] Big canvases with splashes of colour moving in all directions.' Despite the sadness at the core of You Must Remember This, there are moments of tenderness in this novel. Wilson has taken on a challenging subject and, while not a resounding success, this book is a valuable, eye-opening contribution to the literature of dementia. You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson is published by Affirm Press ($24.99)
