Thursday, April 18, 2019

Thursday Movie Picks #249: Interview



This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is interviews, and I have to admit that it's one I had to stop and think about for a while. But, after some thinking, I was able to come up with three movies that are all quite different from one another:

Citizen Kane (1941). People used this one for last week's "Let's start at the end" theme, but it also fits here since the three segments are set up as a newsreall reporter interviewing three different people who knew Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles).

ABBA: The Movie (1977). A document of the Swedish supergroup's 1977 concert tour to Australia, the framing story has a country radio DJ being given the task of getting an interview with ABBA for a special his radio station is doing, but always either getting blocked or being just one step behind the Swedes. There are also man on the street style interviews with what seem to be mostly non-actors, notably a bunch of little girls at a ballet studio

The King of Comedy (1982). Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) has an unhealthy obsession with Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), host of the #1 late-night talk show. When he saves Jerry from a groupie, he think's it's his way in to a tryout to do stand-up on Jerry's show. Rupert has been practicing for quite some time, doing interviews with cardboard cutouts in his basement. When Rupert gets rebuffed, he resorts to some rather extreme measures.

3 comments:

Birgit said...

We match with Citizen Kane! I love ABBA and so I have seen this documentary style show which I obviously enjoyed. I haven’t seen The King Of Comedy for a couple of decades and it’s quite good and rather...icky.

Brittani Burnham said...

The only one of yours I've seen this week is Citizen Kane, but I like ABBA and would probably definitely watch a documentary on them.

Ted S. (Just a Cineast) said...

"Document", not "documentary", if I didn't make that clear enough. It's not quite a concert film, either, since there's the wafer-thin plot and a lot of non-concert footage, some of which may have been done especially for the movie, since the band members speak English at some points where I thought they might have used Swedish in real life.

There's backstage footage of Björn and Benny doing folk songs on the concertina that was probably spontaneous, and the concert footage all looks like real concerts where the cameras had to film defensively as opposed to the performance being designed for the cameras as in A Hard Day's Night.