Monday, January 17, 2022

What did Steven Soderbergh watch on Halloween in 2021?

As a movie buff --ahem-- "cinefile," I look forward every year to director Steven Soderbergh's "Seen, Read," blog post, a meticulously curated list of all the media he consumed that year, by date.  My first stop, always, is what he watched on October 31st, Halloween...

This year on October 31st, as in many past years, Mr. Soderbergh didn't watch anything horror, or even anything scary-adjacent.  It was HBO's Succession (a show I have yet to dive into, myself).  

However, looking back a few days to 10/30, the Saturday of what we would call "Halloweekend," he had a lovely marathon:

He started with an episode of Extrapolations--- an upcoming anthology show on Apple TV+ about the repercussions of climate change-- which is scary on a certain level.  He followed that with the original The Fly movie from 1958.  A great creature feature from the heyday of such films.  

He moved on to Patricia Highsmith--- unclear if that's a TV show, or book (maybe he forgot the italics?), but she is the writer of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (among many other classics).  From there it was further tooling around the Apple TV plus-iverse to 1971, the music documentary.  Maybe as a palette cleanser?

Seeing this progression, let's jump back to that Patricia Highsmith entry:  perhaps it's an episode of Chillers which is ALSO on Apple TV+.  An anthology series hosted by Psycho's Anthony Perkins, each episode is based on one of Patricia Highsmith's short stories.  Ah HA!  [Note to self--- check out that anthology series!]

From there, he watched Alfred Hitchcock's interview on Dick Cavett (are we seeing the Hitchcockian theme, here?).  And then he had the show-closer modern classic, John Carpenter's The Thing.

I love these lists because it's a real insight into how one falls down a rabbit hole of information, flowing from item to item.  Taking the movies themselves out of the flow, the idea of a double-feature creature feature of the original The Fly and the remake The Thing is intriguing to me.  How would those two films complement and accent each other?  A man changing externally in the former, and men changing internally in the latter.  See?  Intriguing.  I might have to try watching those together, myself.  

Feel free to pore over the whole year yourself HERE.  You'll be surprised and perhaps inspired by what you find.  ("Wait he watched Jaws THREE TIMES that year?!")

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