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Hi4H’s 2014 Year In Review

2014 was a pretty great year for Hell Is For Hyphenates. We reached our 50^th episode, we had our first ever live show at the Sydney Film Festival, we landed guests such as Lynn Shelton and Joe Swanberg, and, most importantly, we started this blog.

We thought this would be a good opportunity to take stock, and make some lists that isn't the traditional â€œBest Ofâ€ (those will come later). Please feel free to chime in with your own answers in the comments.

Top five Hi4H film discoveries (that you hadn't seen before)?

Paul: The Long Goodbye (1973, Altman - I'm restricting myself to one film per filmmaker, so just know I could've easily filled this list with Altmans: California Split and HealtH chief among them), M. Hulot's Holiday (1953, Tati), An Unmarried Woman (1978, Mazursky), Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974, Hough), Subway (1985, Besson).

Lee: I'm also gonna limit it to one per filmmaker to keep things slightly easier. Images (1972, Altman), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969, Mazursky), Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974, Hough), Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002, Maddin), Beau Travail (1999, Denis).

Which new filmmakers to emerge in 2014 are you most excited about?

Paul: Can't I just say â€œXavier Dolanâ€ five times? No? Okay. But Xavier Dolan is my clear #1 here. While he's been making films since 2009, I saw four of his five features - two of which were premieres - in 2014. A preternatural wunderkind who brings a unique blend of social realism, melodrama and bold cinematic style to bear, with uncommon power and moxie. Ana Lily Amirpour (just for being supercool and singular of vision), Jennifer Kent (for bringing a dramatic, thematic approach back to horror), Damien Chazelle (while Whiplash blew others away more than me, there was an uncommon command of craft - and an interesting voice - I'm keen to see more of), Joe & Anthony Russo: with one film, these frequent sitcom directors managed to single-handedly restore my faith in the Marvel Studios model.

Lee: So, so many. Gillian Rospierre (Obvious Child), Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior), Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Charlie McDowell (The One I Love), Lake Bell (In a World…), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night), Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays). I'm excited about what everyone in this group will make next.

Five filmmakers you'd like to see us cover on the show?

Paul: Because they're Masters: Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, Mario Bava. Because I want to examine their career in context: John Carpenter.

Lee: I'm gonna eschew the obvious names (Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kubrick), because they are givens, and go with Kenji Mizoguchi, AgnÃ¨s Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexandr Sokurov, Douglas Sirk. Is that a bit of a pretentious list? If so, replace one of those names with, I don't know, Brett Ratner. Or, better yet, don't.

Given we're an Australian show, what were your favourite Australian films of the year?

Paul: 1) Cut Snake; 2) Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films; 3) The Rover; 4) The Babadook; 5) The Infinite Man.

Lee: 1) The Babadook; 2) Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films; 3) The Rover; 4) Charlie’s Country; 5) Canopy. The fact that this list was so difficult to curate speaks to what a great year it was for Australian cinema.

Most Anticipated Films of 2015?

Paul: 1) The Hateful Eight (was there ever any doubt??); 2) Inherent Vice; 3) Tomorrowland; 4) Foxcatcher; 5) Serial Season 2… oh, it has to be films? Okay… Mad Max: Fury Road.

Lee: 1) Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice; 2) Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron; 3) Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight; 4) Todd Haynes' Carol; 5) Martin Scorsese's Silence.

Thank you all for listening this year. We hope you enjoyed it, and we hope you enjoy everything to come in 2015. We have some big plans we can't wait to tell you about.

Big thanks to everyone who helped us out over the year, from our guests to the good people at the Sydney Film Festival, and everyone who loaned us the DVDs and autobiographies we needed for research. Huge thanks to our loyal artist Caroline McCurdy, who did all of our amazing artwork and design.

In the meantime, 2014 isn't done yet! We have our final show for 2014 coming out on the morning of December 31, featuring Richard Watts talking about the films of Gregg Araki, so make sure you kick off your New Year's Eve plans with our latest show!

The Gregg Araki Cheat Sheet

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Want to be knowledgeable about our filmmaker of the month without committing yourself to an entire filmography? Then you need the Hell Is For Hyphenates Cheat Sheet: a suggested double that will make you an insta-expert in the director we're about to discussâ€¦

TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993) and MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004)

Gregg Araki was one of the biggest names in the New Queer Cinema movement, and of his early films, Totally F***ed Up is probably the best example of this. The first part of Araki's thematic Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy is angsty and lighthearted, dramatic and hilarious. It's stylish but also very genuine, and has a potent MTV aesthetic that makes it feel very, very 1993. And we mean that in a good way. After that, give Mysterious Skin a spin. This is not particularly emblematic of his work, but it's key to understanding Araki as a filmmaker, and features him at the height of his talents. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a teenage hustler, unable to shake off the memories of a childhood trauma. It's full-on yet brilliant, and is career-defining stuff from Araki as well as his cast. It simply must be seen.

Substitutions: If you can't get Totally F***ed Up, try The Doom Generation (1995). If you can't get Mysterious Skin, try Kaboom (2010).

The Hidden Gem: We like to recommend a film that's off the beaten path, but that term applies to nearly everything Araki made. Nevertheless, you should try for Splendor (1999), his polygamous romantic comedy that is equal parts parody and sincerity.

The next episode of Hell Is For Hyphenates, featuring Richard Watts talking Gregg Araki, will be released on the morning of December 31 (AEST).

Win a Lynn Shelton DVD Pack!

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The last competition we ran got such a great response, we thought we'd run another. Because giving you things gives us joy. Joy.

This September past we had the wonderful filmmaker Lynn Shelton on the show. Thanks to Madman Entertainment, we have a DVD set featuring three of Lynn's films: Humpday, Your Sister's Sister and Touchy Feely. But that's not all! In that particular episode of Hyphenates, we reviewed the brilliantly funny New Zealand horror-comedy What We Do In The Shadows, and because Madman is so great, they're also throwing that into the mix. We know. You're like, â€œBut that's too much great stuff in one single competition!â€, but we're all about pleasure overload here at Hi4H HQ.

To win the set, simply answer the following question:

In the September 2014 episode of Hell Is For Hyphenates, Lynn Shelton mentions the name of a film that is â€œabsolutely in my top five list of films everâ€. Which film is it and who directed it?

To enter, send your answer to co*********@*****************es.com by midnight on December 31 2014 AEST. All correct answers will be put into a gigantic electronic sorting machine or possibly a hat, and the winning entry will be drawn at random. The winner will then be notified by email.

If you don't want to leave it to the fates, you can order the discs right this second from Madman: Humpday, Your Sister's Sister, Touchy Feely, What We Do In The Shadows.

Our Next Hyphenate: Richard Watts

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Arts journalist and December 2014 Hyphenate Richard Watts

Richard Watts has been on our guest wishlist since about five minutes after we came up with the concept of Hyphenates, so we're pretty excited to end 2014 with him. He is, after all, the busiest arts journalist we know, and we're still not entirely convinced there isn't a fleet of Richard Watts Clones out there covering the Australian arts scene from every angle imaginable.

If this theory is correct, then we're delighted to have one of the Clones joining us. If you're somehow not familiar with his work, Richard will this Thursday celebrate a full decade as the host of Triple R's SmartArts, he is the National Performing Arts Journalist at ArtsHub, he was the Artistic Director of Express Media for five years, and spent seven years on the board of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, including three years as chair. He has been involved in the programming of numerous festivals, including Next Wave, the National Young Writers' Festival, and the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.

So which filmmaker has Richard opted to talk about?

Drumroll please: it’s US indie director Gregg Araki!

Araki was one of the biggest names in the New Queer Cinema movement, with films such as Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987), The Long Weekend (O' Despair) (1989), The Living End (1992) and Totally F***ed Up (1993) making his name on the festival circuit.

He reached a wider audience with 1995's cult film The Doom Generation, and is probably best known for his 2004 film Mysterious Skin, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michele Trachenberg and Elisabeth Shue. This year, he made White Bird in a Blizzard, with Shailene Woodley and Eva Green.

What is it about this filmmaker that Richard so admires, and why should all good cinephiles be more familiar with Araki's name? You'll have to listen in on December 31 to find out!

Our next filmmaker of the month, Gregg Araki

Hartley On Hough

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When Mark Hartley first suggested John Hough as the filmmaker he'd want to talk about, we won't deny it: we went scurrying to IMDb to see who he was and what he'd made.

We'd definitely heard of many of those films, such as Twins of Evil, Watcher in the Woods, Escape From Witch Mountain, American Gothic, but these works were not heavily branded with the director’s name in the way of a film by, say, the Coen Bros film or David Lynch.

Hough is a jobbing director, and probably the first one we've ever talked about on the show. That in itself makes this a special episode. But we were also keen to see who the director behind Not Quite Hollywood, Machete Maidens Unleashed!, and Electric Boogaloo - three documentaries that were absolute celebrations of a type of film that rarely gets the time of day - would choose.

His choice definitely didn't disappoint. Even some of Hough's films that may seem like write-offs hold some merit, and this discussion of a lesser-known name of genre cinema is, we're confident to say, one you won't hear anyone else.

In addition, we talk about some of the month's new releases, including Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Susanne Bier's Serena, and Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler. We also look at whether childhood nostalgia clouds our judgement when it comes to bad films, or allows us to see them more clearly than we would with a critical eye.

All of this in our one hour show! Which you can listen to on iTunes, on Stitcher Smart Radio, or right here.

The John Hough Cheat Sheet

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THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973) and DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY (1974)

Normally, when we recommend two films in our Cheat Sheet, they're films that are not only great watches, but represent the filmmaker's entire body of work. But how do you represent John Hough's work? This is a guy who did Hammer Horror, war thrillers and Barbara Cartland TV movies. There's no easy pair of films that can sum all that up. So this time, we're going to simply suggest two of his best films. The Legend of Hell House is a tremendous horror, with great performances, terrific sound design, and superb direction. If you've been wondering why our guest Mark Hartley has picked Hough, the work he does in The Legend of Hell House will put that question to rest. But even better than that is his next film, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a wild thieves-evading-cops road movie with Peter Fonda, Susan George and Vic Morrow. It boasts a brilliant script, and Hough's direction is insane in all the best ways. Both of these films are a tight ninety minutes, and don't waste a nanosecond. If you want to watch a pair of great genre films this weekend, you couldn't do much better than these two.

Substitutions: If you can't get The Legend of Hell House, try the Hammer horror Twins of Evil (1971). If you can't get Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, try the assassination thriller Eyewitness (aka Sudden Terror) (1970).

The Hidden Gem: We always strive to recommend an off-the-beaten-path work from our filmmaker of the month, but pretty much everything Hough qualifies as off-the-beaten-path. Still, if you want a schlocky, supernatural horror flick starring John freakin’ Cassavetes, you might want to seek out 1982’s Incubus, even if just to see one of New Hollywood’s most compelling actors say the word “sperm” several hundred times in the most serious manner possible.

The next episode of Hell Is For Hyphenates, featuring Mark Hartley talking John Hough, will be released on the morning of November 30 (AEST).

Win a Jacques Tati Box Set!

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We know that, in addition to the one hour of free content we send into your ears every month, you're probably still wondering what we've done for you lately. That's a perfectly fair question, and we'd like to answer it in the form of a DVD giveaway.

Thanks to Madman Entertainment, we have a DVD box set of the Jacques Tati: The Restored Collection to give away to one lucky listener. The set includes everything Tati made: not just his feature films, but all the alternate edits of those films, plus his TV special Parade, plus seven of his short films and the documentary The Magnificent Tati. It's a damn impressive collection.

To win the set, simply answer the following question:

In the October 2014 episode of Hell Is For Hyphenates, we discussed the works of Jacques Tati and the effect he had on cinema. Which two modern directors do we claim were influenced by him?

To enter, send your answer to co*********@*****************es.com by midnight on 30 November 2014 AEST. All correct answers will be put into some sort of electronic randomiser (probably a hat) and the winner will be drawn at random. The winner will be notified by email.

If you don't want to leave it to the fates, you can order the set on DVD or Blu-ray right now!

Our Next Hyphenate: Mark Hartley

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We've been keen to get Mark Hartley onto the show since the very beginning. Hartley's trilogy of kinetic film documentaries - Not Quite Hollywood, Machete Maidens Unleashed and Electric Boogaloo - are celebrations of the type of cinema often ignored or dismissed by academics and documentarians, and we knew that whichever filmmaker Hartley picked to talk about on the show would be in a similar vein.

And sure enough, he's gone with Ingmar Bergman.

No, not really.

He'll actually be talking about the films of John Hough.

Not sure who John Hough is? It's not a name you hear often. Hough has an eclectic filmography: he directed Hammer horror Twins of Evil in 1971, Disney's The Watcher in the Woods in 1980, the adventure adaptation Biggles in 1986, and a bunch of Barbara Cartland TV movies in the '90s. You really can't pin him down, which is what makes him such a fascinating choice.

Why did Hartley go with Hough over all other filmmakers? You'll have to listen in on November 30 to find out.

Discovering Maddin

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LEE

On the most recent show, I mentioned that there was actual video footage of me discovering Guy Maddin on The Bazura Project. So if anyone's interested in seeing this momentous happening, here's the clip from 5 July 2007:

And while we're here, here's our review of Brand Upon the Brain from 9 August 2007 after it played at the Melbourne International Film Festival:

Inch on Maddin

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Sounds like the sort of catchphrase or motivational slogan that is just odd enough to appear in a Guy Maddin film, doesn't it? â€œInch on, Maddin! Inch on!â€

The wonderful Hayley Inch was our guest this month, talking about her one true passion: Guy Maddin. Actually, being a true film buff after our own hearts, Hayley has many cinematic passions, but her love of Maddin is unparalleled. Whether you know Maddin's work or have never heard of him before, you've really got to hear Hayley waxing lyrical about what makes him so great.

This episode also marks the return of the mini-Hyphenate segment, where we take a filmmaker who may not have made enough movies to qualify for the main stage (we have a loose five-or-more rule in place), and discuss them in the mid-section of the show. This month we've gone with Jacques Tati who made five features, one telemovie, and a bunch of shorts. Okay, so we're stretching the rules a little to include him, but given Madman Entertainment just released a beautiful restored edition of his works, it felt like the perfect time.

There's rarely a rhyme or reason to the pairing of mini-Hyphenate with the guest's pick, but as we discussed their works, a connection emerged: both Tati and Maddin continued the tradition of silent films in very different ways. There aren't many filmmakers who so forcefully use the pre-sound era as inspiration the way these two have, albeit in completely different ways.

We say this every month, but this really is a great episode. We talk Gone Girl, Force Majeure, Obvious Child and Whiplash, delve into Tati, and explore Maddin all in one hour. Plus, one of us actually leaves the room at one point! Who leaves and why? You'll only find out the answer by listening to this month's show.