I think that's the name of a country singer that I just named.

I don't think they'd let a country singer have that name.

David Robert Mitchell.

Okay.

I'm a big fan of It Follows, as you should be.

And I did not love Under the Silver Lake, but I respected that it was attempting something quite ambitious.

Yeah.

Amen.

Yes

... coming at the end of September on Blu-ray in the US from Def Crocodile, we've got 1983's Roy del Espacio.

Uh, this film is, uh, worth reading the description.

Completely lost for over 40 years and only the third animated feature ever produced in Mexico, Roy from Space has finally returned, newly scanned from the original 35 millimeter negative, and lovingly restored by Def Crocodile.

I actually had, uh, just to humble brag for a moment, I actually had the great pleasure of sitting next to, uh, Craig as he worked on this film, um, like a couple years ago.

That's how long this has been, uh, in the making.

Um, outsider sci-fi animation loosely inspired by 1930s Flash Gordon serials.

This one's a Screaming Mad George movie too.

Right.

And so I go into this whole thing about how fully 20% of American cowboys were, uh, uh, newly freed, you know, Black people migrating as quickly as possible away from the South.

Uh, that there were all these kinds of tensions between indigenous people and, and Black settlers, because the indigenous people like empathized with their plan, but also were like, um, "Yeah, you're still taking our land, buddy," you know? And, uh, uh, uh, all these things.

And Buck and the Preacher, even more than a, a historical corrective, is a product of the Black Power movement, and Sidney Poitier's first film as a director.

You've got Ruby Dee, you've got Harry Belafonte.

It's a really important, um, film, uh, about these, the, this entire population of Americans whose voices had been silenced.

So I give this whole talk.

Hell yeah.

This is

actually apropos, because I was just thinking as we were talking about melodrama as a genre, the great feminist scholar Linda Williams, who just passed away last year, whose famous essay, Film Excess...

Or film bodies, gender, genre and excess, which links horror films, pornography and melodrama together in the non-linguistic expression of emotion through screams, through moans and sighs and through weeping.

And the intensity of the emotions expressed in those three genres that take them into these sort of over-the-top hyperbolic states of human pain or grief or fright or lust and... release, ultimately.

It was what unites them all.

And so that's one of the reasons I'm really attracted to the breadth of cat movies that you all have been putting out, because they touch on all of these different emotional registers.

Melodrama, perhaps most authentically, because, you know, grief is such a universal emotion.

Yeah,

Right.

In the film, he starts out as a moonshiner sworn to vengeance.

Uh, in the book, it's, it's, it's his, it's the father who's sworn to vengeance, right? Matt doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Um, he doesn't have the sort of blood relation or blood, um, vengeance, um, with Dan, the Shepherd of the Hills, as he does in the film.

So it's just kinda simplified and streamlined, um, in the film.

And this is not really a spoiler, because it's made clear in the very beginning, just as it's made pretty clear in the very beginning of the book, um, when Dan comes to, to, uh, to the Ozarks, to the outback, to the frontier, um, he is a- attempting to atone for having abandoned, uh, his wife, who he had left, um, pregnant, in this case with, um, with, uh, young Matt.

In the book, Dan's son had abandoned his wife, and she had borne Pete, the, the young fellow with the, uh, who's been touched, as they say.

Yeah [laughs]

Hi, Jonah.

That's cool.

It's hot.

I've spent all day today chopping, of all things, chopping firewood and hauling it around, getting them preparing for next year.

I cut down a bunch of trees and tree limbs surrounding the area that my dad has decided is going to be the family cemetery.

So I cleared space for all of us to be buried deep into the dark earth.

Um, and when we're around taking pictures of spooky looking trees and gullies, um, for a, uh, movie treatment, I'm working on.

I'm sure you've seen at least the first one.

Your pickups now.

Well, very excited about this.

This was one of the films that I tried to wish into existence.

Uh, it's not the ideal release, but it is worlds better than what we've been dealing with for years, and that of course is D.O.A. with, um, bonus film Borderline.

Right? A little film noir double feature.

D.O.A. is one of the greatest film noir, films noir ever made.

Um, check it out.

This is what- another one I'd, I'd wish they would've released it on Blu-ray.