Spooky season is upon us!
As the grand finale for “Train” Month’s coverage of teacher and training-themed films, Brian drags his brother Andrew onto the pod to discuss Chuck E. Cheese’s University Training series of videos on operating one of the pizza and game restaurants.
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One Night Only (2026)
It’s stupid.
Dan and Brian continue their month-long look at teachers and training with an investigation of the seminal 1939 teacher flick, Goodbye Mr. Chips.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one: Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak star as romantic leads in a 1958 Technicolor film. This, of course, describes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, an all-time masterpiece, but it also applies to a fluffy little delight of a witch-themed romcom that has some beatnik flavor to it, Bell, Book and Candle. Stewart landed this role as the other half of the trade that sent Novak to Paramount for Vertigo. (Essentially all documentation I can find on the film eschews the Oxford comma in the title. The film’s own opening title card goes even further and skips the commas entirely.)
The mood on this one is great, shot in Greenwich Village with great scenes set in clubs and on the streets. Legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe gives it groovy, green-heavy lighting; he said he had a blast experimenting with tinted lights and filters on this one. It also benefits from an extremely charming supporting cast: Jack Lemmon playing a gay-coded warlock, Ernie Kovacs as a paranormal-obsessed writer, and, most importantly, a remarkable cat named Pyewacket. Novak’s Gillian is about as bewitching as any woman has ever been on film (this and I Married a Witch make a great double feature of contrasting but magnificent examples of eye-popping beauty and screen command with Lake and Novak). Funny that it’s ever-great Stewart who is the closest thing to a wet blanket among the bunch; he’s a bit too old and stodgy for the part, and it’s no surprise this is generally considered his final turn as a romantic lead.
It’s a lightweight affair, and its ending feels a bit like a selling out of the spirit of witchy, feminist freedom that Gillian displays throughout the film, but it’s a good time nonetheless.
The Love Witch is a film of both glimmering achievement and exhausting frustration
It’s tough to imagine a movie aging better than the screwball comedy I Married a Witch
The Devils is one of those films that forces you to ask why it is you watch movies, and I frankly don’t know what to do with it.
Roman Polanski is an awful, woman-terrorizing human being; so, I guess it sorta fits that he’s made one of the most gripping and unnerving depictions of a woman being terrorized by something awful.
Day of Wrath is a strong candidate for the best movie about witchcraft, or, at least, alleged witchcraft.