Podcast Corner: Mission Accomplished is a great listen for film fans
No Country for Old Men is one of the films discussed in Mission Accomplished.
We’re big fans of the one of the best movie/criticism shows around. Over the month of August in the past few years, as hosts Sean Fennessy and Amanda Dobbins take breaks that usually coincide with a lull in film quality, Brian Raftery has stepped in with a limited series. From in 2021, about the critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, to focused on Hollywood’s output around the Vietnam War, to last summer’s exploring the fallout from the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, Raftery has proven an affable host who takes a widescreen view of events both on and off screen.
Over the past month, he’s been hosting a six-part series examining the making of 12 significant films from the 2000s, exploring how Hollywood and America evolved during the Bush years. He lists multiple traumatic events that we associate with the turn of the millennium, such as 9/11, the subsequent War on Terror, and Hurricane Katrina.
He says: “Like many people, I couldn’t wait for those years to be over. And once they were, I managed to put the Bush years as far from my mind as possible. Mission accomplished.”
But then he started rewatching films from that era, which he calls a remarkable period for Hollywood, both commercially and creatively. “Franchise properties, already a key part of any studio’s portfolio, exploded during those years: At the same time, there was a rush of smart, sombre films that reflected the era’s downbeat mood, from to to It was a great time to be a movie fan — and a moviemaker.”
As for the hook of the latest podcast series, he explains: “What’s really striking about the films of that time, though, is the way they reflect a shift in the American mood.”
He partners the 12 cinematic choices including with and and and (two admittedly wildly different films, but they poke holes in America’s past, both set in the 1970s).
Raftery says when he was brainstorming the idea and the thesis for the series, he came up with a list of 75 films. It’s intentional, though, that he ends by talking about which supercharged Hollywood’s obsession with remakes, reboots, sequels, and spinoffs.
The major studio originals and scrappy indie flicks that thrived in the 2000s would become all the more rare in the Marvel Cinematic Universe era, he states. “When you dig into the movies from that era, you realise that writers and directors were scrambling to make sense of that strange time, just like the rest of us.”
