Original Date: July 26, 2009

We begin this week with the results of “homework” assigned to loyal listener (and music journalist) Yoshi Kato, who weighs in on this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film. That leads into a discussion of a great film that Phil recently studied – Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 landmark masterpiece The Celebration. Along with Lars Von Trier, Vinterberg was one of the founders and inspirational “leaders” of the Dogme movement. Dean and Phil re-visit the Dogme 95 manifesto and its rules that were designed to even the playing field between big-budget and low-budget, and American and European filmmakers. Phil then reveals how the tenets of Dogme 95 and the motivation behind them is inspiring and informing his approach to the next fictional feature film he will be directing in October of this year. The film will be called Night Falls Fast and Phil and Dean offer a preview.

Then conversation turns to another recent viewing by Phil, the Rashomon-esque conspiracy thriller Vantage Point, which failed to do much of anything at the box office. As Dean and Phil have discussed before, no matter how good the film might be (like the recent State of Play) it is impossible for a suspense thriller about a fictional conspiracy to draw much audience interest when the population at large is inundated by, intrigued by and/or obsessed with talk of supposedly real-world conspiracies! Dean and Phil end this week’s show with a special sneak preview of their documentary and play a brand new game: Dean Haglund’s Conspiracy Lightning Round.