Meek's Cutoff On DVD: Oregon Transplants

One of the challenges of my gig recommending DVDs over the radio is intuiting the tastes of this vast, invisible audience, most of whom I will never actually meet. Naturally, I want to pick movies that I genuinely think are good, but I also don't want to alienate people by steering them towards films that are weirder, artier, or more graphic than they might be prepared for. Luckily, I'm working for the CBC, so I can safely assume that the listeners are pretty educated and intelligent, but I also recognize that I can't just spring something like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives on them.

So I especially wrestle with how to talk about a movie like Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, which is clearly a superbly made film by one of the most significant directors in America, but whose slow pace, general plotlessness, and casual disregard for audible dialogue do make it challenging viewing for people expecting a conventional Western. That said, I'm pretty pleased with how this segment turned out: I think I managed to put the film in context and prepare people for the difficult viewing experience this movie would be offering them while also hopefully making it sound like it would be worth the extra effort. I even managed to find two usable dialogue sequences to use as sound clips!

You can listen to the segment by clicking here. (And I'd be eager to hear any feedback you might have about these radio pieces I do—is there anything I could do to make them more useful, or any annoying verbal habits that you'd like to see me break?)