Hello, my name Justin McLuhan. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to the Importance Cinema Club. And today, we're coming live from winter,

it seems. It's snowy and Haley in Toronto. It's April. It's the ice storm. It's April 15th,

and there's nothing but snow outside.

It's terrible.

I walked here with pellets of hail hitting my face.

This is a filmmaker that was recommended by a contest winner, and she wanted us to do it, so we did.

And it's a filmmaker that I actually hadn't a lot of fondness for, because when I was in high school, films like Velvet Gold Mine came out, and they were pictures that were very energetic and there was a lot going on. And while I enjoyed watching them, he wasn't someone that I followed a lot. Like, I wasn't obsessed with him by any stretch of the imagination.

I have virtually no relationship with the films of Todd Haynes.

I've seen some of them, you know, haven't thought much about them at all.

But he is a filmmaker that he's doing something that me and you love, which is creating

pastiches of things that have influenced him and seemingly trying to kind of recontextualize them

in ways that they weren't originally

intended to be consumed. So despite my general lack of experience with Todd Haynes, I

dived into this week with an open mind and a happy spirit, eager to learn more. And what did

you find this week? I found that he's a filmmaker who's done a lot of

interesting stuff and one that I'm still not that passionate about. Similar. And I think that while we

talk about his movies, the question I want to keep asking is like, why? Why is this? Because he's

seemingly doing something that is one of my favorite things, which is this kind of repackaging of stuff

that the artist loves.

The tone of his work is hard for me to put a finger on because he's somewhere between

irony and sincerity. He's not Douglas Cirque. He's not John Waters either. I think at his best, the movies evoke these complicated

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