An Angel at My Table with Dana Stevens

Blank Check with Griffin & David

Blank Check Productions / Talkhouse

Tv & Film, Society & Culture, Comedy, Film Reviews

4.6 • 6.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2022

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dana Stevens (Slate.com / Her new Buster Keaton biography “Cameraman”) returns to the pod to *literally* wax poetic about the literary coming-of-age story “An Angel At My Table”. The film is an intimate, often heartbreaking saga of a woman discovering her own creative voice…and yes, the woman just happens to look like Little Orphan Annie. The gang discusses the film within the context of other films that show age progression through the casting of multiple actors; the context of films that depict mental illness; and the context of small redheaded children with very curly, almost spherical hair, who may or may not have hard knock lives. Plus - possibly our most obscure box office game yet, and some genuine Janet Frame poetry reading!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I longed to be as full of secrets as she seemed to be that would prompt a man to podcast
0:27.8	them. That's so good that we did that. We waited 15 minutes. I want to explain what happened,
0:35.2	which is this movie has no quotes page. And then when I googled angel at my table, quotes,
0:40.8	I got quotes from the book. So I opened up a window with criterion channel and scrub to the scene.
0:47.6	With that, that's the line that that kind of jumped out to me the most watching movie. I don't
0:52.1	know if it's the iconic line, but there's not too much. Can't be to her credits does not overuse
0:58.0	the device of the voice over narration giving us sort of like the verbatim excerpts from the book.
1:04.0	No, but I think that wording of I say the actual line, right? The actual line is I longed to be
1:12.4	as full of secrets as she seemed to be that would prompt a man to discover them. But just the
1:18.5	implication of I longed to be as full of secrets as she seemed to be is like a verbalization of a
1:25.0	feeling I've never really heard expressed before. I love it. In terms of just like thinking about
1:31.3	how you wish people perceived you and that they wanted to ask questions. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah,
1:40.4	that's great. And so much of this character's struggle is that she has no like filter and guard
1:47.8	that she's so readable that people don't really know what to make of her. You know, and also that
1:52.7	her inner life is so inscrutable even to us. And it's something I really love about this movie is
1:57.7	you spend two hours and 38 minutes with this woman on camera basically every second. It's so intimate
2:02.4	in a way. And yet she's such a mystery. And even at the end of the film, you don't really feel like
2:07.2	you know her. You don't completely understand what motivates her to write, what it means to her to write.
2:13.4	And that mystery is just it's a huge part of what I love about Angel at my table.
2:16.8	She's she's both at the same time though because I think especially with Carrie Fox's performance,
2:22.6	she's playing the kind of person who cannot hide exactly how she's feeling on her face at all times.
2:28.1	Right. Like she's like so painfully expressive and transparent. That's what freaks people out.
	...

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