The House Next Door

By Trey Albright, Arsenio Assin, Cabrini, Leif Fortlouis, John Lichman, Preston Miller, Vadim Rizov and Keith Uhlich

[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]

INTRODUCTION

Hello. This is Vadim, taking over just this once on intro duties for reasons which, hopefully, will be clear in a moment. This podcast commemorates the one-year-anniversary of Preston Miller's Jones, which debuted last December at the dearly departed Pioneer Theater. And now you may quite reasonably ask: what the hell is Jones, and why are we doing a podcast about it?

Here's the full-disclosure part: Preston's a friend of ours, and was long before we watched his movie (except for Keith, who first met Preston because of the movie). He's a podcast veteran, and regular listeners will recognize his lovely accent, but he's joined us before primarily as color commentary. The subject of this podcast, though, is explicitly Preston's movie, which John and I have both finally watched and liked greatly. We're not the only ones: Jones was well-received by Karina Longworth and singled out as the "Self-Distributed Pick" of the month by Amy Taubin in Film Comment. Yet it's undeniable that Jones got somewhat lost in the shuffle, and that's a damn shame.

We didn't do this podcast out of some kind of weird sense of friendly nepotism or as a favor. We did it because we like the movie a lot and believe it deserves to be seen far more widely. You could start by ordering it from Preston's website. Or not: you could just listen to the podcast, in which we kind of unapologetically delve into the background stories, inspirations and anecdotes surrounding a movie you may well have never seen. It's still fun, we think. We're joined by actor Trey Albright, DP Arsenio Assin, musician/all-round-good-guy Leif Fortlouis and actor/ex-cop/old-school personality Cabrini, who is amazing (if you want to listen to his stories—hence the last 20 minutes—first, I wouldn't blame you.

What I want to stress, in a moment of quite possibly uncharacteristic earnestness, is that Jones is as relevant a topic of discussion as any we've covered this year. In a podcast that isn't up yet, we get into a lengthy discussion with Variety's Peter Debruge in which, at one point, I express quite possibly misplaced frustration at how one of criticism's primary tasks—championing the underseen and unknown—is one of the biggest casualties of 2008's much-discussed Death of Criticism. Consider this, at least in part, an attempt to put this practice into action, one movie at a time. On my HMs for 2005 (which is Jones' IMDb date, for whatever reason), this ranks higher than, say, Brokeback Mountain or The Wayward Cloud. Jones is a terrific movie, and I'm happy to encourage people to watch it. Or just enjoy the podcast; either way, we hope you get something out of it.

Thanks for listening and, as always, we're still waiting for someone to buy us a drink. (VR)

Podcast is embedded below. Any problems, it can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. (TRT: 1 hour 26 minutes 07 seconds)