Last Action Hero feat. Christopher Jason Bell

Filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell (Miss Me Yet, Attention Shoppers) joins us to discuss Last Action Hero, a meta action comedy featuring too many ideas, a healthy serving of great jokes, and a fascinating reckoning for its star Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was aging into the second act of his movie star career.

We begin with a conversation about the action hero vehicle, its dominance in the 1980s, and its turn to self-reference and parody in the early 1990s. Then, we explore Last Action Hero's bizarre combination of action movie tropes and lighter cartoon comedy logic that makes its satirical targets more difficult to identify. After, we address the ways the film incidentally exonerates itself from some of the more ideologically thorny tendencies of police films by embracing fantasy and drawing attention to its artifice.

Finally, we spend some time discussing Chris's latest brilliant and beautiful film Failed State, how its component parts all came together, and what it means to be a filmmaker in our moment of constant crises and social alienation.

Follow Christopher Jason Bell on Twitter

Watch Chris's films on Means.tv

Watch the trailer for Failed State

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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish