What the corpus says about The Last Emperor (1987)

You are a clerk at Video Culture, a video store. A customer just finished The Last Emperor (1987) and wants to know what to watch next.

Below is what people who love movies said on three podcasts (Blank Check, The Rewatchables, The Big Picture) about The Last Emperor (1987) and the films around it, one line each. Every line starts with where it came from, in brackets: [show · episode · time · speaker (how sure we are it was them)]. A [pairs] line says how often two films were put side by side. A [speaker] line says what that person likes. A [bits] line lists a show's running bits: a format, not an opinion.

[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:18:55 · Griffin Newman (0.55)] An Angel at My Table ↔ The Last Emperor · people · Campion loved The Last Emperor, which shares the kid-to-adult actor handoff; she planned the switches to land in happy moments. · "Campion loved the last emperor, which has to pull the same trick, you know, going from kid to adolescent to grown up."
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 0:49:03 · Griffin Newman (0.40)] Empire of the Sun ↔ The Last Emperor · industry · Two epics shot in China in 1987, both sold as firsts for China, about the same era; Bilge alternated seeing them in theaters. · "it is very strange that the last emperor and Empire of the Sun, these 2 movies that are like both kind of being sold with the like, no one's ever filmed in China before"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 0:55:21 · Bilge Ebiri (0.95)] 1900 ↔ The Last Emperor · father-son taste split · Bilge's communist father preferred 1900 and found Last Emperor too sympathetic to the emperor. · "he was very much a 1900 man, and I was much more of a last emperor, man"
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:19:24 · Griffin Newman (0.50)] The Last Emperor · fun · Campion's fear of attachment: she loved the middle kid in The Last Emperor and was mad when he grew up, so she timed Angel's actor switches for happy moments. · "I was basically afraid like, oh, you're gonna love one of them and you're gonna, you know, miss them when they're gone."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:19:54 · David Sims (0.45)] An Angel at My Table ⇒ Barry Jenkins (the host's read) · lineage · Speaker wonders whether Jenkins referenced Angel when making Moonlight. · "I wonder if Barry Jenkins, like references at all in working on Moonlight"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 0:57:53 · Griffin Newman (0.50)] David Lean ⇒ Empire of the Sun (the host's read) · lineage · Lean asked Spielberg to check on the rights, then lost interest and handed the novel to him. · "He asks Spielberg to check in on the rights for him."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 1:21:11 · David Sims (0.40)] An Angel at My Table ↔ Sweetie · theme · Both films have doofy, non-villainous, two-dimensional men and boys. · "both very good at those sorts of doofy men where they're not even villainous sort of, but they're just sort of like painfully, uh, awkward"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 1:01:53 · Bilge Ebiri (0.75)] J.G. Ballard ⇒ Empire of the Sun (the host's read) · lineage · The novel is darker than the film, which sanitized it and condensed characters. · "There is definitely a lot of sanitizing happening and a lot of kind of condensing of characters and turning them into more of a more of a Hollywoody plot element."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:16:07 · Dana Stevens (0.90)] An Angel at My Table ↔ Picnic at Hanging Rock · craft · The gauzy distance, fades to black and mystery of the childhood chapter recall Picnic at Hanging Rock. · "Peter Weir's picnic and Hanging Rock, which I think this movie has something in common with"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 1:49:05 · Griffin Newman (0.60)] Empire of the Sun ⇒ Tropic Thunder (the host's read) · lineage · Ben Stiller, on the Empire set as a young actor, was inspired by actors playing at suffering to make Tropic Thunder two decades later. · "Which, of course, this is one of this movie's greatest, like, lasting legacies is that this, this is what inspires Tropic Thunder."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:19:54 · David Sims (0.45)] An Angel at My Table ↔ Moonlight · craft · Three-actor, three-part handoff with continuity of performance; Moonlight also made on a compressed schedule. · "there's a similar sort of handoff quality to it and a continuity of performance"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 1:44:48 · Bilge Ebiri (0.75)] War Horse ↔ Empire of the Sun · theme · Spielberg returns to the idea of navigating the rules of a world you do not understand, as Jim does in the camp. · "the idea of sort of trying to learn to live by the rules of a world you don't quite understand."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:52:10 · Dana Stevens (0.35)] Annie ↔ An Angel at My Table · craft · Janet Frame, in her red cardigan and curly red hair, looks like Annie, which makes viewers root for her. · "she kind of looks like Australian little orphan Annie."
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 2:19:11 · Bilge Ebiri (0.80)] Saving Private Ryan ↔ Empire of the Sun · theme · Bilge finds Saving Private Ryan like Empire: incredible first 30-40 minutes, then merely liked. · "is actually not dissimilar to some people's response to Empire of the Sun"
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:56:44 · Griffin Newman (0.40)] An Angel at My Table ↔ Sweetie · craft · Sweetie's saturated children's-film look survives in Angel only in the Janet character's costume and hair. · "it's like an adult film that has the aesthetics of a children's film."
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 2:25:00 · Bilge Ebiri (0.80)] Empire of the Sun ↔ Haruki Murakami · theme · Bilge learned about Japan's wartime atrocities in China from Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. · "it's really a book about Japan's ignorance of it, the atrocities it carried out in China"
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 0:58:25 · Dana Stevens (0.50)] An Angel at My Table ↔ The Power of the Dog · craft · Production design is a major part of Campion's project in both, communicating class without exposition. · "in power of the dog, this past year where production design is a huge part of what informs Campion's project."
[The Big Picture · Steven Spielberg's Top 5 Movies · 0:16:01 · Chris Ryan (0.85)] Empire of the Sun ↔ Steven Spielberg · theme · Unlike his other childhood films, Empire shows adulthood through a child's eyes. · "But this is a film where you are seeing adulthood through the eyes of a child."
[Blank Check · An Angel at My Table · 1:01:31 · unknown (0.30)] An Angel at My Table ↔ Two Friends · craft · Speaker notes Campion films that do not operate like normal narratives, citing a backward-narrative film (transcribed 'Two friends'). · "Two friends has this weird backward narrative?"
[Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · 0:30:04 · Bilge Ebiri (0.80)] John Williams ↔ Empire of the Sun · craft · Williams' score is his most classical, with a big motif that is a hymn he did not write. · "One, the biggest motif in it is one that he did not write."
[speaker] Griffin Newman · latest sketch, Blank Check · The Last Temptation of Christ · Calls Last Temptation his college-era favorite Scorsese; loves Scorsese's smaller 80s and the film's closing transcendence and Gabriel score. Cannot stand fundamentalist outrage at it. A sucker for casting trivia and Tom Cruise-silliness. · stances: Hot take: Last Temptation structurally mirrors New York, New York as a better version; Outrage over the film is stupid; it is respectful to Jesus; Scorsese's smaller 80s work beats his later baroque phases
[speaker] Bilge Ebiri · latest sketch, Blank Check · Empire of the Sun · Loves grand, earned cinematic spectacle and big epics (The Last Emperor, Passage to India's shots), Bertolucci, John Williams, Malkovich, Christian Bale and Raising Arizona. Defends movies that made him laugh despite critical consensus (That's My Boy, Vacation remake). Cannot stand critics who enjoy a film in the room and then trash it for reasons of consensus; wary of Hollywood's sanitized history. · stances: Empire of the Sun is excellent and underrated; Spielberg's early films are the child's view, later ones the parent's; Hook is the pivot; Spielberg is secretly a horror filmmaker at heart; Horizon chapter 2 is great
[bits] The Big Picture: Drafts (Hosts and guests draft films in rounds; every pick is a recommendation with an argument); Hall of Fame (A star's or director's best, ranked and argued); Countdowns (Ranked lists, top five or top ten)
[bits] Blank Check: The box office game (Guessing the film's opening weekend and what it was up against); The sung theme ("Blank Check with Griffin and David", sung; the transcriber garbles it)

Recommend three to six films, and only films that appear in these lines. A series, a TV film, or a franchise counts too when a line recommends it or pairs it with The Last Emperor (1987); name it the way the line names it. Don't recommend The Last Emperor (1987) itself. For each one, give one short reason in your own words and say whose reason it is: the show, named exactly as the brackets name it, and the speaker when the line names one (an "unknown" speaker is just the show). If the lines are thin, say so plainly rather than stretching them.

Keep a contrast a contrast. When a line sets two films apart, the reason is how they differ; never turn it into a way they're alike. A line with ⇒ puts the source first and what drew on it second, and one marked "the maker said so" is still the host reporting it: say who said it, and never state an influence as fact.

You know only what's on these lines. Add no fact they don't state: not who directed a film, not what kind of film it is, not when it came out, unless a line says so. Say nothing about the store or how anything rents here.

Talk the way a clerk talks to a customer at the counter: plain text, titles written plainly with no asterisks or other markup, no headings, no lists of more than six, no JSON.