Junk Filter

The writer Sean T. Collins joins the pod from Long Island for a deep dive into the original 1989 Road House and the 2024 remake now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Sean’s book Pain Don’t Hurt offered daily meditations on specific elements of Road House for an entire year, and we discuss the many virtues of this eighties classic about Dalton, the second-greatest bouncer in the world (Patrick Swayze) who is hired by the owner of a violent honkytonk bar in Jasper, Missouri to clean up the place, raising the ire of the local crimelord Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) who rules Jasper with an iron fist and an amazing crew of henchmen. Sean has given this movie a great deal of thought over the years and we discuss the ludicrous plot, spectacular performances and classic one-liners.

And we also compare the OG Road House to the new remake with a pumped-up Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton and UFC fighter Conor McGregor in his screen acting debut as the main henchman, with the action transposed to the Florida Keys. The remake wisely does not try to recreate the original so much as to modernize it, resulting in a film that’s honestly not as bad as fans of the original feared it would be.

CW: This episode discusses cinematic sexual violence.

The founder of Fun City Editions, Jonathan Hertzberg, joins the podcast from New York City to discuss the boutique video label and their latest blu-ray release, 1983’s Deep in the Heart, aka Handgun, directed by Ken Loach’s longtime English producer Tony Garnett.

Deep in the Heart, a brutal portrayal of American gun culture as seen from an outsider’s perspective, stars the undersung actress Karen Young in her screen debut as a Boston schoolteacher working in Dallas who is groomed and then sexually assaulted by a well-liked local attorney and antique gun collector. She gets nowhere trying to get the police and the church to support her quest for justice, but gets all the help she needs from the local gun club, and transformed by the culture and her experience, plans her revenge. The film was bought by Warner Bros. not to release the film properly, but to keep it from interfering with the commercial prospects of their upcoming Clint Eastwood release with a similar theme, Sudden Impact.

Deep in the Heart is the kind of film this label specializes in: films that have for various reasons been forgotten in the modern age but deserve to be restored, reissued and rediscovered. Jonathan gives us insight into the process and the challenges of locating and reviving these catalogue titles, and how Deep in the Heart still speaks to contemporary American concerns over 40 years later.

The writer Corey Atad joins me from Phuket, Thailand for a sequel to our Junk Filter episode about Bane that turned into a discussion about Tenet, and we return to the topic because of the recent cultural reconsideration of Christopher Nolan’s 2020 time-bending thriller, which was released during the pandemic and has taken some time to find an audience. 

Tenet got a one-week re-release in 70mm and IMAX 70mm in the leadup to this year’s Academy Awards, and Corey and I discuss the film as Nolan’s temporal pincer movement; it turns out he released the sequel to Oppenheimer 4 years ago, and we are only realizing it now. Unlike his latest, Tenet is about “the bomb that didn’t go off”, and is a film that perhaps needs to be seen a few times to be best appreciated, especially after seeing Oppy.

We talk about Nolan’s methodology, including the evolution of his creative team (his new cinematographer, editor and composer are bringing out the best in him), his award-season victory lap, and we go over the complex structure of Tenet, including the things that happen that maybe we don’t even understand after seeing it a few times but are clearer when seen theatrically… but do we even need to understand everything we enjoy? 

Plus: Bane jokes! 

The author Jacob Bacharach returns for a sequel to our Junk Filter episode about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, with a look at his long-awaited Dune: Part Two. 

Villeneuve said in interviews that he thought of Frank Herbert’s novel as an allegory for the French Canadians under the thumb of the authoritarian government of Maurice Duplessis that used the Catholic Church to subjugate the Quebecois people before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Jacob and I use this allegory as a jumping off point to extend the metaphor: are the Bene Gesserit the Catholic Church? Are the Fremen the FLQ? And is Paul Atreides the saviour of an independent Quebec, the Kwisatz Tabarnak?

Plus: Jacob and I discuss the charms of Dune: Part Two including how the movie differs from Frank Herbert’s novel, the arrival of Christopher Walken as the Emperor qnd Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha, and our MVP Javier Bardem as Stilgar. Plus: Josh Brolin’s homoerotic ode to Timothée Chalamet, the dreaded Dune Popcorn Bucket, and a look at some of the galaxy-brained responses online from people who thought Paul was supposed to be the hero of the story.

The writer and podcaster Will Sloan is back for a show about Burt Reynolds, who started the eighties as the most popular movie star in America but who by the end of the decade was consigned to a series of B-movies that asked less and less of him, in the years before his unexpected mid-nineties comeback in Boogie Nights (a film he hated even though he won awards and nominations for his performance).

We discuss several of his eighties projects with a particular focus on four of them: his best film as a director, 1981’s Sharky’s Machine, his botched 1986 downbeat Vegas drama Heat (originally a Robert Altman project with a screenplay from the great William Goldman), 1987’s Malone (basically a remake of Shane, shot in British Columbia with a stacked supporting cast) and his nadir, the tired 1987 romantic comedy-thriller Rent-A-Cop (co-starring Liza Minnelli in her first film out of rehab, set in Chicago but filmed at Cinecitta studios in Rome). As his career declined Burt looked increasingly checked-out as a movie star, but these films are fun to watch and talk about, especially since Heat and Malone in particular are almost very good movies despite themselves.

Along the way we discuss Burt’s short-lived discotheque in Atlanta, Marlon Brando’s pathological hatred of him, and the injuries Reynolds sustained on the set of City Heatthat left him with an addiction to painkillers that sparked health rumours in the early days of the AIDS crisis.

Plus Will talks about his new project The Journal of Stoogeological Studies: An Unauthorized Three Stooges Fanzine.

CW: This episode discusses cinematic sexual violence and racist themes.

The film critic and author Adam Nayman returns to the show for a deep dive into Michael Cimino’s 1985 pulp crime thriller Year of the Dragon, starring Mickey Rourke, John Lone and introducing the fashion model Ariane Koizumi as the female lead. 

Year of the Dragon was Cimino’s attempt to reassert himself as an important (and commercially viable) American filmmaker after his post-Deer Hunter fall from grace in the wake of the disastrous Heaven’s Gate. Rourke plays Captain Stanley White, a highly-decorated Polish-American cop (and Vietnam veteran) transferred to New York’s Chinatown precinct who pursues an increasingly unhinged personal war against the young and ambitious new leader of the Triads, Joey Tai (Lone), using an ambitious Asian news reporter to do it, leading to an escalating bloodbath. MGM/UA had to add a disclaimer to the film after the release in the wake of protests and legal threats from the Chinese-American community set off by the rabble-rousing screenplay by Cimino and Oliver Stone (on the precipice of his own directing career)

Adam and I discuss Year of the Dragon as a Problematic Fave: an insanely detailed example of screen artifice (including a hyper-realistic fake New York Chinatown built at Dino DeLaurentiis’ studio lot in North Carolina that even fooled Stanley Kubrick) with movie star performances and spectacular filmmaking clashing against chaotic emotional (and racist) outbursts and WTF moments that mark this film as a secret highlight of eighties American cinema, influential not only on Kubrick but also Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Michael Mann. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore!

The film writer Brandon Streussnig (Vulture, Fangoria, GQ) joins the pod for a discussion about the undersung director Peter Hyams through four of his science fiction movies across a career full of genre work, films that reveal a singular style can be applied to a craftsman, a former Chicago newsman turned director who also (controversially for his industry) served as his own cinematographer.

His all-star conspiracy theory thriller Capricorn One (1977) established Hyams as a filmmaker who could fuse suspense and science-fiction. He would follow this with 1981’s Outland, a hybrid of Alien and High Noon starring Sean Connery, criticized at the time for being derivative but which rips when seen today, a dystopic vision of a future world ravaged by capitalism on steroids that actually anticipated the themes and production design of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner the following year.

Brandon and I make the case for 2010, Hyams’ 1984 sequel to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as a worthy followup if not an essential work, offering a hopeful and utopic vision of man’s future contrasted against Kubrick’s colder take. Set against the topical US/Soviet arms race of the Reagan era and packed with thrills, it’s a much better film than you’ve been led to believe. And of course there’s Timecop, the biggest hit Jean-Claude Van Damme ever had.

This episode means to introduce you to the work of Peter Hyams, solid entertainments across many genres and ripe for rediscovery.

Plus: Brandon talks about the second edition of Vulture’s annual Stunt Movie Awards!

Arizona-based writer and playwright Ashley Naftule returns to the podcast for a look at the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, focusing on the recently rediscovered 1963 film The Cassandra Cat, and its director Vojtěch Jasný,.

In the strange fairy tale The Cassandra Cat, a village is disrupted when a travelling circus comes to town featuring a magical cat wearing sunglasses who can reveal the true natures of the townsfolk by changing their colours when he looks at them, turning thieves grey, hypocrites purple and lovers a bright red, scandalizing the adults into a panic and delighting all the children.

One of the few directors to win two prizes at Cannes, Jasný is not as well remembered as his Czech contemporaries like Miloš Forman but the artistic movement he was a part of was extremely influential on world cinema, using avant-garde techniques and comedy to express modern Czechoslovakian concerns in the brief period where the Soviet Union permitted more freedom of expression and less censorship.

We also discuss another, darker film by Jasný, 1969’s All My Good Countrymen, made right when Moscow sent tanks to Czechoslovakia to crush the revolution and reestablish “normalization” of the state. Despite winning the Best Director prize at Cannes for it, Jasný was pressured by the new regime to apologize for making the film, and instead went into exile along with his contemporaries, with their films banned domestically until the final days of the Soviet Union.

Plus: we discuss the Cat Movies retrospective on the Criterion Channel, including some favourite film felines of ours.

The Cassandra Cat and All My Good Countrymen are currently streaming on Criterion Channel.

The writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a deep dive into Ezra Edelman’s Oscar-winning documentary from 2016, O.J.: Made in America, made for ESPN’s film unit ’30 for 30’ but released in theatres (the Academy changed the rules for the Documentary category after this 5 part docuseries won).

This episode covers the first half of this fantastic 467 minute documentary, from O.J.’s origins as a superstar athlete and celebrity pitchman, his stormy marriage to Nicole that led to her vicious murder and the manhunt once he became the prime suspect. But this story takes place against the larger story of Los Angeles; the mass post-war migration of Black Americans from the South to the west coast and the evolution of the racist LAPD’s law enforcement in the city that culminated in the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent riots in 1992, creating the conditions that gave O.J.’s “Dream Team” their winning strategy for the “Trial of the Century”.

Karen and I discuss our favourite parts of the documentary, O.J.’s narcissism and disinterest in the civil rights movement, his strange showbiz career and finally the night of the Bronco chase, which marked the beginning of a bleak new chapter in American life.

Part 2 of our discussion (about the trial, the verdict, and the aftermath) will be available exclusively to patrons of the podcast.

Access this entire 93 minute episode and additional monthly bonus episodes by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show.

The author Jacob Bacharach returns for a show about Ridley Scott’s latest, the 200 million dollar epic Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

History nerds, YouTube film cranks and the Roman statue bluechecks on Twitter are up in arms about the latest from the Riddler, for straying too far from the real history and most egregiously for hiring their beloved Joker to portray their beloved Emperor of France as a cucked loser. Jacob and I highly enjoyed it as old Hollywood spectacle and as a strange historical comedy about a horny weirdo, hilariously sold to the masses as a badass action film with Black Sabbath in the trailer. 

We also compare this Napoleon to previous attempts to depict him in cinema, with special emphasis on 1970’s Waterloo, a spectacular and extremely expensive recreation of that fateful battle starring Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington, literally a co-production between Dino De Laurentiis and the Soviet Union! 

It’s fashionable in some circles to complain about Ridley Scott but we discuss some movies of his we like, our hopes for the extended version, and discuss some fun facts about the Napoleonic Era including his horny letters to Josephine and an explanation of the French Revolutionary Calendar.

Plus: Napoelon Musk, finally facing his Waterloo after an assault on advertisers at a New York Times summit.

The writer Jessica Ritchey returns to the pod for a show about the continuing collapse of the superhero movie as the dominant American film genre with the latest MCU entry, Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels, which cost $270 million dollars and after 4 release date changes finally opened last week and bombed as hard as a Marvel movie has ever bombed, especially considering it’s the sequel to a movie that made well over a billion dollars in 2019. 

We discuss what went wrong with The Marvels and the troubles now plaguing the MCU but we also (perhaps unfairly) compare this film to an excellent cinematic female superhero team up, Johnnie To’s 1993 Hong Kong action extravaganza The Heroic Trio starring Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung.

For the 150th episode of the podcast, returning guest Meg Shields joins me from Vancouver for a show about William Friedkin’s legendary horror film The Exorcist, which turns 50 years old this December.

I had always been TOO SCARED to watch the original Exorcist (even though I had seen the first two sequels) so for this podcast, as a farewell tribute to Hurricane Billy who passed away this August, I watched it for the first time. Meg and I discuss this prototypical blockbuster based on the bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty, the first horror movie to be Oscar nominated for Best Picture, and a cultural phenomenon where audiences lined up for hours hoping to buy a ticket for this endurance test, with many reports of horrified walkouts and fainting spells in the lobby at every screening. 

We discuss the differences between the original 1973 theatrical version and the “director’s cut” from the year 2000, the criticism of this film in some circles as a reactionary and patriarchal work, Friedkin’s insane conduct on the set (including mistreatment of the actors), the strange connection between The Exorcist and Freidkin’s later film Cruising, and Meg and I wonder what Hurricane Billy would have said about this year’s “legacy sequel” The Exorcist: Believer, which opened two months after his death. 

The 2019 documentary Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist is available to stream in North America on Kanopy. 

The writer Brian Abrams, author of the new book "You Talkin' to Me?”: The Definitive Guide to Iconic Movie Quotes, joins me from New York City to discuss Sam Peckinpah and his underrated 1972 rodeo drama Junior Bonner starring Steve McQueen and Joe Don Baker.

Right after Peckinpah wrapped on his controversial Straw Dogs in England, he jumped into production on Junior Bonner, a small-stakes character study about an aging rodeo rider (McQueen) who returns to his hometown of Prescott, Arizona to compete for one more victory and to reconnect with his family, including his oafish brother, local real estate developer Curly (Baker) and his estranged parents (Robert Preston and Ida Lupino). It’s also the story of the landscape of the American West giving way to the suburban sprawl and exploitation of the modern world, literally being bulldozed all around the Bonner family. As Junior’s rodeo star father Ace asks: “If this world’s all about winners, what’s for the losers?”

Dismissed in its day, and somewhat of an outlier in Peckinpah’s run of action films in the 1970s, time has been kind to Junior Bonner, which can be appreciated now as a Hangout Movie, three days in the life of an aging rodeo star and a fading way of life, vividly brought to life by Peckinpah and his cast.

Plus we discuss Brian’s new book, which looks into the origins of hundreds of classic movie lines across American film history, how some lines have entered the lexicon and live on in the culture, and the movie quotes we each have rolling around in our heads.

The writer James Slaymaker, author of Time is Luck: The Cinema of Michael Mann, returns to the pod from Southampton for a discussion of selected works from the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach, who at age 87 is about to release what is said to be his final feature, The Old Oak.

Ken Loach’s 1969 feature Kes is a staple of the British school curriculum to this day and his 2016 film I, Daniel Blake won the Palme d’or at Cannes and was a big hit in the UK. We discuss the role Loach recently played in British politics, first allied with the Labour Party under the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Cornyn and then ousted from Labour in the ideological purge of the Keir Starmer era.

We discuss three of his features on this episode: the controversial 1990 political thriller Hidden Agenda with Brian Cox and Frances McDormand, 2019’s gig economy drama Sorry We Missed You, and a lesser-seen Loach film from 2001, The Navigators. These works offer a critique from the left of several decades of austerity policies in the UK, the horrors of privatization and the overall exploitation of workers by management.

Plus: RIP William Friedkin.

The writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns to the pod to say farewell to Paul Reubens and his iconic Pee-wee Herman character.

Reubens created the Pee-wee character in the mid 1970s as part of the LA improv troupe The Groundlings, in a cohort that included Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks. A failed attempt to join the cast of SNL in 1980 doubled his resolve to be successful; he took his Pee-wee Herman show from cult status on stage to a smash-hit movie for Warner Bros. (the feature debut of director Tim Burton) and then to Saturday morning network tv with his innovative kids show Pee-wee’s Playhouse which ran for 5 years on CBS.

We talk about two of Karen’s three favourite movies of all time (1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday), discuss the Pee-wee character as a queer icon, pop culture innovator and comedy god, lament the destruction of his success in 1991 with his notorious arrest at a porn theatre in Florida (from the days when so-called ‘Cancel Culture’ could actually cancel careers) and his hard-won third act with the return of Pee-wee to public life as Reubens fought a private battle.

Access this entire 90 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes, including the entire Miami Vice sidebar series) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show.

Aaron and Carlee from the Hit Factory podcast return from San Francisco for a deep dive into the underrated 1983 American remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark film Breathless, directed by Jim McBride.

Assailed at the time of release for being a shallow exercise in style, to watch Breathless 40 years later is to see a work arguably as influential on the next generation of American filmmakers as Godard’s original had been on the New American Cinema of the 1970s; the remake’s cocktail of retro cool, fast cars and meta-textual pop culture references mark it as a clear influence on Tarantino, Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson among others.

In an inversion of the original plot, Richard Gere plays Jesse Lujack, a petty criminal in Vegas obsessed with Jerry Lee Lewis and Silver Surfer comics who steals a Porsche, shoots a highway patrolman on his way to LA and as the manhunt develops, hides out with a French architecture student he’d recently had a fling with named Monica, played by the 19-year-old actress Valérie Kaprisky.

Breathless ’83 is extremely sexy so at the constant risk of being thrown in Horny Jail, the three of us discuss the intense on-screen chemistry between Gere and Kaprisky, McBride’s use of vivid color, rear-screen projection and music to heighten the cinematic experience, what the film has to say about toxic masculinity and male narcissism, and we discuss the Silver Surfer-obsessed Jesse Lujack as a cautionary tale about becoming Marvel-poisoned.

Breathless is currently streaming on Criterion Channel and Tubi.

On the fifth episode of this podcast’s summer sidebar series on NBC’s crime drama Miami Vice, the writer and podcaster Jeb Lund joins me from Tampa, Florida for a look at the two-season story arc that pitted Bob Balaban against G. Gordon Liddy. Balaban’s Ira Stone, an Army reporter who served with Sonny Crockett in Vietnam, shows up in Miami 10 years later tracking down his sworn enemy, the mysterious drug trafficker turned private militia financier “Captain Real Estate”, played by the Watergate burglar and convicted felon in his acting debut.

Jeb wanted us to add a Season 4 episode to our agenda, The Rising Sun of Death, a sleazy one where Vice goes up against the Yakuza with the help of a Japanese PI who is after the murderous head of the Sumiroshi-gumi clan. This episode also features R. Lee Ermey as a dirty cop and a strip club that plays The Smiths.

These three episodes offer sharp critiques from the left of the treatment of Vietnam Veterans and US military involvement in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, America’s intervention in Central America and willingness to work with fascists in the global fight against communism, and the political interference that renders law enforcement pointless.

Episodes discussed on this show:

Back in the World - Season 2, Ep 11

Stone’s War - Season 3, Ep 2

The Rising Sun of Death - Season 4, Ep 9

The writer and filmmaker Scout Tafoya, author of the new book But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, joins the show to discuss one of Ford’s greatest films, the 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin.

Made in the twilight of Ford’s career, the downbeat Liberty Valance is an example of what we would now call a filmmaker’s Late Style: a veteran director taking stock of their own legacy in their final works. Liberty Valance is a preview of the conclusion of the classic era of the Western genre in the tumult of the sixties, the end of the Old West as represented by Wayne, the cowboy archetype finally replaced by constitutional order and modern progress as embodied by Stewart, as a young eastern lawyer who travels west to the town of Shinbone, intending to introduce education and order to a lawless place approaching statehood, and is soon targeted for death by feared local outlaw Liberty Valance (Marvin).

Scout has seen every one of John Ford’s surviving films; we discuss Liberty Valance in the context of Ford’s career and worldview, grapple with the ongoing question in our age of assessing the art of the problematic artist, and consider what this film has to say about the consequences of violence and the media’s role in reinforcing the official version of historical facts.

The writer and critic Jessica Ritchey returns to the show for a look at the strange body of work William Shatner put together in the 1970s, the wilderness years in between the end of the Star Trek TV series and the start of the Star Trek film series. 

We focus on four of his films, all currently available to watch on YouTube:

The Horror At 37,000 Feet (1973), a TV movie that combines The Exorcist with the Airport series, with Shatner as a defrocked priest fighting against the demonic possession of a transatlantic flight. 

Pray for the Wildcats (1974), also made for TV, with Shatner as a depressed ad executive forced to go with his partners on a motorcycle ride through Mexico with a rich client (Andy Griffith) who turns out to be a psychotic monster looking for consequence-free thrills.

Impulse (1974), a deranged regional grindhouse feature by scholckmeister William Grefé starring Shatner as a murderous gigolo, the ultimate Florida Man depicted on screen.

Disaster on the Coastliner (1979), an all-star TVM starring Shatner as a charming conman who gets swept up in the takeover of a train by a deranged engineer determined to smash it into an oncoming train (with the Vice President’s wife on board!)

We also discuss the notorious video of Shatner’s spoken-word version of “Rocket Man” at the 1978 Saturn Awards for science fiction, and other highlights from this very strange and adventurous period in his long career.

Returning guest Adam Jackson joined me to bear witness to the box office failure The Flash, on track to lose Warner Bros 200 million dollars after opening with a dismal box office take that was less than half of what was originally projected. 

The Flash was caught up in several nightmares, including the public meltdown of its star Ezra Miller and three regime changes at WB/DC that led to several reshoots and a strange marketing plan that played down Miller and played up the various Batmans featured in this multiverse time-travel adventure (Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck and a cameo from George Clooney) and unconvincing hyperbole from the studio heads about how massive it was going to be (James Gunn even described it the best superhero movie ever made). 

Why did it bomb so hard? Adam and I discuss the convoluted plot, the troubled lead actor, the crude visual effects (rationalized as a deliberate choice by director Andy Muschietti) the questionable resurrection of Christopher Reeve as Superman, and the creative dead end this series has found itself in as WB/DC prepares for a franchise reset. 

The pod’s sidebar series on NBC’s revolutionary TV crime drama Miami Vice (1984-1989) begins with returning guest and friend of the show James Majure joining us from Athens, GA.

There is so much to discuss in terms of the influence of Vice on contemporary culture but we’re starting at the beginning, with the origins of the idea of Miami Vice, a glimpse into the real world conditions in the city of Miami in the early 80s that led to the concept, how the show refined its style and formula over a long storyline arc about the war between Crockett and Tubbs and the ruthless Calderone Cartel, and how Vice reflects the vision of its two primary architects: creator Anthony Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann.

We also discuss the influence of Scarface on the production, the casting of playwright Miguel Piñero as Calderone, the Mozambique Drill, and the first appearance of “Crockett’s Theme”.

Miami Vice is currently available to watch for free on Tubi. 

Episodes discussed on this show:

Brother’s Keeper (pilot) - Season 1, Ep 1

Calderone’s Return, Parts I & II - Season 1, Eps 4 & 5

Sons and Lovers - Season 2, Ep 23

Cinema Smorgasbord’s Doug Tilley joins the pod for a discussion of the two major AVOD streaming services, Tubi and Pluto TV, and their massive libraries of free content, brought to you with short but forced advertising breaks. 

Even though Tubi has over 60 million regular monthly users, it still feels like an underground streaming platform, carrying tens of thousands of obscure films and documentaries along with recognizable catalog titles from major film studios spanning decades. Doug regularly monitors new arrivals to Tubi and posts update threads on Twitter using the #TubiOrNotTubi hashtag.

So what are the catches for using a streaming service with a massive library for free? Beyond learning to navigate their algorithms to discover content, some may be uncomfortable with its ownership (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation) or put off by some of the questionable material that can be found (their “documentary’” category is loaded with agit-prop documentaries about Trumpism or some pushing COVID paranoia). We offer tips on how to sift through the trash to find the treasure, and we also discuss highlights from Tubi’s main competitor, the more upscale Pluto TV.

The writer Maggie Serota returns to the show for a deep dive into the 2013 music documentary for Showtime, History of the Eagles, directed by Alison Ellwood.

This comprehensive 3 hour documentary is the official story of one of America’s biggest rock bands, spanning their massive popularity in the seventies, their solo careers in the eighties and their reunion in the nineties, but Maggie and I think that as entertaining as the movie must be for fans of The Eagles, it’s even more fun to watch if you’re not a fan. As sanitized and flattering the film is towards the group’s two leaders Glenn Frey and Don Henley, their legendary arrogance and the shocking mistreatment of the other members of the group (in particular the guitarist Henley coldly refers to as “Mr. Felder”) bursts through the constructed image to create a very funny portrayal of toxic masculinity and fevered egos on the rampage. 

We discuss our favourite moments of hubris and chaos, compare this epic documentary to the more recent Beatles film Get Back (which also includes appearances from the great producer Glyn Johns, who clearly didn’t enjoy working with the Eagles), and praise the MVP of the band and the film, guitar god Joe Walsh.

The writer Corey Atad returns to the pod for a discussion of the controversial new eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline, an action film inspired by Andreas Malm’s best-selling non-fiction work that argues in favour of direct and destructive action against the fossil fuel industry to escalate the battle against climate change. The film dramatizes the blowing-up of a pipeline by depicting the act as if it were a heist film, with stopwatch-precise editing and flashbacks explaining how the members of the crew found each other.

We discuss (in some detail) the criticism the film has received from the left and from the right: some on the left feel the movie fails a purity test by being marketed and released in multiplexes by film financiers and studios with ties to Big Oil, while some on the right are furious this pro-terrorist “Hollywood propaganda” is meant to turn the audience into radical extremists. But we also talk about the film itself, and how its in league with classic genre entertainments like First Bloodthat function both as dynamic thrillers and delivery devices for deeper social commentary.

Plus: Corey and I prepare to say ‘farewell’ to our ‘legacy verified’ Twitter bluechecks on 4/20, and we discuss Elon picking a fight with the CBC.

The Maryland-based writer and critic Jessica Ritchey is my special guest for a show that compares the current decline in the interconnected comic book movie business to the collapse in the late sixties of the Roadshow Musical with a look at the notorious 1969 musical western Paint Your Wagon (starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood) with 2022’s box office disappointment Black Adam, meant to launch a new DC superhero franchise for star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Hubris connects these two movies: Paint Your Wagon was a troubled production that was extremely expensive to make and not nearly the hit Paramount expected it to be, while Black Adam was The Rock’s brazen attempt to take over the direction of the DC Universe but released at the moment a new regime took over at Warner Bros’s DC unit.

Black Adam came from the Shazam saga but Johnson consciously distanced the would-be franchise from its source and even teased a future battle between this antihero and Henry Cavill’s Superman that also helped to doom the following Shazam sequel to box office oblivion, leading to public feuding between its star Zachary Levi and Johnson.

Jessica and I discuss the cultural conditions that swallowed up these two films in their respective eras, the questionable politics of these films, and why the Simpsons parody of Paint Your Wagon works better than the original!

Toronto-based writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns to the show to discuss the late screen goddess Raquel Welch and her greatest role as a trans woman out to destroy the Hollywood patriarchy in the 1970 film version of Gore Vidal’s controversial best-selling novel Myra Breckinridge, produced on a high budget by 20th Century Fox in the early days of the new X rating.

Long considered one of the worst movies ever made, Karen and I mount a defense of Myra Breckinridge as a ruthless satire of Hollywood that is intentionally distasteful and accidentally based in terms of its sexual politics. We discuss the troubled production and the cast of creatives including the British director Michael Sarne (who hated the book), the film critic Rex Reed (who made his acting debut here and trashed the movie when it was released) and the original screen sex goddess Mae West, coaxed back on the screen after nearly 30 years, who refused to appear on screen with Raquel and demanded she get top billing and two musical numbers (even though the film was not a musical).

Karen and I also discuss Raquel’s insane prime-time network tv specials and her comeback in the eighties as the star of a series of salacious workout videos.

You can watch Myra Breckinridge for free over at the Internet Archive.

This episode contains major spoilers and deals with difficult subject matter, so please watch the film before you listen to this discussion.

Freelance film critic and programmer Rafa Sales Ross joins me from Scotland to discuss Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, starring newcomer Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in an Academy Award-nominated performance as Calum, a Scottish single father who takes his 11 year old daughter Sophie on a trip to a resort in Turkey in the late nineties, a story told partly through the use of MiniDV holiday footage but more importantly refracted from the perspective of a grown-up Sophie, now at the same age her father was on this fateful vacation and reconsidering her memories.

As a film critic who saw Aftersun at its tear-soaked screening at Cannes and as part of the programming team that later selected the film to open the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Rafa is uniquely equipped to speak about this powerful drama about what gets captured in the “mind camera”; parenthood, loss, depression, empathy, memory, nostalgia and the hard-won wisdom children experience when they transform into adults and finally start to understand their parents as people.

Ed Conroy, a Toronto-based cultural historian and the creator of Retrontario, joins the show for a look back at the 40th anniversary of Pay TV in Canada.

On February 1, 1983, Canada’s first Pay TV channels arrived on the airwaves to great fanfare: Competing movie services First Choice and Superchannel offered subscribers blockbuster movies "uncut and commercial free" while the more refined C Channel offered more highbrow fare: world cinema, opera, theatre and concerts. First Choice distinguished itself from the other services by offering adult entertainment (softcore nudity on the soap opera “Loving Friends and Perfect Couples” and late night Playboy Channel programming, co-productions that controversially qualified as Canadian Content).

But Pay TV was not a success out of the gate, leading to C Channel going off the air within weeks and First Choice eventually having to merge with Superchannel (Canadians know the service now as Crave).

Ed and I take the listener on a tour of this chapter in television history, when uncut movies in your home were a novelty in the days before VCRs were commonplace, and the thrill of being exposed to exciting illicit programming, bringing Canadian teenagers in the eighties an at-home crash course in high and low film culture.

RIP Noah Cowan, veteran programmer and artistic director for TIFF who brought us Midnight Madness at the Festival and whose father Edgar brought us C Channel, a service ahead of its time.