Legends Podcast

Director Rachel Mason set out to make a documentary about her parents' bookstores in the West Hollywood and Silver Lake neighborhoods of Los Angeles. For much of her childhood, Karen and Barry Mason kept the nature of their business a secret from Rachel and her brothers, but the children later learned that their mother and father's stores were at the center of gay culture in L.A. In a true story t...

Based on a true story - sort of - this Elizabeth Banks-directed film bit off a chunk of the box office earlier this year. In the style of Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado, its absurd title promised campy animal chaos that audiences needed to see to believe. When a drug smuggler dumps kilos of Columbian cocaine on Blood Mountain in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, a bear then snorts the...

*******SPOILER ALERT****** (MINOR SPOILERS FOR RANDOM ISH STARTING AT ABOUT 45MINS .. sorry beef forgot the alerts!!) Based on a true story, this 2014 film follows a group of gay and lesbian activists who lend their support to a Welsh mining village during the 1984-1985 miners' strike, uniting two very different communities in the process. Starring Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Paddy...

After a successful franchise reboot with Batman Begins, auteur director Christopher Nolan leaned into the gritty aspects of the comic with a grounded take on the Clown Prince of Crime as the lead villain in a mob-centric tale of Gotham City. Christian Bale once again dons the Batsuit alongside Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman, with Heath Ledger joining the cast as Joker, Aaron Eckhar...

Stand-up comic and SNL star Eddie Murphy broke out on the big screen in Eighties movies like 48 Hrs and Trading Places, but his biggest box office successes came while playing Axel Foley, a street-smart Detroit detective as a fish-out-of-water in Beverly Hills, California. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, the first two films were huge hits commercially and critically, and while the t...

One of John Hughes's most well-know films and decade-defining teem comedy, this ensemble film was made for a million and it is still playing on cable TV. Often imitated but never remade - at  lease not yet, anyway- Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall star as five high schoolers serving Saturday detention in suburban Chicago high school under the watch...

Writer-director John Hughes made his mark on '80s cinema with the National Lampoon's Vacation films and his Brat Pack teen comedies. By the late '80s, he'd transitioned to writing more "grown-up" comedies, starting with 1987's Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Continuing his partnership with actor John Candy in The Great Outdoors, which Hughes wrote, and then the next film he directed, released in 1...

With Arnold Schwarzenegger's star rising in the early 80s, the Austrian bodybuilder filmed his first sequel, a follow-up to his 1982 role in the John Millius sword-and-sorcery epic Conan the Barbarian. Based on the works of Robert E. Howard, the Raffaella De Laurentiis production brought back Mako from the first film and introduced Grace Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, Tracey Walter, and Olivia d'Abo to...

In the early Eighties, Martin Scorcese was struggling to get The Last Temptation of Christ into production. After Paramount abandoned the adaptation, Scorcese decided instead to focus on smaller, independent projects. The script for this 1985 black comedy came to him by way of his lawyer, was written as an assignment for a film class, inspired by a surrealist monologue, and later infused with dial...

Fifteen years ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off with a grounded take on one of their most ____ characters ever. Debuting in 1963, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark became a founding member of the Avengers and also an alcoholic. For the film, director Jon Favreau and producer Kevin Feige cast Robert Downey, Jr., an actor with his own history of substance abuse. Jeff B...

Director Robert Rodriguez teaming up with famed comic creator Frank Miller to bring the pages of Miller's noir-soaked graphic novel to life. Co-directed by Miller (with a scene by Quentin Tarantino), this anthology movie draws not only its inspiration from the page - in many cases, it's a shot-for-shot recreation of the book's stylized black-and-white art. Starring too many people to name in a pod...

Following his breakout success with American Beauty, director Sam Mendes had a variety of projects to choose from, including films like A Beautiful Mind, K-PAX, and The Shipping News. Mendes chose instead to adapt a graphic novel about a hitman and his son on the run in the Prohibition Era Midwest. Starring Tom Hanks, Jude Law, Stanley Tucci, a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, and featuring Paul Newman in h...

Thirty-six years after the original film, a sequel to Top Gun was finally released. Develoment started in 2010 but was delayed by the death of director Tony Scott. Production began in 2017 with the hiring of Joseph Kosinski as director, with filming taking place in 2018 and 2019, with a release date pushed back several times due to the complex shoot and, of course, the pandemic. Multiple streaming...

Director Joel Schumacher was well-known for bring a dark and stylish flair to his films, from teenage vampires in The Lost Boys to benippled Batmen in in his neon-soaked Gotham City. By contrast, his 1993 potboiler starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall stands in the unflinching glare of the Los Angeles summer sun, with two middle-aged men on a collision course for a sunset showdown on the Ven...

This week we're talking about the final three episodes of season 1, "If You Can't Win, Don't Play," "Hockey Brings People Together," and "Don't Poke the Bear," with our special guest Sean. The back half of the season sees Shoresy attend his family reunion and face a dilemma when off-ice shenanigans force the studs to miss their game against the North Bay Norsemen. Faced with suspension, Nat, Miig...

This week we're talking about the first three episodes of season 1, "Never Lose Again," "Veteran Presence," and "Know Your Role." The first half of the season sees Number 69 of the Sudbury Bulldogs vow to never let his team lose again - and if they lose, they fold. General manager Nat finds the Bulldogs a new sponsor, and Shoresy recruits some veteran players to boost - or is it "bloost"? - the te...

Director Danny Boyle made his big-screen debut with a shoestring budget film about four Scottish flatmates - one deceased - and a suitcase full of cash. This black comedy film, co-written by frequent Boyle collaborator John Hodge, raked in the most cash of any British film of 1995, even through the crew had to auction off props during production to buy more film stock in order to keep shooting. St...

Director Rick Famuyiwa went from USC film school grad to Sundance darling to the Star Wars universe and was even the second of five directors attached to direct The Flash movie for WB DC. Common threads through his works are friendship and intersectionality within communities of color, on display his 2015 film starring Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, Kiersey Clemons, Lakeith Stanfield, Blake Anderso...

Spike Lee's third film, released in 1989, presented a day-in-the-life portrait of a neighborhood: Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on the hottest day of the year. Boasting an all-star cast including Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, and Samuel L. Jackson, along with the feature film debuts of Martin Lawrence and Rosie Perez, the film was a hi...

Writer-director Jordan Peele followed up his genre-bending breakout hit Get Out with Us, a straightforward horror film. For his third outing, Peele returned to the mash-up: this time mixing neo-Western with a Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and a bit of Jaws thrown in, but we'll get to that.) Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as siblings who inherit one of Hollywood's oldest working horse ra...

Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe concluded last year with the release of Ryan Coogler's follow-up to 2018's Black Panther. Following the unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020 from colon cancer, Marvel chose not to recast the role, instead allowing the mantle to pass, in the film, to a new Black Panther, as had happened many times before in the comics. Marvel did not, however, adv...

We're ending the Most Dangerous Month where it began, with a remake of the 1932 classic based on the 1924 short story reimagined as a TV show released in short episodes on a steaming app in 2020, and then on another streaming service in 2021 when the first streaming service went bankrupt, and finally re-edited as a movie and released on a third streaming service in 2022. Look, we told you this mon...

We're continuing the Most Dangerous Month with another movie with a controversial history. From director Craig Zobel and horror producer Jason Blum, this politically charged take on the human hunting genre was pulled from release after two high profile mass shootings. In the meantime, it became a cause célèbre over its alleged portrayal of a certain red-hat wearing demographic. Ultimately, the fil...

We're continuing the Most Dangerous Month with a British invasion and the film formerly known as Boyz in the Wood. The debut film from music video director Ninian Doff tells the tale of four boys from the mean streets of Glasgow on a Duke of Edinburgh Award wilderness trip to the highlands of Scotland. When they find themselves being hunted, possibly by the Duke himself, they'll have to work toget...

We're continuing the Most Dangerous Month with a Japanese cult classic that was effectively banned in the United States for over a decade. Based on the controversial 1999 novel by Koushun Takami, concerns over the film's violent content and recent school shootings made it difficult to find a distributor, as well as complicated rights issues around the film's international release. Featuring a grou...