JaZ Make a Podcast

For the very first Cabin Cast, Zac and John drive two hours into the woods, set up the mics in an actual cabin, and fire up Roland Emmerich's Matthew Broderick-led monster movie to find out why it landed with such a thud. The first hour is classic Emmerich: big, dumb, glorious destruction in New York City. Then the movie keeps going for another hour and a half. They dig into how Godzilla gradu...

JaZ Make a Podcast does the Time Warp in a surprise bonus Halloween episode on The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the cult classic musical starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien, Nell Campbell and Meat Loaf. Zac watched it every Halloween through high school. John had never seen it until this week. Together they work out what still holds up almost 50 years later. Ti...

Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024) closes out the JaZ spooky season, and John and Zac have very different reactions to it. The guys dig into how this moody, gorgeous remake stacks up against F.W. Murnau's 1922 original and Bram Stoker's novel, debate whether Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is genuinely unsettling or gets upstaged by Willem Dafoe's scenery-chewing Von Franz, and pick apart what Lily-Rose...

It's spooky season, and John and Zac are digging into Widow's Bay, Apple TV+'s new horror-comedy from creator Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation) and executive producer Hiro Murai (Atlanta). Starring Matthew Rhys, Kate O'Flynn, Dale Dickey, Stephen Root, and Kevin Carroll, the series follows a small island town forced to reckon with the dark bargain its founders struck centuries ago to keep every...

The Next Generation crew's final voyage gets put on trial. On this episode of JaZ Make a Podcast, we dig into Star Trek Nemesis — the 2002 film that closes out the TNG movie era with Tom Hardy as Shinzon, a Romulan-engineered clone of Jean-Luc Picard hell-bent on revenge. We break down how closely Nemesis mirrors Wrath of Khan's structure (right down to Data's death echoing Spock's), whether that...

We're back for Season 2! And to kick things off, we're heading back to Amity Island for Jaws 2 — no Spielberg, no Quint, no Hooper, just Roy Scheider giving what might be his best performance of his career trapped inside a movie that can't decide what it wants to be. We dig into the two competing films buried in here: the genuinely compelling PTSD story of a broken police chief nobody believes (ag...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

Welcome to JaZ Shots — the summer edition of JaZ Make a Podcast! While we take a break from our usual deep-dive format, we're bringing you shorter, punchier episodes packed with the same sharp pop culture takes and real analysis you've come to expect. JaZ Shots is our way of keeping the conversation going through the summer months without the full-length commitment. Quick hits on films, TV, and ev...

The first summer blockbuster. The movie that changed Hollywood forever. The JaZ Make a Podcast Season 1 finale is dedicated to Jaws (1975) — and after rewatching it, both John and Zac are in complete agreement: this is a masterpiece. They go deep on why the broken mechanical shark was the best thing that ever happened to Spielberg's direction, how Roy Scheider's Brody works as the ultimate everyma...

James Gunn's Supergirl film was on the horizon, so John and Zac went back to the 1984 original — and it delivered far beyond anyone's expectations. Helen Slater is a genuinely charming Supergirl/Linda Lee, who enrols in high school while Argo City presumably ceases to exist. Faye Dunaway plays Selena, a villain whose primary motivation is getting laid. Peter O'Toole exists as Zoltar — clearly oper...

Shutter Island (2010) is a film so meticulously constructed that a second viewing transforms every scene. John and Zac go deep on Martin Scorsese's psychological masterpiece: the Hitchcockian and Kubrickian visual language, the deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule as a disorientation technique, the way frozen bodies thawing represents suppressed memory returning, and the glass continuity tri...

Steven Spielberg executive-produced it. Irvin Kershner — director of The Empire Strikes Back — directed the pilot. Roy Scheider stars as Captain Nathan Bridger. So why does SeaQuest DSV feel like it's missing everything that would make it work? John and Zac dig into the 1993 NBC pilot for this ambitious underwater sci-fi series. The production design holds up. The 1993 CG is impressive for its era...

The Caped Crusader has had more cinematic lives than any superhero in history — and John and Zac are ranking them all. This episode is a chronological tour through every Batman film: from the gloriously campy 1966 original through Tim Burton's gothic reinvention, Joel Schumacher's ice-pun disasters, Christopher Nolan's unimpeachable Dark Knight trilogy, and beyond. The big answers: Who is the grea...

With The Devil Wears Prada 2 on the horizon, John and Zac return to the 2006 original — and their verdicts diverge. The cast is undeniable: Meryl Streep delivers one of the great screen performances of her career, Anne Hathaway brings real charm, Emily Blunt is razor-sharp, and Stanley Tucci elevates every scene. The moment Miranda Priestly shows vulnerability is extraordinary. But the script mean...

Generally considered the greatest WrestleMania of all time. Also four hours long, which John consumed across multiple sittings. Zac — a lifelong wrestling fan who once ran an annual family Christmas wrestling league called Christmas Chaos in his grandmother's basement — guides John through the full card from Houston's Reliant Astrodome. The highlights: TLC II between the Hardy Boyz, Dudley Boyz, a...

It was supposed to launch a franchise. It bombed at the box office. Thirty years later, John and Zac are here to explain why it absolutely shouldn't have. The Phantom (1996) is one of the most purely enjoyable action adventure films of the decade: Billy Zane as the Ghost Who Walks, Treat Williams as a villain of boundless charisma, Kristy Swanson as a Marion Ravenwood-worthy love interest, and Cat...

The 98th Oscars are this Sunday. John and Zac head back forty years to the 59th — the 1987 ceremony celebrating the films of 1986 — and find the Academy getting some things defensible, some things wrong, and largely missing the bigger picture. Platoon wins Best Picture and Best Director (Oliver Stone, Vietnam veteran — defensible). Sigourney Weaver loses Best Actress for Aliens to Marlee Matlin (n...

Zac's all-time favourite comedy. The funniest thing John has seen in years. Wet Hot American Summer (2001) is David Wain's absurdist masterpiece — a summer camp comedy in which everyone is obviously in their early 30s playing 16-year-olds, children die and nobody notices, Paul Rudd gives the greatest comedic performance of his career as the most aggressively bad boyfriend in screen history, and a...

An A-list cast so large it had to be printed in two columns. A budget of $52 million. A global box office of $216 million. And a film that John and Zac can barely figure out how to recommend — or not recommend. Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day (2010) is a Love Actually riff with a larger cast and a thinner script: Anne Hathaway has the only storyline that approaches a real arc; Taylor Swift and Ta...

Part Two of the tribute continues. Robert Redford — Butch Cassidy, The Sting, The Natural, and the man who built the Sundance Film Festival from nothing. Rob Reiner, whose directing career is so quietly remarkable it almost defies belief: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. John and Zac agree he deserves his own dedicated episode. Also...