The Twin Geeks

Dad & daughter join forces as a podcasting duo for the first time ever to record their thoughts after seeing Illumination's Mario film in theaters. Ezra shares her favorite videogames, movies, thoughts about the Mario Universe, Dreamlight Valley, and our shared favorite movie experiences. It's a special show about how families connect over movies and videogames. Let's-a go. A produ...

There’s no crying in baseball, as friend of the show Renee Marie joins for a wide-ranging discussion of the iconic A League of Their Own, which remains the pinnacle of Women’s Sports Movies. Films that live with us are our bread and butter. This is especially true for this episode, as Renee has a close personal relationship with the film, informed by hosting trivia nights, meeting one of the film’...

Our friend JD Duran from InSession Film joins the show to discuss the complete works of James Cameron’s filmography, why he is the king of sequels, and how his career as a foremost technician has advanced the course of filmmaking. A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our Discord

Every Best Picture winner in Oscars history enters and all are ranked according to your hosts, Calvin and Matt, organized into tidy tiers for your viewing and listening pleasure. Every movie has been watched, evaluated, and slotted into careful placement in our lists, including all but this year's eventual winner. A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our Discord

The Twin Geeks co-founder David Punch presents his list in this The Twin Geeks podcast special, presented by Stephen Gillespie A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our Discord

It's a The Twin Geeks tradition! Our resident Halloween expert Jesse joins the show to talk Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers , Halloween Ends, seasonal horror watches, and... Radiohead's In Rainbows (2007). See you next year! A production of The Twin Geeks | Join our Discord

Over the course of nearly 50 active years in the film industry, Robert Altman created a total of 35 unique and creative feature films. It has been a long journey to catalog the trajectory of that storied course, but we come now, some four months later, at the end of the road. From an early peak in the mid-1970s, he was churning out an unmatchable string of masterful ensemble contemplations, to a r...

It's not often, in Hollywood, that our heroes find a second wind. It's true that everyone loves a happy ending, but they love a devastating tragedy just as much, if not more. Some of the industry's most treasured pioneers spent the later halves of their career languishing out in the cold, and after more than a decade of relative isolation from the bigwigs in California, it seemed like...

Altman's continued trend of adapting stage plays into feature films proceeded into the end of the '80s with mixed successes. On one hand there were films like  Secret Honor  (1984), a scaled-back character study of a fictional Richard Nixon contemplating on the missteps and bitter grudges of his tumultuous political career, carried by an astounding one-man performance from Phillip Baker Ha...

The legacy of Robert Altman presides mostly in the '70s, based on the strength of his back-to-back run of multiple masterpieces in the early part of that decade. That trend did not continue for him on into the '80s, as a series of previous flops put him in a precarious scenario of needing a big commercial hit that studio executives were praying would allude him. Peculiar oddities like  A P...

If the central thesis of Altman's directorial bent has always been an investigation of what America means, then  Nashville (1975) is his ultimate statement on the matter. This sprawling opus of the country musical capital of the country brings together all the disparate, intersecting elements of our culture into an overlapping menagerie of cultural curios and distinct personalities, clashing a...

And thus began Altman's unprecedented run of innovative masterworks. One by one, Altman ran the gamut of American genre favorites, upending and undoing every convention and expectation held within their structures as a means of dissecting and interrogating the inherent truths buried beneath their mountains of cliches. Time and time again, contemporaries of Altman have called McCabe & Mrs....

Often recognized as a maverick within the Hollywood system, during a time when everyone was a maverick trying to reinvent the American industry just as it had creatively bottomed out, Robert Altman was truly a filmmaker of his own making. Preceding his New Hollywood contemporaries by about a generation, Altman fought in World War II and made his directorial debut in the '50s, before moving on...

Bakshi continued his pursuit of avante-garde animation throughout the 1980s. His refinement of rotoscoping as a means of perfecting the fluid translation of human movement continued into the decade, beginning with  American Pop  (1981): a jukebox journey through America's cultural apogee, starting with the sonic roots of vaudeville and ragtime, building towards an electric rock 'n roll cli...

With the death of the Haye's Code in the late 1960's and a dearth of new movies from the Disney Corporation's homogenous stranglehold over the field of animation, the time was right for new players to take up the field, carving out a unique landscape in cinema which was not only varied in its style and artistic voices, but in its audiences as well. The leader of this pack was a Jewish...

The world's most famous rock band. The last vestiges of a style and sound still thriving after the world has moved on to so many other modern genres. A link to the revolutionary sound stemming from Seattle, Washington in the early '90s, birthed from the ashes of its most infamous loss. And now, another cloud of ash threatens to blanket the Foo Fighters for good, as the tragic eruption of d...

Take a new look at the world around you. Look through a mirror. What does it say about your world that is new? The cinema of Jean Cocteau is a world of mirrors and new ways of imagining the world. Looking at Cocteau’s movies is also a kind of gazing into a mirror, reality reflected back more fantastical, more fabulous, more than the real thing ever could. Cocteau made the prosaic profound. Cocteau...

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature. Jean Cocteau. The rest is literature. When Cocteau was a young boy he said he would be clever later. He said his father was a painter. Boys say a lot of things. His father was an...

Bogdanovich earned his keep in Hollywood as a director of films first and foremost. But he was perhaps more widely recognized for his efforts as a second-hand oral historian of Hollywood movies, embolding their legacy through innumerable interviews and commentary tracks in which he would recite the stories passed onto him in perfect comic imitation of his legendary filmic mentors. Bogdanovich’s lo...

The following chapter of Bogdanovich’s career has yet to be recorded in any significant capacity. Previous retrospectives of his works tend to end at his dramatic apex, with the more thorough examinations dipping into the later classics and recent reevaluations recognizing his last theatrical works. Nobody, however, has paid any attention to his TV works from the ‘90s. Nobody. “ I did a lot of tv...

While the impetus for Bogdanovich’s movie-making career began with Roger Corman, the genesis of his directorial ambitions came earlier, as an actor studying under the tutelage of Stella Adler and her prestigious New York studio for the Method. Bogdanovich gathered a troupe of his fellow students and directed them in a scene from Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife , which went so successfully that it pr...

Bogdanovich has claimed that the early months of 1980 were the happiest time of his life. He was in emphatic, unequivocal love with Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, and she was equally in love with him. Their blissful romance led to Bogdanovich dreaming up his next film, They All Laughed . Weaving together his affections for Stratten, the ongoing dissolution of her current marriage, and the recent...

It was during the casting process for The Last Picture Show when Cybill Shepherd was first brought to Bogdanovich’s attention. He and his wife Polly Platt picked Shepherd out from the cover of a magazine, with Platt in particular noting the devious sexuality she possessed which suited perfectly the role of Jacy Farrow. Her promiscuous nature would prove potent off screen as well, much to Bogdanovi...

Much like the French critics turned New Wave phenoms, Peter Bogdanovich was a student of the American classics. Beginning as a historian, Bogdanovich expanded his knowledge of the medium by chronicling the words of these directors through various books, interviews, essays, and documentaries. He took their sagely advice as inspiration for his own career, carrying the torch of the Old Guard into a N...

It was not evident, on Oscar Night 2010, that Kathryn Bigelow would walk away a historical victor, for her modestly-sized independent film about distressed bomb technicians in Iraq had stiff competition, including a movie which remains the highest-grossing film of all time . Pluck persevered, ultimately, and The Hurt Locker took not only the Oscar for Best Director, but Best Picture, and four more...