Words and Movies

Show Me a Hero is a 2015 miniseries that was produced for HBO and helmed by David Simon, the mind behind The Wire, Treme, The Deuce and Homicide: Life On The Street . So most of his projects are fictional with a dash of real-life in them, but this one is based entirely on a true story and relies only on a few typical embellishments (e.g. combining characters or rearranging events to fit the broade...

So to answer your first question: no, we didn't miscount. We're having a technical issue with Episode 98. If we can fix it, great and we'll release it when it's ready. If we can't, we'll have to re-record it. It's actually happened before, for a different reason, and while it's an interesting experiment to re-hash the discussion we already had, we realized that we d...

In which we continue and conclude our discussion of Lonesome Dove. The mini-series is clearly not a strictly American phenomenon (as evidenced by our last episode), but there was a while when that could easily be the argument. It seemed as though mini-series were ubiquitous during the 1970s and 80s. The first by-definition mini-series in the US was probably The Blue Knight , which aired on NBC in...

The mini-series is clearly not a strictly American phenomenon (as evidenced by our last episode), but there was a while when that could easily be the argument. It seemed as though mini-series were ubiquitous during the 1970s and 80s. The first by-definition mini-series in the US was probably The Blue Knight , which aired on NBC in 1973 and later became a regular series starring George Kennedy in t...

This is the first of five episodes we'll be covering which deal with miniseries, rather than theatrical films. The idea here is that when television decides they're going to do "events" and create these limited series ("limited" in the sense that there's a fixed number of episodes and no more are on the table), budgets tend to go up and the caliber of actor you get...

This is the first of five episodes we'll be covering which deal with miniseries, rather than theatrical films. The idea here is that when television decides they're going to do "events" and create these limited series ("limited" in the sense that there's a fixed number of episodes and no more are on the table), budgets tend to go up and the caliber of actor you get...

Running on Empty is an interesting film by Sidney Lumet that, in our opinion, doesn't get enough love. Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play a married couple forced to go underground when their activist ways take an unfortunate turn and someone is accidentally killed. Now, that event took place nearly twenty years earlier, so it's mostly relevant as the setup to the film. In the present day, they h...

In our last episode we looked at Grace Kelly, whose career was cut short by her own choice. She was given the option to be treated like a princess, or to go out and actually be an honest-to-god Princess. She chose both love and duty, since you can't really Princess and be a movie star at the same time. Fair. In today's episode, we look at a career that was cut short because the actor, who...

In 1955, Kelly paired up with Alfred Hitchcock again, to make To Catch a Thief, co-starring Cary Grant. Grant plays a retired cat burglar who is suspected of committing a new series of robberies, so he sets up a big job as a kind of sting operation to nab the person who's making him look like he's returned to a life of crime. Grace Kelly plays one of his potential victims in this scheme, a...

Sean and I originally came up with something like a half-dozen subjects for this miniseries, including a few actors from Saturday Night Live who made the jump into films. But ultimately it became kind of unwieldy, so we limited ourselves to two full episodes. Hollywood and show business fame in general can be a brutal place, and careers can end for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes actors just fall...

Terrence Malik has written and directed The Tree of Life, a sprawling story that starts in the 1960s, jumps to present-day and then goes back to the birth of the universe. And that's just in the first few minutes of the film. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are the O'Briens, a couple that learns their teenage son has died. Over the years it appears that they still haven't quite gotten o...

Whether we choose to admit it or not, we're driven by some level of faith that something lies beyond our current plane of existence. Some of us simply hope so, some profess not to care, others will go wholeheartedly into some form of religion. And the search for God--however you view that particular concept--is a compelling one, especially when you tell a story about someone whose faith is being t...

In Part 2 of our episode we look at Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights , from 1999. This was the fourth time that Levinson went to the well of life in Baltimore, and the second we've looked at (we still need to get to Tin Men and Avalon). The film is not a response to any of his Baltimore films, but was a response to his portrayal of Dustin Hoffman's character in the film Sphere , which...

FIlm directors have to have a thick skin when it comes to criticism. But once in awhile, it gets to them and they let it show. More often than not, they say that the critics are out of touch with audience tastes. Others will own their failures: Roland Emmerich, for example, admitted that Independence Day: Resurgence didn't work and that he probably shouldn't have been the director. And som...

We continue this episode with To Have and Have No t, a 1944 production directed by Howard Hawks. In this film, Bogart plays a sport tourism fisherman who's asked to use his boat to assist the French Resistance in Martinique. He meets up with Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall) and that's where the fireworks started, both on and off screen. If you don't know how to whistle,...

Casablanca is a film that Sean and I have wanted to cover for a long time, but there was a little bit of a struggle to find a good film to pair it with. Not because there were so few, but because there were so MANY. Finally we came up with focusing on Humphrey Bogart himself rather than on the overall theme of the film. And then there was the realization that Bogart had a couple of films where he...

In the second half of our episode, we take a peek at THE COMPANY (2003), a fictional story involving a real ballet company, with a couple of actors thrown in who aren't professional ballet dancers. As with any Altman film, there's a lot going on, usually simultaneously, and there are are a couple of throughlines making their way through a bunch of set pieces. But once you get used to Altma...

In today's episode we're going to have a look at a couple of films made several decades apart that look at the goings-on behind the scenes in ballet companies. In this half of the episode, we're reviewing THE RED SHOES (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. We have impresario-type behavior, composers with big egos, love triangles, and all of it rather thinly overlai...

In Part 2 of today's episode, we look at TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY, directed by Michael Winterbottom. Steve Coogan is an exaggerated version of himself (we hope), playing the title character in the film adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. He's constantly sparring with another actor in the film over the relative importance of their roles. The dire...

Hey there! LTNS! Today we take a look at a pair of films that deal with the creation of a film, but the catch is that the source material is notoriously difficult to adapt. Consequently the crux of the story we see involves the difficulty the creators are having putting the thing together. We start with ADAPTATION (2002), directed by Spike Jonze. We've got a terrific ensemble cast including Ni...

As you no doubt know, actor/director/producer Robert Redford died last week at the age of 89. Now, lots and lots of people took the time to look back at his film career, so Sean and Claude took a different tack and reviewed a different aspect of Redford's legacy: the Sundance Film Festival. Redford wasn't one of the original founders, but he came in very early in the process, and just havi...

Way, way back in Episode 12, we looked at Stage Door and All About Eve , a couple of films about the theater industry that had practically no theater in them. We're going back to that well only only 76 episodes later, with today's look at two films that also deal with stage performers and the things that go into getting something on the boards. But where Part 1 stuck to the United States, this tim...

In the second half of our episode, we check out Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), which is definitely a tonal shift from the first half. Kristen Stewart is the American assistant to an international star of stage and screen played by Juliette Binoche. The death of a former mentor leads her to consider the implications of time, aging, culture in general, and the blurring lines between relationships. We&...

From New York we head down to Baltimore, Maryland for DINER (1982) written and directed by Barry Levinson. This film was, in fact, shot in and around Baltimore, and Claude takes the time to flex his Baltimore geography knowledge. (By the way, when you're visiting the gravesite he mentions during the episode, you can also visit the grave of John Wilkes Booth, perhaps the best-marked unmarked gr...

This episode takes you to the places where a pair of directors grew up. Coincidentally, these places are also the stomping grounds for Your Humble Hosts. We begin with MEAN STREETS (1973) . directed and co-written by Martin Scorsese, which is set in New York City. (Yeah, it was filmed in Los Angeles, but they found good locations so you don't really notice.) Scorsese weaves a tale through seve...