Junk Filter

CW: this episode contains spoilers for Joker 2 and discussions of cinematic sexual violence. The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns to the podcast to discuss the Reverse Barbenheimer of 2024: the more or less simultaneous release of two extremely expensive blockbusters, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, two films that, as it turned out, nobody wanted to se...

Access this entire 86-minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/180-miami-vice-113085968 We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the premiere of NBC’s crime drama Miami Vice with a new episode of Junk Filter’s continuing series on...

The writer and podcaster Gus Lanzetta returns to the podcast from São Paulo to give our listeners an update on life in Brazil since their Supreme Court banned X: The Everything App from access to the country, and we thought we would pair this with a movie about a revolutionary communication tool that was suddenly not important anymore: Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy-drama BlackBerry . BlackBerry is th...

Access this entire 126-minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/178-junk-filter-112189443 Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine from the great left politics and culture podcast Pod Casty For Me join me for a deep dive into Gerard Butler’s...

Veteran national politics reporter for Semafor David Weigel returns to the show for a discussion of the new conservative political biopic Reagan , starring Dennis Quaid as The Great Communicator, or as he was known in Russia, The Crusader, for the film is told from the perspective of a former KGB agent (Jon Voight) who identified him early on as the man who would someday defeat the Soviet Union wi...

Access this entire 100 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/176-danpilled-109048208 Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua returns to the show to continue our Danpilled series, this time taking a look at one of the main contributors...

The Milwaukee-based film critic and programmer Chris Cassingham joins the show this week to discuss the great director George Stevens and his 1953 masterpiece Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, about a mysterious gunfighter who finds work with a homestead family in the open range of lawless Wyoming and is drawn into the community’s conflict against a gang of violent cattleranchers who are...

Access this entire 86 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/174-costners-108247008 The film writer Corey Atad returns for a show about the return of Kevin Costner to the director’s chair with the first chapter of his planne...

Sami Gold, an undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents joins me from New York City to discuss some key texts of reactionary right-wing cinema from the post-Civil Rights era and the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon, what we could call counter-counter revolutionary cinema or Silent Major...

Access this entire 93 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/172-american-v-o-107059565 In the second half of our discussion about the 2016 FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson , Karen Geier and I d...

With the recent death of O.J. Simpson and this month’s 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a look at the other great O.J. tv epic of 2016, Ryan Murphy’s 10 part series American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson: On part one of our discussion we discuss the cottage industry of content that surround...

The film writer David Jamell Moses joins the show for a discussion about a great nineties film that has been flying under the radar for too long, Boaz Yakin’s debut feature Fresh  (1994) starring Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson and a 13-year-old actor named Sean Nelson making his film debut, in one of the greatest screen acting performances by a child. Nelson plays Michael (aka Fresh), a qui...

Access this entire 105 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. ⁠https://www.patreon.com/posts/169-cannons-with-105061266 The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns for a show about Cannon Films, and the aggressive attempt by “The Go-Go Boys” Menahem Golan an...

Elana Levin from Graphic Policy Radio returns to the show for a deep dive into the second wave of Ska music, a brief but influential era when black and white UK musicians fused Jamaican dance music of the sixties into punk and new wave music of the seventies to create a sound that would further revolutionize American popular music in the nineties. The modern ska genre gets made fun of a lot (mozza...

Access this entire 87 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows every month) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/167-civil-war-102981212 The comedy writer Ursula Lawrence ( Drunk History , Adam Ruins Everything ) returns to the show from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss A24’s first foray into b...

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)...

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...

Access this entire 89 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows every month) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/164-ghostbusters-101387544 The writer and friend of the pod Adam Jackson returns for a show about the Ghostbusters series, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with the...

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 an...

Access this entire 99 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows every month) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/162-zone-of-with-100893723 The writer James Slaymaker, author of Time is Luck: The Cinema of Michael Mann , returns to the pod from Southampton to discuss Jonathan Glazer’s The Zo...

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...

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)...

In honour of Oppenheimer winning the Oscar for Best Picture, we're unlocking our July 26, 2023 premium episode about the film. Over 30% of Junk Filter episodes are available exclusively to patrons of the podcast: you can support the show directly and get every episode by going to patreon.com/junkfilter The film writer Corey Atad returns to the show for a deep dive into Christopher Nolan’s hist...

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...

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...