Unclear and Present Danger

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Ronin , John Frankenheimer’s 1998 action masterpiece starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgard, Sean Bean and Jonathan Pryce, among many others. In Ronin , De Niro plays “Sam,” a CIA agent working undercover as an ex-CIA turned mercenary. He joins with a group of mercenaries to assist an I...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan , starring Tom Hanks, Ed Burns, Matt Damon and Tom Sizemore, among many other notable actors.  Set in 1944 during and after the D-Day landing, Saving Private Ryan follows a group of soldiers on a mission to locate Private James Francis Ryan and bring him hom...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John discuss the 1998 X-Files movie, directed by Rob Bowman with a screenplay by X-Files creator Chris Carter. Starring, obviously, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, the X-Files movie tells a convoluted story of hidden aliens, government plots, a secret cabal of evil rich people and a global conspiracy. It is a perfect encapsulat...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle is joined by Nicole Hemmer, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and co-host of the This Day in History podcast, to discuss the 1997 dystopian science-fiction film Gattaca , directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Ethan Hawke, Jude Law and Uma Thurman. In Gattaca , Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, a natural-born human being in a w...

On this week’s episode of the pod, Jamelle and John cover Michael Bay's 1998 asteroid movie Armageddon — the one where oil drillers, not astronauts, are sent to save the world. They discuss why it reads as the most right-wing film they've covered: a movie that valorizes blue-collar white masculinity and treats scientists and bureaucrats as obstacles, an opening sequence that prefigures 9/11, and a...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched Roland Emmerich’s attempt to bring Godzilla to Hollywood in the appropriately titled Godzilla . Ostensibly a film about the dangers of nuclear testing, Godzilla is a total mess, a miserable failure that deserves its poor reputation. We talked about that deservedly poor reputation, as well as changing American perceptions of the milit...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker to discuss Bulworth , the 1998 black comedy (no pun intended) written, directed by and starring Warren Beatty. After working through their initial shock at the sheer weirdness of the film, Jamelle, John and Vinson explore its politics, its vision of American society, its critiqu...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 Lifetime film Oklahoma City: A Survivor’s Story , starring Kathy Baker as Priscilla Salyers, a real-life U.S. Customs employee who survived the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The film follows the attack, Salyers's rescue, and her subsequent struggle with PTSD, as well as the way the traged...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 action thriller Mercury Rising , directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, and Miko Hughes. The film follows FBI agent Art Jeffries, who goes on the run to protect a nine-year-old autistic boy after the child accidentally cracks a classified NSA encryption cipher — drawing the attention o...

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch U.S. Marshals , the extremely lackluster sequel to The Fugitive which dispenses with a straightforward cat and mouse story in favor of a byzantine conspiracy involving government moles, foreign espionage and the Taiwanese government. Directed by Stuart Baird, U.S. Marshals stars Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Robert Down...

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John were joined by Hilary Matfess of the University of Denver to discuss G.I. Jane , the 1997 military drama directed by Ridley Scott and starring Demi Moore and Viggo Mortenson. The discussion for this film revolves around the evolving role of women in the military, post-Cold War anxieties about American military readiness, the ge...

The next episode of the podcast will be here soon, but while you wait, here is the most recent episode of our politics show on the Patreon. In it, we talk the most recent developments in the Trump administration's attack on Minnesota and what they might portend for both the White House and its opposition going forward. We also say a few words about Epstein because, you know, how could we not. You...

Jamelle and John are back for the new year with an episode on the 1997 thriller Murder at 1600 , directed by Dwight Little and starring Wesley Snipes, Diane Lane, Alan Alda and Dennis Miller. It is yet another entry into the mini-boomlet of films whose premise, essentially, is what if the president were horny…and murderous. In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the relationship between t...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John marked the unfortunate death of Rob Reiner by watching his 1992 military legal thriller A Few Good Men. In their conversation, they discuss Reiner’s career, the underlying liberalism of a film like A Few Good Men , and the continued relevance of Jack Nicholson’s performance as Colonel Nathan Jessup. After this, we’ll be off for...

Wag the Dog tells the story of a scandal-ridden president whose chief spin doctor, Conrad Brean (De Niro), decides to distract the public with a fictional war with Albania. To pull this off, he hires Stanley Motss (Hoffman), a prominent Hollywood producer who throws himself into orchestrating an imaginary war, complete with fake footage, fake war heroes and a popular theme song. The hoax is succes...

Every week, we do a political discussion show over at the Patreon. We wanted to offer you a preview of that show in the form of a full episode, which happens to be our most recent episode, on the Graham Platner affair in Maine. If you like our discussion, sign up for the Patreon to get an episode very week at patreon.com/unclearpod.

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Tomorrow Never Dies , the 1997 action thriller, the eighteenth film in the James Bond series and the second to star Pierce Brosnan as fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, it follows Bond in his effort to stop the media mogul Elliot Carver, played by Jonathan Pryce, from starting World War III...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched the (rightfully) forgotten thriller The Jackal , a loose adaptation of The Day of the Jackal directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier and Diane Venora. In The Jackal , Willis plays the titular assassin, a feared hitman who has been hired by Russian mobsters to assassinate t...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 science-fiction action thriller Starship Troopers , starring Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyers, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown. An adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same title, Verhoeven’s film takes a satirical pass on the material, t...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Red Corner , a 1997 legal thriller directed by Jon Avnet and starring Richard Gere, Bai Ling, Bradley Whitford and Peter Donat. In Red Corner , Richard Gere plays Jack Moore,, an American businessman who becomes entangled in nightmarish legal ordeal after he spends the evening with a Chinese fashion model and wakes up t...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Hostile Waters , a 1997 made-for-TV movie directed by David Drury and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen and Max von Sydow.  Hostile Waters — based on a real-life incident, the loss of the Soviet Navy’s K-219 — was a joint production of HBO and the BBC, released first in the United Kingdom and then the United...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched The Assignment , a 1997 political thriller directed by Christian Duguay and starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland and Ben Kingsley. In The Assignment , Aidan Quinn plays Annibal Ramirez, a U.S. naval officer recruited by CIA agent Jack Shaw — played by Sutherland — for a special operation to capture the elusive t...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Executive Power , an obscure made-for-TV movie directed by David Corley and starring Craig Sheffer as Nick Seger, a Secret Service agent who gets entangled in a web of political intrigue and moral compromise after he assists the president in a deadly cover-up. There is not much more to the movie, but Jamelle and John tr...

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched The Peacemaker , a 1997 political action thriller directed by Mimi Leder and staring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. When a train carrying nuclear warheads crashes in rural Russia, nuclear specialist Dr. Julia Kelly is brought in by the U.S. government to investigate. She quickly discovers the incident was no accident...

On this week's (somewhat delayed) episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Matt Duss to discuss the 1998 conspiracy thriller Enemy of the State, directed by the late great Tony Scott and starring the late great Gene Hackman, as well as Will Smith, Jon Voight and Regina King. In their discussion, Jamelle, John and Matt talk the film's vision of the American surveillance...