Alternate Ending - Movie Review Podcast

Our next podcast topic comes courtesy of Patreon subscriber Andrew, who had a simple request: watch and discuss two of the richest, most exhausting costume dramas ever filmed. It's a Spoiler Alert this time around, as we dive deep into the late epics by the legendary Japanese director Kurosawa Akira: the 1980 Palme d'Or winner Kagemusha , and the monumental King Lear adaptation Ran , from 1985. Th...

At the Ready  premiered at Sundance 2021 and I was super excited about it.  It appeared on my most anticipated films of Sundance list , in fact.  The headline reads "a group of seniors train to become border control agents at El Paso's Horizon High School, near the US/Mexico border." I surmised that the film would feature stupid kids that don't have a big-picture view on humanity. Then, over the c...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Take 2, a sideshow hosted by AE contributor Brennan Klein, where every other week we will dive deep into a movie mentioned on the previous episode. As a followup to the Top 5 Love Scenes episode, Brennan is sitting down with Carrie to discuss a movie she had never seen before: 2005's BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN! Join us as we discuss our differing opinions on who is the...

Wild Indian made it's debut at Sundance 2021 Wild Indian stars Makwa ( Michael Greyeyes) , a young Anishinaabe boy, is dealing with two pretty terrible parents..  He's abused, he's neglected and all of the trauma pours over into his mental health.  He and his only friend, Ted-O, like to escape by playing in the woods, until the day Makwa murders a schoolmate.  It's a shocking and unexpected moment...

Valentine's Day is just behind us, but we're still feeling a little swoony and amorous. That's why our next episode is going to be dedicated to those movie moments that make us feel all tingly and gushy inside, with our picks for the top 5 love scenes in movie history. Maybe they're as sweet as a first kiss on a spring day; maybe they're as hot and steamy as the lead-up to a round of athletic scre...

You've probably never heard of Little Fish and that's a real problem.  It's like when you hear some 14 year old, who is also an Inta-Snap-Tic-Tac-Toe influencer, makes bazillions of dollars singing auto-tuned rhymes, while the actual musical geniuses are eating ramen and playing at dive bars in Chicago. I'll get this out of the way first, the "will love prevail in the face of imminent disaster?" t...

I'll put my hand on the bible right now and tell you right now that Mother Schmuckers will be the weirdest movie you'll see all year.  Weirder than The Holy Mountain . Well, maybe equally weird but in such different ways.  There's fecal consumption and bestiality and plenty of unshaven-body nudity.  What am I even saying, it's exactly The Holy Mountain . I'm going to plagiarize the Sundance's syno...

In the chaos of Sundance we had about 10 minutes to spare.  Luckily Raspberry was just 7 breezy minutes between me and snagging some lunch. At minute 1 my eyes were quickly pooling with water, by minute 2 I had tears streaming down my face, by minute 3 I was laughing, at minute 4 I was laughing through sobs, coming in at minute 5 I was audibly crying and sucking back nose drool, rolling on to minu...

I'm going to tag this post as #journalingforwellness and #freetherpy and hope that you don't throw rotten tomatoes at me as a traverse my feelings on Cowboys .  The last few years has forced me to grapple with some hard truths about myself.  I've spent the majority of my life thinking that I was "good" just because I don't care what you look like, who who love or how you live your life.  But that...

Jockey didn't make my most anticipated list of Sundance , because frankly, horse movies usually depress me.  The horse always gets injured or dies or gets injured and then dies and who amongst us really needs that kind of heartbreak right now? Well shame on me for judging In a surprising turn, I don't even really remember much about a horse in Jockey .  I mean, there definitely is a horse and ther...

Well, Sundance is over and we're all breathing a collective sigh of exhausted relief. Over the course of 5 days, we cumulatively watched over 50 features and shorts.  While our experiences were wildly different, with Tim watching at least 7 films a day and cranking out reviews, while Rob and I averaged 3-4 films a day and stressed about prepping for interviews.  On this episode we talk about some...

Eight for Silver made the Most Anticipated Movies of Sundance lists for both Rob AND Tim.  Despite our often differing tastes, there are still through lines that connect us.  For this film, "extreme violence and gore," meets werewolves, was all they needed to know. I'll tell you my worry, for this  Eight For Silver interview For starters, Boyd Holbrook and Alistair Petrie.  These two edgy bad-guys...

While the experience of the students at Lowell High School is many standard deviations from my own, its exploration is an empathy trip, nevertheless.  The college application process has become increasingly rigorous and the competition for top tier schools is tight.  The teens in Try Harder! have centered their entire high school experience around joining the "right" clubs, making the "correct" co...

From sleeping amongst the wildlife to building set pieces from scratch, Robin Wright went all in on Land Robin Wright hasn't done many interviews on her new film Land . We know, because we googled like crazy to capture a glimpse of her, in an effort to baseline our conversational expectations.  So why us, we thought?  We're not professional interviewers, by any stretch, and we're not exactly Peopl...

The Alternate Ending gang is going to the Sundance Film Festival! Or, anyway, the Sundance Film Festival is coming to us: due to the ongoing public health crisis, the 2021 edition of the fest is going to be conducted entirely online from January 28-February 3, meaning that we don't even have to brave the snowy mountains of Utah to get a peek at the wide world of indie films. We can do it right fro...

So we've reached the end of another very normal year, full of very normal movies, and there's only one thing to do: painstakingly sort through all the many, many films available to us, to select our top ten best movies of 2020. Join us as we share notes on our many adventures with streaming, our very few (and genuinely nerve-wracking experiences with post-pandemic movie theaters, and all the time...

Almost as much as Santa Claus and reindeer, you can't have a Christmas movie without some miserable SOB who starts out by humbugging their way through throngs of cheerful celebrants and has, by the end of the second hour, learned the True Meaning of Christmas, whatever it might be in this case. To help our own hearts grow two-and-a-half sizes at the end of this tough year, we're looking at our top...

This week's podcast topic comes from Patreon subscriber Jack Chivers, who has asked us to look at our favorite films from the United Kingdom, a national cinema broad enough to include stories about nice people laughing while having tea, crying while having tea, and getting shot by gangsters while having tea. There are films as intimate as a working class romance and as epic in their sprawl as the...

If there's one thing The Nest is not , it's light and breezy. It's heavy and chest tightening and emotionally dense. So naturally, with so much to unpack, our first question for Sean Durkin was if he saw any resemblance between Jude Law and Rob Jarosinski. There was awkward laughter, but no confirmation.    A bit about Sean Durkin Born in Canada ( lucky feller ), Sean Durkin won his first cinemati...

I'll admit it, because I'm nothing if not honest, I had no idea who the director of Run , Aneesh Chaganty was by name ( I still question how I got roped into this movie podcast thing, but anyway ).  But then, I saw that he was the writer/director of  Searching , which I really loved and suddenly, the pressure felt a bit greater. Just a bit about Aneesh Chaganty Sometimes you meet people and they j...

Freaky Friday the 13th You can't keep a good slasher killer down, so we've got even more  Freaky Behind the Scenes coming your way! This time I had the opportunity to sit down with co-screenwriter Michael Kennedy, who notoriously teamed up with director and co-writer Chris Landon in a pitch rehearsal turned creative partnership! We sat down to chat about what it means to write an openly queer char...

All week, Rob annoyingly wandering around the house talking about our upcoming Let Him Go  interview with Thomas Bezucha.  He was using a thick Italian mobster accent and probably mispronouncing his name "Ba-zooooo-ka." By the time we got to the interview, it was so burned in my brain, that there's a fair chance I referred to him as a large rocket launcher weapon. Thomas Bezucha in a nutshell Plea...

I have been extremely lucky in my life as an entertainment personality-type person to have already had the chance to podcast with Chris Landon twice before ( most recently about the movie Carrie ). Not only is Chris the writer-director of Happy Death Day , Happy Death Day 2U , Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones , and his new upcoming feature Freaky, co-written with Michael Kennedy, but he's also...

Have you ever noticed the pattern of successful entertainment personalities, having experienced some sort of adversity or hardship when they were young? The comedian whose Dad was an abusive jerk.  The actor who was bullied for their acne or their off-brand jeans or their haircut ( you know the important stuff that bullies care about ).  As a creator, you can control the narrative and ultimately,...

Screen legend Sean Connery passed away on October 31 at the age of 90, and we at Alternate Ending celebrate his career by devoting this podcast to the highlights of his career - the best performances, the best movies, and the most sadly appropriate opportunity Carrie has ever had to put Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at #1 on her top 5 list. In Worth Mentioning we cover Come Play , Let Him Go...