Alternate Ending - Movie Review Podcast

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...

This week we had the chance to sit down with The Dark and the Wicked producer, Adrienne Biddle.  We talked about the making of the film and our feelings on the movie, but we ended up spending a good chunk of time discussing her path to becoming a film producer.  Schooling, early grunt-jobs, relationship building, the whole thing. It was such an enlightening conversation because I've always wondere...

Ten minutes into The True Adventures of Wolfboy , we were triggered.  You see, I usually shut off movies about bullying and Rob is super self-conscious about his body hair ( he has the perfect amount of body hair ), so when a young kid with hypertrichosis gets verbally abused by some douchebags at a carnival, tensions were high. About The True Adventures of Wolfboy The True Adventures of Wolfboy f...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Bride of Alternate Ending! Tim and AE contributor Brennan have joined forces for a monthly Patreon show covering everything horror! We're starting out our run with a special Halloween preview on the main feed dicussing the 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW! Topics include unpopular opinions on the live show experience, the largely ignored tributes...

Halloween is almost upon us, which means it's time for our annual dive into the spooky and scary. This year, we're going to be blunt and to the point: our top 5 jump scares in movie history. The simplest, most brutal way a filmmaker can give audiences a good wallop, jump scares sometimes get slagged for being too cheap and artless, but used well, they can be one of the most portent tools in the ho...

Rob and I got into a marital tift the other night because I made the claim that I never lie.  He didn't agree.  He contests that I omit details in a way that leads people to believe something that isn't true. That's not lying right? That's just a totally healthy need for people to like me.  So, in our interview with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, this plays out something like this, - "I have t...

The truth is, if I'd known what Cicada was going to be about, I'm not sure I would have watched the film.  I would have read the three sentence synopsis and surmised that it would be too painful, too grueling and that it would break my heart - and it was, and it did.  Though, beyond the stomach-knots and frustrated tears, there is so much beauty and love I would have otherwise missed.  To me, the...

When I was in my mid-twenties, I spent my days in a cubical, mindlessly tinkering with the calculator on my desk, figuring out how much I had to save to retire at 40.  Sometimes, I would organize my post-it notes in rainbow color order, and the pens too, if I wasn't too busy.  There was a coffee shop in my building, so every few hours, I'd sucker a co-worker into grabbing a caramel latte with me....

If you give me just 2 seconds I'm going to blow your mind.   Love and Monsters is going to be your favorite movie of 2020. There I said it.  Admittedly, it's not mine. But it will be yours.  That's because it's TIED for my favorite movie of the year with Spontaneous . Which, I realize it cheating, but there are no rules around here. First a bit about Michael Matthews … I have no idea how old Micha...

October is shaping up to be a big month for Netflix original movies, between Radha Blank's Sundance prizewinner  The 40-Year-Old Version (premieres 10/9). Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 (premieres 10/16), Ben Wheatley's Rebecca (premieres 10/21), Glen Keane's Over the Moon (premieres 10/23), and maybe, if the right rumors hold, David Fincher's Mank . To commemorate all of these - as wel...

Here's the headline, in our interview with Josh Ruben writer/director/star of the new feature SCARE ME , Rob is 95% sure Josh tells him he's good looking. To be sure, you'll need to listen for yourself.  For added hilarity, you can see the live reaction when Rob *thinks* that Josh tells him he's good looking.  Imagine when Charlie sees that he's found the golden ticket. So SCARE ME... Two writers...

Our next podcast topic comes to us courtesy of Patreon subscriber Martha, who wants us to help shed some light on one of the film industry's most notorious shortcomings: the challenges facing women who want to direct movies at every level, from thorny little indies to massive blockbusters (such as Wonder Woman 1984 , helmed by Patty Jenkins, which was supposed to open next week till it got pandemi...

Spontaneous will have you simultaneously contemplating your own mortality and igniting your need to seize the day [Interview with writer/director Brian Duffield ] Director Brian Duffield talks about how he keeps a positive vibe on set, his experience working with the A-Team cast of Katherine Langford, Piper Perabo, Hayley Law and Charlie Plummer and the difficult balance of keeping a movie about e...