Gartbage Film

We're back in our regular format just in time for spooky season and for one of Nick's favourite horror films. A tale of ambiguity, repression, and corruption: it's Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS from 1961! CW: due to the nature of this movie's story, child sexual abuse is discussed in general terms. It's a real Freudian time on the podcast this week as we discuss Truman Capot...

THEY (WE) LIVE! We've returned from our summer break with a big discussion on the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Get ready to add items to your watchlists because we've got recommendations for your 4th quarter film-viewing pleasure! We're talking robots, detectives, directorial debuts, cannibals, ghosts, nightbitches, Ralph Fiennes' dong, anti-colonial action, pea...

The final episode of our Hong Kong mini-series takes us into the 21st century! It's the cop drama-thriller box office dynamo, INFERNAL AFFAIRS! We're going full spoilers on the movie discussion this week. Consider yourself warned! Nick's theory that all Hong Kong movies from the time were Handover Movies continues to be true as we discuss Buddhist hell, avoiding undercover cop clichés,...

Summer of Hong Kong continues, and today we're pivoting from the 80's and martial arts into the 90's and emotions! And who else could we be talking about but Wong Kar-wai and his 1994 breakthrough, CHUNGKING EXPRESS! While a touchstone for HK cinema today, Wong Kar-wai's big splash into the arthouse scene was anything but at the time. We're discussing how Wong found his way to...

Welcome to the 80's! We all remember the time: lime green overalls, bolo ties, and dynamite doppelgängers. That's right, Kung Fjune continues with the Hong Kong movie that kicked off the Girls with Guns genre: Corey Yuen's YES, MADAM! from 1985! It was the high-five heard around the world: Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock's first starring roles. We're running down just how mu...

We're back after a brief hiatus with another geographically centered mini-series, this time focused on the movies of Hong Kong! And to kick it off, Nick is finally making good on his longstanding threat to talk Shaw Bros: it's Lau Kar-Leung's THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN (1978)! 36th Chamber is an enormous tentpole in kung fu film, and one of the first post-Bruce Lee HK movies to break...

Welcome to the finale of our petit français mini-series, and we're going out with a bang! It's one of the biggest blueprint movies out there that firmly established the idea of the "cool" assassin, it's Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime masterpiece: LE SAMOURAI We've seen it all before: the taciturn, lone wolf assassin who is a perfect precision instrument has a hit go...

We're continuing our exploration of some French-language favs with Ariane Louis-Seize's feature-length debut, 2023's HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON! If you dig any modern vampire story, from Let the Right One In to What We Do in the Shadows, you owe it to yourself to check this film out! Major trigger warning if the title doesn't give it away: we discuss suicid...

Bonjour and bienvenue au Garbage Film's first installment in a short series on French films, and what better place to start than the film that defined the heist movie, Jules Dassin's 1955 classic RIFIFI! (If you've never seen it, you can check it out on the Internet Archive!) We're talking Parisian slang, awful crime novels, connections with Jean-Pierre Melville, how you adapt some...

It's a St Patrick's Day spectacular on Gartbage Film with the most Irish movie around: Andrew Davis' THE FUGITIVE! It's easy to forget now, but THE FUGITIVE was a craze in 1993 and had an outsized impact -- so easy in fact that we forgot about it! So we're reliving Andrew Davis' action heyday, praising the artistry of montage, running down its amazing accolades, and briefly...

The spring showers have begun their annual process of bringing May flowers, and thus we bid goodbye to Carp-winter on this final episode in the series. We're going back to the very beginning with what Carpenter refers to as his first "real" movie, the germ from which his career grew: it's 1976's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13! We're discussing Carpenter's humble-yet-cynical beg...

Carp-winter continues with the final chapter in John Carpenter's Apocalpyse Trilogy: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS from 1994! We're sorry about the balls!  Reality is on trial as we explore the obvious and not-so-obvious meta layers of Carpenter's Lovecraftian universe, aided and abetted by Sam Neill's villainous energy (complimentary) and Carpenter's propensity for Wet Evil. We'...

It's week 2 of Carp-winter, our series on John Carpenter and his Apocalpyse Trilogy! Today's mammoth episode likely means excommunication from one or several religious institutions for the podcast. because it's the trilogy's middle-child: 1987's PRINCE OF DARKNESS! Carpenter is one of our best filmmakers who will notice a thing and make a movie about it, and this one is tied to...

It's the 100th episode of Gartbage Film! To celebrate we had to cover one of our very favourite movies from one of our very favourite directors including one of our very favourite dogs: it's John Carpenter's THE THING from 1982! We're covering it all: how Carpenter set out to create a different type of horror movie than Halloween, Dean Cundey's approach to lighting and framing,...

2023 is dead; long live 2023! We're here with our year end wrapup, talking about our favourite performances, movies we saw on airplanes, and our favourite theatrical experiences. But most importantly, we put together our respective top 5s of the year and bestow the 1st annual Trashie award for our favourite of 2023! And don't worry, we keep it spoiler free, so listen without fear! But just...

Happy holidays to all! We're here with the trashy counterpart of our holiday episodes, Richard Donner and Bill Murray's SCROOGED! Stop us if you've heard this one: a curmudgeon doesn't like Christmas and three ghosts want to fix that. Reviews have always been mixed since its 1988 premiere, so we're discussing what works, what doesn't, dapper Bobcats, and why we should thank...

It's the most sentimental month of the year, so we're turning to one of our most December-themed sentimental comedies: Ernst Lubitsch's classic tale of love and retail nightmares, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER from 1940! The Shop Around the Corner gets remade pretty often, and it's easy to see why: the movie's a timeless, breezy delight. We're discussing what makes it timeless...

Thrillvember continues with a title that many will know from its constant looping on cable. Beware what floppy disks you shove in your computer because you might get caught in 1995's THE NET. Just as last week's episode on THE PARALLAX VIEW captured the anxieties of the 70's, so does this week's dawn-of-the-internet film. Anxieties like: can Sandra Bullock trust pizza.net with her...

This month we're spurning classic Noirvember fare for a month devoted to its stressed spawn: the investigative paranoia thriller! We're starting with the middle chapter of Alan J Pakula's paranoia trilogy: THE PARALLAX VIEW from 1974! Parallax is the least celebrated of Pakula's paranoia trilogy films, but we here on the pod love it: its (unfortunately) timely themes, how it feels...

It's showtime! Gartbage Film is back just in time to squeeze in a spooktacular special. Before the main event we're discussing the perennial spooky movies we can't go a year without and new-to-us spooky movies we think you should squeeze into your schedules. But the real reason we're all here: to talk about the ghost with the most, BEETLEJUICE! Beetlejuice is the movie with somethi...

We laughed, we cried, we TIFF’d. We’re here with a mini-episode to discuss what we watched at the Toronto International Film Festival, all spoiler-free. See below for the list of movies discussed, just in case you want to go into any of these blind!  We’re discussing our favourite performances, what made us laugh the most, and the best soundtracks. We also break down our top 3 movies, along with s...

This week we're heading to where the vampires hang out: it's Matt Johnson's period piece of comedic Canadiana, the 2023 sensation BLACKBERRY! Come with us on a journey through Canadiana as we discuss Matt Johnson's career and his breakthrough with Nirvanna the Band the Show, Nick's personal Blackberry use, the finer points of Kitchener-Waterloo, the Canadarm, Timbits, Don Cherr...

Boyle warning!! It's our final episode of Sunscream, our horror-filled summer, and what says summer more than that flamin' ball in the sky: that's right, it's Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE from 2007! We're fawning over the insanely stacked cast, how the cast & scientists helped shape the movie, and where we fall on the divisive third act. We're also sharing our general tho...

We continue our Sunscream World Tour in South Korea: it’s Yeon Sang-ho's TRAIN TO BUSAN from 2016! This may be allegedly getting a remake, but BUSAN will always be the genre gamechanger for us. We’re getting into how this changed the zombie movie world without breaking the mold, which video games inspired the zombie design, and what we understand of the South Korean political statements contai...

This week's Sunscream takes us to THE template for psychological horror: Henri-Georges Clouzot's DIABOLIQUE! Just as Clouzot was obsessed with his wife, we're obsessed with this movie: It's got cartoonishly awful husbands with wives and mistresses scheming against him, rundown boarding schools, French Columbo, creative hauntings, and suspense by the barrelful! We're discussing...