Have You Ever Seen

And so we've reached 500 episodes! We started this podcast 10 years ago with the goal of analyzing the AFI's Top 100 Lists, so what better way for us to celebrate a landmark episode than to do...a list! And it's with a flourish as we post a king-sized chat about the greatest Best Picture Oscar winners. We each pulled 10 classic Oscar champions out of a box and did a brief review of them, telling y...

It's a bonus episode, of sorts, but this 499th Have You Ever Seen is definitely timely. We're recapping the Academy Awards. No one got hammered in the face by a miffed man this year, but it WAS a memorable Oscar Night. Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once won 7 awards and was the king of the evening, including taking home 3 acting awards (which hadn't happened in 46 years). That f...

Charles Dickens' hungry orphan was given the musical treatment in this Best Picture Oscar winner that came out more than a half-century ago. Homelessness and songs are a strange mixture, but Carol Reed (mostly) makes Lionel Bart's stage-show work as a movie...even though the director of The Third Man seemed to be out of his element. Oliver is an overlong, yet impressive production that represents...

Marty is one of the most-understated winners of the Best Picture Oscar there's ever been. And at just 90 minutes long, it's also the shortest. Director Delbert Mann's film has a heavy layer of sadness, yet also has plenty of uplift and hope. Paddy Chayefsky wrote him a simple story and Mann tells it quite effectively. Sparks fly when Ernest Borgnine meets  Betsy Blair at a dance, but his friends a...

The 95th Academy Awards are coming up on Sunday, so it's time for us to break down what was nominated, what we think should win and what we think WILL win gold on March 12th. There might be quite a few newbies going up on stage because most of the actors and directors have never been nominated before. 2022 was a year of underdogs and comebacks, from Brendan Fraser to Ke Huy Quan, but also one in w...

It took us nearly a decade to talk about a Terrence Malick film, but our first of his is his first-ever motion picture. Malick was an artist right from the start, although Badlands is unlike just about everything he's directed since because it's mostly a two-hander with a brief running time. Sissy Spacek and the Jimmy Dean-esque Martin Sheen have probably never been so monotone, but their delibera...

Our Month Of Crazy Stupid Love wouldn't have been complete without an episode about one of the most-beloved love stories Hollywood has ever made. Of course, William Wyler's Roman Holiday is reprising a lot of Frank Capra's superior It Happened One Night. Roman Holiday isn't as funny as its inspiration, but it's amusing and very enjoyable. Gregory Peck is looser than he normally was and Oscar-winne...

The whole point of Dangerous Liaisons is to give us terrible people doing horrible things just because they can, so it's not beyond our control to make such delicious savagery our 493rd episode. Stephen Frears' cast ranges from phenomenal to, well, a bit mediocre. However, Christopher Hampton's extraordinary adaptation of his own play that started life as a French play about French characters give...

Peter and Bobby Farrelly's most-successful comedy was 27th on the AFI's Top 100 Laughs 23 years ago. It's a movie that stands out on that list because very few of those other grinners go for broke like this does. There's Something About Mary often toes the line (sometimes even crosses it) with wildly politically incorrect material, but it was—and still is---truly funny. Guts were busted in our hou...

When you cast two movie stars to play people who are 180 degrees apart philosophically, but who fall in love anyway, sometimes you make a mint. Okay, you OFTEN do. Hollywood loves the "opposites attract" formula. The Way We Were is a stellar example of this. It was an award-winning blockbuster 50 years ago, largely because of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, but also because of the beloved the...

We begin the Month of Crazy Stupid Love with a film that the Sight And Sound absolutely worships. The BBC Culture people do too. But we don't. We do RESPECT In The Mood For Love immensely. The actors are good and it's one of the best-looking motion pictures ever made. The cinematography, the sets and especially the costumes should have won Oscars, even though the film wasn't nominated in any of th...

This one is for all you surly folk singers who wallow in failure and unhappiness. Fun! Actually, Inside Llewyn Davis is more enjoyable than the plot outline makes it sound and it's often hilarious...mostly because of Carey Mulligan. Of course, this is a 21st Century Joel & Ethan Coen picture, which guarantees it's going to have gorgeous cinematography and a certain level of opaqueness. Then again,...

Reviewing She Done Him Wrong was simply a ploy to finally talk about Mae West. She was a major star nearly 100 years ago and is considered an icon. This was her story idea and the film came out just before the Hays Code would prevent so many sexy outfits and double entendres to fill a movie. Ryan's monologue here focuses on how the film doesn't work because director Lowell Sherman couldn't balance...

Danny Boyle insists this isn't a zombie movie, but his intense 28 Days Later influenced that popular genre and was at the forefront of digital filmmaking. The director settled for a look that was ugly as dirt to get incredible shots they never could have had with classic film cameras, which allowed for that nightmarish opening of Cillian Murphy walking alone through a deserted London. The first ha...

If you scroll back to January 2016 in our channel, you'll see that the 2nd episode of what we then called "The Next 100 Project" was Before Sunrise. Now for the 486th "Have You Ever Seen" (we've had a weird numbering system...it's complicated), we're finding out what Jesse and Celine are up to in Before Midnight while they're on vacation in Greece. They've been together for nearly a decade and hav...

For the 2nd time this week, Have You Ever Seen talks about escaped convicts. And just 3 days before Martin Luther King Day, Ryan offers up an oral essay about 2 on the run while dealing with '50s-era racism in America's south. The Defiant Ones---unlike Out Of Sight---is deadly serious. One legendary actor in Sidney Poitier and one underrated one in Tony Curtis work well together as two people who...

What happens when a federal marshal---who just happens to love the bad boy---is kidnapped by an immensely likable thief when he's breaking out of prison? Well, in Out Of Sight, it's a blend of comedy, romance and chemistry all set against a backdrop of sometimes brutally awfully crime. The prolific Steven Soderbergh was perhaps at his absolute best here directing Scott Frank's cool, funny, sexy sc...

A Buster Keaton film hasn't been reviewed on this channel in going on 10 years, so Sherlock Jr. seemed like the perfect way to end that drought. It's an acclaimed pratfall comedy done by the stone-faced silent stuntman who also knew how to tickle the bones that are funny. But is this movie actually funny? It's rightly famous for the gimmick where Keaton's projectionist character has a dream and li...

It's a new era for this podcast, although the only things that really change are our name, our logo and our theme music. The first episode of "Have You Ever Seen" and our first show in 2023 looks at Bradley Cooper's musical love story, A Star Is Born. Cooper gives his directorial debut an intimate documentary-like feel and the whole film comes off as more real than almost any traditional musical e...

We wrap up 2022 and we also end a long era of calling ourselves the "Top 100 Project" with this thorough gab about one of the most-successful disaster pictures ever made.  When the topic of game-changing '70s blockbusters comes up, The Poseidon Adventure often gets lost in the shuffle...partly because it came out before most of them. It  has a B-movie story, but its big budget allowed the filmmake...

Bonus episode! As the holiday season envelops us all and  the end of 2022 draws near , Ryan turns his eye to an 82-year-old (supposed) Christmas movie starring Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart. The 2 Hungarian shop-workers spend most of the 100 minutes of Ernst Lubitsch's rom-com  f ussing and feuding, not knowing they're also pen pals who are actually crazy about each other. Yup, this was You'...

The dark comedy and intricate heist film that is Jackie Brown got lost in the late-December movie rush when it  came out a quarter of a century ago , particularly because of the frenzy over Titanic. Still, Quentin Tarantino made what remains his most-mature movie and he even showed uncharacteristic restraint about some brutal violence. Pam Grier sizzles in the title role and Samuel L. Jackson does...

Believe it or not, the best-reviewed Christmas movie on Rotten Tomatoes is this Judy Garland musical about love, family and home. As sweet and fun as Meet Me In St. Louis is though, making it wasn't always a joyful experience for the cast and crew. Garland, who met director Vincente Minnelli---one of her future husbands---while making it, was in rough shape while shooting. That started a discussio...

Bonus episode! This time, Ryan tries to figure out what the real love story is in An Officer And A Gentleman. Sure, Richard Gere and Debra Winger are hot for each other in this famously passionate boot camp movie, but what about the wild card in this love-fest...namely, Louis Gossett Jr? Okay, yes, the drill instructor is also a much-needed father figure to dreamboat Gere, even if the D.I. is one...

The 469th Ellises' Analysis and our first episode in December has us asking you to appreciate the irony of an atheist and an agnostic discussing a Christmas movie about a religious man and an angel.   Cary Grant plays that divine being in The Bishop's Wife and he's given the job of trying to fix Loretta Young and David Niven's struggling  marriage . It's a tricky story to tell because Young has to...