Have You Ever Seen

Put out a bowl of memberberries because episode #675 of Have You Ever Seen is a fond reminiscence of the greatest parody of disaster thrillers ever made. Airplane is still the crowning achievement of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team who made many other funny farce flicks like Top Secret and The Naked Gun. What Team ZAZ perfected their first time out as directors was to make an uproarious comedy out...

While Sofia Coppola's second film, Lost In Translation, remains her finest, the '70s-set The Virgin Suicides was a good start to her writing and directing career. Her debut is far from perfect, although it's lyrical, haunting and it looks fantastic. Now, we had issues with Coppola's loyalty to Jeffrey Eugenides' book, especially the narration and the inconsistent use of 5 boys across the street. S...

Caring crusaders are almost their own movie genre and one of the most successful films about such is Erin Brockovich. Steven Soderbergh had a huge year in 2000 with Traffic and also this biopic, turning both into blockbuster Oscar-winners. He won the award for directing Traffic while Julia Roberts won her own gold trophy for playing the brash, real-life, legal assistant who works day and night to...

Judy Holliday unexpectedly won the 1950 Best Actress Oscar instead of Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd, but the Judes IS outstandingly funny in Born Yesterday. George Cukor's classic comedy actually gets funnier as it goes along, as the likable ditz Holliday grows curious about history, politics, word origins...and bettering herself. Broderick Crawford plays her uncou...

We're entering a stretch of Have You Ever Seen reviews where the performances in the movies in question won the star a Best Actress Oscar. Sissy Spacek took it home 45 years ago for her transformation into the Coal Miner's Daughter...aka the First Lady Of Country Music, Miss Loretta Lynn. Spacek wasn't alone though. Tommy Lee Jones as her husband Doo and Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline shine too....

The documentary that won the Academy Award in 2015 is the topic of #670 of Have You Ever Seen. Asif Kapadia and his team look at the tremendous singer Amy Winehouse through archival footage and many new interviews with those in her circle, but the film sorely misses having these obscure people being shown on camera. Who's who?! We were also critical of how Kapadia's approach isn't as in-depth as h...

Sense And Sensibility is Ang Lee's take on an English tale of manners, money and matrimony. The Taiwanese director was an outsider to this world, obviously, but he also brought a formality and desperate longing to this project. Lead actress Emma Thompson won an Oscar for her adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel. And it's a good role, doing the buttoned-down thing she did so well back in the '...

After more than 12 years of doing this podcast, it was high time for us to review something by French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Le Samourai was his (and his star, Alain Delon's) homage to '40s Hollywood noir. This crime classic is about Delon's passive hitman, who's either too cool for school...or just doesn't care. In this one-Ryan show, the talk gets into  relating to Delon's loner mindset...

On Mission: Impossible weekend, it seemed right for Have You Ever Seen to feature a flick all about an impossible mission to climb a cliff, get inside a Greek island fortress and blow up some enormous German blasters. Our 667th episode talks about that trek, but also about revenge and wartime honour. Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn and David Niven lead a fine cast in The Guns Of Navarone, as they and...

Wait, Ryan O'Neal again?! Yup! What's Up, Doc is our 3rd O'Neal movie this year. And they all came out in the '70s, which was not just the man's peak. That was director Peter Bogdanovich's most-productive time in Hollywood too. They and the Bugs Bunny-ish Barbra Streisand (who's, of course, still a massive star over 50 years later) came up with a screwball comedy that pays homage to the old master...

Ida Lupino was an actor in some classic movies for close to 50 years, but she directed a few classic thrillers in the '50s too. The Hitch-Hiker is her crowning achievement, with William Tallman doing a wonderfully sinister job in the titular role. He's one of the underrated great villains in cinema history. Edmond O'Brien & Frank Lovejoy are the men he kidnaps and forces them to drive him to Mexic...

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin tells a very complete story in only about 70 minutes. The black-and-white, silent flick is based on a real-life mutiny aboard a ship in the waters of the Black Sea near Ukraine. Of course, the incredibly influential Odessa Steps sequence is what people remember best...and it's the extremely violent result of this "war" against your own oppressive rulers. Eis...

Nearly every Stanley Kubrick film has been featured on Have You Ever Seen now that we're spending about an hour reviewing Barry Lyndon. In this 663rd episode, we analyze the gold-digging, underwhelming dueler played by Ryan O'Neal, an Irish soldier (turned gambler) who also turns out to be a terrible stepfather. Even though he's good as the opportunistic Redmond Barry, he's outshone by Patrick Mag...

Clarence Brown's family classic National Velvet is what's on tap in the 662nd edition of Have You Ever Seen. A pre-teen, horse-obsessed Elizabeth Taylor sheds tears from time to time, but she's remarkably optimistic all the same, especially about her beloved equine chum, "The Pie".  Anne Revere won an Oscar for playing Taylor's preternaturally calm mom, while top-billed Mickey Rooney was starting...

To put a finishing touch on this year's Revenge Month, our 661st episode has some fun with Colin Higgins' feminist comedy where a mediocre man gets major comeuppance for treating the women in his office so badly. If only Nine To Five was as funny as its reputation says it is. The tonal problems are partly because this started out as a serious look at how hard women have it in the workplace. Flawed...

As Easter weekend comes to an end, Ryan posts a solo show about another intense blood-feud here in Revenge Month. Leonardo DiCaprio went through hell and finally won his Oscar while auteur Alejandro G. Iñárritu won his 4th in 2 years for their work on The Revenant, a violent, gory, grueling and beautifully-photographed survival story. There's a running theme of racism against Native Americans in h...

Posting a podcast about Munich on Easter Weekend wasn't a deliberately provocative choice. Posting this mostly-effective "you'll pay for that" procedural during Revenge Month WAS intentional. Episode #659 of Have You Ever Seen is a Ryan monologue about Palestinian terrorists kidnapping and then assassinating Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympics...and then the Israelis siccing a hit squad on those...

We reach the mid-point of Revenge Month with a French crime classic that features one of the greatest heist scenes in cinema history. Which has arguably never been topped, with its use of clever thieving techniques, intricate teamwork between the 4 main characters…and silence. Rififi is violent, many people die, it even has a drug addict and it has that brilliant break-in sequence where our "heroe...

The blood-soaked Blood Simple represents the debuts of not only auteurs Joel & Ethan Coen, but also their star (and Joel's future wife) Frances McDormand. They don't seem to agree though with the widely-shared view that their first film was an expertly-plotted noir. It's one of their best movies, in fact. When the Coen Brothers go down to Texas to shoot a nihilistic movie about death and contract...

Have You Ever Seen's 656th podcast begins our 3rd (Annual, probably?) Revenge Month and Oldboy's plot o' vengeance is particularly sinister. Park Chan-wook's sadistic South Korean thriller has several unforgettable moments, including the one-take hallway hammer fight and the shocking, blood-soaked climax. Choi Min-sik is quite terrific in the lead role, an ordinary man who's forced to live in the...

Play your flame guitar as you cue up the 655th edition of Have You Ever Seen to hear us jaw about the loner known as Max Rockatansky, but stay for the Imperator known as Furiosa. George Miller's 6-time Oscar-winner was the 4th in a series that already featured one of the greatest stunt movies ever made (The Road Warrior), but then he and his team managed to easily top it with Fury Road. And just a...

Note: this episode might be listed as "E" on your app, but there's no bad language in this one. Tomorrow will mark the beginning of our 13th year of podcasting, so we end #12 with another one-Ryan show...this time about a 7-time Oscar-winner. Along with a slew of technical awards, Out Of Africa won Best Picture and Sydney Pollack was rewarded for his direction. His romantic epic, with all those sc...

Many boxing movies have surpassed what Robert Wise and Paul Newman brought to the screen in Somebody Up There Likes Me, but their biopic DID win 2 technical Oscars. Newman is not at his best playing Rocky Graziano, an angry young delinquent who turned a life spent in various forms of trouble into a championship boxing career. He was still new to movies though and wasn't to be laconic and cool as h...

It's St. Patrick's Day, so Have You Ever Seen #652 gets into an IRA frame of mind, puts on some green and talks about John Ford's The Informer. The legendary director and leading man Victor McLaglen won Oscars, but the set-bound film itself lost out to the epic grandeur of Mutiny On The Bounty for Best Picture. McLaglen plays a pathetic liar who betrays and rats out a fellow Irishman to British au...

Oscar Month continues! Bev's couple of weeks off begins! She's not here to talk about The King's Speech, which is a classy movie that ended up being a huge hit, even though it's about a group of people that Ryan has never liked: the royals. A monarchy? In a democracy? Come on! Yet, credit where it's due, Tom Hooper does an admirable job of making a non-fan care about the king of England and his en...