Have You Ever Seen

Our 625th episode is another Ryan solo show, with the topic of the day being George Cukor's 1954 take on A Star Is Born. Judy Garland plays a movie star on the way up while James Mason plays a movie star on the way down. While Garland was the one who was struggling with addiction in reality, Mason's character is the one who's a raging alcoholic bringing much pain to his wife, who also happens to b...

A sci-fi movie about nuclear war sounds like a depressing way to honour veterans on their day, but not when the podcast is about one of the greatest (horror) movies ever made. James Cameron didn't have much of a budget to make The Terminator, but it started a franchise. And it stars the unlikeliest of movie stars, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton are terrific too, but Ah-nul...

Nice and uplifting movies like The Straight Story are a welcome sight in a world that's evermore cynical and meanspirited. David Lynch, a man known for sex and violence, was an usual choice to direct a real-life story about an elderly man riding his lawnmower across state lines just so he could visit his ailing brother. Still, despite some wonky acting from some of the non-professional actors, thi...

Happy Halloween! Scary Movie Month comes to an end with this 622nd edition of Have You Ever Seen. No, this episode isn't about George Romero's 1978 zombie classic where humans hole up in a mall. Ryan's 3rd solo show in 3 days is about Zack Snyder's intense 2004 remake. The original had plenty of blood, guts and thrills, but also a lot of satire. This has even more gore, better acting and action sc...

Even though The Blair Witch Project didn't invent the genre, it's probably the best-known and the biggest hit of all the found footage movies. The online marketing campaign was especially revolutionary. It's a shame that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez never hit these heights again as writers or directors, but they got so much mileage out of their made-up story, considering it was mostly improvi...

Halloween Week = extra episodes! Ryan talks by himself here about the 1979 Amityville Horror...and a little about the other Amityville flicks too...all of which are based on a horrific real-life tragedy that led to a (possibly made-up) haunting in that same house. James Brolin and Margot Kidder play newlyweds who move into a place on Long Island with her 3 kids, then it starts messing with all of...

We kick off a big week on Have You Ever Seen with our 619th episode, a gab about Tim Burton's (probably) best film. One of the quirkiest directors of all time was actually fairly grounded making this lighthearted biopic. Johnny Depp is troublesome these days, but you can't question his work in Ed Wood as the optimistic, yet stunningly self-unaware title filmmaker. And while the entire cast is righ...

Most of our choices so far in this year's Scary Movie Month haven't been all that goosebump-inducing. Creature From The Black Lagoon isn't very frightening either, but Jack Arnold's film WAS influential, especially on Guillermo Del Toro and his Oscar-winning The Shape Of Water. The Gill Man in this 1954 Universal Monster flick might look corny now in his creature suit, but the underwater shots the...

Fridays mean Ryan posts monologues on Have You Ever Seen and our 617th episode digs a one-man hole into Pet Sematary. Mary Lambert's 1989 horror show about unholy reanimation keeps on reminding us that "sometimes dead is better". The one who's always saying that, Fred Gwynne, is probably the best actor in this cast, although he's not THAT much better than the underwhelming Dale Midkiff or Denise C...

This is our 31 days of films that have chills & thrills, but Have You Ever Seen's 3rd posting in Scary Movie Month (and our 616th episode overall) is far more funny than it is frightening. Just like Shaun Of The Dead last week, much mirth results from nitwits dealing with reanimated corpses. Mel Brooks' beloved blockbuster is a satire of the classic Universal monster story and he's got his co-writ...

The first episode in Scary Movie Month 2024 that the Ellises are doing together gets into the second leg of Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy. We covered Hot Fuzz a few years ago, but this one that put the Englishman on the map is—-to one of us—-funnier...and is his best film. As always with Wright and Simon Pegg, the flick is jammed with clever references to other movies. And in their zombie rom-co...

Bob Clark made his name directing popular comedies in the '80s like Porky's and A Christmas Story, but his 1974 horror flick about a home-invading murderer has become a classic too. And that's good because Scary Movie Month 2024 is here! The ending of Black Christmas is one of the best in the history of horror...even if it also has MANY flaws. Ryan's one-man show gets into that, but also talks abo...

We're hours away from Scary Movie Month and---while Nightcrawler doesn't exactly qualify as frightening---it IS intense. Jake Gyllenhaal is certainly at his Taxi Driver weirdest. He's also just about at his best in Dan Gilroy's investigation of capitalism-at-any-cost. Rough stuff, but it's also quite funny. Gyllenhaal plays an amoral "stringer" (a freelance videographer) who knows that ratings equ...

Scarlett Johansson playing a cold, indifferent alien probably wasn't something her fans expected from her. She was an A-lister who was a key figure in all those Marvel movies, but here she was in Under The Skin, the only actor of note in a detached art film. The movie star even gets nude a lot in her role as a succubus who learns how to feel empathy. Jonathan Glazer's strangest film to date is Kub...

In The Thin Man, William Powell and Myrna Loy are 2 married, childless adults living in the big city...and they like to drink. It's the Ellis Story! Well, no, but the 611th episode of Have You Ever Seen features those 2 comedic tipplers Nick & Nora trying to solve a murder (which is really more his job than it is "theirs"). But is this acclaimed yucks-fest actually funny enough to be so revered fo...

Roland Joffe is not a director who's been beloved by critics over the years, but most seem to agree that his magnum opus is the Oscar-winning The Killing Fields. Sam Waterston plays an American journalist in war-torn Cambodia in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge went on a run of violence---especially against their fellow Cambodians---that was chilling. Haing S. Ngo...

Some film shoots (like the one for Apocalypse Now) seem to last 12 years, but here's a movie with a production schedule that was DELIBERATELY that long. Although gimmick aside, Boyhood is Richard Linklater's lauded attempt to show the slow growth of a fractured family, with the focus on Ellar Coltrane going from 6 to 18. Linklater's daughter Lorelei plays Coltrane's older sister and their divorced...

Ryan's first Friday show in 3 months tries to be extraordinary and also to seize a day or two in this monologue about Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams' performance as an inspirational poetry teacher at a posh prep school was up for an Oscar, but some critics thought his impressions of famous people was out of place. He IS funny, but his serious scenes are far more effective ("thank you, boys, th...

We continue our summertime trend of posting listicles on holidays as we exchange 10 (or perhaps a few more) theatrical experiences that stuck with us. Many of these are about laughing at funny movies with enthusiastic audiences, but sometimes the experience was seat-grippingly scary...or it might have even been an angry time at the flicks. Documentary festivals and just being in legendary theatres...

2023 was the year of Barbenheimer, but it was the movie about serious science that went on to win 7 Academy Awards this past spring. Oppenheimer was also an absolute blockbuster, which is par for Christopher Nolan's course. He always just goes around making monster hits that also get critical acclaim. Although while the spectacle in this film wowed millions of people last summer, one of us hated i...

Franka Potente never became a bonafide movie star after Run Lola Run, but her intensely iconic work in this breakout movie remains awesome 25 years later. Tom Tykwer has had a solid career of his own since writing and directing this video-game-esque flick with the butterfly-effect gimmick. He and future collaborators the Wachowskis were making some of the coolest movies around back then, taking ad...

For our 604th drop in the Have You Ever Seen bucket, we're highlighting the steamy noir Body Heat. And, hey, what happened to sex thrillers?! Well, not everyone is as good at making them as Lawrence Kasdan was...in his debut as a director, no less. Many stars of these kinds of stories are not often as hot together as William Hurt and newcomer Kathleen Turner were. This movie made her an instant st...

In recent months, holidays have meant an excuse to post listicles on this channel, so here we go again for podcast #603. In this, we give our Hot Takes about a wide range of film topics. They include: self-indulgent Method actors, the problem with directors' cuts, the need for more sex thrillers, whether or not a certain cartoon is sexist and which big-name movie star is actually unappreciated. Th...

If you are what you choose to podcast, then we choose to say a lot of nice things about Brad Bird's debut cartoon. As wonderful as the animation and the voicework are and as touching and emotional as the story is, The Iron Giant somehow failed at the box office. Maybe it wasn't funny or fun enough for people who were used to Disney style 'toons? Maybe it was too reliant on reminding us of other cl...

Joel & Ethan Coen's ultra-Jewish film was a project that was very personal to them. Their '60s-set A Serious Man takes a humorous look at the trials of Job in the form of Michael Stuhlbarg, an actor who's done many great things in the past 15 years, but this was his breakout. Stuhlbarg looks for meaning in this often-funny, but often-impenetrable and even stressful movie. While this isn't a classi...