Junk Filter

Access this entire 84 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/132-rising-sun-84172029 I’m joined by Aden Jordan, a grant writer based in Southern California and patron of the podcast, to discuss Philip Kaufman’s 1993 deeply strange and lurid murder m...

Cinema Smorgasbord’s Doug Tilley joins the pod for a discussion of the two major AVOD streaming services, Tubi and Pluto TV, and their massive libraries of free content, brought to you with short but forced advertising breaks.  Even though Tubi has over 60 million regular monthly users, it still feels like an underground streaming platform, carrying tens of thousands of obscure films and documenta...

Access this entire 90 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show.  https://www.patreon.com/posts/130-return-of-83425574 Rob Rousseau returns to the show from Montreal for an episode commemorating this week’s 40th anniversary of Return of the Jedi . Episode VI of “The Skywalker Saga”...

The writer Maggie Serota returns to the show for a deep dive into the 2013 music documentary for Showtime, History of the Eagles , directed by Alison Ellwood. This comprehensive 3 hour documentary is the official story of one of America’s biggest rock bands, spanning their massive popularity in the seventies, their solo careers in the eighties and their reunion in the nineties, but Maggie and I th...

The writer Corey Atad returns to the pod for a discussion of the controversial new eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline , an action film inspired by Andreas Malm’s best-selling non-fiction work that argues in favour of direct and destructive action against the fossil fuel industry to escalate the battle against climate change. The film dramatizes the blowing-up of a pipeline by depicting the act...

Access this entire 77 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/127-benaissance-81474016 The comedy writer Ursula Lawrence returns to the podcast from Madison, Wisconsin for a discussion of the latest film from Ben Affleck as a director, Air, a film ma...

The Maryland-based writer and critic Jessica Ritchey is my special guest for a show that compares the current decline in the interconnected comic book movie business to the collapse in the late sixties of the Roadshow Musical with a look at the notorious 1969 musical western Paint Your Wagon (starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood) with 2022’s box office disappointment Black Adam, meant to launch...

Access this entire 84 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/125-sexy-beast-79799951 Dan Siber, an avid listener of the show and a Junk Filter patron, pitched his way on to the show for a discussion of Jonathan Glazer’s British crime drama Sexy Beast (2000), which is getting a prequel streaming series on Paramount+ thi...

Toronto-based writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns to the show to discuss the late screen goddess Raquel Welch and her greatest role as a trans woman out to destroy the Hollywood patriarchy in the 1970 film version of Gore Vidal’s controversial best-selling novel Myra Breckinridge , produced on a high budget by 20th Century Fox in the early days of the new X rating. Long considered on...

Access this entire 70 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/123-dick-tracy-78893447 The writer and podcaster Will Sloan returns for a show about Warren Beatty and his now-decades long relationship to Chester Gould’s classic thirties comic strip detective Dick Tracy. We discuss what we can now call The Dick Tracy trilo...

This episode contains major spoilers and deals with difficult subject matter, so please watch the film before you listen to this discussion. Freelance film critic and programmer Rafa Sales Ross joins me from Scotland to discuss Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun , starring newcomer Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in an Academy Award-nominated performance as Calum, a Scottish single father who t...

Ed Conroy, a Toronto-based cultural historian and the creator of Retrontario, joins the show for a look back at the 40th anniversary of Pay TV in Canada. On February 1, 1983, Canada’s first Pay TV channels arrived on the airwaves to great fanfare: Competing movie services First Choice and Superchannel offered subscribers blockbuster movies "uncut and commercial free" while the more refined C Chann...

Access this entire 87 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/120-singing-with-77990062 The American writer and filmmaker Ted Mills, now living in Wellington New Zealand, joins the program for a discussion of the television playwright Dennis Potter’s greatest achievement, his 1986 series for the BBC, The Singing Detecti...

Access this entire 83 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/119-ymo-part-1-77692321 Isobel from the Brooklyn-based electronic group pet wife returns to the show for the first of a two-part series on the pioneering Japanese electronic music supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra: keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, bassist Haruom...

Access the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63667721 Isobel and Noelle from the experimental electro pop group pet wife join me from Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss the life of Marvin Gaye and his 1978 concept album Here, My Dear. There’s nothing like Here, My Dear , the result of a divorce settlement between...

Roxana Hadadi, a TV critic for New York magazine's culture site Vulture . and returning guest Corey Atad join me for an enthusiastic discussion of Tony Gilroy’s ambitious new Disney Star Wars streaming series Andor . Gilroy, who had been brought in by Lucasfilm to rescue the troubled production Rogue One in 2016, recently returned to the franchise for a series that provides a backstory for the cha...

Access this entire 65 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/116-straub-sight-75792117 Ben Nash returns to the podcast from Colchester England to say farewell to the influential French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who with his wife Danièle Huillet produced several decades worth of formally controlled yet fiercely radic...

The novelist and essayist Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod to discuss the Elon Musk era of Twitter in relation to another cautionary tale about what happens when you fool with Mother Nature, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park . It turns out there are unintended consequences to messing around with systems you didn’t understand when you first altered them! We talk about Jurassic Par...

Access this entire 70 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/113-diego-with-74800431 On the eve of what looks like the most cursed World Cup yet, the host of the Criterion Project podcast Conrado Falco joins the show to discuss Asif Kapadia’s 2019 football documentary Diego Maradona, the Get Back of sports documentarie...

The writer and podcaster David Moscrop, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, returns to the pod from Ottawa to discuss a Spooky Season classic, Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , a film that turned 30 years old this year but like a vampire has barely aged a day. Coppola followed up The Godfather Part III with an ambitious gothic horror with an all-star...

Access this entire 75 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron! https://www.patreon.com/posts/110-michael-mann-73896455 Veteran boom operator Sean Armstrong ( Hannibal , Star Trek: Discovery ) returns to the podcast for the latest episode on our series on the films of Michael Mann, with the one film he prefers not to discuss, his second feature, 1983’...

The writer Meg Shields ( Film School Rejects ) returns to the show for a look at one of the highlights of Criterion Channel’s lineup of 80s Horror, Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of the fifties cult classic The Blob . Not as celebrated as two other eighties Body Horror remakes of fifties sci-fi (Carpenter’s The Thing and Cronenberg’s The Fly ), The Blob is ripe for rediscovery with it’s incredible us...

Access this entire 81 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron: https://www.patreon.com/posts/108-holly-hunter-73420058 Comedy writer Ursula Lawrence ( Drunk History , Adam Ruins Everything ) returns to the pod for a show about the great actor Holly Hunter, with a look at the two classic movies she made to launch her big-screen career in 1987, Raising...

Access this entire 81 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus episodes) by becoming a Junk Filter patron: https://www.patreon.com/posts/72332422 Filmmaker Peter Fishbeast returns to the podcast from Belper, England to discuss the great director William Friedkin and his 1977 thriller Sorcerer. Hot off two of the biggest hits of the seventies ( The French Connection and The Exorcist ), Friedkin...

To commemorate the death of Jean-Luc Godard, we’ve assembled a panel to discuss his impact on cinema: returning guests Will Sloan and Ben Nash are joined by two new guests, the Southampton-based film writer and PhD researcher James Slaymaker, and in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, Toph, friend of the show, francophile socialiste and Twitchstreamer. We’ve all come to Godard from different directions and dif...