Junk Filter

Access the entire 111 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61765426 Brooklyn-based musician Nick Miller joins the program for a deep dive into the immortal 1979 Elvis Costello and the Attractions album Armed Forces . Costello and his band recorded Armed Forces after relentlessly touring This Year’s Model in America, absor...

My guest Sotiris Tsernoglu joins the show from Lesbos, Greece to discuss the incendiary political thriller Z by the Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras. Z shocked the world on its release in 1969, striking a huge cultural chord worldwide in an era of war, protests and political assassinations (it was immediately banned in Greece). Set in an unnamed French-speaking country and filmed in Algiers to...

Access the entire 103 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61121473 Toronto writer and trivia master Terrance Balazo joins the show for a deep dive into the history of the Fleetwood Mac of Sweden, ABBA. From their origins in the European "Schlager" music genre and the contempt for the group in Sweden in their early days,...

Access the entire 86 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60782460 Film writer Corey Atad, a contributor to Esquire, Hazlitt, Slate and other outlets, returns to the podcast for a discussion of Adam McKay's new all-star satire for Netflix Don’t Look Up , a disaster movie about a comet heading directly for Earth that also...

Anna Swanson, Senior Contributor for Film School Rejects, returns to the podcast to discuss The Riddler (aka Ridley Scott) and the two all-star historical epics he has released this fall, October’s The Last Duel (the critically acclaimed drama that unexpectedly bombed) and November’s House of Gucci (a critically drubbed melodrama that has become a sizeable hit). We discuss some of the criticism Th...

Access the entire 86 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59961406 Andrew Tracy, the new associate editor of Reel Screen magazine, joins the program as our first in-person guest for a deep dive into the famously problematic 007 entry Live and Let Die , Roger Moore's debut as James Bond, going up against the powerful drugl...

After taking some time to let it marinate, the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel joins me to unpack the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chloe Zhao’s Eternals . We discuss how Eternals was first promoted as “a Terrence Malick version of a Marvel film”, some of the film’s flaws and questionable aesthetic choices (particularly the controversial Hiroshima scene), how it was received by critics...

Comedy writer Ursula Lawrence ( Drunk History , Adam Ruins Everything ) returns to the podcast from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss three great films from the Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth, whose early self-financed successes laid the groundwork for Scotland’s film industry to flourish. We talk about three of Forsyth's best films: his first studio project, the highly-acclaimed Local Hero (19...

The New Republic's Osita Nwanevu joins the show from Baltimore, Maryland to discuss the life of Scott Joplin, known in his day as the King of Ragtime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Joplin's music achieved widespread popularity in America, transcending segregated society, and his innovations laid the groundwork for the evolution of jazz and helped to revolutionize American music and the culture...

Access the entire 101 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/58389913 Jared Bailey joins me from Columbia, South Carolina to discuss Elvis Costello’s monumental 1978 pop/punk album This Year’s Model , his first with his band The Attractions. Costello and his Argentine producer Sebastian Krys recently deconstructed and reima...

Robyn Citizen, TIFF’s Senior Manager of Festival Programming, returns to the program to discuss (in great spoilery detail) a Spooky Szn classic, the film noir / horror hybrid Angel Heart, an extremely controversial film in 1987, branded with the X rating by the MPAA before director Alan Parker removed 10 seconds of sex and violence. Like The Sixth Sense over a decade later, Angel Heart has everyth...

Access the entire 80 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57121333 Street Fight Radio’s Bryan Quinby joins the show from Columbus, Ohio to discuss Jody Hill’s black comedy Observe and Report . Misunderstood in 2009 as a mean-spirited comedic spin on Taxi Driver and King of Comedy , it is clearer to see in 2021 that Observ...

Chapo Trap House’s Will Menaker joins us from Brooklyn to discuss the career of veteran writer-director Paul Schrader, whose latest work The Card Counter is the latest iteration of a story Schrader has told many times over his long career, in true Auteurist tradition: an immersion into a dark subculture from the anguished perspective of God’s Lonely Man. To set the table, Will and I also discuss t...

Dan Boeckner of Operators and Wolf Parade and co-host of The Bottlemen podcast returns to Junk Filter for an episode about one of the great underseen films of the eighties, Ivan Passer’s 1981 California neo-noir Cutter’s Way , based on the crime novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg. One rainy night in Santa Barbara, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) witnesses a man dumping the corpse of a young gir...

Access the entire 82 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/56088312 Veteran boom operator Sean Armstrong (who worked on every episode of Hannibal !) joins the podcast to discuss Chris Smith’s 1999 film American Movie, a work by a determined documentary filmmaker about a determined independent filmmaker: it tells the story...

The writer and playwright Ashley Naftule returns to the pod from Scottsdale Arizona for a look at the work of the ambitious Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik, who has made only 4 films so far, each of high quality, each in their own way about outlaws. Chopper (2000), a comedic biopic of the notorious and unrepentant Aussie criminal / tabloid folk hero Mark “Chopper” Read, with a starmaking perfo...

The hosts of the Hit Factory Podcast, Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes, join us from San Francisco to discuss two Val Kilmer films. Made as David Mamet was getting redpilled post-9/11, his bizarre 2004 thriller Spartan has a stripped-down screenplay comprised mostly of jargon and commands and features a terrific performance from Kilmer as an army ranger sent to rescue a high-value target (the Preside...

Access the entire 93 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/55330993 Author Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod to discuss Hal Ashby’s evergreen social satire Being There (1979), adapted from the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. featuring Peter Sellers in his greatest performance as Chance, a simple-minded gardener raised by televis...

Violet Lucca, web editor for Harper's Magazine and the host of the publication's podcast, is the special guest for an in-depth discussion of Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 comedy Ghost World , based on a running segment within Daniel Clowes’ comic book series Eightball . The screenplay by Clowes and Zwigoff was the first comic book adaptation to be nominated for an Academy Award. Violet and I discuss the ex...

Access the entire 87 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54704122 Toronto-based writer and content strategist Karen Geier (The Guardian, Vice, The Cut) joins the podcast to discuss Shira Piven’s 2015 comedy-drama Welcome To Me , about a mentally ill woman obsessed with television and Oprah (Kristen Wiig); she wins a stag...

Los Angeles-based writer actor and producer Zandy Hartig joins the pod for a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 historical romance Phantom Thread . Anderson's first film shot entirely outside of the United States, Phantom Thread is a hybrid of his detailed historical recreations like There Will Be Blood and The Master fused with Punch-Drunk Love's absurdist romantic sensibility. The fi...

Access the entire 132 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/45-genius-of-54253436 Toronto-based musician Marker Starling, who does the original music for the podcast, is my special guest for a very in-depth and supersized conversation about the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songbook, their innovative work with their greates...

Comedy writer Ursula Lawrence ( Drunk History , Adam Ruins Everything ) returns to the podcast from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss the cultural influence of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which 30 years ago revolutionized visual language in American cinema; a hybrid of classic all-star Hollywood filmmaking and experimental film techniques with its mixture of various film stocks and a complex editing st...

Access the entire 85 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/53826690 Toronto-based writer and podcasting king Will Sloan returns to the podcast to discuss the final films of director Jerry Lewis, Hardly Working (1980) and Cracking Up (a.k.a. Smorgasbord , 1983) as well as his great performance in Scorsese's The King of Come...

Author and political commentator Jared Yates Sexton returns to Junk Filter to discuss the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its association with the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. I have seen very few of these MCU films, uncomfortable as I am with the partnership between Disney/Marvel and the U.S. Department of Defense, but for the pod I watched the recent Russo brothers trilogy of Captain America:...