Junk Filter

Toronto-based writer Corey Atad joins the pod today to talk about Bane, as a jumping off point to discuss Christopher Nolan, who seemed like one of the villains of 2020 as he was determined to release Tenet in theatres during a global pandemic, but who became a Good Guy at the end of the year when he started feuding with his studio Warner Bros. after they used Tenet ’s disappointing box office tot...

On this week’s episode, Toronto-based writer and podcasting magnate Will Sloan returns to the pod to discuss Abel Ferrara’s 2014 film Welcome To New York , a dramatization of IMF chief (and presumptive future French President) Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in Manhattan in 2011 for the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid, starring Gerard Depardieu as the thinly-disguised DSK figure. Not only was...

Toronto-based film producer and TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky comes on the pod to talk about The Astrologer (1975), a one of a kind vanity production / ego trip by first time filmmaker (and con artist) Craig Denney, briefly screened after being rediscovered decades later but then pulled from circulation over music licensing issues too complex to untangle. But before the clampdow...

Our subject today is nuns in the movies in general, and in particular the 1961 Luis Buñuel masterpiece Viridiana . Buñuel left Spain over the Franco dictatorship and forged a great filmmaking career in Mexico. Surprisingly. Buñuel accepted an invitation from Franco to return to Spain to make whatever film he wanted. He delivered Viridiana , one of the great “Fuck You” movies, a vicious satire of b...

An overworked family man suddenly facing a terminal health crisis is given what appears to be a miracle cure, an experimental steroid treatment. But as the man’s health returns, he becomes addicted to the steroids and gets increasingly deranged and delusional, his mania escalating into a full blown domestic rampage that threatens to destroy him and everyone around him. This is what likely cost Pre...

Today’s extremely Toronto Politics Twitter episode concerns the ongoing #BBQAnon clownshow in town. A barbecue restaurant got a lot of media attention recently when they defiantly refused to cooperate as the province imposed new public health restrictions on indoor dining during a new COVID-19 lockdown: the local right wing press hailed the restauranteur as a “barbecue revolutionary” fighting for...

Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman joins host Jesse Hawken for an in-depth conversation about Clint Eastwood’s 2018 Dudes Rock drama The 15:17 To Paris , a re-enactment of the 2015 incident where three young American tourists stopped a terror attack on a European high-speed train... but starring The Boys as themselves, and telling the whole story that led to this decisive moment, going back to thei...

Host Jesse Hawken is joined by Toronto-based author and film critic Adam Nayman, who has written a new pictorial monograph “Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks”, for an in-depth discussion of Anderson’s singular romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love . The film won the Best Director prize at Cannes but despite some great reviews, audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of it in 2002, as the long-anticip...

Toronto podcasting magnate and author Will Sloan was also, improbably, one of the last people to see Al Goldstein alive. Goldstein, for better or worse, was a trailblazing First Amendment crusader who embodied a particular time and place in American cultural history as the publisher of Screw magazine and the host of the long running New York public access program Midnight Blue, both indelibly scuz...