Legends Podcast

Legends of Halloween starts early this year with Rita's pick, a 2003 horror flick that remakes a 1971 hit. The film stars Crispin Glover as a misfit who befriends a colony of rats living in his basement, later using them to get revenge on those who have wronged him. Written and directed by The X-Files writer, producer, and director Glen Morgan, this darkly comic tale was based on the original film...

Legends of Halloween starts early this year with Rita's pick, a 2003 horror flick that remakes a 1971 hit. The film stars Crispin Glover as a misfit who befriends a colony of rats living in his basement, later using them to get revenge on those who have wronged him. Written and directed by The X-Files writer, producer, and director Glen Morgan, this darkly comic tale was based on the original film...

The year is 2027, and for the past two decades, humans have been unable to reproduce. The infertility crisis has brought the globe to the breaking point, with Britain now a totalitarian, anti-immigrant state. Clive Owen plays Theo, a depressed bureaucrat tasked by his insurgency leader ex, played by Julianne Moore, with escorting a woman out of the country. When the woman turns out to be pregnant,...

Last week, we talked about Song Sung Blue, Neil Diamond, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This week, we've got another color, musical icon, and Midwestern city in mind: purple, Prince, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yes, the Purple One himself makes his feature film debut in this 1984 Albert Magnoli-directed rock opera. By 1984, Prince had already established himself as one of pop music's most exciting and...

For her 2025 release pick, Rita selected a film with loads of local Milwaukee flair. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play Mike and Claire Sardina, a real-life Neil Diamond tribute duo known as Lightning & Thunder. Documentary filmmaker Greg Kohs captured the couple's attempted comeback in a 2008 festival favorite, where Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer first encountered their story. Brewer spent y...

From the depths of his birth year - 1980 - Beef brings us a tale of horror and suspense based on Stephen King's classic novel. Yes, for the second month in a row, Beef picked a movie based on a story by Stephen King. Redrum! Redrum! Redrum! Yes, it is that movie, the one directed by Stanley Kubrick and all-but disowned by King himself. Starring Jack Nicholson as Jack, a struggling writer who takes...

Aug-Heist comes to a close with this 1995 Michael Mann film starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, sharing screen time for the first time in their careers. Mann already made this movie once, in 1989 as a made-for-TV movie called L.A. Takedown. In this iteration, De Niro plays the leader of a sophisticated band of thieves while Pacino plays the hardboiled detective obsessed with taking them down. T...

Our first-ever Aug-Heist pick, 1973's The Sting, saw Paul Newman and Robert Redford re-team with director George Roy Hill for a Depression-era crime caper. Now, we're reviewing the 1969 film that brought the three of them back together for the first time. The film, from a script by legendary writer William Goldman, is loosely based on the real-life Wild West outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker (Newman), a...

In 2021, I, Tonya and future Supergirl director Craig Gillespie unleashed the live-action origin story of Disney's 101 Dalmatians baddie Cruella De Vil. Emma Stone dons the iconic black-and-white wig as the dognapping fashionista, here an orphaned up-and-coming designer in '70s punk rock London who also does crime. Emma Thompson plays her foil, the Baroness, an established couturière, in the story...

Legends Podcast is cracking open the cinematic vault and bringing you a whole month of cons, capers, and car chases! Whether you're a wrongfully-convicted banker or an aspiring fashion designer, you'll find the big score right here on our podcast. This is Aug-Heist! This week takes us to Maine's Shawshank Prison for a 1994 film directed by Frank Darabont based on a Stephen King novella. When Andy...

This week, we're visiting L.A. for a 1988 film that takes place almost entirely in one night, in one neighborhood, along Wilshire Boulevard. When a jazz trombonist meets a diner waitress at a museum, sparks fly - up until he gets a phone call telling him the end is nigh! With nukes about to fall, he will risk it all to get the girl and get out alive! Starring Brat Pack-adjacent faces Anthony Edwar...

This week, we're wrapping up our great "Mash-Up" picks with a film that combines mystery and comedy by parodying some of the greatest mysteries of our time. Released in 1976 from a script by the great playwright Neil Simon, this "whodunnit?" stars a veritable "who's who?" of screen royalty, including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Maggie Smith, James Coco, Peter Falk, Eileen Brennan, Elsa Lanchester,...

This week, we're eating out with a 1989 cult film from director, writer, and visual artist Peter Greenaway. The film centers on a cook, Richard, played by Richard Bohringer; a thief, mobster Albert, played by Michael Gambon; his wife, Georgina, played by Helen Mirren; and her lover, Michael, played by Alan Howard. Through a series of dinners at Richard's fancy London restaurant, Le Hollandais, whi...

We're celebrating summer by heading to the drive-in! Over the next two weeks, we're bringing you a double bill of blockbuster movies from last summer. Maybe you saw them, maybe you missed them, but we think you'll enjoy Last Summer's Drive-In Movie Double Feature! Hit the restroom, refill your popcorn, and settle in for a late night… our second feature is starting now! Marvel's first family has ha...

We're celebrating summer by heading to the drive-in! Over the next two weeks, we're bringing you a double bill of blockbuster movies from last summer. Maybe you saw them, maybe you missed them, but we think you'll enjoy Last Summer's Drive-In Movie Double Feature! Grab a corndog, tune in your radio, or hang that weird staticky speaker in your window… our first feature is starting now! In 2022, aft...

Director James Whale brought Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the big screen in 1931, and followed it up with classics like The Invisible Man, The Old Dark House, and Bride of Frankenstein. Throughout his Hollywood career, Whale lived as an openly gay man, something quite rare in the '20s and '30s. Along with his horror pictures, Whale directed Remember Last Night?, Show Boat, and The Man in the Iro...

This week, we're celebrating Pride with the movie that brought the drag queen road trip genre to America! Hot on the high heels of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert from 1994 Australia comes this 1995 American release starring Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo. When their car breaks down in small-town Nebraska, three drag queens must win the hearts and minds of the l...

This week, we're spending time with Melvin James Kaminsky, better known to the universe as comedy icon and director Mel Brooks! After lampooning westerns, monster movies, and world history, Brooks turned his signature sense of humor to the cinematic sci-fi outings of Star Wars, Alien, 2001, and Planet of the Apes. With an all-star cast including Rick Moranis, John Candy, Joan Rivers, Bill Pullman,...

Aside from the release of Christopher Nolan's period piece magician caper The Prestige, the year 2006 had one more trick up its sleeve in the form of Neil Burger's adaptation of Steven Millhauser's short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist." Set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Austria, the film stars Edward Norton as a poor magician who falls in love with a countess (Jessica Biel) while rivals Crown P...

Nineteen Sixty-Four was a huge year for cinema, especially for movie musicals. Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady went one and two at the annual box office, with the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, becoming breakout hits. But for his birth year pick, Rum Daddy didn't play along with the band. He went with Bond. James Bond. Yes, the third outing fo...

In 2011, director Tate Taylor adapted Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel into a feature film with an all-star cast including Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson, and Sissy Spacek all getting a piece of the pie. Set among upper-class white families in early 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, aspiring journalist Skeeter (Stone) chr...

Around the same time that cinematic universes began to dominate every multiplex, one satire landed like a live grenade tossed directly into Hollywood's lap. Co-written, directed by, and starring Ben Stiller, the movie follows the catastrophically doomed production of an over-budget Vietnam War epic whose cast of self-absorbed actors - including Stiller's fading action hero, Jack Black's substance-...

Thirty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg released his updated take on the classic children's story Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. Arriving in theaters in 1991 with enormous expectations, the film was toplined by four actors at the height of their fame: Robin Williams stars as an aged-up Peter, fresh off Dead Poets Society and Awakenings - and just a year away from Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire; Dustin Hof...

Chris Condon is an acclaimed comic book writer known for his gritty, atmospheric storytelling and neo-Western themes. He is currently writing major titles for Marvel and DC Comics while continuing his celebrated creator-owned work at Image Comics and Oni Press.    You may know him as the writer of: That Texas Blood & The Enfield Gang Massacre (Image Comics) Far Down Below (Mad Cave Studios); Hell...

On September 13, 1979, animators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy left the feature animation department at Walt Disney Productions to set up their own independent animation studio. Their first feature, directed by Bluth, was based on the 1971 children's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. The book had originally been rejected by their former employer as "too dark" t...