Legends Podcast

The Terminator franchise can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever... until you are dead! This past weekend's release of Terminator: Dark Fate proved that statement definitively as the film became the third attempt to restart the franchise in only a decade. But will the fact that Fate delivered less than $30...

Daylight savings threw beef off, he thought it was sent time back a full week... not clocks back an hour.. his bad! your final Legends of Halloween for 2019   Director Robert Eggers made a name for himself with the 2015 release of his debut film, The Witch. Stylized as The VVitch, the film, set in colonial New England with all its "thees" and "thous," established Eggers's bonafides as an auteur wi...

Thanksgiving is a time when friends and family gather together to eat, watch football, and be grateful. And what podcast wouldn't be grateful to have listeners who request films for us to watch and rate? Films like 2009's ThanksKilling, a direct-to-video horror-comedy flick so absurd that no studio would touch it. And by no studio, we mean that literally: the filmmakers made it for $3,500 and sold...

The second-highest grossing release of 1999, sitting at $672.8 million worldwide, was M. Night Shyamalan's supernatural horror drama film The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. The film spent five weeks at number one in the U.S. box office, was nominated for six Academy Awards, and introduced the phrase "I see dead people" into the pop culture lexicon. The film's final twist...

Based on the equally divisive novel by Bret Easton Ellis, the film American Psycho has been polarizing audiences since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival nearly two decades ago. Set in the late '80s, released in the year 2000, and now seen as a cult classic, the horror-comedy put Christian Bale on the map - and also spawned an '80s pop-infused musical. In the words of director Mary Harron,...

One of 1999's breakout success stories was a found-footage horror movie, a student documentary, a Sundance darling, an elaborate hoax, a sleeper hit, one of the most successful independent films of all time, and a viral marketing experiment that resulted in the film's three stars being listed as "missing, presumed dead" on the website IMDb for over a year. The Blair Witch Project, a long-gestating...

Quentin Tarantino's films seem to excite and divide audiences with equal fervor. His 2009 World War II masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, was met with approval, but not universal acclaim. The film's breakout star, Christoph Waltz, won an Academy Award for his role as SS colonel Hans Landa, but Basterds lost out in the Best Picture race to another war movie, The Hurt Locker. Dealing as it does with...

This week, we're checking ourselves in for some therapy with Analyze This. Harold Ramis paired Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal for a gangland comedy that parodied films like The Godfather and A Bronx Tale and was co-written by esteemed playwright Kennth Lonergan. Before he fully embraced his comedic side with his role in Meet the Parents, DeNiro played to type with his role of an emotionally distr...

American director Robert Altman's career spanned forty years, and included critical and commercial successes like M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Nashville. Altman's films often featured large ensemble casts, improvisational dialogue, and social commentary - all of which are on full display in 2001's Gosford Park. Based on an idea of an Agatha Christie-style whodunit set at...

This week Legends Podcast goes back to school with Election, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Directed by Alexander Payne and produced by MTV Films, Election is a biting satire of high school politics that also presages the recount drama of the 2000 Election. Joining us this week as substitute teacher is Ian, author of the film blog Primal Scenes, which is a good thing because we'...

Legends Podcast is cracking open the cinematic vault and bringing you a whole month of cons, capers, and car chases! Whether you're an East End card sharp, a handsome art thief, a trio of rogue soldiers, or eight feisty heisting heroines, you'll find the big score right here on our podcast. This is Aug-Heist!    This week we're talking about Ocean's 8, last summer's hit heist movie that also happe...

Legends Podcast is cracking open the cinematic vault and bringing you a whole month of cons, capers, and car chases! Whether you're an East End card sharp, a handsome art thief, a trio of rogue soldiers, or eight feisty heisting heroines, you'll find the big score right here on our podcast. This is Aug-Heist!    This week we're talking about Three Kings, also one of our Legends of '99, starring Ge...

Legends Podcast is cracking open the cinematic vault and bringing you a whole month of cons, capers, and car chases! Whether you're an East End card sharp, a handsome art thief, a trio of rogue soldiers, or eight feisty heisting heroines, you'll find the big score right here on our podcast. This is Aug-Heist!    This week we're talking about The Thomas Crown Affair, also one of our Legends of '99,...

Legends Podcast is cracking open the cinematic vault and bringing you a whole month of cons, capers, and car chases! Whether you're an East End card sharp, a handsome art thief, a trio of rogue soldiers, or eight feisty heisting heroines, you'll find the big score right here on our podcast. This is Aug-Heist!    This week we're talking about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, also one of our Leg...

Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood churned out another remake of "The Most Dangerous Game," the classic tale of man-meets-man, man-hunts-man, hunter-becomes-the-hunted… you know, that old chestnut. Coming just a year after Jean-Claude Van Damme played a certain Hard Target, Surviving the Game combined the same basic plot with a fish-out-of-water story as a character actor from the city (Ice-T) is br...

It's Comic Con weekend and our spidey-senses are tingling with news and trailers from San Diego! But first we're tackling the third second Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home! Picking up where Avengers: Endgame left our broken hearts, the latest spidey-flick starring Tom Holland sees our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler on a Euro-trip, with a Mysterio-us new player on the scene. But does...

A handful of years ago Netflix jacked their prices and started  making TV shows and movies. It didn't take us long to realize that they are much better at making TV shows. Yet for some reason we keep going back to the well of Netflix movies. Most likely it's because they are free. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad , mostly they're just free.  What will "I am mother" hold? Listen in and...

Thirty years ago, Batman swept into movie theaters, ushering in the modern era of comic book movie-making. Directed by Tim Burton, starring Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, and Michael Keaton as the man who launched fifty thousand letters protesting his casting as Bruce Wayne. Despite a troubled production which saw a writer's strike, budget overruns, stolen film reels, and...

In honor of the release of Spider-Man: Far From Home, we're opening the Legends Vault and serving up a retro episode from our storied past. Sit back and enjoy "Spider-Man 2002" with Beef, Sean O'Hara, the Operator and John D. in Legends Podcast  #101  from June of 2012. We'll return to our regularly scheduled programming next week with Batman 1989! Enjoy the parade, and bring me pictures of Spider...

We're just past the summer solstice, and what better way to celebrate the longest day of the year than by watching The Rock climb the tallest building in the world? Another hit from the summer of 2018, Skyscraper featured Dwayne Johnson as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, set in a Towering Inferno-meets-Die Hard pyrotechnic spectacular. However, the film was less successful domestically...

The highest-grossing movie of 1999 was the summer release of the long-anticipated return of Star Wars to the big screen. After Star Wars experienced a resurgence in the '90s thanks to the comic books, the Special Edition re-release of the original trilogy, and the "everything-but-the-movie" multimedia experiment Shadows of the Empire, George Lucas capped the decade with Star Wars - Episode I: The...

The summer of 2018 saw a few breakout hits, but none more surprising than Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians, which earned $238 million worldwide and came in at Number Seven at the domestic office between May and Labor Day. Based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians boasted the first time a film featured a majority-Asian cast in a modern setting since 1993's The Joy Luck Club. And along with...

Man, it's a hot one… like the Sahara in the midday sun. The summer movie season is upon us, what better time to revisit some classics from the Summer of '99? First up is the unexpected hit The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, which revived a long-buried horror franchise. The Mummy also paid homage to Hollywood adventure films like Raiders of the Lost Ark… which was paying homage to...

Ten years ago, director J.J. Abrams brought Star Trek back to the big screen in grand fashion, with a young cast and a surprising link to the original series. 2009's Star Trek proved to be a summer blockbuster and the highest-grossing Trek film to date. It also proved to be Abram's audition reel for a gig directing Star Wars - which he always professed was his first love. But a decade later, as J....

Video game movies have a long history of disappointing fans. And perhaps no video game franchise has been more beloved - in a wider variety of formats - than Pokémon. From the original Game Boy game to collectible card games to the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, Pikachu and his ilk of "pocket monsters" have captivated fans and garnered zealous devotion. And though Pokémon has inspired many ani...