Measuring Flicks

Max and Karl butt gritty, realistic heads over Clint Eastwood's final say on the genre he helped to build. Karl is bummed that nobody's really heroic or anything. Max is convinced that's sort of the point. Karl thinks the Kid is trying too hard to be The Man With No Name. Max is convinced that's sort of the point. One thing they both agree on: the last 35 minutes of this movie are stunning. For mo...

Max and Karl put on their boots, their gunbelts, and the their spurs to dig into John Ford's last true work of genius,  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance  (1962). Ever wanted to hear two grown men almost cry? Look no further. Ever wondered about the larger cultural implications of The Duke? Then Pilgrim, are you in for a treat.

Changing gears from the myriad miseries of March Madness, welcome to wide open spaces and fine country living! This month, Max and Karl dip a toe into American Mythology with their first foray into the Western: 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . Listen in and find out just how this movie makes us feel so good, so bad, and just how much Karl hates Raindrops falling on his head.

Max and Karl aren't sure if they were supposed to want to go in the morgue drawer or not, but after the sanity-testing string of movies they've endured this month, a little nap in a urine-stained onesie doesn't sound so bad. Besides, high doses of hallucinogens combined with dangerously long periods of enforced isolation never killed anyone.

Max and Karl are starting to doubt their reality, which is fine by them if the movies in Crazytown are all this good! 2004's The Machinist  shows us all exactly what a great director can do with a great actor and a phenomenal  script, even outside the Hollywood movie mill. We wish there were more movies like this. Also, that Christian Bale would go see a nutritionist or something.

Max and Karl bang their heads on a cupboard door, and fall into a full-on psychotic episode trying to wrap their heads around Richard Linklater's brilliant A Scanner Darkly  (2006). Did you know Timothy Leary was Winona Ryder's godfather? Did you know that Robert Downey Jr. memorizes his lines with thousand-character acronyms? Did you know that rotoscoping can make you feel like you're having...

Welcome to the first episode of MEASURING FLICKS! In this episode, Max and Karl sink their teeth into the weird, hallucinatory world of 1994's In the Mouth of Madness , directed by John Carpenter, which is not, however much we want it to be, a Stephen King movie.