Not Another 2001 Movie Podcast

PEARL HARBOR is what happens if Michael Bay wants to make TITANIC and everybody around him says, ‘OK, you should definitely go for it bro!’” We kick off the back half of our year-long trek through 2001's cinema monuments with one of the most dreadful blockbusters of the 21st century. And we welcome back a special guest, Justin of “Unvarnished,” to help us parse through the history. If PEARL HARBOR...

Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. And they were correct. Honestly a great call. We’re battered but not broken after 25(!!!!!) mainline episodes of this “limited series” and have finally arrived at the halfway mark, and it’s a big boy — SHREK is on deck!!!!!! Does this swampy romp even need an introduction? SHREK won the first EVER Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film and spawned a...

Is .COM FOR MURDER a tech-thriller? An unintentional comedy? A prophetic look at the future? Even a 2001 movie? We try to answer some of those questions this week with our special guest Larry Treadway, lead singer of Tojo Yamamoto and a renowned aficionado in cinema that’s … less loved than most. Directed by longtime D-lister Nico Mastorakis and staring Nastassja Kinski, Nicollette Sheridan, Roger...

This week we’re traveling across continents and deep into our feels with NOWHERE IN AFRICA (NIRGENDWO IN AFRIKA) Caroline Link’s sweeping 2001 drama captivated global audiences and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 75th Academy Awards (an important distinction particularly for our show). Based on Stefanie Zweig's autobiographical novel, the film tells the story...

Hi, Josh here. I put off watching A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE for a long time and immediately after watching felt like I had to talk about it. This might be my favorite movie of the year. This is a monumental collaboration between Stanley Kubrick (who conceived it) and Steven Spielberg (who wrote and directed it after Kubrick's death). Haley Joel Osment gives a performance of a lifetime as David,...

Check your meteorites at the door, because this week we’re dealing with an outbreak of alien ass! Luckily we’ve got extra help: Malcolm from “Hidden Stats: The Podcast” joins the show. It’s time for EVOLUTION, Ivan Reitman’s 2001 sci-fi comedy that attempted to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of GHOSTBUSTERS, but with a lot more Head & Shoulders. We dive into the film's bizarrely st...

GHOST WORLD, Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic book with the same name, departs from the source material in some key material ways but is about as faithful, spiritually, as anything you’ll find. The film, like the comic, follows Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) right at the point where they start to navigate that weird post-high school, pre-rest of our l...

Hey, a bonus episode! Josh wrote a monologue about MONKEYBONE because he's a mad man. NOTABLE CLIPS REFERENCED Ebert & Roeper's episode featuring MONKEYBONE: https://youtu.be/Nv4w8Nbv_4s?si=WFHi8eri-Pau_Bvg Phil Machi's interview with Kaja Blackley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcLH7y1yn38 NOT ANOTHER 2001 MOVIE PODCAST is a limited series exploring movies released in the first year of a ch...

After the breakout success of 1999’s THE MUMMY , a new take on the classic movie monster, less than two years later Universal decided it was gonna squeeze every last drop out of its revitalized IP. THE MUMMY RETURNS , Stephen Sommers’ action-packed, CGI-heavy follow-up that threw (up) everything at the screen. We discuss the film's frenetic pacing, its massive box-office success, and, of course, t...

Are you ready to hide from the light? This week, we’re closing the curtains and lighting a candle for Alejandro Amenábar’s gothic masterpiece THE OTHERS. We discuss Nicole Kidman’s powerhouse performance as the high-strung Grace Stewart, the film’s masterful cinematography, its "twist" and how it compares to that of a much more famous contemporary, THE SIXTH SENSE. In our bonus feature segment, we...

CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE INCLUDES DISCUSSION OF DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE Whether you call it PULSE or KAIRO or CIRCUIT, this week’s movie is as unnerving as a dial-up tone. Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, PULSE is a cornerstone of the J-horror boom that trades the jump scares of its contemporaries for a slow-crawling sense of existential dread. The film follows two groups of young people in Tokyo...

CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE INCLUDES DISCUSSION OF SEX CRIMES AND PEDOPHILIA. This week, we’re hitting the road to discuss JEEPERS CREEPERS, the 2001 creature feature that turned a catchy old tune into a nightmare. In our bonus feature segment, we tackle a darker reality: the crimes of the movie’s director, Victor Salva. We discuss the history of his conviction, the controversy surrounding his H...

SHUT UP! A miracle has happened in San Francisco, and we’re not just talking about Mia Thermopolis’ hair. This week, we’re diving into THE PRINCESS DIARIES, the Garry Marshall-directed smash hit that introduced the world to Anne Hathaway and reminded us all that Julie Andrews is, in fact, screen royalty. It was the second overall pick in our draft at the start of the year, and Allison came away wi...

Who’s ready for some demonstrable shit? SWORDFISH is this week’s adventure. The fourth film from former music-video director Dominic Sena, who just a year earlier saw GONE IN 60 SECONDS become a box-office smash, is remembered mostly for two reasons and they’re part of Halle Berry. You might also recall that early in the film Hugh Jackman gets a jack, man. SWORDFISH is a love(?) letter to everythi...

Slate’s back in the saddle and ready to GIVE IT TO YA! It’s time for EXIT WOUNDS, the second in a sort of spiritual mid-budget action trilogy from director Andrzej Bartkowiak. He in the span of four years churned out this, ROMEO MUST DIE (2000) and CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE (2003). Unfortunatel, EXT WOUNDS is the only one of those three not to star Jet Li. Instead we get Steavan Seagal, who in a Hollywoo...

Prepared to be weighed, measured and found anything but wanting! This week we’re diving into A KNIGHT’S TALE, a sports comedy starring Heath Ledger. Slate couldn’t join us for the recording but we called up a reserve jouster, David from The Glitterjaw Podcast Collective, who performed admirably — and in the wee hours of the morning in his local Spain! Join us for a lighthearted conversation about...

After no bonus episodes in March, we’re starting April WITH a bonus episode, cause it’s our podcast and we’ll do whatever the hell we want. Happy April Fool’s Day! It’s also our first triple-feature episode! We’re speedrunning conversations about JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, SCARY MOVIE 2 and WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER this go-around, so pack your outdated language and references for an extra trip...

We conclude Oscars Month with Hayao Miyazaki’s magnum opus. SPIRITED AWAY, the eighth feature film directed by the beloved Japanese director, follows Chihiro Ogino (or Sen, if you’re watching the original-language version) on an accidental journey into the land of kami. It was the Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, and the second animated movie from 2001 to...

Milquetoast. Mid. Mayonaise on white bread. Those are some of the nice things we have to say about 2001’s A BEAUTIFUL MIND, which went on to win Best Picture at the 74th Academy Awards because … who knows. Directed by Ron Howard, A BEAUTIFUL MIND is a biopic about mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe), a schizophrenic whose life goes off the rails and must be put back on track with the help of h...

The third movie in our Oscars Month collection, unfortunately, might be even more important than it was in 2001. MURDER ON A SUNDAY MORNING was directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and released Sept. 14, 2001 — a few days after a consequential Tuesday in America. It documents the trial and defense of Brenton Butler, a 15-year-old who on May 7, 2000, was charged with the murder of Mary Stephens, a t...

Our second movie featured during Oscars Month is MULHOLLAND DRIVE, a critically acclaimed classic hailed not just as one of the best movies released in the 21st Century, but ever. Time’s been much kinder to MULHOLLAND DRIVE than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was in 2002. It received a single nomination for Best Director, the late David Lynch’s third and final nomination in that c...

It’s Oscars Month here on Not Another 2001 Movie Podcast, and we’re kicking things off with NO MAN’S LAND, the winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards in 2002. NO MAN’S LAND was the first narrative feature film directed by Danis Tanović, who also wrote and scored the movie. It stars Branko Duric as Ciki, a Bosnian soldier, and Rene Bitorajac as Nino, a Serbian soldier, who...

Can a movie kind of kill a franchise and somehow still be the second best movie in that franchise? JURASSIC PARK III suggests “yes.” BEN?!? ERIC?!? Give a B-movie a $175 million (inflation-adjusted) budget and the result is this flick by Joe Johnston, the man behind the 1991 cult classic THE ROCKETEER and 1995 smash hit JUMANJI who would later go on to remake THE ROCKETEER as CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE...

Robert Altman is rolling over in his grave. GOSFORD PARK earned the iconic director his fifth Oscar nomination for Best Director and earned a place in the Best Picture field — which is the reason why it was an automatic qualifier for this show! We could list the cast but podcast description fields probably can’t accommodate that many characters. This forebear to DOWNTON ABBEY is lean on plot and h...

How much do we love our listeners? You get not one but TWO bonus episodes this week! And what would Valentine’s Day be without VALENTINE, a horror flick that time’s attempted to forget but that everyone associated with this show — especially Allison!!! — is determined to preserve. We welcomed Merrilee, co-host of FEAR CODED: A QUEER HORROR PODCAST, joined us to discuss Jamie Blanks’ second (and le...