Pod Casty For Me

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. This week we're taking a look at a bunch of songs about, featuring, or otherwise related to Clint Eastwood...which is a great reason to bring on Jetski, aka Ian Ostaszewski, the composer of the Paid Costly For Me theme music! We chat Gorillaz, M...

Yeah, like we weren't going to go over two and a half hours on FULL FRONTAL. Following the generational run of OUT OF SIGHT, THE LIMEY, ERIN BROCKOVICH, TRAFFIC, and OCEAN'S ELEVEN, Steven Soderbergh did what anyone would do: he shot a semi-improvised ensemble Hollywood satire on a consumer grade digital camera. The result, FULL FRONTAL, is a fascinating film about connection, mediation, performan...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. Our dear friend Comrade Yui joins us to discuss Lee Sang-il's 2013 remake of UNFORGIVEN, which stars Ken Watanabe and transposes the action to Meiji Japan. We talk Japanese history, Westerns vs. jidaigeki, Pokémon metaphysics, and pantsing. Grea...

Ante up, listener! It's the OCEAN'S ELEVEN episode. After the unbelievable one-two punch of BROCKOVICH and TRAFFIC, Steven Soderbergh took a victory lap by remaking a dull Rat Pack movie into one of the most entertaining films ever made - and it made a bunch of money and everyone loves it. Including our guest, filmmaker and YouTuber Patrick Willems! We talk heists, movie stars, Vegas, pleasure - t...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. Jake's 23-year-old coworker Zoomer Josh is back, and this time we made him watch UNFORGIVEN. We talk Westerns, Hackman, the anti-ICE demonstrations in LA, and Josh's journey as a young cinephile. Plus: a dumb game! Follow Zoomer Josh: https://x....

The second half of Soderbergh's unbelievable year 2000 was TRAFFIC, his sprawling adaptation of the 1989 Channel 4 miniseries about the many sides of the drug trade. At the time, it was hailed as a highly nuanced and humane look at narcotics. But how does it look from 2025? Joining us to discuss is professor and author of our much-cited Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Ce...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. In the aftermath of DIRTY HARRY, there were plenty of films looking to get in on the semi-legal vigilante craze. One of the most successful of these was Phil Karlson's WALKING TALL, starring the great, recently departed Joe Don Baker as real-lif...

Soderbergh finally hit a box-office home run in 2000 with ERIN BROCKOVICH, a Julia Roberts-starring biopic about a paralegal with a big personality and a nose for corporate environmental malfeasance, and the one-two punch of BROCKOVICH and TRAFFIC in a single year cemented him as a truly major filmmaker. This is one of the big ones, so we brought in our friend Carlee from Hit Factory to talk about...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. We return to our very slow trip through the films of Sergio Leone with 1971's DUCK, YOU SUCKER!, also known as A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE, also known as GIÙ LA TESTA, a story of the Mexican Revolution starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn. It's a rea...

In 1999, Steven Soderbergh pushed his formal experimentation even further, rendering a straightforward revenge tale into a modernist masterpiece. In the process, the Terence Stamp/Peter Fonda joint THE LIMEY examines memory, the legacy of the 60s, and inaugurates Sodie's obsession with Cockney rhyming slang. Film writer and podcaster and UK resident Elena Lazic joins us to get limey! Good ep! Furt...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. GET SHORTY and OUT OF SIGHT weren't the only high-profile Elmore Leonard adaptations of the 1990s. Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited follow up to PULP FICTION was a race- and setting-swapped adaptation of Rum Punch retitled JACKIE BROWN, starring...

It's the OUT OF SIGHT episode, and our guest is Bilge Ebiri. Do we need to sell you on this? OK, fine: in 1998 Steven Soderbergh took a job for hire directing an Elmore Leonard adaptation and ended up finding the style that would define much of his career, minting George Clooney as a movie star, capturing Jennifer Lopez's best-ever performance, working with Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman and a bunch...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. We're talking more Gene Hackman and getting into the 1990s Elmore Leonard boom with Barry Sonnenfeld's GET SHORTY, and our friend Forrest Tiffany is here to help! Join us as we plot the line from PULP FICTION to GET SHORTY to JACKIE BROWN to OUT...

What the hell is going on with Steven Soderbergh's 1996 super-low-budget labor of love comedy SCHIZOPOLIS? Our returning guests, the filmmakers and all-around handsome devils Jordan Fish and Ray Tintori of the To The White Sea Podcast, help us get to the bottom of it. Is this quietly a devastating analysis of a failed marriage starring the director and his real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley? Or is a...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. One of "the world's favorite movies," starring two guys who won back-to-back Best Supporting Actor Oscars under Clint Eastwood's direction, and Jake's never seen it? You know we had to talk about Frank Darabont's THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, prison...

In 1989, Steven Soderbergh was on top of the world. By 1995, he was underneath...THE UNDERNEATH, that is! We're talking Sodie's very loose remake of the 1949 Robert Siodmak film noir CRISS-CROSS (and the 1934 novel on which  it was based), noir in the 1990s, armored cars, and Soderbergh's evolving film language as he becomes the director we all know and love. Nobody's favorite Sodie movie, but may...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. Today we're talking about the 2005 documentary BUDD BOETTICHER: A MAN CAN DO THAT, which features both Clint Eastwood and Paul Schrader (among others) talking about the elemental western films of Budd Boetticher and his influence on their work....

What to do next after KAFKA doesn't quite hit...how about adapting a boyhood memoir by the guy who helped Paul Newman bottle his salad dressing? We continue Soderbergh's less-remembered beginnings with 1993's KING OF THE HILL, a subtly brutal Depression-era bildungsroman in which a boy gets so hungry he eats pictures of food - and joining us is film writer Jason Miller! Listen along for a discussi...

This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month. We pay tribute to the late Gene Hackman with one of his - or anyone's - greatest films, Arthur Penn's 1975 neo-noir NIGHT MOVES. Shot by longtime Eastwood DP Bruce Surtees and starring Clint co-stars Gene Hackman, Susan Clark, James Woods, and J...

How do you follow an industry-shaking debut like SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE? If you're Steven Soderbergh, the answer is obvious: a weird, downer sort-of-biopic of Franz Kafka shot in black and white. We're joined by filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell (MISS ME YET, THE WINDS THAT SCATTER) to talk 1991's KAFKA, Soderbergh's influence, and Chris's outstanding new film FAILED STATE. Great ep! Further Read...

***This is a preview of a premium episode from our Patreon feed, Paid Costly For Me! Head over to Patreon.com/PodCastyForMe to hear more for just $5 a month.*** Around 2011, Clint Eastwood tried to remake A STAR IS BORN with Beyoncé and any of a number of men including Bradley Cooper and maybe Tom Cruise. It didn't pan out, but the project eventually became Cooper's directorial debut and a star ve...

Steven Soderbergh's first feature, sex, lies, and videotape put him on the map hard. It won the Palme d'Or, made the Sundance Film Festival into an industry unto itself, and helped turn Miramax into a major player - to say nothing of its actual content. Join us as we dig into the film that made Soderbergh an overnight sensation and try to act normal about intimacy. Good ep!   Further Reading: Sex,...

And Sode it berghins! We're kicking off our career retrospective of director Steven Soderbergh with an overview of his early life, career so far, and major thematic concerns. We'll also meet a new voice joining us on our journey... Follow Pod Casty For Me: https://www.podcastyforme.com/ https://twitter.com/podcastyforme https://www.instagram.com/podcastyforme/ https://www.youtube.com/@podcastyform...

Pull up a chair, folks - it's time for our episode on Paul Schrader's "first post-mortem film," the Russell Banks adaptation OH, CANADA, fresh from the cinema. Joining us to unpack it is Final Boss of the podcast and real-life Canadian person Will Sloan! We talk about what we expect of the personal morality of political artists, Canada's relationship to her neighbor to the south, and the film's pl...

It's finally here: our episode on Clint Eastwood's latest film, JUROR #2.   Further Reading: "An Abolitionist Summoned to Jury Duty for a Murder Trial" by Luna Nicole "Nullification: Jurors' Secret Weapon Against Harsh Sentencing" by Molly Knefel Jonathan Abrams interview with Indiewire Jonathan Abrams interview with GQ "Why Policing and Prisons Can't End Gender Violence"   Further Viewing: 12 ANG...