Random Acts of Cinema

This week we revel in the lo-octane ease of 90's independent filmmaking with Richard Linklater's love letter to love and travel, and discussions about love and travel.  Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke 90's it up even more in a single evening long meet-cute set in Vienna, killing time until their departure in the morning.  We discuss Linklater's proclivity to long-term film projects, and whether or not...

Sorry this episode is posting a little late this week, but we wanted to add a little extra no-dialogue silence to our discussion of Kaneto Shindo's similarly dialogue-free year-in-the-life of a family struggling to farm on a small isolated island.  It's a quiet film, to be sure, but full of nuance, rich humanity, and humble beauty. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be disc...

This is a movie that sells itself.  Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska's musical is about flesh-eating mermaids working in a sleazy cabaret/strip club in 1980s Poland. That deranged mash-up of a premise provokes just as varied of a series of responses: thrilling, unsettling, sexy, repulsive, funny, and despairing.  With a kind of magical realism/urban fantasy/rock opera aesthetic, the director plays wi...

It's first episode for one of our theme song directors!  And one of your hosts went a little overboard getting up to speed with the works of Rainer Werner Fassbender.  Honestly, a lot of the typical second-half of the twentieth century European auteur themes come up in this film except now we have a decade spanning domestic drama exploring of postwar…femininity. Hanna Schygulla plays the eponymous...

Boy oh boy, we really crack the nut of red scare allegories this time! Or we don't.  Hard to say which.  But we have a great time talking about rural Southern California, divorce, imposters, whatever happens to the eponymous bodies, losing family and friends to right wing hysteria, Morticia Addams, and the Twilight Zone. Fun stuff! If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be disc...

The word "game" has two meanings.  So that means that the title of director Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game  can also mean…wait…oh no…oh god…run!  RUN!!  Anyway, it seems like we spend about as much time talking about Hard Target (1993) and Surviving the Game (1994) as we do the film in question.  So get ready for a wild ride. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we wi...

"All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces." You know what rhymes with "faces"?  "Places".  Know what rhymes with "places"?  "Faces".  If you like this kind of clever word play, except with more mother-in-law jokes, then have we got a mad cap flick for you!  Director Stanley Kramer brings us an all-star (of sorts) comedic ensemble cast with his oft-parodied cross country ra...

Why not just jumpstart the sub-genre of body horror by inventing a whole new pseudoscience called psychoplasmic therapy that allows for the fears of divorce, children, and past mental traumas to literally manifest themselves in growths, tumors, little blonde goblin killers, and a mounting body count? And if on top of all that, you happen to be legendary director David Cronenberg, why not make all...

It's that time of the…decade again. And we've got international amateur athletic competition fever! In honor of the return of the Olympic Games to Japan, we're watching one of the great documentaries on the subject: director Kon Ichikawa's lyrical vision of the 1964 Tokyo games.   If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing David Cronenberg's The Brood (1...

We're dipping back into the Henry James-adaptation pool with William Wyler's Olivia de Havilland vehicle  The Heiress,  based on Washington Square.   Making this a period piece featuring a kind of funhouse love triangle where neither the dashing if penniless Morris (Montgomery Cliff) nor her father Dr. Sloper (Ralph Richardson) seem to love Catherine (de Havilland's titular heiress) who must suffe...

We're back with directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (AKA "The Archers") for one of their all-time biggest pictures.  This time they rework and update a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale into a romance chronicling the ascending fame of a celebrated ballerina and the men competing for her love and success.  And, as promised, the shoes are REALLY red. If you'd like to watch ahead for next...

We're back for a little welcome murder and mayhem with Jonathan Demme's genre-defining take on, well, not just serial killer procedurals, but Hannibal Lector-based serial killer procedurals.  We cover it all this today's episode, but we somehow always end circling back to how perfect this movie is. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Michael Powel...

After months of campaigning and hype, constant drama and re-selection of the hosts, and hours of red carpet interviews, it's finally happening.  Looking back of the year of randomly chosen (and a few guest-selected) films we select and discuss the best of the arbitrary best.  Who goes home with their hearts and career-hopes crushed?  And who walks away with the most coveted award for excellence fo...

Make no mistake gentlemen, we are in for the podcast of our lives. About one of the most notorious and successful action films of the 20th century, I shit you not.  Because we finally made it to… The Rock .  Truly: we've been anxiously and excitedly waiting the opportunity to discuss this Michael Bay "masterpiece" since the very start of this podcast.  And all it took was our guests AJ and Richard...

Weddings! Funerals!  Business meetings!  But like, in a sweet and poignant way.  We are joined by Kevin Allison (of RISK! and The State ) to discuss Edward Yang's subtle and deliberate drama chronicling the lives of a Taiwanese family over a year of heartache, tragedy, professional setbacks, and almost imperceptible victories. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussin...

You'd think we'd spend this episode reflecting thoughtfully about the degree of influence Carrie Nation had on the America female suffrage and temperance movements, but we mostly end up focusing on mundane stuff like drugs, trans representation, murder, Shakespeare, midnight movies, and shocking behind-the-scenes dalliances. This is probably due to the influence of our delightful guest: Peaches Ch...

We are joined by comedian and director Michael Patrick Jann (of The State and Michael Patrick Jann Can't Direct Traffic ) to discuss director Bill Forsyth's Local Hero . A film where oil tycoon Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) tells Mac Macintyre (Peter Riegert) to go convince Urquhart (Dennis Lawson) and the other inhabitants of a small Scottish coastal town to sell out. But there's one problem: the...

It's a big one. It's our 100th episode so we're watching Criterion spine number 100. And we brought in our first 3-peat all-star guest and super fan Shelley to talk with us all about the legacy of Beastie Boys music videos. You know, all the classics like… uh… "Intergalatic Spaceman", "Rampage", and my favorite "3 DJs and 1 MC." If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discuss...

As it turns out, the coexistence of two movies dedicated to the exploits of the fictionalized eighteenth-century German adventurer Baron Munchausen far from exclude one another from narrative authority. So for Mike's birthday episode, why not just just do a double episode treating them like parts of an anthology that took a couple of centuries to make? We do just that with Karel Zeman's 1962 The F...

Is it a western/film noir mash-up, a subtly coded red scare-era warning, or a a heart-on-its-sleeve anti-racism morality tale? It definitely has a little of each, but is there enough of any to give Spencer Tracy's oddly elderly WWII veteran a big enough stage to convince a desert town with a shameful secret to inspire a nation to live up to its principles? Not if Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, and...

Can Roy Scheider (playing Joe Gideon - a gossamer thin veiled version of director Bob Fosse) keep his addictions and self-destructive inclinations in check long enough to finish edits on a motion picture he's directed while also choreographing a broadway musical extravaganza?  Of course he can.  But can he achieve true excellence in these tasks without succumbing to his most base impulses?  Now th...

"Dolls" mean pills.  There, now that we've gotten that out of the way... Mark Robson's epic movie about three women finding their ways through the obstacle-ridden world of entertainment, offers a soapy and campy take on ambition and those living in the orbit of successful women.  Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, and Sharon Tate protagonize against a series of professional rivals, embattled romances, a...

Criterion 25:17. The path of the righteous podcast is beset on all sides by the inequities of the tasteless and the incompetence of bad movies. Blessed is he who, in the name of quality and good filmmaking, shepherds the listeners through the valley of movie reviews. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls (1967).

It's been a while since Randy picked something from a nation's film output with which we have little-to-no familiarity.  And a little 1970s Filipino cinema is just what we needed to break us out of the endless Criterion pattern of American/French/English/Japanese.  With this - celebrated director Lino Brocka's adaptation of a novel following a young man named Julio (played by Rafael Roco Jr.) who...

What's better than a 1970s, grimy, sun-baked, L.A.-based neo-noir about a well-intentioned stripclub owner (played with all of the nervous swagger of a Ben Gazzara in his prime) with a gambling problem who gets in too deep with the mob?  Two for the price of one, that's what.  This week we're talking about both the theatrical release and unexpectedly shorter director's cut of John Cassavetes' unde...