The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

Send us Fan Mail This week, the Italians are coming! For the final lap of TGTPTU’s 16 rounds of episodes this 4x4, we cover hack director Peter Yates’s heartfelt, heartland sports underdog working class summer coming of age bicycle story BREAKING AWAY (1979).    Guest Shannon returns despite no possible book report, the film instead being an original work by author Steve Tesich who would win the O...

Send us Fan Mail THE HOT ROCK Season 17’s 4x4 Hacks continues with Peter Yates’s return to directorial form and TGTPTU’s return to contentious split takes among its hosts with the heist caper THE HOT ROCK (1972).    Based on acclaimed crime writer Donald E. Westlake’s 1970 novel of the same name as covered in this week’s special book report coverage by guest Shannon and regular Tom, and the first...

Send us Fan Mail Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round fair people of podland and lend the bold knaves and jesters of TGTPTU your ears for Episode Two-Beyond-a-Dozen of Season Seven-and-Ten. Hark, forthwith the trio tell tale of the Atari-level ren faire, chopped Star Wars glory that is KRULL (1983).   This second selection by host Ken to bookend the career of hack director Peter Yates, a two-time Oscar-...

Send us Fan Mail BULLITT Right in time for Father’s Day, TGTPTU with special guest Erik W. Van Der Wolf introduce their fourth of four directors for Season 17’s 4x4 HACKS with director Peter Yates entry into the Dad Film canon: BULLITT (1968).   Starring the coolest Caucasian cat to strut the silver screen, the American Great Escapee himself, Steve McQueen (no, Zoomer, not that Steve McQueen, he’s...

Send us Fan Mail As prefunk to next week's first Peter Yates episode, BULLITT, for his HACKS 4X4, we re-present our first Yates film, covered last year, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. Coyle is so good and co-host Ken's befuddlement so severe that Yates also directed KRULL is what eventually led to this season of HACKS. Below is the sadly prescient original show notes for our Coyle episode w...

Send us Fan Mail Season 17 of TGTPTU calls a wrap on its third of four directors in its 4x4 this week with Ron Howard’s THE DA VINCI CODE (2006) .    Starring Tom Hanks, father of musician and male model Chet Hanks but also known for leading roles in such earlier Howard films not covered on this podcast as Splash (1984) and Apollo 13 (1995), with a grotesque haircut as supersleuth symbiologist Rob...

Send us Fan Mail TGTPTU’s olds take a break from handing out shiny nickels and Werther’s Originals warm from their pockets and yelling at clouds to join Gen Z cohosts Thomas and Jack for the latter’s third pick from Ron Howard, the child star turned hack director’s big studio, Industrial Light & Magic, four-quadrant blockbuster COCOON (1985).    Chosen due to nightmares it’d given to, and an i...

Send us Fan Mail TGTPTU’s good ol’ boys continue their binge with another director-hack four-pack, this time with that pilsner of directors, Richie Cunningham himself (Ron Howard) as we funnel a second watery intoxicant down our gullets and try not to puke with HILLBILLY ELEGY (2020).      Labeled a drama/comedy, this Netflix original is light on the latter, despite the normally exceptional screen...

Send us Fan Mail Season 17’s halfway to the finish line, and the TGTPTU boys are back from break revving their engines, ready for the next four in their “hack” director line-up. Jack’s pick coming in third is Ron Howard, starting with his first film in the big chair, the “smash-‘em-up” smash success (for a Roger Corman feature) GRAND THEFT AUTO (1977).  Howard’s only feature to co-write or to co-s...

Send us Fan Mail Season 17’s second four from a hack director concludes this week with the final film by Edward Dmytryk under discussion, a color saddles-and-stirrups flick WARLOCK (1959).    Arguably a better title of ≪L'Homme aux colts d'or≫ in its French-language release, Warlock as a two-hander Western covers the entry into the unincorporated community of Warlock by Henry Fonda’s Cla...

Send us Fan Mail It’s calm seas and second helpings of strawberries this week as the TGTPTU boys cover their third of four curated Edward Dmytryk films, the multiple Oscar-nominated picture THE CAINE MUTINY (1954).   Saving its then “issues” producer (and subsequent to this movie an issues director) Stanley Kramer’s bacon, Dmytryk delivered a bona fide hit picture adapting the already popular book...

Send us Fan Mail Mirage Season 17’s Hacks continues with MIRAGE (1965) , the latest selection from Edward Dmytryk’s filmography curated by cohost Ryan phoning in from Arizona for his second of four flicks picked in this season’s 4x4. And another black-and-white noirish mystery loosely adapting a novel.    Dmytryk’s reworking of the uncredited print material (the 1952 novel Fallen Angel) created a...

Send us Fan Mail TGTPTU goes Old Hollywood this week with Ryan’s pick for his Season 17’s Hacks 4x4 director: Edward Dmytryk.    As we learn this ep, the former Canadian, former movie editor, former son (California courts would emancipate him from an alcoholic father) Dmytryk would rise through the studio system starting off as a messenger in his teens to become a talkies director by age 31. At ag...

Send us Fan Mail T HE BODYGUARD  TGTPTU’s first set of four Hack 4x4s concludes this week with THE BODYGUARD (1992), director Mick Jackson’s sleeper hit starring peak Kevin Costner and top shelf Whitney Houston.   Allegedly offered to Jackson the day after the L.A. Story premiere, the plot of The Bodyguard is bigger than you remember or would expect, so if you haven’t seen it or not in a while, do...

Send us Fan Mail Season 17’s Hack 4x4 continues as predictable as the weather in the City of Angels (no relationship to the previously covered film, and host Ken’s favorite motion picture remake, see S4,E4 for more on the Nicholas Cage movie with this sobriquet for a title) with this week’s third entry in the Mick Jackon canon: L.A. STORY (1991).  Written by and starring Steve Martin at the arguab...

Send us Fan Mail VOLCANO Expatriated British director Mick Jackson erupts on screen and sets Los Angeles on fire with his latest (to be covered in Season 17 Hacks) blockbuster film VOLCANO (1997).    Suffering from a release date only weeks after another volcano disaster movie hit American movie theaters (Dante’s Peak), Jackson’s big-budget disaster movie flips the script on Threads (covered last...

Send us Fan Mail THREADS A new 4x4 starts with a bang (and a lot of whimpers) as the gang begins their Season 17 coverage of hacks (i.e., directors for hire) with THREADS (1984), director Mick Jackson’s pseudo-documentary but fully anti-nuke made-for-TV movie.   Cohost Thomas’s pick of directors to launch the season of hacks, Jackson got his start in film with the BBC in the late-60s as an editor....

Send us Fan Mail With Episode 8, our hosts put their Gray Days behind them, wrapping the short Season 16 with THE IMMIGRANT (2013) , or as it was a.k.a.’ed during its short development and prior to its delayed release “Low Life” and “The Nightingale.”   James Gray teams back up with cowriter Richard Menello to write a period drama role explicitly for Marion Cotillard whom Gray met through her then...

Send us Fan Mail TWO LOVERS (2008) For Season 16, Episode 7, writer-director James Gray gets geometric with TWO LOVERS (2008), his third of four collabs with Joaquin Phoenix whom he puts into a love triangle with Gray’s only film to-date starring Gwyneth Paltrow or Vinessa Shaw.   Gray leaves his crime trilogy behind with this contemporary piece focusing on the family and loves of Phoenix’s Leonar...

Send us Fan Mail THE LOST CITY OF Z  Before James Gray hung Brad Pitt on wires and took him to space, he first brought a different blonde to the Amazon (the rainforest) to encounter snakes, torrential rains, and an insect extracted from his ear during the shooting of he writer-director’s first Amazon (the company) Studios distributed film THE LOST CITY OF Z (2016).   Charlie Hunnam is that blonde,...

Send us Fan Mail We Own the Night For Season 16 Episode 5, TGTPTU dives deep into what writer-director James Gray considers the conclusion of his NYC crime trilogy WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) while also starting the first of two planned sizzurp episodes with host Ken sick and sipping on some strong cold medicine. And joining this top to the third temporal pincer™️ pairing is special guest and invetera...

Send us Fan Mail As if the fourth in a horror film series, this week TGTPTU goes to space! In Season 16, Ep 4 of Gray Matter (working title), Ken, Thomas, and Ryan discuss writer-director James Gray’s AD ASTRA (2019) as their unpatented pincer movement continues along the auteur’s eight-movie filmography.    Cowritten with a television writer of meager IMDB credits, Gray’s highest budget film to d...

Send us Fan Mail The Yards A family crime drama set in New York City with a sick mother, ambivalently abusive father figure, and nudity along with a role for Domenick Lombardozzi (The Wire’s Herc)? Get out your James Gray bingo cards, because Season 16 Gray Poop On (working title) persists with TGTPTU continuing in Episode 3 its temporal pincer movement covering the auteur’s second film THE YARDS...

Send us Fan Mail Armageddon Time This week in Season 16’s Going Gray (working title), Episode 2 will cover the writer-director’s 2022 autobiographical film about his Jewish American assimilative upbringing and formative childhood events slightly beyond his ken that will have the potential to lead him to become the legendary director we know today, that same director whose film we are—     Wait, no...

Send us Fan Mail LITTLE ODESSA (1994) A new season (Season 16) in a new year (2026 CE), and The Good, The Pod, and The Ugly returns to its roots with its unpatented temporal pincer movement covering the directorial filmography of American auteur James Gray. And in keeping with this homecoming, we begin our Touch of Gray Season with the Gen X filmmaker’s first feature endeavor LITTLE ODESSA (1994)....