The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

Send us Fan Mail 4X4 III: TSAI MING-LIANG: REBELS OF THE NEON GOD It's the beginning of our four film dive into Queer Asian New Wave master Tsai Ming-liang. Released in 1992 and made shortly after Taiwan's "quiet revolution" from a dictatorship to democracy, Rebels of the Neon God stars the director's muse, Lee Kang-sheng (who would go onto being in every one of his films...

Send us Fan Mail THE LONGEST YARD This week, the TGTPTU boys return to prison for more fun and games, this time stopping this 4x4 season’s first round drafted director Robert Aldrich’s run with inches to go. For the final film of the first four and to cap the Aldrich coverage, Ken drafted THE LONGEST YARD (1974).  Following Ryan’s fumbling the intro and benched as provisional cohost, this season’s...

Send us Fan Mail THE DIRTY DOZEN Season 13’s 4x4 marches on with the most ill-mannered, ill-disciplined hosts that it’s ever been you’re your displeasure to meet, sergeant. That’s right, the dirtiest voices in the TGTPTU’s army are getting filthier covering Robert Aldrich’s THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967).  It’s a story of twelve convicted army men, who don’t bath, until they do and the man chosen to whip...

Send us Fan Mail What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? TGTPTU Season 13’s 4x4 continues with the second half of its first Robert Aldrich pairing, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962).  Like last week’s entry, WEH2BJ is another black-and-white film adaptation of a novel, this one truer to the source material, at least to cohost Thomas who read Henry Farrell’s 1960 novel of the same title (in other wo...

Send us Fan Mail Kiss Me Deadly Welcome back to TGTPTU, and welcome back in Season 13 to both former cohost Jack and to the 4x4, the latter making its third season appearance! For TGTPTU stans reading this, able to recite the following explanation by heart, go ahead and save yourself half-a-minute and skip the rest of this paragraph. But for you sad majority of population Earth, a 4x4 is where the...

Send us Fan Mail PAPRIKA For the final episode of Season 12 Nolan Void, the TGTPTU gents get timey-wimy as they repeat last season finale with another film from anime director Satoshi Kon also allegedly plagiarized by the season’s director, this time Kon’s final flick PAPRIKA (2006) and Nolan’s Inception rather than Black Swan stealing from Perfect Blue (Kon’s first film, almost as if TGTPTU were...

Send us Fan Mail The One With The Dream Stuff Inside Oppenheimer  INCEPTION This week TGTPTU reaches the timey-wimey center of Season 12 as the Nolan Void temporal pincer pairing movement ends with INCEPTION (2010), Sir Chris’s studio-backed super-successful non-supes cinema experience and his first Oscar nom for Best Picture--and finally winning pod-fav Wally Pfister his Best Cinematography troph...

Send us Fan Mail TGTPTU reaches the beginning of the end of Season 12 as the team covers THE DARK KNIGHT (2008), the penultimate NOLAN VOID film in our temporal pincer pairing movement.   Rebounding from the only moderate success of The Prestige, Sir Chris creates a mega-blockbuster with The Dark Knight, his follow-up to Batman Begins and a film that compresses at minimum two movie’s worth of stor...

Send us Fan Mail This week, the TGTPTU’s untrademarked “temporal pincer movement” catches up with the boys as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012), Sir Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his Batman trilogy, gets covered before his penultimate The Dark Knight. Sir Chris has been quoted as saying, “There are no good third sequels, basically—Rocky III maybe,” and this week Ken, Ryan, and returning former host...

Send us Fan Mail TGTPTU Book Club returns this week with Sir Christopher Nolan’s first and only adaption, i.e., THE PRESTIGE (2006), with bookworm and repeat guest Shannon joining from The Bunker.    Post-Batman Begins, Sir Nolan returned to his love of puzzle-box stories to bring to life the work of another Chris (Christopher Priest) while casting a third Chris (Christian Bale) as a rival magicia...

Send us Fan Mail INTERSTELLAR In this week’s episode of TGTPTU, director-writer-producer Sir Christopher Nolan adds space to his repertoire of time-bending narratives as we venture deeper into The Nolan Void with INTERSTELLAR (2014).   The Nolan brothers return with cowriting credits, Nathan Crowley on production design, and Lee Smith as editor on this tale of global dust bowl devastation and huma...

Send us Fan Mail BATMAN BEGINS Cast aside your Batnipples! As a certain Patrick Bateman lookalike once said, “Well, a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues,” and this week, TGTPTU tackles these issues in Sir Christopher Nolan’s entry into the franchise that would define his middle career with BATMAN BEGINS (2005). Former cohost Jack returns from France to talk Bat and comics with a Gen...

Send us Fan Mail NOLAN VOID 3.5: WET 'N WILD WWII  Join TGTPTU for an hour, a day, a week—the approximate runtime of, how long it feels listening to us talk for, and the delay in releasing the episode due to internet issues, respectively—as we respectfully cover Sir Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK (2017 ) as part two of our third pairing in our NOLAN VOID season.   Surprisingly his shortest major...

Send us Fan Mail NOLANVOID FIVE! For the first in our third set of NOLAN VOID pairings this week, TGTPTU hosts Ken and Thomas take on the surprisingly linear INSOMNIA (2002) with newly appointed co-host Ryan to introduce a new drinking game guaranteed to kill any participant: take a dose of an alcohol every time Kenneth says something about not wanting to compare Nolan’s adaption to the 1997 Stell...

Send us Fan Mail This week TGTPTU goes deeper into Season 12’s NOLAN VOID with TENET (2020), a title spelled the same forward and backward, and the progenitor of TGTPTU’s “temporal pincer movement” description of our podcast’s episode pairing methodology. Instead of spoiling the episode with notes, here’s a transcript spoiling cohost Thomas’ plot summary: We’re following one main person, played by...

Send us Fan Mail MEMENTO Our Nolan Void Season continues with the first of our second pairing MEMENTO (2000). Many of you might suspect we would try writing these show notes in reverse, but, as that’d be too meta for us, we’ll leave that to some other aspiring writer with memory problems we know.   Speaking of self-referential memory problems, Memento was actually the film that couldn’t find distr...

Send us Fan Mail Season 12, Episode 2 continues TGTPTU’s paired exploration of the films of Sir Christopher Nolan with his most recent film OPPENHEIMER (2023).  Running the risk of being considered by critics a “bomb,” Sir Nolan boldly moves away from genre pictures for his first biopic of a man who’ll/’d (pardon the time-wimey-ness) get mention in Sir Nolan’s preceding film (and anteceding in our...

Send us Fan Mail CHRISTOPHER NOLAN SZN! FOLLOWING *SEASON PREMIERE* For Season 12 *Nolan Void*, TGTPTU continues its iconic practice of pairing bookended movies from a director’s filmography, first and last until we pair the middlemost. This season we cover the twelve movies of the granddaddy/infant son of the temporal pincer movement himself Christopher Nolan, starting with his inaugural feature:...

Send us Fan Mail Our Darren Ssarfinale! Season 11 of The Good, The Pod, and The Ugly concludes on an odd note, both mathematically and colloquially, as the boys wrap up their Darren Aronofsky season with Episode 9 covering PERFECT BLUE (1997), joined by frequent guest Ryan. The debut film of famed anime and short-lived director Satoshi Kon released one year prior to Aronofsky’s debut (PI), Perfect...

Send us Fan Mail DARREN ARONOFSKY CH. 4 E2: THERE'S A LITTLE BLACK SWAN ON THE SUN TODAY Season 11’s temporal pincer movement by The Good, The Pod, and The Ugly draws to a close with tricky reflections on BLACK SWAN (2010) . Listen to our opinions double, pirouette, and morph during Chapter 4, Episode 2, covering our final Darren Aronofsky movie but not our season’s finale, with No-Longer-Spe...

Send us Fan Mail SCARF SEASON: ARONOFSKY 7 Alright, brother. It’s the smackdown, drag-out matchup you’ve been waiting for all season long as THE WRESTLER (2008) jumps into the ring with The Good, The Pod, and the Ugly for Chapter 4, Episode 1. In this final chapter, we watch with teeth and sphincters clenched tight on the edge of our folding chair seats as the subject of Season 11, director Darren...

Send us Fan Mail ARONOFSKY SEASON! NOAH Chapter 3, Episode 2 : So the Voice of Kenneth spake unto The Good, The Pod, and the Ugly, and it sayeth: Let there be NOAH (2014) ; and all the peoples then of the world rejoiced for Darren Aronofsky for his blockbuster that bringeth forth He of the Scarf his firsteth and onlyeth picture to be No. 1 opening weekend at the box office. As the temporal pincer...

Send us Fan Mail THE FOUNTAIN No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, and no one expected Darren Aronofsky to follow up the success of Requiem for a Dream with a genre-breaking, scyfy-romantic-period-spiritual-medical drama (kinda? maybe?) entitled THE FOUNTAIN (2006). Join your hosts Ken and Thomas along with returning guest Ryan for Season 11, Chapter III, Part A as they drink from The Fountain,...

Send us Fan Mail SCARF SEASON #4: GARDEN OF EDITS: mother! Rejoin Ken and Thomas along with guest Shannon in the rebirth of Season 11, Chapter II as they tackle (figuratively) Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER! (the 2017 film, not the parent of Darren!). After the big budget success of NOAH, and having not made a movie with a female lead with whom he was romantically involved in well over seven years (if...

Send us Fan Mail DARREN ARONOFSKY CHAPTER TWO, PART ONE: Deuce by you! Deuce by you! Whoa #2! REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) , Darren Aronofsky’s second film, follows these three simple rules for success: #1 Adapt a novel you love. – As a college student, Aronofsky fell in love with Hubert Selby, Jr.’s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1964). He’d owned a copy of Requiem but hadn’t finished it until he lent it t...