The Good, The Pod and The Ugly

Send us Fan Mail CAGE UNCAGED CAGE MATCH: WILD AT HEART & 8MM  " The Difficult Follow-Up ".  Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the textbook for cool, edgy nihilists (teenaged and otherwise) with 1995's SE7EN, directed by pod fave, overexposing messiah David Fincher . For fans, Walker's spiritual and numerical follow-up, 1999's 8MM was something of an event! Nicolas Cage as a P...

Send us Fan Mail CAGE UNCAGED: ACAB (ALL CAGE AND BEES) CAGE COP! This week Ken, Thomas and Jack talk the pairing of WICKER MAN (2006) and BAD LIEUTENTANT:  PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009) . Neil Labute and Werner Herzog both made excessive... um, well, sequels/sidequels/remakes/ whut here. We may be at Peak Cage of the 00's in both films but are they any good? This match-up is Jack's wi...

Send us Fan Mail CAGE MATCH: F*CK FANGS The Good, The Pod and The Ugly will trace the historic and maximalist acting career of Nicolas Cage through 20 of his films over the course of 10 episodes. How the 20 films were picked is simple: We argued about them. Two films will be paired from our master list based on theme and each episode we'll present our latest Cage Match. For week one it is fro...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E15 THE END OF EASTWOOD    TRIGGER WARNING: Tightrope's central plot is about a serial rapist.   Hell of a thing, startin' a pod covering every Eastwood movie. You talk about every movie he made, and, someday, it ends.  Today is that day. 63 Eastwood movies and the first episode of Rawhide down. We watched and talked about them all. Now we wrap up season three and the...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E 14  PALE HEAT 1985's PALE RIDER is Eastwood's first western in nine years and the third of four he would direct (High Plains Drifter, Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven). A play off the classic SHANE template, Eastwood stars as a mysterious stranger named Preacher who helps a small town against unscrupulous miners. He's like a ghost but we swear it is different...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E13 SUDDEN HEARTBREAK TRIGGER WARNING:  One of the films covered in this episode, Sudden Impact, has a major plot point concerning sexual assault.   1983's Dirty Harry epic SUDDEN IMPACT , is Eastwood's only film in the series as director. Made after personal project Honkytonk Man (S3 E12) in 1982, Clint is in clear "one for them, one for me" mode here, cast...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E12 HONKYTONK DEADPOOL DEADPOOL , the wise-cracking meta-superhero is not the same as THE DEAD POOL , from 1988, the final Dirty Harry film; running on thin enough fumes that podcast fave Buddy Van Horn (S3 E10)  was called in to nominally direct a script written by a trio of antioxidant advocates with zero film experience (none of whom would ever work on a film again). Liam Ne...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E11 FIREBIRD!  1982's FIREFOX was not about a future web browser but about a Soviet plane during the Cold War that you can fly with your brain or eyes or showtunes. Just go with it - Brain Plane . Eastwood plays the only man that can sneak into  Soviet Russia and steal the plane and take it home so America can use it to bomb them. Lotsa spycraft-type hijinks ensue before h...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E10 HORNY PINK APE . Buddy Van Horn was a legendary stuntman (doubled for Eastwood numerous times) and stunt coordinator (Million Dollar Baby, baby!) but he also directed what may be the least essential of films in Eastwood's 65 year filmography. This week we coincidentally get two of those films, 1980's ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN and 1989's PINK CADILLAC . Any Which...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E9 WHITE BRONCO, BILLY'S HEART One of Clint's most ambitious films prior to Unforgiven ,  1990's WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART is covered here in detail.  A roman a clef about John Huston prepping The African Queen , toxic masculinity, white imperialism, and malignant narcissism all fuel Eastwood's studied take on Huston's patrician airs. Jeff Fahey appears...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E8 ESCAPE FROM CHARLIE SHEEN'S POOL HOUSE  1979's ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ , directed by podcast fave Don Donald Siegel (Coogan's Bluff, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, Two Mules For Sister Sara),  remains one of Clint's most memorable films. Turning down the laffs and winks that dominated a good portion of his 70's output, Eastwood is as taut here as Siegel&apo...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E7 THEY GOT A SIGN ON THE POD? OUTSIDE OF GREELY'S? We conclude our lovingly epic discussion of 1992's Unforgiven by talking with a number of our friends. We speak with Erik, Larry, Andi, Leigh, Thomas and Rick about their experiences with Unforgiven, both when they first saw it and in re-watching it in 2020 for this show. This is the best movie Eastwood has ever made...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E6 NO FORGIVENESS! UNFORGIVEN, 1992.  The only reason there is a Clint Eastwood podcast (incidentally called The Good, The Pod and The Ugly) and that is because we love this movie and wanted to watch everything Eastwood made before and after it like some kind of sun holding all the others in orbit. It's not only the best movie of Clint Eastwood's storied career but on...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E5   We take a much-earned break from the epic (and endless) filmography of the World's Greatest Movie Star/Director, Clinton Eastwood Jr., for the Holidays! Ken and Jack have each chosen a "Christmas Adjacent" movie to screen. We don't know what they are until they start.  The only rule is it cannot be a standard Christmas Genre movie where the season remin...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E4 JOHN MALKOVICH VERSUS THE APE. In the Line of Fire (1993) was Clint's victory lap film following Unforgiven . Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, this is one of two films Clint has been in since 1990 he did not direct. If you know the other film you win a prize (the prize is watching Amy Adams! ). Clint plays a confident - yet haunted - secret service agent who engages in a...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E3 A PERFECT, BULLET-RIDDEN GAUNTLET. 1977's The Gauntlet is the first vehicle specifically for Clint and then-muse, Sondra Locke . She was nominated for an Oscar years prior and Eastwood claimed she would be again for this film. Was she? The Gauntlet is a road movie with a mismatched couple who start off not liking each other but... through adversity somehow find love. Al...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E2 THE ENFORCER OF MADISON COUNTY . DIRTY HARRY IS BACK ! And he is shooting some... bad bridges in.... Iowa? Sadly, no. In 1976's The Enforcer , Harry Callahan returns in his third outing, where he drops pretense of political ambiguity of the first two installments and goes full on law & order with society crumbling while he teaches Tyne Daley how to be an Inspector a...

Send us Fan Mail S3 E1 ABSOLUTE PRESIDENT OUTLAW . Clint Eastwood's Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976,  inspired The Eastwood Rule in the DGA. What is it? Why is it? Does it limit squints per film? Generally considered Clint's first masterpiece as director, Wales also features the first of six pairings with Sondra Locke , whose contentious offscreen relationship with him will form a behind-the-sc...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E10 THE GOOD AND EVIL SANCTION.  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is Eastwood's second movie in 1997 (preceded by next episode's Absolute Power). Based on the blockbuster true crime (the title of a film in LAST week's episode) novel of the same name by John Berendt. John Cusack has the unenviable job of acting alongside the director's daughter, Alliso...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E9 TRUEFOOT AND CRIMEBOLT . Penultimate S2 episode! We are rejoined by super guest Thomas to discuss 1974's Thunderbolt & Lightfoot , written and directed by the late Michael Cimino , co-starring The Dude. Cimino would go on to direct The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate but shows more restraint in scenes of people dancing or celebrating here and focuses instead on q...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E8 XL MAGNUM COWBOYS FORCE . 2000's Space Cowboys finally brings us to the end of Eastwood's films released this century (he has released 3847 movies since 2000 as well as one avant garde stage piece where he talks to a chair). T ommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner and Verna herself, Marcia Gay Harden , join Eastwood for one of the best high concepts Eastw...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E7 MANIC PIXIE BLOOD BREEZE. AN INSTANT AND INFAMOUS CLASSIC! One of our best epsiodes for two films no one has even seen. 1973's Breezy has gone virtually unseen by anyone for nearly 50 years. Unearthed forgotten masterpiece or... not quite? It is a rare, early Eastwood directorial effort in which he does not appear and features William Holden at 53 in a relationship with...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E6 MYSTIC DRIFTER TRIGGER WARNING: One of the films discussed in this episode, High Plains Drifter, includes scenes of sexual assault by the protagonist as a plot point. 2003's Mystic River is not a movie about pizza. It's about childhood friends who grow into Hollywood stars Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins , that play cops, criminals and grocery store owners i...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E5 MILLION DOLLAR KIDD Eastwood directed two films that won Best Picture and Director Oscars. One was his masterwork, Unforgiven (1992) and the other was Million Dollar Baby (2004), which we cover in detail this week. We also dive into Joe Kidd , 1972, Eastwood's last western directed by someone other than himself. Featuring Robert Duvall , Don Stroud, and John Saxon , wit...

Send us Fan Mail S2 E4 PLAY MISTY FOR OUR FATHERS 1971's PLAY MISTY FOR ME is the first of Clint's 8000 films he directed so dissecting it is  a landmark for our podcast. In it, Clint plays DJ Lank'n $quinty and gets in over his head with obsessive fan, and future Bluth, Jessica Walter . Then in 2006's FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS , we learn why objective masterpiece Letters From Iwo J...