The Pink Smoke podcast

On this episode, we're joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss some of his favorite moments of bittersweet love in the movies. Having made One Day Since Yesterday, a documentary about Peter Bogdanovich's unsung sleeper They All Laughed, Teck knows something about cinema's most achingly romantic, heart-wrenchingly complicated relationships and crafted a list of some of the most unforgettable. We f...

Here it is. Our massive exploration of one of the most disreputable genres imaginable: The Swishbuckler. A loose collection of movies created in the mid-70s through the mid-80s parodying the classic swashbucklers of yore, swishbuckler films like Zorro The Gay Blade, Pirates, Yellowbeard and Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers are marked by their terrible comedy, penchant for grotesquerie, extre...

In 1986, NBC debuted the series Crime Story, co-created by former Chicago cop Chuck Adamson and produced by hot-off-Miami Vice Michael Mann. The show adapted an unconventional serial format in order to span three decades in the conflict between MCU detective Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and rising mobster Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). The ambitious approach proved the downfall of the show, which...

All episodes of The Pink Smoke podcast are made available to Patreon subscribers a week before their general release. Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are joined by Martin Kessler to discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally digs into their favorite films of the year, everything from an animated French adaptation of a Japanese short story collection to the travels of Mrs. Ha...

"Nobody enjoyed having pie in the sky turn into pie in the face." Keenly aware of the 1988 Chevy Chase vehicle Funny Farm (the last movie directed by George Roy Hill), hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs only recently discovered its source novel written by sports columnist and humorist Jay Cronley. In this episode, they travel into rural life along with city slickers Andy and Elizabeth Fa...

We get high-vallewton* with Tim Quirk, longtime cinephile and frontman of one of The Pink Smoke's favorite bands, Too Much Joy. At the height of the pandemic, Quirk initiated a binge of great movies that led him to Val Lewton's legendary run of low-budget horror films produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940's. Quirk was captivated by these deep philosophical explorations of darkness and isolation, w...

On our massive new episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs are joined by longtime friends of the show John Arminio and Bill Teck to discuss one of the greatest film series in the history of le cinema: the Indiana Jones tetralogy! Join them at their own podcasting Club Obi-Wan as they tackle Mr. Play Mountain’s brilliantly fun series the way Indy tackles one of Lao Che’s henchmen goin...

“Only pain and suffering will make you realize who you are.” A Halloween double feature! Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg look at a pair of re-marriage thrillers in which the new spouse turns out to be diabolically psychotic: Audition and The Stepfather. Director Takashi Miike and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake (the respective creative forces behind each film) bring a masterful level...

“I’ve looked into his eyes and seen the blackness of the beyond, the great nothing that waits for our warmth.” The podcast gets as metal as it will ever get: we’re joined by Tenebrous Kate of the Bad Books for Bad People podcast to discuss David Peak’s utterly indefensible horror novel Corpsepaint. Its snaking story slithers its way from a grimy travelogue about a pair of musicians traveling acros...

“The chaste woman loves to contemplate dawn.” Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg sit down to discuss Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece of suspense, Les Diaboliques. The film follows a pair of abused women seeking revenge on their tormentor as it builds to one of cinema’s greatest (and most diabolical) twist endings. The conversation covers Clouzot’s controversial past and working metho...

“The trouble with us Americans is that we all want a tragedy with a happy ending.” Sophie won't tell anyone she's sleeping with her professor. He's young, handsome, and passionate - perfect for Sophie, who just wants to write about love. When they hook up, he drops everything and her notebook begins to fill with poetry. But while he's head-over-heels, she's about to write two important words: The...

For this episode in our Patreon-exclusive series on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, we’re joined by Martin Kessler to discuss unfinished masterpieces, over-finished masterpieces, post-humous puzzles, re-edits, rejiggerings, and all manner of ways in which the “completeness” of a masterpiece can remain unresolved. Naturally, Kafka’s work leads the way in the discussion, but quickly turns to artworks rangi...

We’re back. After an extended Covid, malaise and illness-induced hiatus, John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg return to the 47th annual Toronto International Film Festival to watch all the best in the current world of le cinema. The preview follows their traditional format: each picks 3 must-see films, 3 films to avoid & a handful of wildcards! Included in this year’s slate are North American debu...

Parker, that stoic solo brute of independent career criminals, made his debut in the pages of Richard Stark's The Hunter 60 years ago. Stark (the pseudonym under which legendary crime fiction writer Donald E. Westlake chronicled the Parker stories) introduces the world to this ultimate anti-hero at his lowest: backstabbed by a coward, shot by his own wife, ripped off for his take from a bold heist...

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the second of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person. Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-breaking documentary style to the small screen. T...

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the second of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person. Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-breaking documentary style to the small screen. T...

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the second of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person. Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-breaking documentary style to the small screen. T...

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by critic & author Martin Kessler for the first of four episodes covering Errol Morris’ stunningly brilliant documentary television show, First Person. Filmed on Morris’ notorious documentary-interrogation device, The Interrotron, and touching on all his favorite obsessions, First Person brought Morris’ ground-breaking documentary style to the small screen. Th...

“I want to kill someone but everybody’s already dead.” Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg sit down to discuss Tom Piccirilli’s grotesque Southern Gothic novel A Choir of Ill Children. This movie comes via a recommendation from author Stephanie Crawford, who paired it with John Farris’ All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes by on our episode about that book. It’s a deeply eerie and unsettling...

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss Jim Thompson's haltingly bizarre crime novel THE GOLDEN GIZMO, originally published in 1954 as part of a flood of work by Thompson following the success of THE KILLER INSIDE ME. GIZMO, however, is based on a manuscript written by Thompson years earlier and rejected by publishers until demand for Thompson's work resurrected it. Visit The Pink Smoke...

“You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.” Martin Kessler returns to take a trip down memory lane, joining John Cribbs in conversation about Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall. Since its release in 1990, Verhoeven's consciousness-expanding roller coaster ride has remained a mind-blowing anomaly, a fusion of high-minded philosophical science fiction and pulse-pounding big Ho...

In 1985, William "Hurricane Billy" Friedkin was back on the streets with the savage and illusive policier To Live and Die in L.A. Filmed with gritty precision, photographed in painterly textures by the immortal Robby Müller and encompassing one scorcher of an extended city-wide high-speed pursuit that leaves even the celebrated chase from The French Connection in the dust, the movie electrified th...

“You just like children. Have eyes but don't see. You try live in taiga, soon dead.” We’re joined by illustrator and poster designer Tony Stella to discuss what might be Akira Kurosawa’s most neglected masterpiece, Dersu Uzala! The trio discusses where the film, an unexpected Russian-Japanese co-production, fits into the filmography of a filmmaker any reasonable cinephile would consider to be amon...

On this episode, The Pink Smoke welcomes back podcaster and physical media maven Brian Saur to bite into the succulent apple that is The Lady Eve. The gleaming center of an unparalleled four-year, 7-movie run of masterpieces from the peerless Preston Sturges, Eve strikes an immaculate balance of comedy that is high and low brow, impressions of love both cynical and romantic, and a leading lady who...

“It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden appletrees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man - as he had long suspected - was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.” Join hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs on the high seas as they celebrate the 100th anniversary of Rafael Sabatin...