The Projectors

THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR, our celebration of classic noir, continues in abundance and we land on one wild flick involving another iconic private dick that isn’t Philip Marlow. We’re talking about Mickey Spillane’s two fisted dirtbag protagonist “Mike Hammer” as played by Ralph Meeker In Robert Aldrich’s 1955 genre-bending noir, “KISS ME DEADLY”. Some dame that looks a lot like a young Cloris Leachma...

We’re crossing into the seedy sporting life for our film noir theme we’re calling “THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR” and what sport feels more noir than boxing? Stoker feels like he’s got one more good fight in him but his poor wife is sick of seeing his battered mug. She doesn’t want the violence to ruin her marriage. Meanwhile, some scuzzy managers are making a set-up bet that they don’t want to let the o...

We’re getting noir month rolling real strong with this hard-boiled theme we’re calling THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR and every Monday in March we’re discussing a different adaptation centered around Raymond Chandler’s archetypical P.I., Philip Marlowe. This movie happens to be the first feature to depict the character on the big screen. Bogie may edge out in swag but Dick Powell’s rendition delivers nice...

We’re wrapping up our first full week of THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR and you can call it a FEMME FATALE FRIDAY FEAST with a cold side of murder. The original platinum blonde, Lana Turner, is in deep with a wily drifter and they set in motion a plot of murder so that her sad sap husband can be out of the picture while they move on with their happy lives. We’re talking about Tay Garnett’s 1946 adaptation...

It’s classic noir month, a theme we call THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR, and every Thursday in March we go overseas and away from the Hayes code for some Noir classics beyond the English language. Some greatly influenced by classic American noir and one that helped influence it. Today we break the seal on Frederico Fellini for the show and discuss a whimsical crime tale involving some swindlers that may b...

THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR is this month’s theme and that means classic noir 5 days a week. Bob loves this shit so we’re all gonna overdose on it. No drug use under the Hays Code, though. We got ourselves a lovely little “noirmance” from “Rebel Without a Cause” director Nicholas Ray. This is actually Ray’s debut film and it’s a very worthy noir gem that most folks may not have heard about. We’re talki...

Alright, you scoundrels. March’s theme of THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR is in full effect. That means all classic film noir, see? That means dangerous dames and Switchblade Sammies out the wazoo, see? We’re going a little bit beyond the typical top 10 noir suggestions but we definitely got some heavy hitters out the gate and today is no exception because we’re talking about Charles Vidor’s iconic and inf...

It’s a sordid world all this month for the theme we’re calling THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR. That means we’re watching classic film noir every weekday all March long and every Monday we’re zeroing in on a film adaptation of author Raymond Chandler’s iconic hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe. It’s the first of our MARLOWE MONDAYS and we’re hitting it off with what is probably the most iconic of the Ph...

Hot damn! It’s March! That means it’s time for a whole new MOVIEHUMPERS theme and all month long we will discussing a whole “orgy” of underworld endeavors that we’re calling “THE LEFT HAND ENDEAVOR”. Maybe not too much “orgy” though because most of our talks fall under the Hollywood Hayes code which needlessly censored subject US movies but sometimes presented parameters that lent films to some cr...

This year really seems like it’s gonna be a von Trier kinda year. Sad and cruel with a warped sense of humor. That’s why we’re gonna be discussing Lars von Trier movies about once a month all year long. Twelve of these movies with the last one being about a serial killer. That will be perfect for Christmastime but it is the end of February right now and we’re halfway through the Europe Trilogy wit...

This is it. The last of our selections for February’s theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and it’s time to dive into some Hollywood nights and strange blue realms for a dreamy tale of an amnesiac woman and an up and coming actress who get wrapped up in a mystery of missing pieces that they may not want to really solve. What is the key? Is there no band? What are the cowboy and the dirty man trying to convey?...

We wrap up what is left of the 2024 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees that we hadn’t gotten to yet with a nice little romantic drama about love, destiny and the nature of relationships. Nora left her childhood love, Hae Sung, in Korea when her family emigrated to Canada. They reconnect in their twenties online for a friendship with overwhelming emotion. Years later Nora has married a man she me...

We’re winding down February’s theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and for our last vintage selection we got a case of Crisis in front of and behind the camera. We couldn’t wrap up without a little Hitchcock and the struggles of Tippi Hedren regarding some calculated aviary beasts. Alfred Hitchcock wanted Tippi to be his personal leading lady human doll that he could control and throw birds at. He got two fil...

We’re heading into the last leg of February’s theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and the mental state of women this month has been pretty rough. Imagine being a housewife in the 1970s and you’re pretty much losing it. Sure, you can get away with being “eccentric” much of the time but eventually the mask slips and all the devotion in the world can’t get in the way of the struggle. You can question the intens...

We’re almost done discussing all of the Best Picture Oscar nominations and we’re talking about the other Sandra Hüller nominated movie in a VERY UNSPOILERY way. A crafty little mystery that is not so much about the mystery itself, but the culmination of pieces that form guilt and animosity in long term relationships. Did she kill her husband or did he do that himself? We’re going to the lovely Fre...

It’s WOMEN IN CRISIS month and we’re discussing several movies with several distraught women in them. Crisis comes in many forms and this movie has several obvious crisis layers to contend with. A fundamentalist government crisis. A crisis of war and an actual haunting. Persian style. For many in Islam, you don’t throw around the name of the fiend that haunts a mother and her child in this 2016  N...

It’s WOMEN IN CRISIS all month long and our classic film discussion today is a little bit different. Most of our selections actually have women going through a detrimental mental change Our heroine in this movie is being completely manipulated into thinking she is crazy. Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, this tale coined a very common term to signify emotional and mental manipulation in a relat...

Breaking up is quite hard to do. Especially when you’re not yourself and controlled by some entity that makes you into a really bad parent. You can’t feel pain, that’s a plus, but poor Bob. Polish director, Andrzej Żuławski pulled directly from his life as a filmmaker and cuckold from Poland and set to make a psychological horror right by the wall of Cold War era Berlin. It’s the only Andrzej Żuła...

Some extra fun this month as we explore the rest of what we haven’t seen amongst the 2024 BEST PICTURE OSCAR NOMINATIONS. Well, we’re skipping the fun for this particular week because we finally get to the disturbing and unsettling Jonathan Glazer film about the Holocaust that centers specifically on its perpetrators. Perpetrators with wives and children and pets. Husbands who seek to rise within...

February’s official theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and people went through a crisis getting this movie made and then people went through a crisis watching it. Our one “biopic” this month and who else could it be about than Norma Jean Baker AKA Marilyn Monroe. There’s a lot of Marilyn Monroe biopics to choose from but our theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and never has the icon been portrayed in such a damaged wa...

So we’ve being doing special episodes of movies that we randomly generate the titles of from a website and there have been some ups and downs in the process. It broke our seal on Roman Polanski. We watched some suicidal Polish shit. It had Bob watching his first James Bond movie. It had us watching a CGI cartoon dog. Some real ups and downs when you randomly generate movie content to discuss. For...

It’s time to go vintage with our theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and today’s movie discussion involves a certain director who should know a little something about that type of thing. Yes, we are definitely talking about Roman Polanski and his 1965 film, “REPULSION”, is his first English speaking film. It stars Catherine Deneuve as a young and beautiful French woman in London making her way while living w...

This month’s theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and crisis is coming in a variety of ways. Sometimes women can go insane and maybe they need to be admitted to a facility but maybe they don’t really need to be in that facility? Perhaps it’s all just a trauma response because she might have a stalker. What kind of crisis is this? An insanity crisis or a stalker crisis? Maybe both? We’re discussing Steven Sode...

For some extra movie content this month we’re doing extra drops of the Best Picture nominees we missed leading up to the 2024 Academy Awards. It’s the first awards show we will sit and watch in decades. It’s been decades because this kind of award show stuff is boring as shit. The Golden Globes? I’ve never watched more than 5 minutes of that stuff. Movies are great but we take the circle jerking w...

All February we’re discussing movies about WOMEN IN CRISIS and we find ourselves in some strange Swedish territory. A mansion with very red interiors and sad women in white. In this big house a woman suffers from cancer and her sisters, one frigid and the other the opposite, must come to terms with their familial relationships and their own mental state. Then you have Anna, whose bosom is ready fo...