The Super 70 Podcast

We had a helluva weekend folks. Friday night, the boy and an caught The Phantom Menace for the 25th anniversary re-release. Saturday, we caught Jeanne du Barry with Johnny Depp. Starring Johnny Depp, I mean we didn’t go see the movie with him. And Sunday we woke up and caught the first screening of The Fall Guy. Join Luke and I as we try to navigate our feelings around such an emotionally complica...

Just after we finished the bracket for the best James Bond film, Luke and I kept on going, using the same bracket and the same faulty feeders to determine the best James Bond theme song. Just like the film bracket, the results here might surprise you. Jack White and Alicia Keyes made cinema history when they collaborated on what White called “the most divisive thing I’ve ever done,” the theme song...

A couple of months ago, Luke and I had a short discussion on March Madness. I showed him an NCAA bracket and he instantly said, ‘we should do one for James Bond.’ I duly put one together, grouping the bonds together and facing them off basically using Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan on one side and Moore and Craig on the other. Then we went to it, and the results may surprise you. www.thatdylandavis....

My son took a course in Fascist Cinema in college. I was aware of his workload since that was an area of my study in grad school. Join us as we talked about the fucked-up values of National Socialist films and why their beauty makes them so dangerous. Be prepared for an opening statement with a lot of requests and qualifiers. Works Cited: Hoffman, Hilmar. The Triumph of Propaganda. Providence Pres...

One year ago, I saw a trailer on YouTube, showed it to my son, and he said hell yes! Let’s see Pathaan! We were blown away by this action powerhouse with Hindustan’s most famous actor Shah Ruh Khan and Deepika Padukone. Since then we’ve seen a handful of Bollywood films, all from 2023, and we were greatly impressed with what we saw.

Dave and I go over the biggest releases in 2023 and hit our letterbxd to see what worked, what didn’t, and why we keep going back to the theatre. We also discuss the most important topics of the day, such as watching Fincher’s The Killer with no sound, the merits of Friedkin, and who’s Letterbxd is more impressive.

Takeshi Yamazaki shook the American movie market last month when Godzilla Minus One became the highest earning Japanese film in history. The lizard has always been popular but placed against the backdrop of the tragedy of the Second World War and entwined with the lives of survivors Noriko and Koichi, Godzilla Minus One captures the heart as well as the eyes. Luke and I sit down and discuss the ed...

My good friend Dave Anderson went to go see the Holdovers on my recommendation and he listened to my last podcast episode with great envy. Jealous that he could not participate, he texted me, begged me, pleaded with me, to come back into the Hacienda to discuss what must be the first Christmas Classic in 20 years, and what may be the last one in a very long time.

Alexander Payne had not made a single film that I like until I went to see The Holdovers for Tightwad Tuesday. Masked by the period piece setting, the story is more about how broken people find peace than it’s outward image as a Christmas film. Teaming up with Paul Giamatti and using David Hemingson’s first script for the big screen, Payne avoids the rom-com holiday fare by pitting the veteran Gia...

34.2 Ridley And Napoleon by Dylan Davis

After wrapping up the Sorcerer commentary, Dave and I sat around, consumed mass quantities, and as much as we tried to focus on Hurricane Billy Friedkin and his work, we quickly descended into how we consume cinema, soundtracks, and Friedkin’s fellow auteurs. We go all over the place but you can follow along. You can find me on Threads, Letterbxd, and www.thatdylandavis.com.

Hot off the success of the ninth highest grossing movie of all time, William Friedkin abandoned a film about the Bermuda Triangle to focus on a re-interpretation of the George Arnaud novel “The Wages of Fear.” Every possible thing went wrong during every stage of production. Stars dropped out. The budget ballooned. Friedkin fired needed personnel. The shoot stretched past 90 days. Largely ignored...

I sent my friend Dave Kinnaman Hanna Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil. Dave became so engrossed in Arendt’s history of the Holocaust and her philosophy of murder that I then sent him an Israeli documentary of the Eichmann’s trial called The Specialist by director Eyal Sivan. Using original footage of the trial, Sivan reconstructs Arendt’s arguments of why...

A few months ago I asked a friend of mine, Paul Emig to pick a movie, any movie, for the Super 70 Podcast. He chose Peter Jackson’s Braindead and needless to say this was not my cup of tea. But we don’t care about bad taste at the Super 70 Podcast. We don’t care if it has a budget of twenty thousand dollars or two hundred million, if it’s shot on Super 8, or 70 millimeter. All we care about, if I...

Peter Jackson had already spent most of his own money developing his third film Braindead when his producer closed a deal to bring in a quarter million dollars to finish the project. Avalon Studios of Wellington, New Zealand had to spend thousands of dollars of unforeseen expenses to clean the floors of their office and lots when Jackson and his WETA crew blasted the sets with hundreds of gallons...

I keep in touch with my friend Dave Kinnaman over Zoom. We talk carpentry, history, and literature. Things got pretty wild when I dove in deep discussing two famous documentaries: Ken Burns’ Vietnam and The Last Days of Vietnam on PBS. Both of these documentaries were outstanding efforts to understand and convey the toxic American experience in Asia. Unfortunately, most of this conversation was lo...

Shah Rukh Kahn was already one of the biggest stars in the world when he returned after a four-year hiatus to take the lead in Pathaan, the fourth film in Yash Raj Films’s Spy Universe. Ostensibly about a retired Indian Intelligence agent teaming up with a Pakistani spy to stop a rogue group from carrying out a mass casualty event, Pathaan quickly reveals itself to be a deeper discussion of subcon...

Dave Kinnaman and I used to teach across the hall from one another. He taught American History, which I thought was boring. I taught World History, which he really never gave a shit about. I was a conservative Republican. He was a liberal Democrat. We were fast friends. We believed in our Republic for which it stands, listened to American Hardcore Punk, and incessantly read history and literature....

Michael Winterbottom might be the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of the UK with a shocking 48 directing credits, both in film and television, since 1988. Known for jumping from genre to genre, he landed in Science Fiction in 2003 when he directed Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton in Code 46. In a future in which the haves and the have-nots are starkly divided, Code 46 paints a world in which DNA is everyt...

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Dave Anderson sat down with me after FURY ROAD and we discussed the future, fascism, and femininity. Then we went through the Sight and Sound 100 list to sort out what was interesting, what was surprising, and what was a tall, stinking pile of Jeanne Dielman You can find me at www.thatdylandavis.com and thatdylandavis@gmail.com. All music on this podcast is by Rozalind MacPhail at www.rozilandmacp...

Australian Auteur George Miller, MD, had already cranked out ten films and earned the top golden man for animation when Warner Brothers finally approved his 3,500 storyboarded idea for a fourth Mad Max Franchise installment. At the age of 70, Miller took almost a thousand cast and crew members to the middle of the Namibian desert for over a year to create what has been called the greatest action f...

The last forty years of Hollywood has been dominated by a handful of stars that stayed in the A List. Join us as we go through the impressive career of Bruce Willis, American Wunderkind who managed to turn his television career into an impressive melee into action, comedy, and dare I say…art? Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. Y...

British Director Gurninder Chadha dominated the UK theaters for three weeks in 2002 with a story about an Indian girl who just wanted to play soccer. When the audience turned out, though, they saw a multi-layered critique of modern British society that included sexism, racism, and clashing culture. Join me as we go scene by scene to see how clandestinely Chadha discusses these topics using clever...

Okay fan boys and girls, you know the drill. Once upon a time I bet any year of film in the 1980’s would beat any film from any other year in any other decade. I flippantly told Dave 1984 would beat 1924, 1934 and do on. And he roundly proved me wrong. I wanted a rematch, and again chose 1987 out of a hat. That year may flip both of our points of view. By the time the podcast is over we’ll take a...