The Super 70 Podcast

Ok, fanboys and girls, what we have here is two recordings. The first recording is my son and I after we recorded the Breathless podcast chatting about Godard. That’s about 20 minutes. And the second recording is me and Dave Anderson chatting about Godard as well. I went over to his house and miked his back yard so we could smoke outside and watch the Astros lose and well, that pretty much dictate...

Last episode I asked Dr. Teresa Van Hoy from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, to go scene by scene with me through Maria Louise Bemberg’s Immortal story about Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz titled “I the Worst of All.” We had such a stimulating conversation I asked her back for a couple of hours so we could discuss important topics as racism and John Ford’s The Searchers, Confederates in fi...

Maria Louisa Bemberg, the granddaughter of German immigrants to Argentina, was 48 years old and the mother of four when she moved from Franco’s Spain back to Peronist Argentina to pursue a film career. At 68, she moved her critical eye to the Church of New Spain when she directed I, the Worst of All. A compelling true story of a seventeenth century nun in the convent of St. Gerome outside Mexico C...

Katsushiro Otomo’s Akira Commentarycast guest starring Laura Seiling and Danny Gaylord from the Film is Lit Podcast and their friend and self appointed Manga enthusiast Ryan Burns was a blast. We had so much fun doing that we decided to do this special report in which we wander through discussion of psychology and Akira, race and Ghost in the Shell, misogyny and Blue is the Warmest Color; we discu...

Katsuhiro Otomo was 34 years old and had only directed a short film when he dished out the most important Japanese anime film of all time. Based on his own massively popular Manga, AKIRA takes western influences and filters them through eastern experiences. Join Laura Seiling, Danny Gaylord, and Ryan Burns from the Film is Lit Podcast as we go scene by scene through AKIRA and discuss the influence...

Mike White of the Projection Booth Podcast was nice enough to sit for a Special Report for the Super 70 Podcast. We discuss the career and possible future of Bruce Lee, the importance of Cinema in our lives, and I ask him when the hell does he have time to push out three hour episodes every week on the Projection Booth? Find Mike at https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com On Twitter @proboothcast F...

Martial artist and Hollywood actor Bruce Lee passed away a mere month before the release of his breakthrough Gung Fu film Enter the Dragon. Easily dismissed as a remake of Doctor No that rehashed a famous scene from Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, Enter the Dragon has several puzzling loopholes neither the screenwriter, editor, or director could fix. However, this Hong Kong production cashed...

“There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless.” So begins the description of Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film on the back of the Criterion Collection’s Blu Ray edition. Godard became the prime mover in what has been called by film historians as “The French New Wave” that changed cinema forever. His inspired use of cinematography paired with what some would say is his rather lazy...

Ingmar Bergman was 27 years old with a decade of film and stage credits when he had an international hit with the fun loving and light hearted Swedish Musical Smiles of Summer Night. Riding the wave of that success, he swore on a stack of bibles he would shoot his next film in 35 days that summer on a low budget and on the studio lot. The result was a terrifying gothic contemplation of death and e...

Take a year, any year, and match it with any year from the 80’s, and I’m willing to bet the 80’s win. Dave Anderson thought that was a crock of Ed Wood, and took me to task on the year 1984. Is it really better than 1974’s auteur boom and 1994’s Indie Craze? Join Dave and I as we touch on the Golden Age of Hollywood, Powell and Pressburger, and the cut scene from Apocalypse Now! that makes that mo...

Michael Powell was thirty-four when the Second World War broke out and changed the trajectory of his career. By then he had already collaborated with Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had UFA screenwriting experience before the Nuremberg Laws forced him out of Nazi Germany. When the Ministry of Information was formed to crank out narrative propaganda films for the Allied War effort, Powell a...

Join Dave Anderson and I as we spend the weekend on Galveston Island pontificating on the two most controversial films of the 1980’s, why films with problematic racism should be protected as time capsules, we celebrate the release of Bruce Lee’s Greatest Hits by the Criterion Collection. Then we wrap up discussions by arguing over how to pronounce the names of Hollywood legends Sydney Poitier and...

Paul Emig came back into the Hacienda to talk about our favorite topic. We find the droids we’re looking for in Felicity Jones and Emelia Clarke. We marvel at the behind the scenes drama that infected both movies, thanking both Gareth Edwards and Tony Gilroy. And in the end we will take it all despite its flaws. Join Paul and I as we hammer out our love and questions regarding Rogue One and Solo.

Paul Emig is an acquaintance of mine and I saw a Facebook post he wrote about a year ago on the Star Wars Prequels and I was really impressed by how he broke down those three films and pointed out why they don’t work as a narrative. I ran into Paul the other day and I asked him to come onto the show so we could run through most of our favorite space saga. We ran way over, but managed to cover just...

Join Dave Anderson and I as we wax intellectual after the M podcast. We take a deep dive into the career of Clint Eastwood, go on the rollercoaster of quality that is the James Bond franchise, and discuss the varying success of the Game of Thrones cable series. Near the end of the episode we are accosted by our friend Kirby Wells who gave us his take on George R. R. Martin, and the three of us com...

Fritz Lang was already considered one of the leading filmmakers not just in Germany but in the world when he took a script by his wife Thea von Harbou to Nero Film and made perhaps the greatest crime film of all time. Considered a ‘Zeitfilm’ that dealt with contemporary social issues, “M” told the story of a child murderer on the loose in Berlin and how both sides of the law mobilized to bring the...

Sergei Eisenstein was 27 years old when the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution with literary, stage, and screen commissions. Assigned to make a film about the mutiny that happened aboard the Czar’s star battleship, Eisenstein used the opportunity to deploy his five theories of editing, or what the French cineastes cal...

Dave and I hung out in the Hacienda after the Social Network podcast to talk about a myriad of issues concerning the present and future of cinema. For instance, why are cinephiles increasingly turning away from spoilers? What value is there in Anna Hathaway Kaiju Movies. Is Taxi Driver is a successful model for Joker? We go off the deep end discussing the now infamous Marvel versus Scorsese fight....

When David Fincher put Aaron Sorkin’s words into Jesse Eisenberg’s mouth, he just may have made the most important movie of the 21st Century. Paired with his trademark visual style and stunningly invisible special effects, a legal drama regarding the boring topic of intellectual property rights transforms into a jaw dropping tome to youth, ego, elitism, the influence of online, and what any man wi...

Dave and I sat down again after the Kingdom of Heaven Podcast, to forget about the horrible ordeal that was that three hour marathon podcast, and instead drank ourselves to an area where we tried to understand the talent of Denzel Washington, the power of Toshiro Mifune, the best battle scenes ever captured on film, debate the merits of Brian DePalma, and spend three quarters of an hour pontificat...

Ridley Scott was on a run when he handed down Kingdom of Heaven, a Crusader Epic that seemed ambitious and ballsy so soon after 9/11. A bomb that was initially torn to shreds by critics and panned by the audience, Kingdom of Heaven’s Director’s Cut was released almost immediately with more mixed results. While some can see the steady hand of a master filmmaker, others wondered why Scott had change...

Mike White of The Projection Booth Podcast takes the reigns of The Super 70 Podcast as he guides you through one of the most successful independent films ever made, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palm D’Or in 1994, Pulp Fiction scored seven Academy Award nominations and started or restarted several acting careers. It’s development, marketing, and dis...

Last month I asked a friend of mine, Dave Anderson, to come onto the show and watch The Terminator with me. We had so much fun that Dave recommended I turn the mikes on while we shot the shit for a couple of hours. This special report is the result of that fine night, about six beers, and the enjoyment of two friends who had not seen each other for a number of years. The Super 70 Podcast is availa...

Fellow Film Aficionado Dave Anderson joins me as we watch James Cameron’s seminal 1984 B-Movie Masterpiece, The Terminator. On the surface there seems to be something bold and original going on. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a role you can understand, Linda Hamilton is our female hero in a time of hypermasculine film, and a high quality in film production hides the bottom dollar spent to shoot this cyb...

Gordon Parks, Jr. was a photographer from Minneapolis who had trained as a cinematographer under his father when he convinced a group of African American investors from Harlem to pool their money into a Blaxploitation movie. Using a cast and crew that was by and large African American and Puerto Rican, Parks and Blaxploitation star Ron O’Neal shot to fame with 1972’s Super Fly, a sordid tale about...