The Take-Up Podcast

This week, Lindenwood professor/ Hellbender Student Film Festival coordinator Andrew Millians walks Josh and Andrew down the aisle to Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding ! Holding their piece on this joyous comedy, the trio praise the humanity underlying a story of love, family, arranged marriages, showing off old college haunts, an army of uncles, and so, so many hot people.  Join in the festivities as t...

Joining them this week on the Take-Up, film historian/programmer KJ Shepherd joins Josh’s dive into all things French by picking one of Claude Chabrol’s late works, La Cérémonie ! A class-conscious thriller rivaling the likes of Parasite, the trio get into its skewering of the French upper class, noting its take on polite society, its darkly comedic turns, and an out-there performance by Isabelle...

Settle into library chairs and let's research, mama! Andrew and Josh go down the Chronovisor rabbit-hole with Cosmic Salon's galaxy-brained semi-experimental/semi-horror/semi-doc/semi-slow cinema debut feature. First, Josh recommends what he calls one of the most important films of the year, NAZA , from the filmmakers of No Other Land . Lastly, for One More Thing, Andrew is loving his tent and Jos...

With Halloween around the corner, Josh and Andrew dig through the ditches and burn through the witches in The Lords of Salem ! An underrated movie in Rob Zombie’s career of shock and gore, they share their thoughts with its take on liberation and addiction, discuss the ups-and-downs in Zombie’s filmography (you will not guess which movie Josh thinks is “close to a masterpiece”), and soak in the de...

Out on the wily, windy moors, “Josh” and “Andrew” take a trip down to “Emerald Fennel”’s psychosexual take on the much-adapted Gothic classic “Wuthering Heights” ! Daring to give kudos to one of the most controversial films of the year, they praise the sensual atmosphere, the pervasive thoughts on kink and sex, the wild production and costume design, and how well it works as its own adaptation/Cha...

If anyone's going to podcast with Andrew and Josh, it'll be Joe Bowman , San Francisco film programmer. (They don't like podcasting with strangers.) Joe brings Lee Daniels' The Paperboy , his midcentury Florida-set "crime thriller" with more than a few kinks in its legacy, to The Take-Up. The three get to the heart of Daniels' killer instincts as a filmmaker and the freedom he gives major stars li...

Andrew and Josh tear through David Robert Mitchell's career and his latest, the dino-invades-the-suburbs 80s throwback The End of Oak Street . There's a lot of meat on its bones too. Is the peak Amblin key-jangling to a purpose? Or is it just an excuse to see Anne Hathaway whack away at a titanaboa? Why can't it be both? Andrew has One More Thing with one of this year's best, the underseen Thai fi...

After having differing thoughts on if they saw the TV glow, Josh and Andrew go nightswimming in Jane Schoenbrun’s much-talked-about slasher romance Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma . A wild departure from Schoenbrun’s usual work, our hosts share a bigger appreciation for its big swings at the slasher genre, its thoughts on sex, fantasy and media, the best Counting Crows needle drop since Shrek...

Shannon Weber of the new (and great) St. Louis culture mag Soundbite stops by for her third visit with Joshua and Andrew. Could it be that she keeps getting her memories of the Take-Up erased, or does she really do just love it and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that much? Find out if a second (!) Shannon pick enters the canon after the three discuss Charlie Kaufman (and Michel Gondry's) lo...

As school goes back in session, Lindenwood professor and Catching Bullets director Ben Scholle stops by the Take-Up to discuss a class favorite, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson . A sprawling, non-chronological documentary he loves to show his students, Ben gets deep into it with Josh and Andrew, discussing the several story fragments of people and wars that Johnson shot and pieced together during h...

A hundred eps, a hundred eps, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred eps. On our 100th episode (if you ignore the bonus episodes, panel discussions, and two-parters, so, like, using Tarantino logic), Josh and Andrew rummage through the archives and search for which films are worthy of being a part of the Take-Up Canon. Will it be Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho ? Will it be Björk’s...

On a very special episode of the Take-Up podcast, Josh and Andrew peer into the memory palace of Sophy Romvari’s semi-auto-biographical debut Blue Heron , giving their own two cents on one of the most acclaimed films of the year. Praising the introspection and heartbreak, they admire the dedication to the late-90s childhood period drama that manages to hold its own against the other semi-biographi...

A FILM! TWO CRITICS! A THOUGHT! A TALK! TO BREAK THE DISCOURSE OF NOLAN! After a decades-long journey of seeing Christopher Nolan’s hot new Odyssey on the biggest available IMAX screen they could find, Joshicus and Andrewussy return to give their blessing over his take on the millennia-old tale. Tackling such a dense beast of a film, they get into Nolan’s method of modernizing his adaptation, appl...

Before giving their take on Christopher Nolan’s buzzy new Odyssey adaptation next week, Josh and Andrew go on their own epic journey back twenty years to look at one of his early hits among the cluster of 2006 magician thrillers, The Prestige ! Diving headfirst into a tale of doubles, obsession, unsubtle foreshadowing, magic tricks, sacrifice, and David Bowie’s attempt at a Serbian accent, they co...

Artist and film scholar Isabelle Roig has been hacking into super secret Neil Breen-related databases, discovering more than any hacker ever has ever! Bravely disclosing it to twisted pair Josh and Andrew, what she has found will shock them. Taking a more fair reading on the “so-bad-it’s-good” filmmaker, the trio try to make sense of his cult film Fateful Findings , unraveling all the genre-mashin...

Just before the premiere of his film For Those at the Golden Apricot Film Festival this week , filmmaker Emile Parseghian nominates one of his favorite French films for the Take-Up canon, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows . He schools Joshua and Andrew on the film's history, French history, and Melville's WWII French Resistance story (on- and off-screen). After that, Joshua and Andrew have On...

This week, Andrew and Josh take a trip down to 70s Watts to talk about Charles Burnett’s slice-of-life masterpiece Killer of Sheep ! Going into a film all about "This Bitter Earth", they analyze the down-to-earth quality and humor Burnett brings into his potentially woeful premise, the hidden impact Killer of Sheep had over the decades, its scattered release history, and if it's the most definitiv...

After a night of cat-burgling across Paris, Joshua strips off his latex catsuit and to luxuriate in the world of Irma Vep . He and Andrew peel away the meta-textual layers of French director Olivier Assayas' 1996 tribute to French film history and culture and the cinematic force that is Maggie Cheung. Before that, they have a promised (mini-)discussion about David Lowery's Mother Mary , and after,...

After a spring break of sorts, Andrew and Joshua are back in the Backrooms , Kane Parsons' (née Pixels ) breakout liminal-space horror. Lose yourself in the endless corridors of the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline while the critics break down The Discourse around the new filmmaker ("He's 20") and his box office smash and find out whether the two consider it sensational enough to enter the Take-Up's...

Josh and Andrew venture into Soviet Russia to discuss the iconic Dziga Vertov film shown in film history classes, Man with a Movie Camera . Make sure to pay attention and take notes as our hosts go through their thoughts on this essential building block of pure cinema, including a reading of Josh’s undergrad essay, commentary on self-awareness, Eisensteinian montage (or not), the nature of “propag...

Starting off their dare of including silent films into the Take-Up canon, Josh and Andrew watch F.W Murnau’s class-conscious drama The Last Laugh . Tackling the miserablist story of status, our hosts discuss the film’s political connections with Weimar Germany, its place in film history, the immense talent of Emil Jannings, and a mixed response to the "studio-note" ending. Then, they have One More...

Joining Josh and Andrew this week, Washington University PhD Candidate Victor Putinier takes them down to post-Summer-of-Love California for 70s cult horror classic Messiah of Evil . Giddily getting into Gloria Katz and William Huyck’s “California gothic”, the trio voice their admiration for a film that refuses to draw a clear line in the sand, from its unfinished production, subversion of zombie...

Paging doctors Josh and Andrew, returning guest Alex McPherson calls them down to take a look at documentary icon Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital . A seminal early work in the director’s decades-spanning career, the trio dissect all the gross, aggravating, depressing, and heartwarming moments spread throughout this encapsulating look at 1970s healthcare. Including a talk about similarities to Wiseman...

Josh and Andrew thought they could just roll and tumble… live from song to song… kiss to kiss… until filmmaker Stephen Tronicek twirled them around with Terrence Malick’s musical love-quadrangle drama Song to Song ! Picking into a film made in the experimental late-stage of the arthouse icon’s career, the trio quickly get into their love (and some qualms) of one of Malick’s most divisive movies. F...

For their final episode on some of the 2026 Best Picture Oscar nominees, Joshua and Andrew go head-to-head with Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme . How does it fit in the Safdie ouvré? Is Timothée Chalamet a total turd? Do Safdie female characters deserve better? Does everybody really want to rule the world? They'll answer these burning questions and whether this "historical" ping-pong nerve-jangler bel...