Jesse Hawken

187: Juror #2 (with Corey Atad)

The film writer Corey Atad and I went on opening day to see the new Clint Eastwood courtroom drama Juror #2, which is getting an extremely limited release in North America even though Warner Bros. gave it a full rollout in the UK, France and Spain. Why is David Zaslav doing Clint, still working at age 94, one of the icons of American cinema and of Warner Bros., so dirty?

Before seeing Clint’s latest, Corey embarked on a journey into the last decade of Eastwood’s work for hi...

186: The Apprentice, Part 2 (with Sami Gold)

On part two of our discussion about The Apprentice, Sami Gold and I discuss the 2024 election and have a more specific conversation about the role of Trump in modern political life and how he’s changed both political parties, and our concerns about the outcome of the 2024 election.

Sami also brings us a report from the “Make America Healthy Again” rally in Washington DC with Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson.

Follow 2024-11-02 16:52:51 +0000 UTC View Post

185: The Apprentice, Part 1 (with Sami Gold)

CW: This episode discusses cinematic sexual violence.

Sami Gold, undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents, returns to the podcast for a two-part deep dive into the controversial new Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice, which was released weeks before the 2024 election despite half-hearted attempts from the Trump campaign to block the film.

Featuring Sebastian Stan as young Donald Trump and Je...

184: Saturday Night (with Adam Nayman)

The author and film critic Adam Nayman returns to Junk Filter to discuss the new Jason Reitman race-against-time comedy thriller Saturday Night about the backstage antics leading up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, a feature film that serves an an ode to its producer Lorne Michaels while trying to spin tension and suspense out of a foregone conclusion.

Reitman is back in Oscar Bait mode after having some success with the new Ghostbusters films, but this one, l...

183: The Curse of the Werewolf (with Meg Shields)

The film writer Meg Shields returns from Vancouver for a spooky season show about one of her favourites, the 1961 Hammer Films gothic horror The Curse of the Werewolf, the first starring role for the great Oliver Reed.

Based loosely on Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris, Hammer's only werewolf movie is a unique take on the usual lycanthropic fare, positing it as a spiritual curse tied to a person's environment rather than something you catch from a we...

182: Back to the Cluuub: Megalopolis and The Fountainhead (with Jacob Bacharach)

The author Jacob Bacharach returns to continue this podcast’s look at Megalopolis. On this episode we compare Coppola’s latest to another overheated epic about a visionary architect, King Vidor’s ludicrous 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Coppola has acknowledged the film version of The Fountainhead as a key influence on Megalopolis, but what Jacob and I value about these two films is how they each rebuke the reactionary so...

181: Jokeropolis (with Jessica Ritchey)

CW: this episode contains spoilers for Joker 2 and discussions of cinematic sexual violence.

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns to the podcast to discuss the Reverse Barbenheimer of 2024: the more or less simultaneous release of two extremely expensive blockbusters, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, two films that, as it turned out, nobody wanted to see.

The original Joker&nbs...

180: Miami Vice: Heartbeat / Death Drug (with James Majure)

We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the premiere of NBC’s crime drama Miami Vice with a new episode of Junk Filter’s continuing series on the show. James Majure returns from Athens, Georgia to discuss the bizarre duelling vanity musical projects of stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas that appeared as the success of the show culturally peaked.

Philip Michael Thomas struck first with a strange solo album for Atlantic Records in 1985, Living the Book of My Life, that ...

179: BlackBerry (with Gus Lanzetta)

The writer and podcaster Gus Lanzetta returns to the podcast from São Paulo to give our listeners an update on life in Brazil since their Supreme Court banned X: The Everything App from access to the country, and we thought we would pair this with a movie about a revolutionary communication tool that was suddenly not important anymore: Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy-drama BlackBerry.

BlackBerry is that rare Canadian movie that had a worldwide impact; based loosely on a true story, it chr...

Bonus: The Killing of America (with Jake Serwin & Ian Rhine, from Pod Casty For Me)

CW: This episode contains discussions of graphic violence.

Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, the hosts of the left politics and culture podcast Pod Casty For Me, invited me on to their show as part of their continuing Paul Schrader series, because I wanted to discuss two pieces of Schrader-related curiosities; the only music video Paul directed, for Bob Dylan’s Tight Connection to My Heart (1985), and his brother Leonard’s controversial documentary about the normaliz...

178: Junk Filter Has Fallen (with Jake Serwin & Ian Rhine from Pod Casty For Me)

Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine from the great left politics and culture podcast Pod Casty For Me join me for a deep dive into Gerard Butler’s trilogy of Has Fallen thrillers, which chronicle the life and times of Secret Service agent (and American hero) Mike Banning.

We discuss all three entries which span the 2010 decade and fuse meathead action cinema with post 9/11 paranoia and anxieties: Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, one of the two 2013 thrillers about a terrorist...

177: Reagan (with David Weigel)

Veteran national politics reporter for Semafor David Weigel returns to the show for a discussion of the new conservative political biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid as The Great Communicator, or as he was known in Russia, The Crusader, for the film is told from the perspective of a former KGB agent (Jon Voight) who identified him early on as the man who would someday defeat the Soviet Union with facts and logic.

There’s a lot to unpack with Reagan, filmed in 2020 ...

The Songs of Episode 176

Songs excerpted on the episode in order

Peg - Steely Dan

Minute by Minute (Live from the Greek 1982) - The Doobie Brothers

Ride like the Wind - Christopher Cross

Victim of Love - Elton John

Steal Away - Robbie Dupree

Movin’ On - George Duke

Lança Perfume - Roberto De Carvalho and Rita Lee

I Got the News - Steely Dan

Peg - Steely Dan (isolated Michael McDonald vocals)

Here to Love You - The Doobie Brothers

Takin’ i...

176: Danpilled Extended Universe: Michael McDonald (with Matthew Perpetua)

Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua returns to the show to continue our Danpilled series, this time taking a look at one of the main contributors to their sound, the singer/songwriter Michael McDonald, who has just released his memoir What a Fool Believes, co-written with Paul Reiser.

Through a look at some of our favourite McDonald songs we discuss his long and productive career, from his troubled childhood to his collaborations (musical and otherwise) with Donald Fagen and Walter B...

175: Shane (with Chris Cassingham)

The Milwaukee-based film critic and programmer Chris Cassingham joins the show this week to discuss the great director George Stevens and his 1953 masterpiece Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, about a mysterious gunfighter who finds work with a homestead family in the open range of lawless Wyoming and is drawn into the community’s conflict against a gang of violent cattleranchers who are trying to take over the territory.

George Stevens’ life was transformed by hi...

174: Costner’s Horizon (with Corey Atad)

The film writer Corey Atad returns for a show about the return of Kevin Costner to the director’s chair with the first chapter of his planned four-part theatrical western epic Horizon: An American Saga.

Costner resuscitated his career as a leading man thanks to television with Yellowstone and then surprisingly left the series to begin work on Horizon (which may have been a factor in his wife’s filing for divorce after he started selling his prope...

173: Hardhat Cinema (with Sami Gold)

Sami Gold, an undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents joins me from New York City to discuss some key texts of reactionary right-wing cinema from the post-Civil Rights era, the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon, what we could call counter-counter revolutionary cinema or Silent Majority cinema.

We begin with a discussion of the John Birch Society, a formerly influential win...

172: American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Part 2 (with Karen Geier)

In the second half of our discussion about the 2016 FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Karen Geier and I dig into more of the great performances including Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, Sterling K. Brown as Christopher Darden, and Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and talk about some of the other highlights of the series, including the possible romance between Clark and Darden the show illustrates, and the episodes about the Bronco chase, the racism o...

171: American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Part 1 (with Karen Geier)

With the recent death of O.J. Simpson and this month’s 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a look at the other great O.J. tv epic of 2016, Ryan Murphy’s 10 part series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story Season 1.

On part one of our discussion we discuss the cottage industry of content that surrounded the Simpson trial, and how Murphy rose to the occasion in this ser...

170: Fresh (with David Jamell Moses)

The film writer David Jamell Moses joins the show for a discussion about a great nineties film that has been flying under the radar for too long, Boaz Yakin’s debut feature Fresh (1994) starring Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson and a 13-year-old actor named Sean Nelson making his film debut, in one of the greatest screen acting performances by a child.

Nelson plays Michael (aka Fresh), a quiet 12-year-old boy who runs drugs for rival gangsters in New York City, incl...

169: Cannon’s Prestige Pictures (with Jessica Ritchey)

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns for a show about Cannon Films, and the aggressive attempt by “The Go-Go Boys” Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to bring legitimacy to their schlock studio by financing projects designed to win them awards and prestige.

Despite the critical success of some of these offerings, and some high-profile wins and nominations, none of these films were financially successful thanks to Cannon’s hapless marketing strategies and their bad reputation within...