Junk Filter
183 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★★ - 41 ratingsJunk Filter: a podcast about strange and overlooked artifacts from the worlds of film, music and popular culture with a generous side order of jokes and politics. Hosted by Jesse Hawken with guests from the worlds of Politics Twitter and Film Twitter. Original music for the program by Marker Starling. Follow us now on Twitter: @junkfilterpod
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Episodes
TEASER - 76: Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear (with PET wife)
March 11, 2022 16:02 - 5 minutes - 4.58 MBAccess the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63667721 Isobel and Noelle from the experimental electro pop group PET wife join me from Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss the life of Marvin Gaye and his 1978 concept album Here, My Dear. There’s nothing like Here, My Dear, the result of a divorce settlement between Gaye and his first wife Anna, where it was agreed that he would record his next album for Motow...
75: The Color of Money (with Steven Hyden)
March 06, 2022 16:43 - 1 hour - 90 MBThe author and music critic Steven Hyden joins the program from Minneapolis to discuss Paul Newman' and “The Fast (Eddie) Saga”: 1961’s The Hustler and Martin Scorsese’s only sequel, 1986’s The Color of Money. We talk about The Hustler as a bridge between classic Hollywood filmmaking and the New American Cinema of the later 60s, and the great performances (all four main actors were Oscar nominated). This was my first time watching The Color of Money. We discuss Scorsese as a commercial fil...
74: Harry Dean Stanton (with Justin Schneider)
March 02, 2022 16:35 - 1 hour - 79.5 MBOne of the great American character actors, Harry Dean Stanton had over 200 acting credits but only played the leading role in two films, and my guest Justin Schneider (a patron of the podcast) pitched his way onto the show to discuss them: 1984’s arthouse classic Paris, Texas and the underseen 2017 comedy-drama Lucky (Stanton’s final film to be released before his death). Along the way we discuss the healing power of cinema, and how beloved Harry Dean was with filmmakers, actors and audien...
TEASER - 73: Shattered Glass (with Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes)
February 21, 2022 19:11 - 4 minutes - 3.7 MBAccess the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62861889 The hosts of the Hit Factory podcast return to Junk Filter for a discussion of the 2003 drama Shattered Glass, the directorial debut of screenwriter Billy Ray, starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s a great adaptation of the rise and fall of The New Republic's hotshot journalist Stephen Glass, who was exposed as a serial fabulist thro...
TEASER - 73: Shattered Glass (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory)
February 21, 2022 19:11 - 4 minutes - 3.7 MBAccess the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62861889 The hosts of the Hit Factory podcast return to Junk Filter for a discussion of the 2003 drama Shattered Glass, the directorial debut of screenwriter Billy Ray, starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s a great adaptation of the rise and fall of The New Republic's hotshot journalist Stephen Glass, who was exposed as a serial fabulist thro...
72: Costa-Gavras: State of Siege & Missing (with Jacob Bacharach)
February 14, 2022 15:22 - 1 hour - 109 MBThe author Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod. Following the recent JF episode on Z by Costa-Gavras, we continue to explore the work of the great Greek-French filmmaker with two of his greatest: 1972’s State of Siege, set in an unnamed Uruguay but filmed in Salvador Allende’s Chile, and 1982’s Missing, set in the unnamed Chile of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship but filmed in Mexico. Both films are based on true stories about the executions of American citizens in South America. Both films e...
TEASER - 71: Double Troubles: Belfast & The Image You Missed (with Ben Nash)
February 07, 2022 21:51 - 5 minutes - 4.74 MBAccess the entire 89 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62244513 Ben Nash, a PhD student at Kings College London and a writer whose work has appeared at Mubi and Splice Today, joins the show from Colchester, England to discuss two recent films about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, each grappling in their own way with issues of history, family, memory and cinema. Belfast (2021) has been called director Kennet...
TEASER - 71: Double Troubles: Belfast and The Image You Missed (with Ben Nash)
February 07, 2022 21:51 - 5 minutes - 4.74 MBAccess the entire 89 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62244513 Ben Nash, a PhD student at Kings College London and a writer whose work has appeared at Mubi and Splice Today, joins the show from Colchester, England to discuss two recent films about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, each grappling in their own way with issues of history, family, memory and cinema. Belfast (2021) has been called director Kennet...
70: The Informant! (with Mike Mekus)
February 01, 2022 15:16 - 1 hour - 77.3 MBActor and writer Mike Mekus joins the show from Manhattan for a discussion of Steven Soderbergh and his 2009 “comedy thriller” The Informant! Based on the best-selling non-fiction book of the same name (sans exclamation point) by Kurt Eichenwald, it’s the story of Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland Company executive turned corporate whistleblower on price-fixing collusion in agri-industry, who turns out to have been embezzling from the company the entire time he was co-operating with ...
TEASER - 69: Armed Forces (with Nick Miller)
January 28, 2022 15:44 - 4 minutes - 4.42 MBAccess the entire 111 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61765426 Brooklyn-based musician Nick Miller joins the program for a deep dive into the immortal 1979 Elvis Costello and the Attractions album Armed Forces. Costello and his band recorded Armed Forces after relentlessly touring This Year’s Model in America, absorbing the influences of the only music they listened to on the road (ABBA, Bowie, Kraftwerk and ...
68: Costa-Gavras: Z (with Sotiris Tsernoglu)
January 26, 2022 19:51 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBMy guest Sotiris Tsernoglu joins the show from Lesbos, Greece to discuss the incendiary political thriller Z by the Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras. Z shocked the world on its release in 1969, striking a huge cultural chord worldwide in an era of war, protests and political assassinations (it was immediately banned in Greece). Set in an unnamed French-speaking country and filmed in Algiers to avoid state interference, Z is a thinly-fictionalized but clinically detailed account of the 19...
TEASER - 67: ABBA from A to B (with Terrance Balazo)
January 13, 2022 20:00 - 3 minutes - 3.11 MBAccess the entire 103 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61121473 Toronto writer and trivia master Terrance Balazo joins the show for a deep dive into the history of the Fleetwood Mac of Sweden, ABBA. From their origins in the European "Schlager" music genre and the contempt for the group in Sweden in their early days, to their legendary victory at the Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo" that instantly broke ...
TEASER - 66: Don't Look Up (with Corey Atad)
January 06, 2022 02:00 - 4 minutes - 4.42 MBAccess the entire 86 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60782460 Film writer Corey Atad, a contributor to Esquire, Hazlitt, Slate and other outlets, returns to the podcast for a discussion of Adam McKay's new all-star satire for Netflix Don’t Look Up, a disaster movie about a comet heading directly for Earth that also stands as an allegory for the threat of climate change and the systemic problems in American med...
65: The Last Duel & House of Gucci (with Anna Swanson)
December 20, 2021 00:55 - 1 hour - 64.7 MBAnna Swanson, Senior Contributor for Film School Rejects, returns to the podcast to discuss The Riddler (aka Ridley Scott) and the two all-star historical epics he has released this fall, October’s The Last Duel (the critically acclaimed drama that unexpectedly bombed) and November’s House of Gucci (a critically drubbed melodrama that has become a sizeable hit). We discuss some of the criticism The Last Duel has received about it’s unusual storytelling structure, why Ben Affleck’s over-the-...
TEASER - 64: Live and Let Die (with Andrew Tracy)
December 16, 2021 03:12 - 6 minutes - 6.15 MBAccess the entire 86 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59961406 Andrew Tracy, the new associate editor of Reel Screen magazine, joins the program as our first in-person guest for a deep dive into the famously problematic 007 entry Live and Let Die, Roger Moore's debut as James Bond, going up against the powerful druglord Dr. Kananga, played by Tha God Yaphet Kotto. Plus, a discussion of Bond's inability to mak...
63: The Beatles: Get Back (with Rob Rousseau)
December 04, 2021 20:15 - 1 hour - 89 MBWriter and podcaster Rob Rousseau joins me from Montreal to discuss Peter Jackson’s new epic-length documentary about those four mop-topped Lads from Liverpool. The Beatles: Get Back draws from the raw material collected in 1969 by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for his 1970 documentary Let It Be. More than just a documentary about the Beatles, Get Back is more importantly a film about the process of artistic expression and collaboration that also offers a detailed reconsideration of the off...
62: Eternals (with Dave Weigel)
November 28, 2021 03:37 - 1 hour - 94.8 MBAfter taking some time to let it marinate, the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel joins me to unpack the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chloe Zhao’s Eternals. We discuss how Eternals was first promoted as “a Terrence Malick version of a Marvel film”, some of the film’s flaws and questionable aesthetic choices (particularly the controversial Hiroshima scene), how it was received by critics and fans, whether there will be an Eternals 2, and where the MCU goes from here. Patrons of th...
61: Three Films by Bill Forsyth (with Ursula Lawrence)
November 17, 2021 00:27 - 1 hour - 95.4 MBComedy writer Ursula Lawrence (Drunk History, Adam Ruins Everything) returns to the podcast from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss three great films from the Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth, whose early self-financed successes laid the groundwork for Scotland’s film industry to flourish. We talk about three of Forsyth's best films: his first studio project, the highly-acclaimed Local Hero (1982) with Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster, 1984’s Comfort and Joy, his “serious comedy” about an i...
60: Scott Joplin (with Osita Nwanevu)
November 09, 2021 14:27 - 1 hour - 70 MBThe New Republic's Osita Nwanevu joins the show from Baltimore, Maryland to discuss the life of Scott Joplin, known in his day as the King of Ragtime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Joplin's music achieved widespread popularity in America, transcending segregated society, and his innovations laid the groundwork for the evolution of jazz and helped to revolutionize American music and the culture itself. Joplin died penniless in 1917 and his name languished in relative obscurity for decades ...
TEASER - 59: This Year's Model (with Jared Bailey)
November 06, 2021 23:13 - 3 minutes - 3.61 MBAccess the entire 101 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/58389913 Jared Bailey joins me from Columbia, South Carolina to discuss Elvis Costello’s monumental 1978 pop/punk album This Year’s Model, his first with his band The Attractions. Costello and his Argentine producer Sebastian Krys recently deconstructed and reimagined this landmark record for the new Spanish Model project where the album’s lyrics are reinte...
58: Dune vs Dune (with Jacob Bacharach)
November 02, 2021 01:09 - 2 hours - 120 MBAuthor Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod for a deep dive into the various adaptations of Frank Herbert’s Dune, directly comparing David Lynch’s 1984 epic with the 2021 Denis Villeneuve version of the first half of the book, with digressions on the 2000 TV miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune and the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. We also discuss in detail two of Denis Villeneuve’s recent futuristic works that are related through casting and themes to his Dune: his 2015 thriller Sicario (wh...
57: Angel Heart (with Robyn Citizen)
October 22, 2021 18:11 - 1 hour - 94.7 MBRobyn Citizen, TIFF’s Senior Manager of Festival Programming, returns to the program to discuss (in great spoilery detail) a Spooky Szn classic, the film noir / horror hybrid Angel Heart, an extremely controversial film in 1987, branded with the X rating by the MPAA before director Alan Parker removed 10 seconds of sex and violence. Like The Sixth Sense over a decade later, Angel Heart has everything riding on the big twist at the end paying off, and is a pleasure to revisit just to see how...
56: Bond, Craig Bond (with Liam Daly)
October 17, 2021 19:31 - 1 hour - 71.9 MBRecovering Maritimer, avant-cinephile and fellow Bond head Liam Daly joins the show from Ottawa to review the Daniel Craig 007 era, a 15 year reign that has just ended with the release of the long-delayed No Time To Die. Relatively unknown at the time he was announced as the new James Bond, Daniel Craig became a major movie star after 2006’s Casino Royale, which became an instant classic in the 007 series. We mount a defense of the much-maligned Quantum of Solace, we grouse about Skyfall, L...
TEASER - 55: Observe and Report (with Bryan Quinby)
October 07, 2021 15:55 - 4 minutes - 3.77 MBAccess the entire 80 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57121333 Street Fight Radio’s Bryan Quinby joins the show from Columbus, Ohio to discuss Jody Hill’s black comedy Observe and Report. Misunderstood in 2009 as a mean-spirited comedic spin on Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, it is clearer to see in 2021 that Observe and Report was intended as a vicious satire not only of the American police state, but also of...
54: The Card Counter (with Will Menaker)
September 27, 2021 13:28 - 1 hour - 81.5 MBChapo Trap House’s Will Menaker joins us from Brooklyn to discuss the career of veteran writer-director Paul Schrader, whose latest work The Card Counter is the latest iteration of a story Schrader has told many times over his long career, in true Auteurist tradition: an immersion into a dark subculture from the anguished perspective of God’s Lonely Man. To set the table, Will and I also discuss two important concepts of understanding modern cinema, both of which strongly apply to this podc...
53: Cutter's Way (with Dan Boeckner)
September 15, 2021 14:17 - 1 hour - 86.7 MBDan Boeckner of Operators and Wolf Parade and co-host of The Bottlemen podcast returns to Junk Filter for an episode about one of the great underseen films of the eighties, Ivan Passer’s 1981 California neo-noir Cutter’s Way, based on the crime novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg. One rainy night in Santa Barbara, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) witnesses a man dumping the corpse of a young girl; when he later recognizes a local captain of industry as the man who could be the culprit, his...
TEASER - 52: American Movie (with Sean Armstrong)
September 13, 2021 01:49 - 3 minutes - 3.43 MBAccess the entire 82 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/56088312 Veteran boom operator Sean Armstrong (who worked on every episode of Hannibal!) joins the podcast to discuss Chris Smith’s 1999 film American Movie, a work by a determined documentary filmmaker about a determined independent filmmaker: it tells the story of Wisconsin’s Mark Borchardt and his determination to finally finish his abandoned short horror...
51: The Films of Andrew Dominik (with Ashley Naftule)
September 06, 2021 02:29 - 1 hour - 75.3 MBThe writer and playwright Ashley Naftule returns to the pod from Scottsdale Arizona for a look at the work of the ambitious Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik, who has made only 4 films so far, each of high quality, each in their own way about outlaws. Chopper (2000), a comedic biopic of the notorious and unrepentant Aussie criminal / tabloid folk hero Mark “Chopper” Read, with a starmaking performance from Eric Bana The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a rev...
50: Val Kilmer (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory)
August 30, 2021 12:52 - 1 hour - 79.6 MBThe hosts of the Hit Factory Podcast, Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes, join us from San Francisco to discuss two Val Kilmer films. Made as David Mamet was getting redpilled post-9/11, his bizarre 2004 thriller Spartan has a stripped-down screenplay comprised mostly of jargon and commands and features a terrific performance from Kilmer as an army ranger sent to rescue a high-value target (the President’s daughter) kidnapped by sex traffickers (a scenario that has new meaning in our modern poli...
50: Val Kilmer (with Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes)
August 30, 2021 12:52 - 1 hour - 79.6 MBThe hosts of the Hit Factory Podcast, Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes, join us from San Francisco to discuss two Val Kilmer films. Made as David Mamet was getting redpilled post-9/11, his bizarre 2004 thriller Spartan has a stripped-down screenplay comprised mostly of jargon and commands and features a terrific performance from Kilmer as an army ranger sent to rescue a high-value target (the President’s daughter) kidnapped by sex traffickers (a scenario that has new meaning in our modern poli...
TEASER - 49: Being There (with Jacob Bacharach)
August 25, 2021 16:51 - 2 minutes - 2.48 MBAccess the entire 93 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/55330993 Author Jacob Bacharach returns to the pod to discuss Hal Ashby’s evergreen social satire Being There (1979), adapted from the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. featuring Peter Sellers in his greatest performance as Chance, a simple-minded gardener raised by television who becomes a respected political thinker in Washington through sheer circumstance, luck an...
48: Ghost World (with Violet Lucca)
August 20, 2021 05:24 - 1 hour - 80.5 MBViolet Lucca, web editor for Harper's Magazine and the host of the publication's podcast, is the special guest for an in-depth discussion of Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 comedy Ghost World, based on a running segment within Daniel Clowes’ comic book series Eightball. The screenplay by Clowes and Zwigoff was the first comic book adaptation to be nominated for an Academy Award. Violet and I discuss the experience of feeling Extremely Seen watching a movie (in both positive and critical ways), how the...
TEASER - 47: Welcome to Me (with Karen Geier)
August 09, 2021 15:27 - 2 minutes - 2.09 MBAccess the entire 87 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54704122 Toronto-based writer and content strategist Karen Geier (The Guardian, Vice, The Cut) joins the podcast to discuss Shira Piven’s 2015 comedy-drama Welcome To Me, about a mentally ill woman obsessed with television and Oprah (Kristen Wiig); she wins a staggering amount of money in the California lottery, goes off her meds and bankrolls an expensive a...
46: Phantom Thread (with Zandy Hartig)
August 02, 2021 13:48 - 1 hour - 78.3 MBLos Angeles-based writer actor and producer Zandy Hartig joins the pod for a conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 historical romance Phantom Thread. Anderson's first film shot entirely outside of the United States, Phantom Thread is a hybrid of his detailed historical recreations like There Will Be Blood and The Master fused with Punch-Drunk Love's absurdist romantic sensibility. The film was said to be the final screen performance of the great Daniel Day-Lewis but it is also a ge...
TEASER - 45: The Genius of Burt Bacharach (with Marker Starling)
July 29, 2021 16:19 - 6 minutes - 5.85 MBAccess the entire 132 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/45-genius-of-54253436 Toronto-based musician Marker Starling, who does the original music for the podcast, is my special guest for a very in-depth and supersized conversation about the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songbook, their innovative work with their greatest discovery Dionne Warwick, and the dissolution of their partnership in the wake of the disastr...
44: Oliver Stone’s JFK (with Ursula Lawrence)
July 23, 2021 03:06 - 1 hour - 73.2 MBComedy writer Ursula Lawrence (Drunk History, Adam Ruins Everything) returns to the podcast from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss the cultural influence of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which 30 years ago revolutionized visual language in American cinema; a hybrid of classic all-star Hollywood filmmaking and experimental film techniques with its mixture of various film stocks and a complex editing structure, made just before digital editing was a post-production standard. We discuss the great per...
TEASER - 43: Late Style Jerry Lewis (with Will Sloan)
July 18, 2021 14:49 - 4 minutes - 3.9 MBAccess the entire 85 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/53826690 Toronto-based writer and podcasting king Will Sloan returns to the podcast to discuss the final films of director Jerry Lewis, Hardly Working (1980) and Cracking Up (a.k.a. Smorgasbord, 1983) as well as his great performance in Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982). Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive episode...
42: The Marvel Complex (with Jared Yates Sexton)
July 15, 2021 14:45 - 1 hour - 87.9 MBAuthor and political commentator Jared Yates Sexton returns to Junk Filter to discuss the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its association with the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex. I have seen very few of these MCU films, uncomfortable as I am with the partnership between Disney/Marvel and the U.S. Department of Defense, but for the pod I watched the recent Russo brothers trilogy of Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame for a discussion with Jared on the MCU...
41: Excalibur (with Meg Shields)
July 06, 2021 19:59 - 1 hour - 83.5 MBBC-based film writer Meg Shields returns to the podcast for a conversation about her favourite movie, John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), the definitive screen version of the legend of King Arthur. Reportedly Zack Snyder’s favourite film too, Excalibur kickstarted a wave of sword and sorcery movies in the early eighties. Filmed entirely on location in Ireland and featuring several future stars in the vast supporting cast (including Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson), Excalibur is a b...
TEASER - 40: Deep Cover (with Zach Vasquez)
July 01, 2021 05:25 - 4 minutes - 3.75 MBAccess the entire 89 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/53154024 Returning guest Zach Vasquez (Crooked Marquee, The Guardian) comes back to discuss another LA Neo-noir, Bill Duke’s 1992 crime classic Deep Cover, on the eve of its arrival to the Criterion Collection. One of the most radical studio releases of the nineties, Deep Cover stars Laurence Fishburne (in his final role billed as Larry) as an undercover cop p...
39: Danpilled III: Danpilled Summer (with Matthew Perpetua)
June 22, 2021 20:45 - 1 hour - 108 MBThe third chapter in a continuing series between Junk Filter in Toronto and Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxpod in Brooklyn, Danpilled III is about vibin’ in a Steely Dan t-shirt as we start to emerge from the pandemic into the promise of a Danpilled Summer. Matthew and I choose at least one good summer song from each of Steely Dan's golden age albums plus an overdue discussion of Donald Fagen’s 1982 solo record The Nightfly, which is basically a Steely Dan album without Walter Becker, and appreciat...
UNLOCKED: Danpilled II (with Matthew Perpetua, from Fluxpod)
June 20, 2021 21:53 - 1 hour - 95.4 MBIn celebration of the first day of summer, and in advance of this week's upcoming Junk Filter episode Danpilled III: Danpilled Summer, I have unlocked this bonus Patreon content on the public Junk Filter feed, the sequel to Episode 24, courtesy of Matthew Perpetua's Fluxpod. This time Matthew and I go EVEN DEEPER down the Steely Dan rabbit hole by focusing entirely on songs, with discussions of 17 classics we both love including "Show Biz Kids," "Deacon Blues," "Chain Lightning," "Josie," "...
TEASER - 38: Find Me Guilty (with Gus Lanzetta)
June 19, 2021 18:15 - 3 minutes - 3.52 MBAccess the entire 88 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52691451 In our first episode with a South American guest, writer and podcaster Gus Lanzetta joins the pod from São Paulo, Brazil to discuss Vin “The Movies” Diesel on the eve of the worldwide release of F9. Gus has deep knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise as a former correspondent for Rolling Stone Brazil but he suggested we talk about Vin’s best per...
37: Panic in the Streets (with David Moscrop)
June 11, 2021 16:01 - 1 hour - 78 MBOttawa-based author and political commentator David Moscrop, whose work has appeared in the Washington Post and Maclean’s, joins the pod to talk about an underseen film noir classic, Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets. Shot entirely on location in New Orleans, Kazan’s film depicts a heroic public health official (Richard Widmark) and a determined police captain (Paul Douglas) in a race against time to capture a criminal on the loose (Jack Palance in his feature film debut) who doesn’t know h...
TEASER - 36: Pretty Woman (with Sooz Kempner)
June 08, 2021 12:11 - 2 minutes - 2.45 MBAccess the entire 82 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/52243824 Comedian and podcasting queen Sooz Kempner joins the pod from Surrey, England to discuss Garry Marshall’s 1990 smash hit Pretty Woman, which made a massive star out of Julia Roberts and created a new template for the rom-com. Disney’s grown-up movie division Touchstone Pictures redeveloped J.F. Lawton’s dark dramatic screenplay about the dangers of...
35: Sound and Vision (with Michael Balazo)
May 28, 2021 16:05 - 1 hour - 74.8 MBThe very funny Toronto comedian, writer and podcaster Michael Balazo joins the show for a discussion of David Bowie’s American odyssey in the seventies, as captured by two film projects. The 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor followed Bowie on his Diamond Dogs tour and revealed a frail, drug-fueled, isolated rock star, which inspired Nicolas Roeg to cast him as the alien visitor in his big screen debut, 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth; a sci-fi classic that directly influenced the next two ...
34: God Grodin (with John Semley and Will Sloan)
May 21, 2021 13:46 - 1 hour - 60.6 MBReturning guests John Semley and Will Sloan join the pod to celebrate actor, author and activist Charles Grodin, a comedy hero of ours who passed away this week at age 86. With special attention paid to his legendary talk show appearances on Carson and Letterman in character as a belligerent and uncooperative guest, his two highly influential film comedy masterpieces The Heartbreak Kid and Clifford, and other highlights of a long career that ranged from Rosemary’s Baby to Midnight Run to tw...
TEASER - 33: X Gave It To Ya (with Adam Jackson)
May 20, 2021 15:59 - 3 minutes - 2.98 MBAccess the entire 81 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51486104 Toronto’s own Adam Jackson (a former contributor to Vice and Noisey) strikes a victory for Reply Guys everywhere by talking himself onto the podcast as a guest to discuss the late DMX as a screen actor. We discuss 5 of his performances: his debut, the influential hip hop classic Belly (1998), his trilogy of dumb studio action films by the overquali...
32: The Nasty Girl (with David Demchuk)
May 17, 2021 12:48 - 1 hour - 80.7 MBToronto-based playwright and author David Demchuk (The Bone Mother) joins the pod to discuss Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl (1990), a coming-of-age tale based on a true story about a precocious and tenacious young student who enrages her small German town as she relentlessly endeavours to uncover what life was really like there during the Third Reich. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, The Nasty Girl has kept a lower profile in recent years but is fascinatin...
31: Dick Pix (with Jacob Bacharach)
May 12, 2021 13:44 - 1 hour - 83.8 MBThe author Jacob Bacharach joins the pod from Blacksburg, Virginia to discuss selected film adaptations of the work of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. We feature two films that understood the assignment, striking the balance between properly adapting PKD while retaining the integrity of the filmmaker’s vision - Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall and Richard Linklater’s underrated A Scanner Darkly. We also talk about two projects that show how you can go wrong adapting Dick: John Woo’s last Hollyw...