Junk Filter

28: Roe v Wade & Gutfeld! (with Alex Shephard)

April 23, 2021 13:11 - 1 hour - 76.5 MB

The New Republic’s Alex Shephard joins the show from Brooklyn to discuss the new Conservative propaganda film Roe v Wade, filmed three years ago in the hopes of cashing in on the anticipated repeal of a woman’s right to abortion access by a conservative Supreme Court, but only now dribbling out to VOD in the early days of the new Biden administration. The film’s director Nick Loeb also stars as an amoral abortionist who reveals "the truth" about his profession, the Henry Hill of this shamel...

28: Roe v. Wade & Gutfeld! (with Alex Shephard)

April 23, 2021 13:11 - 1 hour - 76.5 MB

The New Republic’s Alex Shephard joins the show from Brooklyn to discuss the new Conservative propaganda film Roe v. Wade, filmed three years ago in the hopes of cashing in on the anticipated repeal of a woman’s right to abortion access by a conservative Supreme Court, but only now dribbling out to VOD in the early days of the new Biden administration. The film’s director Nick Loeb also stars as an amoral abortionist who reveals "the truth" about his profession, the Henry Hill of this shame...

27: Shakedown (with Ricky Camilleri)

April 18, 2021 23:34 - 1 hour - 64.1 MB

Ricky Camilleri of the Thirty Years Later podcast joins the show from Brooklyn to talk about the 1988 James Glickenhaus thriller Shakedown (released internationally as Blue Jean Cop). Shakedown is a prime example of Dudes Rock cinema: films that celebrate and uphold the ideals of male friendship. Peter Weller is an overworked but idealistic NYC public defender who takes the case of a crack dealer accused of murder; when the victim turns out to be an undercover cop and his client insists he ...

TEASER - 26: Rebels of the Neon God (with Ruairí McCann)

April 11, 2021 21:00 - 3 minutes - 3.2 MB

Access the entire 68 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/49910402 Our first international guest, Belfast-based film critic and editor Ruairí McCann, joins the podcast to discuss the great Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and his auspicious first feature, 1992’s Rebels of the Neon God, a film that took 23 years to get a North American release. Rebels of the Neon God set the tone for Tsai Ming-liang's singular ...

25: Cocktails and Dreams (with Robyn Citizen)

April 05, 2021 13:28 - 1 hour - 77.2 MB

Robyn Citizen, TIFF’s Senior Manager of Festival Programming, joins the program to discuss one of her obsessions: 1988's box office smash Cocktail. Cocktail was adapted for the screen by Heywood Gould from his own novel, but the dark tale was significantly brightened when Disney refashioned the film as a Tom Cruise vehicle for Touchstone Pictures during their domination of the multiplex in the eighties. The film started the “flair bartender” craze and its soundtrack spawned two monster radi...

24: Danpilled (with Matthew Perpetua)

March 31, 2021 15:06 - 1 hour - 82.4 MB

Brooklyn-based writer and podcaster Matthew Perpetua (Fluxblog) joins the pod for an extended conversation about Steely Dan, a Boomer band that Gen X had to learn to like (as they got older) but which had a different appeal for Millennials and Gen Z thanks to their music being sampled in hip-hop and their inclusion in “Yacht Rock” subculture. Along the way we discuss the cinematic properties of the band’s music through their storytelling and Kubrickian approach to production, the heavy use ...

23: Out For Justice (with Maggie Serota)

March 26, 2021 14:08 - 1 hour - 73.5 MB

Brooklyn-based writer/journalist Maggie Serota (Spin, Esquire, Rolling Stone) joins the pod to discuss the mysteries of Steven Seagal’s movie career at Warner Bros. in the late eighties through the mid nineties with a deep dive into his bizarre 1991 Brooklyn-set crime thriller Out For Justice. This was clearly Seagal’s attempt at being taken seriously as an actor, a pretentious mafia drama originally titled The Price of Our Blood with several allusions to On the Waterfront, an opening title...

TEASER - 22: Zack Snyder's Justice League (with Will Sloan, David Hains, Ethan Vestby)

March 23, 2021 01:08 - 1 minute - 1.75 MB

Junk Filter patrons have access to the full 73 min episode as well as past and upcoming Premium episodes. Consider becoming a direct supporter of the program by becoming a patron. https://www.patreon.com/posts/49084707 The first panel discussion of the podcast features an in-depth discussion of Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Snyder, 2021). Was it worth the wait? Is the artist’s original vision an improvement on the 2017 studio release heavily doctored by Joss Whedon? And does this film final...

21: Sad Affleck (with Ursula Lawrence)

March 19, 2021 04:55 - 1 hour - 70.7 MB

This episode contains spoilers for both films. Comedy writer Ursula Lawrence (Drunk History, Adam Ruins Everything) joins the show from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss the last few years of the career of Ben Affleck. Affleck has had quite the decade: after two big hits as a director with The Town and the Academy Award for Best Picture winning Argo, he announced he would be starring as Batman in a series of new DC films. From this point his personal life seemed to go into a tailspin: his marr...

20: The Gamification of Cinema (with Alex Ross)

March 15, 2021 14:48 - 1 hour - 58.4 MB

Toronto-based researcher and PhD candidate Alex Ross is today’s guest for a discussion of the intersection between videogame culture, film culture and fandom. We go over the initial use of videogames in the 80s as story premises (Tron, WarGames), official videogame adaptations in the 90s (Mortal Kombat), and into the 21st century, when films were adapted into videogames (GoldenEye, The Godfather), and videogames themselves became more cinematic (the Grand Theft Auto series, which in turn in...

TEASER - 19: Tony Scott's The Fan (with David Roth)

March 10, 2021 21:25 - 5 minutes - 5.02 MB

Junk Filter patrons can hear the entire 100 minute episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/48593297 Defector Media’s David Roth joins the podcast from New York City to discuss The Fan, Tony Scott’s 1996 psychological thriller about a deranged San Francisco Giants fan and struggling knife salesman (Robert DeNiro) who develops an extremely unhealthy fixation on superstar slugger Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), a player experiencing his own parallel career crisis. It’s not a good movie but ...

18: 52 Pick-Up (with Zach Vasquez)

March 03, 2021 02:37 - 1 hour - 68.1 MB

Los Angeles-based film writer Zach Vasquez comes on the show to discuss John Frankenheimer’s sordid 1986 crime melodrama 52 Pick-Up, one of the only legit good movies made by Cannon Films, a slept-on eighties classic. With a screenplay by Elmore Leonard adapted from his 1974 novel, 52 Pick-Up was not well-received upon release but time has been extremely kind to this shocking and grimy thriller about a wealthy businessman (Roy Scheider) who becomes the target of a blackmail plot, and has to...

17: Tha God Takeshi Kitano (with Dan Boeckner)

February 22, 2021 14:47 - 1 hour - 76.3 MB

Dan Boeckner of Operators and Wolf Parade joins the pod today from Montreal to discuss Tha God Takeshi Kitano. Outside his homeland Kitano is best known for his prizewinning violent crime dramas, but in Japan “Beat” Takeshi is a superstar TV comedian whose serious arthouse film career was not taken seriously there for several years. Dan and I discuss two of Kitano’s films that exemplify his singular comic sensibility: the deadpan Boiling Point (1990) and the galaxy-brained sex comedy Gettin...

16: Cronenberg's Rabid (with Angelo Muredda)

February 19, 2021 00:19 - 1 hour - 64.3 MB

Toronto-based writer and film critic Angelo Muredda joins the pod for a discussion of David Cronenberg’s Canuxploitation classic Rabid (1977), a depiction of a horrifying viral epidemic sweeping the city of Montreal that is fascinating to reconsider today as we approach the one year anniversary of the start of lockdowns in Canada related to the real-world Coronavirus pandemic. We discuss Cronenberg’s use of limited resources and the banality of seventies Canadian architecture and interior de...

TEASER - 15: The Fandom Menace (with Jared Yates Sexton)

February 15, 2021 16:23 - 2 minutes - 2.66 MB

PATREON EPISODE: Subscribe to our Patreon to hear the whole 87 minute episode https://www.patreon.com/posts/47584756 Author and political commentator Jared Yates Sexton joins the pod to discuss the Disney Star Wars movies in great detail. Jared and I are both lapsed Star Wars fans and in this episode we talk about a bunch of things: our deteriorating relationship with these films and how the new Star Wars trilogy unintentionally encapsulates our political and cultural moment, with their pan...

14: Found Footage Horror (with Joe Berkowitz)

February 12, 2021 03:31 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MB

Minneapolis-based author and Fast Company opinion columnist Joe Berkowitz joins the podcast this week to talk about the found footage horror genre with a focus on Ti West’s 2013 thriller The Sacrament, which presents a fictionalized version of the 1978 Jonestown massacre, set in the modern era and presented as an edgy documentary from Vice Media. Joe and I discuss the evolution of the Found Footage genre, their common structural problems, the use of Vice journalists in The Sacrament, and the...

13: White SquallAnon (with David Hains)

January 16, 2021 14:28 - 1 hour - 57.3 MB

Toronto-based journalist David Hains joins the pod on the eve of Trump’s exit from the White House, in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Many people in the melee were members of QAnon, an elaborate pro-Trump online conspiracy theory that has picked up more believers during this pandemic year. QAnon hates Hollywood for its supposedly depraved celebrities but ironically much of their language and belief structure comes from their misunderstanding of certain (unlikely) ...

12: Femme Fatale and Domino (with John Semley)

January 11, 2021 13:52 - 1 hour - 68.9 MB

Spoilers abound during our discussion, please watch Femme Fatale before listening as there is a stunning twist you don’t want us to ruin for you. Femme Fatale is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime. No need to watch Domino first, or even at all! For the first of likely several Junk Filter episodes about Brian De Palma, Toronto-based writer John Semley joins the program for a look at two films that bookend De Palma’s post-Hollywood exile in the land of European film financing, 2002...

11: The Bane Episode (with Corey Atad)

January 04, 2021 13:39 - 1 hour - 73.2 MB

Toronto-based writer Corey Atad joins the pod today to talk about Bane, as a jumping off point to discuss Christopher Nolan, who seemed like one of the villains of 2020 as he was determined to release Tenet in theatres during a global pandemic, but who became a Good Guy at the end of the year when he started feuding with his studio Warner Bros. after they used Tenet’s disappointing box office totals to justify moving their entire 2021 release slate to HBOMax to prop up their streaming servic...

10. Welcome To New York (with Will Sloan)

December 29, 2020 17:30 - 1 hour - 70.1 MB

On this week’s episode, Toronto-based writer and podcasting magnate Will Sloan returns to the pod to discuss Abel Ferrara’s 2014 film Welcome To New York, a dramatization of IMF chief (and presumptive future French President) Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in Manhattan in 2011 for the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid, starring Gerard Depardieu as the thinly-disguised DSK figure. Not only was it Ferrara’s best film in years, but it was also very ahead of the curve, a drama centred around...

10: Welcome To New York (with Will Sloan)

December 29, 2020 17:30 - 1 hour - 70.1 MB

On this week’s episode, Toronto-based writer and podcasting magnate Will Sloan returns to the pod to discuss Abel Ferrara’s 2014 film Welcome To New York, a dramatization of IMF chief (and presumptive future French President) Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in Manhattan in 2011 for the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid, starring Gerard Depardieu as the thinly-disguised DSK figure. Not only was it Ferrara’s best film in years, but it was also very ahead of the curve, a drama centred around...

9: The Astrologer (with Peter Kuplowsky)

December 21, 2020 14:00 - 1 hour - 78.5 MB

Toronto-based film producer and TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky comes on the pod to talk about The Astrologer (1975), a one of a kind vanity production / ego trip by first time filmmaker (and con artist) Craig Denney, briefly screened after being rediscovered decades later but then pulled from circulation over music licensing issues too complex to untangle. But before the clampdown it did play theatrically in Toronto, thanks to Peter Kuplowsky. And I got to see it. This ep...

8: Viridiana (with Justine Smith)

December 14, 2020 14:20 - 1 hour - 70.8 MB

Our subject today is nuns in the movies in general, and in particular the 1961 Luis Buñuel masterpiece Viridiana. Buñuel left Spain over the Franco dictatorship and forged a great filmmaking career in Mexico. Surprisingly. Buñuel accepted an invitation from Franco to return to Spain to make whatever film he wanted. He delivered Viridiana, one of the great “Fuck You” movies, a vicious satire of both Franco’s dictatorship and the Catholic Church. It was condemned by the Vatican and banned in S...

7: Bigger Than Life (with Ashley Naftule)

December 11, 2020 14:14 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MB

An overworked family man suddenly facing a terminal health crisis is given what appears to be a miracle cure, an experimental steroid treatment. But as the man’s health returns, he becomes addicted to the steroids and gets increasingly deranged and delusional, his mania escalating into a full blown domestic rampage that threatens to destroy him and everyone around him. This is what likely cost President Trump his re-election, but it’s also the plot of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 masterpiece of melod...

6: Body Snatchers and BBQ (with Daniel Reynolds)

December 07, 2020 14:00 - 1 hour - 64.8 MB

Today’s extremely Toronto Politics Twitter episode concerns the ongoing #BBQAnon clownshow in town. A barbecue restaurant got a lot of media attention recently when they defiantly refused to cooperate as the province imposed new public health restrictions on indoor dining during a new COVID-19 lockdown: the local right wing press hailed the restauranteur as a “barbecue revolutionary” fighting for “the little guy” but this spectacle wound up giving media oxygen to some of the darkest forces i...

5: The 15:17 to Paris (with Matt Christman)

November 30, 2020 15:02 - 1 hour - 65.8 MB

Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman joins host Jesse Hawken for an in-depth conversation about Clint Eastwood’s 2018 Dudes Rock drama The 15:17 To Paris, a re-enactment of the 2015 incident where three young American tourists stopped a terror attack on a European high-speed train... but starring The Boys as themselves, and telling the whole story that led to this decisive moment, going back to their childhood. Part After School Special, part aimless travelogue, starring non-actors but strange...

4: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (with Anna Swanson)

November 27, 2020 13:00 - 1 hour - 85.3 MB

In this spoiler-heavy discussion of the instant Dudes Rock classic Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Toronto-based writer Anna Swanson joins host Jesse Hawken for an in-depth examination of the various controversies sparked by Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film and how we interpret them. Not only did Anna write a great article that thoroughly investigates one of the film’s most shocking reveals, but we also all owe her a debt of gratitude for creating the “Leo Pointing” viral Twitter meme. We also ...

3: Punch-Drunk Love (with Adam Nayman)

November 23, 2020 12:42 - 1 hour - 69.7 MB

Host Jesse Hawken is joined by Toronto-based author and film critic Adam Nayman, who has written a new pictorial monograph “Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks”, for an in-depth discussion of Anderson’s singular romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love. The film won the Best Director prize at Cannes but despite some great reviews, audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of it in 2002, as the long-anticipated followup to the epic Magnolia turned out to be a 90 minute (arthouse-adjacent) Adam Sandler ...

2: Al Goldstein (with Will Sloan)

November 18, 2020 01:27 - 1 hour - 76.9 MB

Toronto podcasting magnate and author Will Sloan was also, improbably, one of the last people to see Al Goldstein alive. Goldstein, for better or worse, was a trailblazing First Amendment crusader who embodied a particular time and place in American cultural history as the publisher of Screw magazine and the host of the long running New York public access program Midnight Blue, both indelibly scuzzy documents of the city’s sex trade in the 70s and 80s. Things didn’t end particularly well for...

1: Uneasy Listening: Richard Harris (with Marker Starling)

November 12, 2020 12:58 - 1 hour - 65.1 MB

My name is Jesse Hawken and welcome to episode one of Junk Filter, a new podcast about film, music, politics and jokes. For our debut episode, Toronto musician Marker Starling joins me to celebrate the music of actor Richard Harris. His notorious 1967 pop smash MacArthur Park is his most famous song, but is only the tip of the iceberg: Harris recorded several epic concept albums in partnership with the great American songwriter Jimmy Webb, that are by turns beautiful, powerful and completel...

Junk Filter: podcast trailer

October 13, 2020 14:51 - 51 seconds - 823 KB

Junk Filter, a podcast about overlooked, underappreciated and strange artifacts from the worlds of film, music and popular culture and how they reflect our Extremely Online lives. Each week, host Jesse Hawken and his special guests from the arenas of Politics Twitter and Film Twitter will be serving up knowledge and comedy every week. We launch in November 2020, you can follow us now on Twitter at @junkfilterpod

Episodes