Shows
Celtic Ligers#092 Then Maybe You Shouldn't Be Occupying HEEERE! feat. Jesse HawkenThe Ligers sit down with writer and podcaster Jesse Hawken to talk about Martin Campbell's 2017 movie "The Foreigner" where Jackie Chan takes on the IRA and Pierce Brosnan plays NOT Gerry Adams. They talk Bronson's Bronson way about him, IRA blockbusters and the confused politics of a Chinese financed movie based on a book from 1992. Check out Jesse's podcast Junk Filter about film, TV, pop culture things and politics. A 10/10 Liger recommend: https://pod.link/1535693601
2025-08-081h 32
Box Office GROSS: The Top 50 Hit Films of 2005S1 E14: "The Interpreter" (#33) - with Jesse Hawken!It took us fourteen episodes but we invite the great Jesse Hawken (JUNK FILTER) to be our guest as we have finally arrived at a REAL GROWN-UP MOVIE on this project: Sydney Pollack's political thriller THE INTERPRETER., a movie that is basically completely forgotten now because it is not really equipped to deal with the political implications of its general premise, but a handsomely made, professional thriller starring two compelling actors that a lot of people paid money to see on original release, more than a lot of higher-profile films released around it. We practice our Afrikaans...
2025-06-021h 39
Hit FactoryLa Cérémonie feat. Jesse HawkenHit Factory's Chief Canadian Correspondent and host of Junk Filter Podcast Jesse Hawken is back to discuss the work of French genre provocateur Claude Chabrol and his 1995 thriller 'La Cérémonie' starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert. Inspired by the true story of Christine and Lea Papin - two French sisters who, as live-in maids, were convicted of murdering their employer's wife and daughter in 1933 - the film follows Sophie (Bonnaire) a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Brittany who befriends Jeanne (Huppert), the local postal clerk. Together, the two slowly begin to form a shared psychosis, sharing a...
2024-07-062h 09
Struggle SessionRIP MCU w/ Jesse HawkenOn today’s episode I had a great conversation with returning champion Jesse Hawken. We discuss the recent stumbles and possible downfall of Disney’s MCU. We talk about the box office failure of The Marvels, the production hell of Mahershala Ali's Blade, and the Zionist superhero that may be holding up the next Captain America. All that plus a brief update with Jesse on The Beatles and their final single "Now and Then."Thank you so much for your subscriptions, support, and kind words. Support the show by subscribing: http://patreon.com/strugglesession http://strugglesession.substack.com http...
2024-04-011h 14Struggle SessionRIP MCU w/ Jesse HawkenOn today’s episode I had a great conversation with returning champion Jesse Hawken. We discuss the recent stumbles and possible downfall of Disney’s MCU. We talk about the box office failure of The Marvels, the production hell of Mahershala Ali's Blade, and the Zionist superhero that may be holding up the next Captain America. All that plus a brief update with Jesse on The Beatles and their final single "Now and Then."Thank you so much for your subscriptions, support, and kind words. Support the show by subscribing: http://patreon.com/strugglesession http://strugglesession.substack.com http...
2024-04-011h 14
Pod Casty For MeTrue Crime (1999) with Jesse HawkenFor one week only: we're a TRUE CRIME podcast. We're going to make so much money as Jesse Hawken (writer/filmmaker/Junk Filter Podcast) joins us to cover Clint Eastwood's 1999 death row journalism thriller TRUE CRIME! We go deep on True Crime as a genre, capital punishment, and, of course, Speed Zoo. Give it a listen! Topics include: Clint's ageless sexual dynamism, OJ: MADE IN AMERICA, obviously the Star Wars prequels, the function of the media in Eastwood films, Denis Leary, the rightward turns of James Woods and Isaiah Washington, the triumphant return of the Pine Cone...
2023-09-221h 54
Junk Filter142: Breathless ’83 (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory)Aaron and Carlee from the Hit Factory podcast return from San Francisco for a deep dive into the underrated 1983 American remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark film Breathless, directed by Jim McBride.
Assailed at the time of release for being a shallow exercise in style, to watch Breathless 40 years later is to see a work arguably as influential on the next generation of American filmmakers as Godard’s original had been on the New American Cinema of the 1970s; the remake’s cocktail of retro cool, fast cars and meta-textual pop culture references mark it as a clear...
2023-08-061h 48
Hit FactoryPrimal Fear feat. Jesse HawkenJesse Hawken, host of Junk Filter Podcast, returns to the show to discuss 'Primal Fear'. The film is a taut piece of middlebrow entertainment which offers maximum reward as a cable classic. We discuss the film's two standout performances - one from aging handsome guy Richard Gere as a hotshot attorney looking for his next big break, the other from then-newcomer Edward Norton who took audiences by storm and wound up on the short list of actors nominate for an Academy Award for their very first film performance. Then, we talk the movie's famous twist ending, and...
2023-07-201h 42
Junk FilterTEASER - 76: Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear (with pet wife)Access 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 Motown and give to her the entire advance and half the royalties. He...
2023-01-2405 min
Cinema SmorgasbordEpisode 123 – You Don’t Know Dick – Get Crazy (1983) (/w Jesse Hawken)RSS/iTunes/Spotify
The entire YOU DON’T KNOW DICK archive is available right here.
On this episode of YOU DON’T KNOW DICK we’re joined by Junk Filter Podcast host (and Twitter provocateur) Jesse Hawken to discuss Alan Arkush’s long-unavailable concert-movie comedy GET CRAZY from 1983! It’s a wild film, with performances from Malcolm McDowell (as an aging rock star), Daniel Stern, Lou Reed(!), Lee Ving, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel.. and plenty more! We also discuss our favorite Rock and Roll movies, Alan Arkush’s career, why the film was buried and all things D...
2022-06-201h 23Junk Filter80: Red Heat (with Asawin Suebsaeng)Asawin Suebsaeng, senior reporter for The Daily Beast and co-host of the Fever Dreams podcast, joins the show from Cincinnati to discuss Walter Hill’s underrated 1988 Cold War cop thriller Red Heat, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a KGB cop on the hunt for a Soviet gangster on the loose in the United States, forced to cooperate on the case with Chicago cop Jim Belushi. Arnold mentioned filming Red Heat in Moscow during his recent video address for the Russian people to tell them the truth about the war in Ukraine.
Swin and I talk about Red Heat as...
2022-04-031h 11Junk Filter79: The Last of Sheila (with Marker Starling)Toronto musician Marker Starling, who does the music for the podcast, returns for a deep dive into one of our favourites: the 1973 all-star murder mystery The Last of Sheila, directed by Herbert Ross, with an original screenplay by puzzle fanatics Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.
A producer’s wife is killed in an unsolved hit-and-run death during his house party. A year later, the producer invites some guests from the party, all Hollywood strivers, for a weeklong cruise on the French Riviera, where every night they must play a parlour game of his devising, in what seems to...
2022-03-251h 45Junk FilterTEASER - 78: We Are All Batmen, Part II (with Corey Atad and Ben Nash)Access the entire 58 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63901173
Part two of our Bat Panel on the Gotham Cinematic Universe focuses on Joker (Phillips, 2019) starring Joaquin Phoenix in his Oscar-winning performance as the Clown Prince of Crime, and how both it and The Batman lean heavily on signifiers from other characteristic filmmakers to tell their stories.
We also continue our discussion of The Batman, including the evolution of the character on screen, and how the latest film portrays Batman as “The World’s Grea...
2022-03-1802 minJunk Filter77: We Are All Batmen, Part I (with Corey Atad and Ben Nash)Returning Junk Filter guests Corey Atad and Ben Nash join forces for a special Bat Panel, a two part episode on the latest films in the Gotham Cinematic Universe.
Part one takes a deep dive into Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022): what we liked about it, our issues with the film, a discussion of the film’s politics, and how DC and Warner Bros. continues to evoke the cinematic style of other filmmakers (in this case the work of David Fincher) to tell the Batman story.
Part two (available on the Junk Filter Patreon feed) continues the...
2022-03-171h 32Junk Filter75: The Color of Money (with Steven Hyden)The 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 filmmaker, the great pairing of Newman and Tom Cruise, and how this film was a...
2022-03-061h 38Junk Filter74: Harry Dean Stanton (with Justin Schneider)One 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 audiences.
Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive epis...
2022-03-021h 26Junk FilterTEASER - 73: Shattered Glass (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory)Access 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 through the rigorous fact-checking of a competitive news outlet and then the magazine’s new editor, Charles Lane.
We...
2022-02-2104 minJunk Filter72: Costa-Gavras: State of Siege & Missing (with Jacob Bacharach)The 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 enraged the State Department for directly implicating the United States in these deaths and the...
2022-02-141h 58Junk FilterTEASER - 71: Double Troubles: Belfast & The Image You Missed (with Ben Nash)Access 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 Kenneth Branagh’s “most personal film”, a depiction of his childhood as sectarian violence gripped his neighbourhood. It’s a fil...
2022-02-0705 minJunk Filter70: The Informant! (with Mike Mekus)Actor 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 the FBI.
We talk about what we love about Soderbergh’s career-long capitalist critique in his works, the many risks he...
2022-02-011h 24Junk FilterTEASER - 69: Armed Forces (with Nick Miller)Access 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 Cheap Trick) for a dark, complex, funny and furious power pop record that regularly equated doomed social and romantic re...
2022-01-2804 minJunk Filter68: Costa-Gavras: Z (with Sotiris Tsernoglu)My 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 1963 murder of Grigoris Lambrakis (Yves Montand), a popular democratic politician set up by the country’s military establishment to be murdered by ri...
2022-01-261h 13Junk FilterTEASER - 67: ABBA from A to B (with Terrance Balazo)Access 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 them in England and kicked off ABBAmania around the globe, to the spectacular disintegration of the band...
2022-01-1303 minJunk FilterTEASER - 66: Don't Look Up (with Corey Atad)Access 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 media and government that we've seen manifested during the pandemic.
Corey and I discuss wh...
2022-01-0604 minJunk Filter65: The Last Duel & House of Gucci (with Anna Swanson)Anna 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-top supporting performance in Duel works while Jared Leto’s cartoonish turn in Gucci doesn’t, the response from the Guc...
2021-12-201h 10Junk FilterTEASER - 64: Live and Let Die (with Andrew Tracy)Access 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 make a proper cup of coffee in his apartment, and we praise another great Yaphet Kotto p...
2021-12-1606 minJunk Filter63: The Beatles: Get Back (with Rob Rousseau)Writer 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 official myths and legends about the final days of the band.
Rob and I also discuss Smooth Ringo, Checked Ou...
2021-12-041h 37Junk Filter62: Eternals (with Dave Weigel)After 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 the Junk Filter podcast receive access to additional exclusive episodes every month: som...
2021-11-281h 43
The BottlemenPREVIEW: Drome Logic ft. Jesse Hawken
Riley, Dan, and Junk Filter Pod's Jesse Hawken sit back and relax for a watch-through of David Cronenberg's fabulous VIDEODROME. We reflect on God Cronenberg's keen foresight into what media would become in the decades ahead.
Check out the full episode on www.patreon.com/dabottlemen
2021-11-2205 minJunk Filter61: Three Films by Bill Forsyth (with Ursula Lawrence)Comedy 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 ice cream van turf war in Glasgow (based on true events!) and his American debut, 1987’s Housekeeping with Christine Lahti, based on Marilynne Robinson’s great nove...
2021-11-171h 44
FluxpodDanpilled IV: Steely Dan talk with Jesse HawkenJesse Hawken of Junk Filter is back for another episode of Danpilled, our sporadically produced Steely Dan series! This episode covers the new live albums plus discussion of the songs "Aja," "Dirty Work," "Razor Boy," "Night by Night," "Your Gold Teeth II," "Everything You Did," "Time Out of Mind," "The Second Arrangement," and "The Goodbye Look."
2021-11-101h 38Junk Filter60: Scott Joplin (with Osita Nwanevu)The 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 until his music was rediscovered in the early 1970s and he received long-overdue recognition for his achievements.
Osita and...
2021-11-091h 16Junk FilterTEASER - 59: This Year's Model (with Jared Bailey)Access 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 reinterpreted by singers from across the Spanish-speaking world, using the original backing tracks.
We also discuss Elvis Costello as the protot...
2021-11-0703 minJunk Filter58: Dune vs Dune (with Jacob Bacharach)Author 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 (which depicts an American covert war against Mexican drug cartels in an otherworldly manner) and 2017’s Blade Runner 2049...
2021-11-022h 10Junk Filter57: Angel Heart (with Robyn Citizen)Robyn 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 you were tricked the first time. We also talk about the glory da...
2021-10-221h 43Junk Filter56: Bond, Craig Bond (with Liam Daly)Recovering 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, Liam tries to talk me into liking Spectre (which introduces Blofeld back to the se...
2021-10-171h 18Junk FilterTEASER - 55: Observe and Report (with Bryan Quinby)Access 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 the kinds of toxic males that want to be cops, presented as a Ju...
2021-10-0704 minJunk Filter54: The Card Counter (with Will Menaker)Chapo 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 podcast and The Card Counter: Movie Mindset™ and Dudes Rock Cinema. Along the way we dis...
2021-09-271h 29Junk Filter53: Cutter's Way (with Dan Boeckner)Dan 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 unhinged and physically shattered Vietnam veteran buddy Alex Cutter (John Hear...
2021-09-151h 34Junk FilterTEASER - 52: American Movie (with Sean Armstrong)Access 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 film Coven and sell enough copies of it on VHS to finance his long-planned feature film Northwestern.
Plus: Sean tells us w...
2021-09-1303 minJunk Filter51: The Films of Andrew Dominik (with Ashley Naftule)The 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 revisionist epic Western starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck (badly mishandled by Warner Bros.)
Kill...
2021-09-061h 22
49th ParahellThe Rob Rousseau Show: Election-Mania with Jesse HawkenIt's episode 1 of The Rob Rousseau Show audio edition, with Jesse Hawken of Junk Filter Pod. please make sure you subscribe on the new feed or you'll miss future episodes! new podcast feed: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/473204.rss apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rob-rousseau-show/id1584204650
2021-09-0242 minJunk Filter50: Val Kilmer (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory)The 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 political age).
The new documentary Val is assembled from hundreds of hours of video captured by Ki...
2021-08-301h 26Junk FilterTEASER - 49: Being There (with Jacob Bacharach)Access 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 and misunderstanding.
Along the way we discuss the amazing run of great films Hal Ashby made through the 1970s, Being There’s (mostly) succ...
2021-08-2502 minJunk Filter48: Ghost World (with Violet Lucca)Violet 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 film depicts the decline of a close friendship between two young girls as they transition into adul...
2021-08-201h 27Junk FilterTEASER - 47: Welcome to Me (with Karen Geier)Access 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 and strange syndicated daytime talk show about herself, where she re-enacts traumatic events in her life using actors for an increasingly at...
2021-08-0902 minJunk Filter46: Phantom Thread (with Zandy Hartig)Los 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 generous showcase for the relatively unknown Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps. Zandy and I also talk about the film’s extr...
2021-08-021h 25Junk FilterTEASER - 45: The Genius of Burt Bacharach (with Marker Starling)Access 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 disastrous 1973 movie musical Lost Horizon.
Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive episodes a month: some of...
2021-07-2906 minJunk Filter44: Oliver Stone’s JFK (with Ursula Lawrence)Comedy 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 performances, the radical elements, the flaws, and how JFK’s information bath and blending of facts and conjecture normalized and mainstreamed conspiracy thinking in the wider cult...
2021-07-231h 19Junk FilterTEASER - 43: Late Style Jerry Lewis (with Will Sloan)Access 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 episodes a month: some of our notable previous guests include Jared Yates Sexton, David Roth, Sooz Kempner and Zach Vasquez. More...
2021-07-1804 minJunk Filter42: The Marvel Complex (with Jared Yates Sexton)Author 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’s stranglehold on popular culture and the role these superhero movies play to advance the pr...
2021-07-151h 36
Hit FactoryL.A. Confidential feat. Jesse HawkenToronto-based writer, filmmaker, and host of Junk Filter podcast Jesse Hawken joins us to discuss Curtis Hanson's thrilling 1997 crime epic "L.A. Confidential". We go long on the near-flawless narrative and aesthetic choices of the film's creators, its complex indictment of modern policing, and the complicated politics of the story's original architect, novelist James Ellroy. We also make the case for the film as a seminal "Dudes Rock" text. Consider supporting the podcast by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content. Listen and subscribe to Junk...
2021-07-092h 09FluxpodDanpilled III: Danpilled Summer feat. Jesse HawkenHere's the third Danpilled episode, originally aired on Jesse Hawken's Junk Filter podcast. In this episode Jesse and I talk about Steely Dan's most summery tunes including "Glamour Profession," "Do It Again," "Bad Sneakers," "King of the World," and "Kid Charlemagne."
2021-07-071h 59Junk Filter41: Excalibur (with Meg Shields)BC-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 berserk personal vision along the lines of Boorman’s previous fantasy films Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic, depicting the Arthur...
2021-07-061h 31
Junk FilterTEASER - 40: Deep Cover (with Zach Vasquez)Access 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 posing as a drug dealer while working for the DEA. He teams up with an unsuspecting mobbed-up lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) and th...
2021-07-0104 minJunk Filter39: Danpilled III: Danpilled Summer (with Matthew Perpetua)The 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 appreciations of several key studio musicians that helped to define their sound: Jeff P...
2021-06-221h 57Junk FilterUNLOCKED: Danpilled II (with Matthew Perpetua, from Fluxpod)In 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," "FM," "Pretzel Logic," "Reelin' in the Years," "Only A Fool Would Say That," "Black Cow" and "Don't Take...
2021-06-201h 44Junk FilterTEASER - 38: Find Me Guilty (with Gus Lanzetta)Access 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 performance as a screen actor in Sidney Lumet’s entertaining 2006 courtroom comedy/dr...
2021-06-1903 minJunk Filter37: Panic in the Streets (with David Moscrop)Ottawa-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 he’s become a plague carrier and has no intention of being caught.
Pani...
2021-06-111h 25Junk FilterTEASER - 36: Pretty Woman (with Sooz Kempner)Access 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 the L.A. sex trade (originally titled 3000) into a frothy fairy tale about a young and somewhat innoce...
2021-06-0802 minJunk Filter35: Sound and Vision (with Michael Balazo)The 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 Bowie albums, Station To Station and Low, and his newest persona, the Thin White Duke. It was...
2021-05-281h 21Junk Filter34: God Grodin (with John Semley and Will Sloan)Returning 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 two Beethoven movies.
Follow John Semley and Will Sloan on Twitter.
Trailer fo...
2021-05-211h 06Junk FilterTEASER - 33: X Gave It To Ya (with Adam Jackson)Access 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 overqualified cinematographer turned director Andrzej Bartkowiak - Romeo Must Die (2000), Exit Wounds (2001) and Cradle 2 The Gr...
2021-05-2003 minJunk Filter32: The Nasty Girl (with David Demchuk)Toronto-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 fascinating to reconsider today with its unexpected use of comedy and Brechtian distancing devices (rear-screen projection, direct ad...
2021-05-171h 28Junk Filter31: Dick Pix (with Jacob Bacharach)The 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 Hollywood film Paycheck and the recent Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, both wor...
2021-05-121h 31Junk FilterTEASER - 30: But Seriously, ffolkes (with Corey Atad, Ben Gordon, Meg Shields, Anna Swanson)Access the entire 99 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51136898
This panel discussion episode is a deep dive into the bizarre 1980 maritime action film ffolkes (aka North Sea Hijack) starring Roger Moore and James Mason, made in between Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only.
A terrorist cell led by Anthony Perkins and Michael Parks hijacks a supply ship in the North Sea, attaches bombs to an oil rig and a refinery platform and demands 25 million pounds in 24 hours or they will blow them all...
2021-05-1103 minJunk Filter29: Superstar & Dark Waters (with Justine Smith)Montreal-based film writer and programmer Justine Smith returns to the pod to discuss two radical works by the great director Todd Haynes, both based on true stories: his first short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) and his latest feature, Dark Waters (2019).
Dark Waters was written off by many critics at the time of release as a “work-for-hire” project from Haynes, but in fact it is of a piece with the director’s career-spanning concerns about the dangers built into living in a consumer society and the hidden illnesses that grow behind the facade of normalcy. Both films h...
2021-05-051h 25
49th Parahell96: Fordpocalypse III Beyond Ontariodome (with John Semley and Jesse Hawken)We regret to inform you that Doug Ford is, in fact, "at it again." I've got writer/researcher John Semley and Junk Filter Pod host Jesse Hawken joining me here in riff city to talk about Doug's very bad week and whether or not we're on board with the redemption arc. http://www.patreon.com/robrousseau
2021-04-231h 08Junk Filter28: Roe v. Wade & Gutfeld! (with Alex Shephard)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 shameless attempt to simulate the style of both Goodfellas and Ol...
2021-04-231h 23FluxpodDanpilled II - Jesse Hawken on Steely DanThis episode is a sequel to my appearance on Jesse Hawken's show Junk Filter in which we went deep on Steely Dan. This time Jesse and I go EVEN DEEPER by focusing entirely on songs, with discussions of 17 classics including "Show Biz Kids," "Deacon Blues," "Chain Lightning," "Josie," "FM," "Pretzel Logic," "Reelin' in the Years," "Black Cow," and "Don't Take Me Alive."
2021-04-211h 43Junk Filter27: Shakedown (with Ricky Camilleri)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 acted his self-defense, Weller teams up with Sam Elliott, a tough undercover cop who knows...
2021-04-191h 09Junk FilterTEASER - 26: Rebels of the Neon God (with Ruairí McCann)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 film career: his exploration of urban loneliness, the use of public and private spaces, and the beginning of his...
2021-04-1103 minJunk Filter25: Cocktails and Dreams (with Robyn Citizen)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 radio hits: “Kokomo” by The Beach Boys and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin. Cocktail was partly shot in Toronto...
2021-04-051h 24Junk Filter24: Danpilled (with Matthew Perpetua)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 of irony and subversion in their lyrics, the usual reasons why people bear grudges against their...
2021-03-311h 30Junk Filter23: Out For Justice (with Maggie Serota)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 card quoting playwright Arthur Miller, an overqualified supporting cast and showy Seagal acting monologues. Warner Bros. hacked this...
2021-03-261h 20Junk FilterTEASER - 22: Zack Snyder's Justice League (with Will Sloan, David Hains, Ethan Vestby)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 finally answer the question first posed when the Snyder DC Trilogy began in 2013: “How does Superman shave?”
Follow...
2021-03-2301 minJunk Filter21: Sad Affleck (with Ursula Lawrence)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 marriage ended, the paparazzi covered his every vape...
2021-03-191h 17Junk Filter20: The Gamification of Cinema (with Alex Ross)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 inspired Crank). Leading us into today: blockbusters that feel more and more like cut scenes and gaming quest storylines designed to se...
2021-03-151h 03Junk FilterTEASER - 19: Tony Scott's The Fan (with David Roth)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 an extremely fun movie to talk about, since it has major tone problems and a storyline that in another pair of han...
2021-03-1005 minJunk Filter18: 52 Pick-Up (with Zach Vasquez)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 use his wits to outsmart a trio of sadistic creeps from the porn world who keep upping the an...
2021-03-031h 14Junk Filter17: Tha God Takeshi Kitano (with Dan Boeckner)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 Getting Any? (1994), two films about the plight of the young, frustrated Japanese male oaf, and the culture that made h...
2021-02-221h 23Junk Filter16: Cronenberg's Rabid (with Angelo Muredda)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 design to generate dread, his depictions of institutions and the scientist-monster heroes that serve as his usual protagonists, and we muse aloud about how Onta...
2021-02-191h 10Junk FilterTEASER - 15: The Fandom Menace (with Jared Yates Sexton)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 pandering fan service, nonsensical story structure, and corporations pretending to be artists. And we discuss The Rise of...
2021-02-1502 minJunk Filter14: Found Footage Horror (with Joe Berkowitz)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 overall “ethics” of cinematic exploitation.
Plus: a chat about the annoyingly obvious but noteworthy parallels between Trump and Re...
2021-02-1259 minJunk Filter13: White SquallAnon (with David Hains)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) Hollywood movies, in particular Ridley Scott’s forgettable 1996 boys-on-the-high-seas adventure White Squall.
We talk about other random movi...
2021-01-161h 02Junk Filter12: Femme Fatale and Domino (with John Semley)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’s Femme Fatale (a masterpiece) and 2019’s Domino (not a masterpiece). Along th...
2021-01-111h 15Junk Filter11: The Bane Episode (with Corey Atad)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 service at the expense of theatrical releases.
Audiences that went to se...
2021-01-041h 19Junk Filter10: Welcome To New York (with Will Sloan)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 issues that would become central cultural themes in the second half of the decade: the #MeToo movement, the abus...
2020-12-291h 16Junk Filter9: The Astrologer (with Peter Kuplowsky)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 episode goes down the rabbit hole: what The Astrologer is, how it was made, and why you currently can’t s...
2020-12-211h 24Junk Filter8: Viridiana (with Justine Smith)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 Spain for 17 years. It also won the Palme d’or and vaulted Buñuel into the top rank...
2020-12-141h 17Junk Filter7: Bigger Than Life (with Ashley Naftule)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 melodrama Bigger Than Life, starring James Mason.
Phoenix-based playwright, writer and extremely funny Twitterer Ashley Naftule joins...
2020-12-1152 minJunk Filter6: Body Snatchers and BBQ (with Daniel Reynolds)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 in the city, including the anti-mask/anti-vaccine brigade and the far right.
Guest Daniel Reynolds is a writer and critic who also w...
2020-12-071h 10Junk Filter5: The 15:17 to Paris (with Matt Christman)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 strangely featuring sitcom actors in supporting roles, this is a film about millennials made by an 87 year old man. It’s one of the...
2020-11-301h 11Junk Filter4: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (with Anna Swanson)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 talk about Hollywood’s unexpected lyrical beauty and sensitivity, the pleasures of being tricked by a good sto...
2020-11-271h 33Junk Filter3: Punch-Drunk Love (with Adam Nayman)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 comedy. But time has revealed Punch-Drunk Love to be the film that marked a new trajectory in Anderson’s career, a generous a...
2020-11-231h 15Junk Filter2: Al Goldstein (with Will Sloan)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 Al, as two documentaries we discuss, 1996’s Screwed and 2005’s Porn King: The Trials of Al Golds...
2020-11-181h 23