Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics

For years, Dan avoided this movie, fearing it was like a Hallmark Holiday Classic or Very Special Episode of Mad About You. But after our episode on Broadcast News, Mike insisted Dan give it a watch. Join us as we talk about the ways in which the film surfs just above the sharks of sentimentality that threaten it at every plot point and offers a great combination of characters, problems, and new problems once original ones are solved.

Patrick McGilligan’s Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson and Marc Eliot’s Nicholson are good starting points if you’re interested in the life of the actor.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Strangers on a Train (1951) may not be an “obvious Hitchcock” like Vertigo, Rear Window, or North by Northwest, but it’s fascinating, rewatchable, and has everything we love in the Hitchcock canon. When Guy Haines (Farley Granger) meets Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), he learns that he might not know himself as well as he thought he did. The whole film is like a ride on the carousel at the end and we’re like the screaming kids, afraid and loving it. Hop on!

Strangers on a Train is based upon Patricia Highsnith’s novel, which you can find here.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material, including a recent essay and interview about Hitchcock, Coleridge, and Strangers on a Train.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has your day today been worth narating? If it were retold in the pages of a novel, would anyone read it? Are you worthy of narration? Most of us would say that we weren’t, but that’s not the case for Jack Manfred, the title character of Croupier, Mike Hodges’ 1998 film about authorship and narcissism. Jack thinks that one must be a gambler or a croupier: one can either try to bend the universe to do what he wants it to do–or know that that’s impossible and revel in watching the losers. But is there a middle way?

In the episode, Dan mentions Steven and Frederick Barthelme’s Double Down: a terrific memoir of gambling and loss. It’s a true page-turner.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If L. A. Confidential (1997) were two degrees campier, it would seem like Dick Tracy–but Curtis Hanson made sure to capture the spirit of James Ellroy’s novel while making its labyrinth plot understandable to viewers. Join us for a conversation about how the film examines the need for heroes yet seems to only offer them in a way to which the movies have made us accustomed. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but how much sunlight do we really want illuminating the institutions that hold society together? Do we want to live in Chinatown or on the set of Badge of Honor?

If you haven’t read James Ellroy’s novel, you can find it here, as well as Steven Powell’s new biography of James Ellroy, Love Me Fierce in Danger. You can also listen to Dan’s interview with Steven Powell here on the New Books Network, as well as a conversation between Dan and Steven about L. A. Confidential on the page and screen.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) are collectively known as “The Man with No Name” trilogy and are often thought of as one long movie about the hero’s adventures, much like we think of the original three installments of Indiana Jones. Quentin Tarantino has called the third film the most well-directed film ever made, but Mike contends that For a Few Dollars More is superior to the other two. Join us for a conversation about this most dreamlike of Westerns that operates like a buddy-cop movie and reminds us the question posed by classicists, “Could Achilles beat Odysseus in a fight?” In other words, who would be more afraid of angering: Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef?

If you’re interested in learning more about Leone’s work, you might want to read Alireza Vahdani’s The Hero and the Grave: The Theme of Death in the Films of John Ford, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) is more Hollywood than Hemingway–something for which we should all be grateful. The film is a wonderful example–perhaps the best–of onscreen chemistry and remains wildly entertaining even aside from the onscreen courtship of Bogart and Bacall. Join us as we talk about banter as a tool of seduction, the ways in which films let us “borrow the nature” of their actors, how To Have and Have Not feels like Casablanca II, and if Howard Hawks has an odd obsession with Hoagy Carmichael.

In this episode, Dan mentions William J. Mann’s recent book Bogie and Bacall, a terrific dual biography of the stars. You can hear Dan’s interview of the author here. And if you don’t believe that the source material for the film is as bad as we say it is, you can find Hemingway’s novel here.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone loves a good heist movie that depends on the combination of cold, logical planning and some element going sideways–and Thief is one of the best. Its 1981 release date is seen in every frame and the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream makes for great nostalgic viewing. But the film has real power as a character study of a highly skilled man trying to get something beyond his reach and wants what he cannot steal. James Cann’s performance as Frank is one of his best; he even seems to channel his most famous role when he needs Frank to let off steam. Give it a listen and learn how Michael Mann answers the question of whether there is honor among thieves.

Want to read more about Michael Mann? Jean-Baptiste Thoret’s Michael Mann: A Contemporary Retrospective examines Mann’s “contemplative way of filming that combines fascination and melancholy.”

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you need to be a wolf to protect the sheep? That’s the question at the heart of Training Day (2001), in which Ethan Hawke plays the lead and Denzel Washington plays himself–at least for the first hour. What happens in the film once the sun goes down gets Mike and Dan arguing as they haven’t in a while: does the movie become yet another one where people go through a house with pistols drawn and shotgun blasts take out kitchen counters? Or is there a deeper reason why the film must end as it does? Listen and decide!

During the conversation we also bring in Meeting Evil, and The Screwtape Letters–both terrific books.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any director other than Christopher Nolan would have done one of two things with this material: made an Oceans Eleven at Los Alamos or a cradle-to-grave biopic. That Nolan resisted these temptations to instead use the life of his subject to explore issues of historical legacy and what happens to those who steal fire from the gods makes Oppenheimer worth all its hype. Dan talks about how Nolan managed to create suspense without action; Mike looks at the challenge of dramatizing intelligence; both talk about what they call “the Nolan scene,” a way for the director to move into the quantum realm of his story just as Oppenheimer moved into the quantum realm of physics. The form of the film suits its content and reminds us that there was a time before everybody with an internet connection assumed that they knew everything.

Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus, found here.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Collateral was made in 2004, ten years after Speed—and while both films have the same story of a good guy trying to stop a killer in real time, Collateral feels decades away from the innocence of Speed. Much of that has to do with the villain, who espouses a set of assumptions about the world that we se all around us on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Shark Tank. On a lighter note, the movie also ends the debate of how Superman could disguise himself with a simple pair of glasses. It’s a movie made for the hosts: Michael Mann for Mike and Tom Cruise for Dan. Jump in the taxi and give it a listen!

If you love Michael Mann, you love Heat. Mann’s new novel, Heat 2, can be found here.

Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices