By Gartbage Film
Join hosts Nick & Erin as they discuss a movie-of-the-week and then each pick a 2nd film to create a thematically spicy double bill. Their goal: to pair art with trash and vice versa. Because a
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The podcast currently has 115 episodes available.
We're back in our regular format just in time for spooky season and for one of Nick's favourite horror films. A tale of ambiguity, repression, and corruption: it's Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS from 1961!
CW: due to the nature of this movie's story, child sexual abuse is discussed in general terms.
It's a real Freudian time on the podcast this week as we discuss Truman Capote's "skull beneath the skin" gothic concepts, Deborah Kerr's masterful portrayal of psychosexual ambiguity, why you shouldn't use flashbacks, creepy kids, and candelabras (candelabrae?). We're asking the question, how do you adapt a purposefully ambiguous tale? Fittingly, there's no exact answer!
Plus, we're talking about how this was a huge leap forward for the horror genre in its cinematography and sound design, and it's a perfect opportunity to discuss electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram.
Next time on the pod we visit a core text of the Gartbage crew: SHAUN OF THE DEAD!
THEY (WE) LIVE! We've returned from our summer break with a big discussion on the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Get ready to add items to your watchlists because we've got recommendations for your 4th quarter film-viewing pleasure!
We're talking robots, detectives, directorial debuts, cannibals, ghosts, nightbitches, Ralph Fiennes' dong, anti-colonial action, peacocks, ice cream truck drivers, game shows, organic buildings, Kafka-esque nightmares, punks, street fighter, time travel, and funky fresh soundtracks.
We try our best to stay out of spoiler territory, but for full disclosure, here are the movies discussed on this episode:
The final episode of our Hong Kong mini-series takes us into the 21st century! It's the cop drama-thriller box office dynamo, INFERNAL AFFAIRS!
We're going full spoilers on the movie discussion this week. Consider yourself warned!
Nick's theory that all Hong Kong movies from the time were Handover Movies continues to be true as we discuss Buddhist hell, avoiding undercover cop clichés, Andy Lau's unfathomable superstardom, and Tony Leung's cute nicknames.
To wrap up the Hong Kong series, we're going over the "twilight of Hong Kong's film industry", how Infernal Affairs avoided the pitfalls of the industry, how it completes the journey that started with our 36TH CHAMBER episode, and our general thoughts and feelings on this unique place and time in film.
Summer of Hong Kong continues, and today we're pivoting from the 80's and martial arts into the 90's and emotions! And who else could we be talking about but Wong Kar-wai and his 1994 breakthrough, CHUNGKING EXPRESS!
While a touchstone for HK cinema today, Wong Kar-wai's big splash into the arthouse scene was anything but at the time. We're discussing how Wong found his way to his style leading up to CHUNGKING, how it captured the Hong Kong attitudes at such a precise moment, and the different relationship phases we recognized in these characters, in addition to highliighting Tony Leung's sad eyes.
We're also connecting CHUNGKING EXPRESS to our previous HK movie, YES MADAM and 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN to chart just how we've arrived here. Plus, we get some some surprise foreshadowing for our next episode and the finale of our Hong Kong series: 2002's INFERNAL AFFAIRS!
Welcome to the 80's! We all remember the time: lime green overalls, bolo ties, and dynamite doppelgängers. That's right, Kung Fjune continues with the Hong Kong movie that kicked off the Girls with Guns genre: Corey Yuen's YES, MADAM! from 1985!
It was the high-five heard around the world: Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock's first starring roles. We're running down just how much these two women could kick one's ass, especially Rothrock's Grand Master status and how she was cooking fools even as a teenager, and take some time to shout out our numerous cameo-filled trios of doofuses.
Plus, Nick connects the threads from last episode's Shaw talk on our 36th Chamber episode to YES, MADAM!'s contemporary setting. This movie kicked off a lot of careers, many of which guided the action genre through the next few decades and we're here to celebrate that.
Next time we're heading to the 90's for a different side of Hong Kong film: Wong Kar-wei's CHUNGKING EXPRESS!
We're back after a brief hiatus with another geographically centered mini-series, this time focused on the movies of Hong Kong! And to kick it off, Nick is finally making good on his longstanding threat to talk Shaw Bros: it's Lau Kar-Leung's THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN (1978)!
36th Chamber is an enormous tentpole in kung fu film, and one of the first post-Bruce Lee HK movies to break through to international audiences. We're probing into what made it so influential, how it established training tropes, and we opine on why it's a perfect introduction to the genre.
We're also talking about Lau Kar-Leung's approach to martial arts as a self-improvement tool, Gordon Liu and Shaw Bros' outsized impact outside of the kung fu world, and the Kill Bill siren. And yes, we mention Bruce Lee.
But who are the Shaw Bros exactly? Nick's here with a quick rundown of their history and how there's literally a place called Movietown. We also determine what chambers would absolutely wreck us personally.
Next time: we're agreeing with Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock in Corey Yuen's YES MADAM (1985)!
Welcome to the finale of our petit français mini-series, and we're going out with a bang! It's one of the biggest blueprint movies out there that firmly established the idea of the "cool" assassin, it's Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime masterpiece: LE SAMOURAI
We've seen it all before: the taciturn, lone wolf assassin who is a perfect precision instrument has a hit go bad, his employer betrays him, and the police are on his tail. But this is the one that set the template! We're talking all parts of Melville's style, from the trenchcoat uniform and the quiet protagonist, to the otherworldly qualities that push it into the the sligthly surreal.
Plus, it's a grand opportunity to finally delve into one of Nick's favourite topics: Jean-Pierre Melville's insane personal history.
We're continuing our exploration of some French-language favs with Ariane Louis-Seize's feature-length debut, 2023's HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON! If you dig any modern vampire story, from Let the Right One In to What We Do in the Shadows, you owe it to yourself to check this film out!
Major trigger warning if the title doesn't give it away: we discuss suicide in this episode! Also, full spoilers.
This is a film of major firsts, from directing through starring and writing, and we're here to track how it does such a great job trading in vampiric mysticism in favour of its thematic material. We're talking poutine, anti-chemistry, Canadian Film & TV regulations, our favourite Québec swears, and the screaming interiority of teen angst. Plus: welcome to swag corner!
Next week we're heading back to France for Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SAMOURAI!
Bonjour and bienvenue au Garbage Film's first installment in a short series on French films, and what better place to start than the film that defined the heist movie, Jules Dassin's 1955 classic RIFIFI! (If you've never seen it, you can check it out on the Internet Archive!)
We're talking Parisian slang, awful crime novels, connections with Jean-Pierre Melville, how you adapt something you hate, pistol-toting authors, and the interpersonal dynamics of France's underworld
More than anything else, we're getting into the clockwork mechanism of Jules Dassin's films, the beauty of the silent 30-minute heist, and how those elements took the world by storm. And a Hooray for Hollywood segment for a French film? It's more likely than you think!
Next week we head to Québec for Ariane Louis-Seize's debut film, the 2023 vampire romcom, HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON.
It's a St Patrick's Day spectacular on Gartbage Film with the most Irish movie around: Andrew Davis' THE FUGITIVE!
It's easy to forget now, but THE FUGITIVE was a craze in 1993 and had an outsized impact -- so easy in fact that we forgot about it! So we're reliving Andrew Davis' action heyday, praising the artistry of montage, running down its amazing accolades, and briefly getting into Roy Huggins' original 60's TV series and the real-life fugitive inspiration.
It's an episode about spectacular train crashes, both the literal one and the behind-the-scenes chaos like not having a "script", relying on Tommy Lee Jones' writing chops, and securing the cooperation of the Chicago Plumbers' Union.
The podcast currently has 115 episodes available.