Junk Filter

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We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the premiere of NBC’s crime drama Miami Vice with a new episode of Junk Filter’s continuing series on the show. James Majure returns from Athens, Georgia to discuss the bizarre duelling vanity musical projects of stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas that appeared as the success of the show culturally peaked.

Philip Michael Thomas struck first with a strange solo album for Atlantic Records in 1985, Living the Book of My Life, that came with a famously terrible music video for the single “Just The Way I Planned It”; for some reason PMT promoted this project by reissuing a forgotten anti-drug exploitation film he made in 1978 (co-starring The Gap Band), retitled Death Drug, where he plays a rising musical talent who tries PCP and immediately goes insane, which features ludicrous new sequences shot on a camcorder that make the project even more incoherent.

Don Johnson on the other hand had a solo rock album for CBS Records the following year, Heartbeat, with full label support and an all-star cast of collaborators. It spawned a Top 5 hit with the title track and came with an expensive album-length music video project for HBO that feels like a lost Sonny Crockett episode of Miami Vice.

We also discuss one of the most bizarre episodes of Vice that has this eighties psychedelic vanity production energy, Season 4’s “Missing Hours”, featuring alien abductions, UFOs and (inexplicably) Chris Rock and James Brown.

“Miami Vice at 40: You Can't Go Home Again” by Chaim Roth, for Miami New Times, September 24, 2024

Music video for Heartbeat (Don Johnson, 1986)

Music video for Just The Way I Planned It (Philip Michael Thomas, 1985)

The writer and podcaster Gus Lanzetta returns to the podcast from São Paulo to give our listeners an update on life in Brazil since their Supreme Court banned X: The Everything App from access to the country, and we thought we would pair this with a movie about a revolutionary communication tool that was suddenly not important anymore: Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy-drama BlackBerry.

BlackBerry is that rare Canadian movie that had a worldwide impact; based loosely on a true story, it chronicles the boom and bust of the tech firm Research in Motion based out of Waterloo Ontario, and their “angel investor” Jim Balsillie who scaled the small company up to a global powerhouse with 20 billion in sales annually with their invention of the BlackBerry smartphone, only to crash out years later when the iPhone changed the marketplace once again.

Gus and I talk about the recent boom of movies dramatizing the origin stories of brands and what makes BlackBerry stand out from the rest, what this film has to say about being a Canadian, Glenn Howerton’s terrific performance as the hotheaded Balsillie, and how Johnson pushes the limits of copyright law and the Fair Use exception to tell this story with unlicensed clips and logos.

And Gus tells us all about life in Brazil now that Elon’s latest “jogada de mestre” has led to a mass exodus of Brazilians over to Bluesky and what led up to his idiotic war against the Brazilian Supreme Court that has further jeopardized the company!

Over 30% of all Junk Filter episodes are only available to patrons of the podcast. To support this show directly and to receive access to the entire back catalogue, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Gus Lanzetta on Bluesky.

Part one of Gus Lanzetta and Antonio Uribe’s series The Boku Diaries for American Jank

Trailer for BlackBerry (Matt Johnson, 2023)

Canadian viral video Man Goes Crazy Rips off Shirt During Street Interview

Music video for Tapa no Real, Marcos Valle, 1983

Access this entire 126-minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/178-junk-filter-112189443

Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine from the great left politics and culture podcast Pod Casty For Me join me for a deep dive into Gerard Butler’s trilogy of Has Fallen thrillers, which chronicle the life and times of Secret Service agent (and American hero) Mike Banning.

We discuss all three entries which span the 2010 decade and fuse meathead action cinema with post 9/11 paranoia and anxieties: Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, one of the two 2013 thrillers about a terrorist attack on the White House, the ultraviolent sequel London Has Fallen, released in the wake of the real life terror attacks in London and Paris, and the best film in the franchise so far, Angel Has Fallen, where a weary Mike Banning has to take on the deep state and evil military contractors who have framed him for an assassination attempt on peacenik President Morgan Freeman, which leads him to have to team up with his estranged dad Nick Nolte, interrupting his Unabomber lifestyle.

Plus: a review of Mike Banning’s classified Secret Service dossier (which I found on the internet), and how excited we all are for the return of Butler’s other iconic screen hero Big Nick O’Brien in next January’s Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Follow Pod Casty For Me on Twitter, and you can find out more about the show (and subscribe to their Patreon feed) at their website.

Trailers

Olympus Has Fallen (Antoine Fuqua, 2013)

London Has Fallen (Babak Najafi, 2016)

Angel Has Fallen (Ric Roman Waugh, 2019)

Preview of the 2024 Canal+ streaming series Paris Has Fallen (no Butler in it, though he has a producer credit)

Veteran national politics reporter for Semafor David Weigel returns to the show for a discussion of the new conservative political biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid as The Great Communicator, or as he was known in Russia, The Crusader, for the film is told from the perspective of a former KGB agent (Jon Voight) who identified him early on as the man who would someday defeat the Soviet Union with facts and logic.

There’s a lot to unpack with Reagan, filmed in 2020 during the pandemic and only being released now. This film represents how much the Conservative movement has changed in the Trump era and since this film was shot, which leads us into a discussion about how Reagan has been somewhat diminished in the modern Republican Party, and how this political hagiography is somewhat out of step with the times. Why is a film about this significant historical figure such a low-budget, clumsy affair populated with “stars” like Kevin Sorbo and Robert Davi (as Leonid Brezhnev!) and told from the perspective of defeated Soviet spies, with a new Bob Dylan recording in the end credits?

Over 30% of all Junk Filter episodes are only available to patrons of the podcast. To support this show directly and to receive access to the entire back catalogue, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/junkfilter⁠

Follow Dave Weigel on Twitter and Bluesky, and subscribe to his twice-weekly newsletter “Americana” on Semafor.

Trailer for Reagan (Sean McNamara, 2024)

Access this entire 100 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/176-danpilled-109048208

Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua returns to the show to continue our Danpilled series, this time taking a look at one of the main contributors to their sound, the singer Michael McDonald, who has just released his memoir What a Fool Believes, co-written with Paul Reiser.

Through a look at some of our favourite McDonald songs we discuss his long and productive career, from his troubled childhood to his collaborations (musical and otherwise) with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, to the way he applied what he learned from Steely Dan to his leadership of the Doobie Brothers and his influence on singles through the seventies and eighties. Sober since the mid-nineties, he’s enjoyed a second wind as an artist and pop culture icon in the 21st century through sampling, guest appearances on the music of contemporary artists and as a central figure of the whole concept of Yacht Rock.

Plus: Matthew’s thoughts on the Disney era of the X-Men with the release of Deadpool & Wolverine!

Follow Matthew Perpetua on Twitter and subscribe to the Fluxblog Substack!

The legendary Michael McDonald “Ride like the Wind” SCTV skit

The Doobie Brothers performing “What a Fool Believes” live in 1981

The Milwaukee-based film critic and programmer Chris Cassingham joins the show this week to discuss the great director George Stevens and his 1953 masterpiece Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, about a mysterious gunfighter who finds work with a homestead family in the open range of lawless Wyoming and is drawn into the community’s conflict against a gang of violent cattleranchers who are trying to take over the territory.

George Stevens’ life was transformed by his service in World War II as part of the military’s Special Motion Picture Coverage Unit, bearing witness to D-Day and the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and he returned to Hollywood to become one of the great American dramatic filmmakers with his unofficial fifties trilogy of A Place in the Sun, Giant, and this immortal western that serves both as a classic example of the genre and as a revisionist “psychological western” that questioned heroism, masculinity, the family unit and most importantly, the horror and the toll of gun violence on American life, a work that pushed cinema in the fifties forward towards the modern age, and is cited by some of today’s great directors as a key influence.

Plus: on the eve of the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, a discussion of what was once billed as Hugh Jackman’s final performance as the character in 2017’s Logan, a film that pays explicit (and in our opinion unearned) tribute to Shane.

Over 30% of all Junk Filter episodes are only available to patrons of the podcast. To support this show directly and to receive access to the entire back catalogue, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠⁠patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Chris Cassingham on Twitter and catch up to Chris' film writing here.

Re-release trailer for Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Access this entire 86 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/174-costners-108247008

The film writer Corey Atad returns for a show about the return of Kevin Costner to the director’s chair with the first chapter of his planned four-part theatrical western epic Horizon: An American Saga.

Costner resuscitated his career as a leading man thanks to television with Yellowstone and then surprisingly left the series to begin work on Horizon (which may have been a factor in his wife’s filing for divorce after he started selling his properties to finance the production). Warner Bros. through its studio New Line Cinema agreed to release the first two instalments, initially scheduled to open within weeks of one another, but when the first chapter tanked at the box office the studio indefinitely postponed the release of Chapter Two.

Corey and I went to see the first one (in an empty theatre) and we talk about the film as Costner’s personal vision, how it compares to his other films as a director, and how this planned theatrical epic still cannot escape the shadow of television or transcend the history of the genre.

Follow Corey Atad on Twitter, visit coreyatad.com and subscribe to Corey’s Substack!

Teaser trailer for Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One and Two (Costner, 2024)

Sami Gold, an undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents joins me from New York City to discuss some key texts of reactionary right-wing cinema from the post-Civil Rights era and the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon, what we could call counter-counter revolutionary cinema or Silent Majority cinema.

We begin with a discussion of the John Birch Society, a formerly influential wing of the Republican Party whose ideas we can see being indulged now in Donald Trump’s control of the GOP, including the JBS’s controversial propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A., which argues that the Civil Rights movement is a secret Communist plot to fuel a “Negro-Soviet” takeover of the United States.

John Wayne was once a member of the John Birch Society and we discuss his passion project of the late sixties, the controversial pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets which he co-directed, one of the only studio films about the war made during the war, released in the summer of 1968 in a climate of antiwar protests, assassinations and the rise of Richard Nixon.

And we also discuss the 1970 political satire Joe, starring Peter Boyle as a blue collar, racist, anti-hippie right-winger who strikes up a friendship with a conservative member of the executive class who in a moment of rage murders the drug-dealing boyfriend of his junkie hippie daughter, and how their search for her in New York leads to further carnage, with remarkable echoes to modern politics because these two men represent the two main voter blocks that support Trump today. 

To support this show directly and to receive access to dozens of exclusive episodes, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at ⁠patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Sami Gold on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack, Shmulik’s Takes.

Sami's article "Chris Rufo and the Great Liberal Threat" for Liberal Currents, Feb 27, 2024

"Barry Goldwater vs. The Swinging ’60s: The ‘Choice’ Film” by Daniel McCarthy, for the American Conservative, May 20, 2013

The suppressed 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign commercial Choice

The John Birch Society propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A. (G. Edward Griffin, 1966), courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation

Trailer for The Green Berets (John Wayne and Ray Kellogg, 1968)

UK trailer for Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)

Access this entire 93 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/172-american-v-o-107059565

In the second half of our discussion about the 2016 FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Karen Geier and I dig into more of the great performances including Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, Sterling K. Brown as Christopher Darden, and Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and talk about some of the other highlights of the series, including the possible romance between Clark and Darden the show illustrates, and the episodes about the Bronco chase, the racism of the LAPD and the experiences of the sequestered jury members, and a salute to the other creative forces of the show, producers and showrunners Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, specialists in what they call “anti-biopics”, depicting the lives of people who wouldn’t seem worthy of the biopic treatment, with full immersions into these characters and their worlds. 

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson is available for streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally. 

Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.

With the recent death of O.J. Simpson and this month’s 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a look at the other great O.J. tv epic of 2016, Ryan Murphy’s 10 part series American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson:

On part one of our discussion we discuss the cottage industry of content that surrounded the Simpson trial, and how Murphy rose to the occasion in this series by approaching this story as history, tragedy and camp, infusing soap opera theatrics into the retelling of a true life televised trial that in turn led to the replacement of soap operas with reality television, and how the Kardashian family, through their involvement in the trial, directly benefited from this cultural sea change. 

We discuss in detail a few of the fine performances from the ensemble cast, including from some unexpected turns: Connie Britton as Faye Resnick, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey and Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J., and we dig into one of the best episodes, the one that centers on Marcia Clark and the one episode that deviates from the source material, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life, and dramatizes moments from Marcia Clark’s 1997 memoir Without a Doubt, focusing on the intense sexism she faced while trying to prosecute this case. 

Part two of this discussion, on more of the great performances and some of our favourite moments in the series, is available on the Patreon feed.

To support this show directly and to receive access to Part two of this discussion and dozens of exclusive episodes, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson is available for streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally.