Junk Filter

The film writer Corey Atad and I went on opening day to see the new Clint Eastwood courtroom drama Juror #2, which is getting an extremely limited release in North America even though Warner Bros. gave it a full rollout in the UK, France and Spain. Why is David Zaslav doing Clint, still working at age 94, one of the icons of American cinema and of Warner Bros., so dirty?

Before seeing Clint’s latest, Corey embarked on a journey into the last decade of Eastwood’s work for his Substack, so we touch on these films and where Juror #2 fits in with the preoccupations of Clint in his Late Style period, a series of films that examine what takes to be a hero, the concepts of right and wrong, the challenges of modern American life, and the people trying to do their best within failing systems, in this case a struggling justice system not designed to handle people operating out of self-interest.

In our discussion we don’t give away any spoilers for Juror #2 that aren’t in the trailer. Go see this movie!

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 Corey Atad on Twitter and visit coreyatad.com

Corey's interview with Juror #2 screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams, for GQ, November 15, 2024

Corey’s reviews of all the Late Style Clint movies discussed in this episode are on his Substack - here’s his review of Juror #2.

“The Mystery Behind Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 Release Is Solved” by Pamela McClintock, for THR, Nov 4, 2024

“Halftime in America” - Clint’s 2012 Super Bowl ad for Chrysler, directed by David Gordon Green

Trailer for Sully (Clint Eastwood, 2016)

Trailer for Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)

Access this entire 48-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/186-apprentice-2-115230237

On part two of our discussion about The Apprentice, Sami Gold and I discuss the 2024 election and have a more specific conversation about the role of Trump in modern political life and how he’s changed both political parties, and our concerns about the outcome of the 2024 election.

Sami also brings us a report from the “Make America Healthy Again” rally in Washington DC with Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson.

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

“There’s No Check on Trump Except Reality”: A Q&A With Wayne Barrett, by Alex Shephard and Theodore Ross, for The New Republic, December 1, 2016

CW: This episode discusses cinematic sexual violence.

Sami Gold, undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents, returns to the podcast for a two-part deep dive into the controversial new Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice, which was released weeks before the 2024 election despite half-hearted attempts from the Trump campaign to block the film. 

Featuring Sebastian Stan as young Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as his notorious mentor, the political fixer Roy Cohn, The Apprentice exceeded our low expectations. Part one of our discussion is about the film itself: the challenges of depicting Trump cinematically, an evaluation of how Toronto does standing in for Manhattan in the seventies and eighties, and the mixed reaction to the film from within Trump’s inner circle. 

Part two of our discussion, on Trumpism in general and the upcoming election, is available on the Patreon feed. 

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

“Don't Mess With Roy Cohn” by Ken Auletta, for Esquire, December 1978

“How Gotham Gave Us Trump”, by Michael Kruse, for Politico, July/August 2017

“The Apprentice at Cannes: Location Manager Richard Hughes on the Whirlwind Of 50 Locations In 30 Days”, from the Directors Guild of Ontario’s “The Wider Lens”, May 21, 2024

International trailer for The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

The author and film critic Adam Nayman returns to Junk Filter to discuss the new Jason Reitman race-against-time comedy thriller Saturday Night about the backstage antics leading up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, a feature film that serves an an ode to its producer Lorne Michaels while trying to spin tension and suspense out of a foregone conclusion. 

Reitman is back in Oscar Bait mode after having some success with the new Ghostbusters films, but this one, like many of his recent award season efforts, failed to connect with audiences. Adam and I discuss the film’s shortcomings, which real life characters it chooses to venerate and which it chooses to attack or demean, and how Reitman, in his supposed recreation of a comedy revolution, actually values the establishment of an institution. 

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 Adam Nayman on Twitter. 

Saturday Night Live Deserved Better Than Saturday Night, by Adam Nayman for The New Republic, September 30, 2024

Trailer #1 for Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024)

Access this entire 68-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/183-curse-of-meg-114731524

The film writer Meg Shields returns from Vancouver for a spooky season show about one of her favourites, the 1961 Hammer Films gothic horror The Curse of the Werewolf, the first starring role for the great Oliver Reed.

Based loosely on Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris, Hammer's only werewolf movie is a unique take on the usual lycanthropic fare, positing it as a spiritual curse tied to a person's environment rather than something you catch from a werewolf bite. Set in Spain, the film follows Reed as a young man who gets a job at a wine vineyard… cursed to transform into a werewolf when the moon is full. His only hope for a normal life depends on the love of a good Catholic woman. Complications ensue.

Despite its controversial violence and memorable werewolf transformation effects, the film was initially unsuccessful but has since garnered a cult following and is now considered one of Hammer’s best. Reed's tragic performance, mirroring his future troubled life, adds depth to this dark tale.

Plus: some great quotes from Oliver’s 1979 autobiography “Reed All About Me” and Meg’s takes on some of the other Horror FX movies now streaming on Criterion Channel, along with The Curse of the Werewolf. 

Follow Meg Shields on Twitter.

Trailer for The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

The author Jacob Bacharach returns to continue this podcast’s look at Megalopolis. On this episode we compare Coppola’s latest to another overheated epic about a visionary architect, King Vidor’s ludicrous 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Coppola has acknowledged the film version of The Fountainhead as a key influence on Megalopolis, but what Jacob and I value about these two films is how they each rebuke the reactionary source material: Vidor does it through hyperbole while Coppola rejects Rand’s philosophy outright in his parable about America as a near-future Roman Empire. And both films are intensely personal projects with Vidor pointing the way towards the future of cinematic language (no doubt inspiring Paul Verhoeven and the Coen Brothers) and Coppola emptying out his bag of tricks to finally finish a deranged project he spent half his life hoping to make.

And Jacob and I contrast the ways we each saw Megalopolis: from a packed out IMAX cinema in Toronto with a live-streamed Coppola q&a and the full “immersive” presentation to being the only people in a suburban cinema in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was the best time we each had in a movie theatre in eons.

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 Jacob Bacharach on Twitter and visit jacobbacharach.com

“Ayn Rand Made Me a Communist”, by Jacob Bacharach for the New Republic, January 27, 2016

Trailer for The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Second trailer for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (that got pulled by Lionsgate)

CW: this episode contains spoilers for Joker 2 and discussions of cinematic sexual violence.

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns to the podcast to discuss the Reverse Barbenheimer of 2024: the more or less simultaneous release of two extremely expensive blockbusters, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, two films that, as it turned out, nobody wanted to see.

The original Joker was a riff on Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and the sequel drew inspiration from his earlier musical New York, New York as well as Coppola’s One from the Heart, but it was a shock to the studio and to fans of the first film when this unnecessary sequel turned out to be of little interest to general audiences (especially when word got out it was a musical, downplayed in the marketing) and was taken as a slap in the face by a significant section of the fanbase.

Megalopolis was not expected to be a hit but got a one-week theatrical release in the IMAX format and flabbergasted those few who saw it on that scale with its ludicrous plot, grandiose posturing and eye-popping visuals. But will this grand cinematic folly be reconsidered in the future as so many previous Coppola films have? We say yes. 

We discuss all four of these films, offer a post-mortem on where it all went wrong for Joker 2, and profess our unexpected enthusiasm for Megalopolis and why we think it bizarrely succeeds where these other bloated vanity productions all fail.

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 Jessica Ritchey on Bluesky, and support her work on Patreon.

Trailer for New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977) 

Trailer for One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)

First trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)

First trailer for Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Music video for “My Life”, Billy Joel, 1978

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/180-miami-vice-113085968

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)