Writer and podcaster Gus Lanzetta returns to the podcast from São Paulo, Brazil for a show about Mads Mikkelsen and his 2020 Danish action comedy Riders of Justice.

Along the way we discuss Mikkelsen’s two careers in domestic and international cinema, the history of Danish cinema that dates back to the beginning of the medium, and how Riders of Justice balances action, violence and comedy and puts a uniquely Danish spin on familiar genre tropes.

Plus: Gus lends his Fast Saga expertise to discuss the latest news from the set of Fast X. Has Vin Diesel snapped?

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, Will Sloan, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Gus Lanzetta on Twitter.

Trailer for Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2020)

Music video for “Bitch Better Have My Money” - Rihanna, 2015

Vin Diesel singing “Stay” by Rihanna in his house

Access the entire 72 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/67140452

From Montreal, Rob Rousseau returns to the podcast for a discussion of the decline of comedian Ricky Gervais, with the release of his new Netflix special Super Nature. We’re a long way from the heights of The Office now. Why does Gervais seem more determined now to court controversy than to tell actual funny jokes? Do edgy "anti-woke" comedians with huge platforms realize (or even care) that they are contributing to a cultural anti-trans panic that is already making life dangerous for LGBT people?

Plus: Ontario sleepwalks towards the re-election of Doug Ford as Premier.

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, Will Sloan, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Rob Rousseau on Twitter, and check out his podcasts @insurgentspod and @TRRSpod.

Writer and former NFB senior producer Gerry Flahive joins the podcast to discuss moviegoing in Toronto in the 1970s, at the dawn of the multiplex age. Gerry worked as a teenage usher at the new Imperial Six cinema, under the precise command of cinema manager Phil Traynor, the inspiration for Gerry’s alternate Twitter persona Bert Xanadu, who tweets from the year 1973 where he is both the reigning mayor of Toronto and the manager of the Imperial Six. Bert’s tweets and essays have been collected in Gerry’s new book I Own This Town: The Mayor Bert Xanadu Xanthology.

Gerry and I talk about the many movie theatres, from cavernous palaces to alternate film spaces to grindhouses that used to exist on Yonge Street, the eclectic programming and architecture of the Imperial Six, and the local film culture that led to the development of cinema multiplexes and the Toronto International Film Festival.

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, Will Sloan, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Gerry Flahive and Mayor Bert Xanadu on Twitter.

I Own This Town: The Mayor Bert Xanadu Xanthology by Gerry Flahive is now available at the Spacing store in Toronto and other fine bookstores. Also available as an e-book at Amazon.

Famous Players Theatres “Next Attraction” snipe, mid-1970s

Famous Players Theatres “Gift Books” snipe, 1972

Trailer for Emperor of the North (Robert Aldrich, 1973)

Trailer for The Harrad Experiment (Ted Post, 1973)

Access the entire 88 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/66652078

Will Sloan returns to the podcast for an in-depth discussion of the strange career path of comedian and impressionist Joe Piscopo: from his origins on Saturday Night Live and stardom as their second banana to superstar Eddie Murphy, his short-lived movie career, his bodybuilding phase, his various network tv specials, most notably 2012’s A Night at Club Piscopo for Showtime, to his current life as a conservative talk radio guy in New Jersey.

All of Piscopo’s eighties tv specials discussed on this episode are available to watch on YouTube, and A Night at Club Piscopo is currently streaming on Tubi.

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Will Sloan on Twitter and subscribe to his great podcasts The Important Cinema Club and Michael and Us.

“Kimberly” - Joe Piscopo, 1997

The Vulture Transcript: Joe Piscopo Dissects His Career, From SNL to the Buff Era and Beyond - by Steve Marsh, August 2011

Defector Media’s David Roth returns to Junk Filter to discuss highlights from the long career of veteran action filmmaker Martin Campbell and pay tribute to his work beyond the famous 007 reboots.

We discuss his origins in film and television: his debut in British sex comedies in the seventies, his groundbreaking 1985 BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness with Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker, a terrific “bottle episode” he made for NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street (“Three Men and Adena”), No Escape, his effective 1994 sci-fi with Ray Liotta (set in the year 2022!), and his latest, the Liam Neeson “Hit Man with Alzheimer’s” B-movie Memory.

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow David Roth on Twitter and check out his show with Drew Magary, Distractor: A Defector Podcast

Trailer for Eskimo Nell (Campbell, 1975)

Trailer for No Escape (Campbell, 1994)

Trailer for Memory (Campbell, 2022)

Comedy writer and labor organizer Ursula Lawrence (Drunk History, Adam Ruins Everything) returns to the show from Madison, Wisconsin for a look at 3 epic films that in unique ways depict the life of the controversial president of the Teamsters Union Jimmy Hoffa: Sylvester Stallone in F.I.S.T. (Norman Jewison, 1978), Jack Nicholson in Hoffa (Danny DeVito, 1992) and Al Pacino in The Irishman (Scorsese, 2019).

How do these films contrast Hoffa’s achievements for the American worker with his connections to organized crime, his mysterious disappearance and how he is remembered culturally? Why didn’t Danny DeVito continue directing historical epics? And why is there a scene in Hoffa that takes place in the woods but filmed indoors on a giant soundstage (with a live deer?)

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Ursula Lawrence on Twitter and her French Republican Calendar project

A must-read: Patrick Goldstein’s report for the Los Angeles Times from the set of Hoffa, 1992

Trailer for F.I.S.T. (Norman Jewison, 1978)

TV commercial for Hoffa (Danny DeVito, 1992)

Danny DeVito’s address to the 2011 Teamsters convention in Las Vegas

Access the entire 88 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/65467969

Writer Brian Buster joins me from Los Angeles to discuss David Robert Mitchell’s 2018 mystery Under the Silver Lake, Mitchell’s blank check film after the success of It Follows. Silver Lake played in competition at Cannes but for some reason its distributor A24 got cold feet and after moving the release date a couple of times, dumped it into a few theatres and VOD nearly a year later.

A disaffected and desperate young man named Sam (Andrew Garfield) meets a beautiful blonde (Riley Keough) who vanishes the next day. Sam plays detective to find out where she went, and descends into a mystery world of secret societies, coded messages and conspiracies just below the surface of sunny Tinseltown.

In our spoiler-heavy discussion, Brian and I talk about how Silver Lake anticipated Epstein Brain, this film’s placement in the sub-genre of Ambient Noir, the associations the film has to Hitchcock and Mulholland Drive, and the decoding of the cryptic clues and perceived secret messages of the film taken up online by its fans.

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Brian Buster on Twitter and stay tuned for Brian’s Patreon, coming soon!

Trailer for Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018)

Returning guest Ethan Vestby, a contributor to The Film Stage, joins the pod for a discussion of All Things Wahlberg, including Mark's brand new project, the faith-based comedy/drama Father Stu, based on a true story, co-starring Mel Gibson and directed by Gibson’s girlfriend Rosalind Ross in her feature debut.

Father Stu is the kind of studio movie we don’t see a lot of these days, a personal project aimed at Catholic audiences that Wahlberg partly financed himself along the lines of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ but unlike most entertainment aimed at the religious market, this one is loaded with sleaze and profanity and easily earns its R rating. What does this tell us about the changing world of faith-based entertainment in the new world of the MAGA-influenced religious right and their sudden opposition to “cancel culture”?

Plus we talk about Mark Wahlberg’s business ventures including the Wahlburgers chain, his HBO reality series Wahl Street, and his prolific partnership with the director Peter Berg.

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Ethan Vestby on Twitter.

Trailer for Season 1 of Wahlberg's HBO reality series Wahl Street

Trailer for Father Stu (Rosalind Ross, 2022)

Filmmaker Peter Fishbeast joins me from Belper in Derbyshire, England to discuss the 1969 George Roy Hill blockbuster Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, aka Dudes Rock: Origins.

Butch Cassidy is a great example of the influence the French New Wave had on late sixties Hollywood cinema, as it transitioned towards the New American Cinema of the seventies. It’s a western loaded with countercultural appeal and modern sensibilities, powered by an unexpected Burt Bacharach soundtrack that spawned the first No. 1 song of the seventies, "Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head".

Peter and I talk about the film’s enigmatic director George Roy Hill, the magic of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Dudes Rock avatars, William Goldman’s screenplay being perhaps an unfortunate influence on today’s quippy soy banter in modern blockbusters, and the film’s forgotten prequel.

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, Bryan Quinby, Will Sloan, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Peter Fishbeast on Twitter and visit his website.

Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head - Bobbie Gentry, 1971

Trailer for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)

Trailer for Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (Richard Lester, 1979)

Access the entire 82 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/64822370

Screenwriter and filmmaker Brenden Gallagher joins the program from Los Angeles to discuss two westerns about Toxic Masculinity: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she won Best Director at this year’s Academy Awards, and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

In some ways The Power of the Dog seems to be a film in dialogue with The Searchers, both stylistically and in terms of being a psychological profile of a damaged and dangerous American male archetype. We also talk about the complex legacy of The Searchers, considered one of the greatest American films, but featuring an unapologetically racist hero.

And speaking of the perils of Toxic Masculinity, we also talk about this year’s Academy Awards!

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, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Brenden Gallagher on Twitter and visit his website.

Sacheen Littlefeather turning down Marlon Brando’s Oscar for Best Actor in The Godfather, 1973

Trailer for The Power of the Dog (Campion, 2021)

Trailer for The Searchers (Ford, 1956)