Every now and then, a film critic puts their money where their mouth is and makes a movie for themselves - and sometimes they even prove to be true masters of the craft: Paul Schrader and Francois Truffaut, for example. But MG argues that one of the most impressive debuts of all time is someone who is now a bit forgotten - film historian and Orson Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich - whose incredible one-two punch of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon made him the toast of the town in the early 70s!

Have Margot Robbie and a dead theoretical physicist saved theaters from Covid? Are we recovered from the filmic scurvy of watching nothing but Netflix dating competitions for two years? It’s been a long time since we at Martini Giant have seen a packed house for would be blockbusters like these, so it looks like this brilliant bit of counterprogramming may have done the job! Let’s talk Barbenheimer!

Barbie's Margot Robbie leads Damien Chazelle's three-hour epic Babylon, with a screenplay inspired by Gene Kelly's bona fide masterpiece Singin' in the Rain - and before its release, the studio thought they had the Oscars all locked up! But theatergoers felt very differently - alternately offended and bored by the endless over-the-top antics of the drug-dizzy plot, audiences stayed away in droves, making It the one of the biggest bombs of the past few years! Were they right? MG compares it and its source material in a double-feature bonanza!

Starting with David Fincher's The Social Network, corporate mythologizing has become a major genre, with more and more entries every year - from Danny Boyle's Jobs, to Apple's Tetris, to Hulu's Flamin' Hot movie - based on the creation of spicy Cheetos no less. Have we slipped a peg culturally, since the days of Ghandi and Ali? Or will tonight's double feature of Air - the Air Jordan story - or Blackberry, the fall of the world's most popular handheld device, change MG's mind?

MG is excited to welcome Lily Nichols back to the show with a double feature of surrealist strangeness!  First up we look at a fascinating Belgian comedy called The Brand New Testament, in which God's daughter comes to Earth to fix everything he did wrong -  then we take on Jean-Pierre Jeunet's landmark romantic masterpiece Amélie, who's brilliant visuals and bold new filmmaking reinvigorated French cinema in the early 2000s nearly as much as Jean Luc Godard's Breathless did in the 1960s!

Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen are two of the most successful leading men in movie history, yet they appealed to wildly different audiences: McQueen was the master of detached cool in road romances like The Getaway or the experimental Thomas Crown Affair, whereas Reynolds exuded easy, relatable charm in everything from Gator to Hooper. But their biggest hits came from a single genre: the car chase movie! So buckle up for tonight's double feature of Bullitt and Smokey and the Bandit

Clint Eastwood has directed over 40 feature films, and is now working on what he says will be his last movie, called Juror No. 2 with Nicholas Holt and Toni Collette. So to celebrate, Erick, Chris, and Daniel have chosen three films apiece to serve to celebrate his towering and incredibly varied career. There are, of course, a couple of classics - but also a few picks might be new to many listeners! Come join Martini Giant in wishing this master a happy 93nd birthday!

These days, Jack Nicholson seems to have settled happily into the role of world's-most-casually-dressed-Lakers-fan, but in the 1970's he was arguably the greatest new actor since Brando.  Even before he perfected his explosive rage act for Kubrick's The Shining, he had come to symbolize America's collective frustration, betrayal, and anger at the collapse of the Hippie dream - and no films capture that sadness more accurately than Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail!

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture in part because it was a rebuke of Oscar-bait pretension with its non-western story, diverse cast, and fun unpretentious style - whereas in the leadup to the awards, many avoided the frontrunner, Todd Fields' Tar, because it appeared to be old-school Oscar: a ponderous, self-serious reinforcement of the Great Art. But tonight, along with the gentle indie Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, MG argues that classical doesn't necessarily mean pretentious.

When the Coen Brothers’ comic-noir masterpiece The Big Lebowski hit theaters in 1997, it fizzled with both critics and audiences - but it has since cemented its position in the pantheon of classic sendups of Los Angeles culture to the point that nearly everyone these days knows "the Dude abides."  But Gen-Xers will remember that, for the longest time, the go-to for Los Angeles quotes was a movie that has now completely disappeared from the public consciousness: Steve Martin's LA Story!