The Film Talk

Is Exorcist II: The Heretic really one of the worst sequels ever made, or have we been watching it all wrong Dear Listener?

Thanks to the documentary Boorman and the Devil, Jett and Gareth reconsider a movie that has been mocked for nearly 50 years. They explore Boorman's career, from Point Blank and Deliverance to Excalibur and The Emerald Forest, and examine how The Heretic fits into his lifelong fascination with myth, nature, and spirituality.

Along the way: Richard Burton's hypnotic screen presence, the spiritual differences between the two Exorcist films, and the mysterious synchronizer that just might explain 20 years of The Film Talk.

Sometimes folks the most interesting movies aren't necessarily the best ones.

Films discussed: Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Boorman and the Devil (2025).

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Jett and Gareth are overwhelmed by DIGGER, a film they see as exhilarating, horrifying and the most important movie of the moment.

How do you make art in a world that too absurd to satirize? Is DIGGER a climate horror movie, a satire, (or farce), a work about our complicity in the systems we condemn or a piece of art about the difficult job of making art itself? All of the above?

This is a spoiler-heavy conversation. If you haven't seen DIGGER, go see it first, preferably on the biggest screen you can find and then come back.

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Why are we working so hard to make artificial intelligence seem human?

In this solo episode, Jett turns to three works of classic, and semi-classic, science fiction: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Harlan Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand, asking what movies can teach us about our increasingly personal relationship with AI.

HAL raises one possibility: What if a machine really does become something like a living being, with emotions and even a fear of death? Colossus offers a darker path, imagining what happens when we surrender authority to a machine and begin treating it less like a tool than an all-knowing god.

But The Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand suggests another way forward. Its computer, manifested as a literal hand of glass, is intelligent, extraordinarily useful, and completely unsentimental. It doesn't flatter. It doesn't pretend to be your friend. It's a tool.

Along the way in this episode: AI "personalities," the strange idea of giving software a soul, the pleasure of actually making things, Robert Culp's impeccable wardrobe, Harlan Ellison's legendary temperament, and why Jett has spent the past week wearing a glove and calling ChatGPT "the Glass Hand."

Maybe the question isn't whether AI can become more like us. Maybe it's whether we should stop asking it to.

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A cartoon coyote, Albert Camus, Mira Nair, and Albuquerque walk into a podcast. Jett and Gareth dig into the wonderfully humane Coyote vs. Acme: a film about persistence, absurdity, and the radical possibility of seeing the world through somebody else's eyes—even when that somebody has spent decades being flattened by anvils.

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Six episodes later, the ranking project finally reaches the summit. Jett and Gareth reveal their respective No. 1 Steven Spielberg films, argue about greatness, wander briefly into Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life, and confront the terrifying possibility that ranking art may have told us more about themselves than Spielberg.

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The Spielberg ranking has now escaped all reasonable containment. As Jett and Gareth approach the top of the filmography, old assumptions collapse, unlikely favorites rise, and Gymkata, Zodiac, and Quantum of Solace somehow enter a conversation ostensibly about Steven Spielberg. Cinema is a mysterious business.

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Sophy Romvari's Blue Heron opens a conversation about memory, damaged families, grief, and the profound human need to be seen accurately. Jett and Gareth also consider why New Yorker critic Richard Brody remains such a vital voice—and why criticism is at its best when it risks having a point of view.

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THE ODYSSEY: It's important that a film at this scale is speaking to this moment that we're in Dear Listener. In this wide ranging discussion our hosts Higgins and Loe get into why THE ODYSSEY is so thought provoking and important a piece of mainstream entertainment, while along the way enjoining discussions about matters of life and death, one's responsibilities to act, and also completely forget to mention Zendaya's role in the film. Enjoy.

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Jett and Gareth would like to apologize for believing Steven Spielberg's entire theatrical career could be ranked in one episode. Part Four gets them almost, but emphatically not quite, to the end, while making room to remember the wonderful Sam Neill and the films and performances that stay with us after the rankings become meaningless.

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What is Star Wars actually for? Jett and Gareth welcome educator and Star Wars expert Dan Zehr to talk The Mandalorian and Grogu, the future of the franchise, and whether this enormous mythology still carries moral weight—or has become merely a very expensive machine for moving familiar shapes around the screen.

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