SARAH WATSON is a writer/producer who is best known as the creator of The Bold Type, the author of a terrific YA novel called Most Likely, and for her work on the long-running Parenthood. We met through mutual friends and bonded over general movie nerdery, and watching her climb through the ranks of writing rooms has been a huge pleasure over the years. Plus she’s a great dog owner, and, honestly, what higher praise is there?

She’s currently hard at work on seasons two and three of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but decided to take some time to talk to us about three movies that are hugely important to her. First up is The Dish, a delightful Australian comedy about a team at a remote radio dish who play an important role in the Apollo moon landing mission. Then there’s the Brit Marling/Mike Cahill film Another Earth, which, like most Brit Marling projects, is an absolute vibe. And then there’s the coming-of-age drama A Walk on the Moon, with Viggo Mortensen and Diane Lane.

Aundria picked this week’s response film, the terrific Denis Villenueve SF/drama Arrival, and it dropped right into the line-up in a delightful way.

Finally, this week’s Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry is one of my favorite films of the ‘90s, the Robert Zemeckis adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel Contact.

I hope you enjoy this hangout with Sarah as much as I did, and I encourage you to dig into her IMDb page and check out her work. She’s the best.

Support The Hip Pocket over at Patreon, where we’re neck-deep in recording a full season of bonus episodes!

Support The Hip Pocket on BlueSky!

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

PHIL NOBILE JR. is the editor-in-chief of Fangoria magazine, which is kicking ass and taking name these days. Before this, you may have known him as part of the Birth. Movies. Death. editorial team, where he spent a ton of energy writing about his deeply-seeded love of the James Bond franchise. He’s also worked as a producer on films like Horror Noire, Satanic Panic, and VFW, and you’ve probably seen him in documentaries as a talking head. While you might guess that he’d pick all horror films or maybe spy movies because of his Bond mania, he threw us a delightful curveball instead.

First up, we’ve got Peter Fonda’s lyrical, heartbroken follow-up to Easy Rider, the recently reclaimed and restored The Hired Hand, co-starring Vera Miles and the great Warren Oates. This one will sneak up on you, and I think the same is true of his second film this week. It was a legendary pain in the ass for its studio, but I adore Elaine May’s Mikey & Nicky, co-starring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. Finally, he picked a movie that ties together this week’s theme of unusual male friendships, a legendary comedy that just got a legacy sequel last week in theaters. That’s right. Turn it up to 11, because we’re talking about Rob Reiner’s 1984 This Is Spinal Tap.

Our reaction film for Phil is the first entry in one of the unlikeliest ongoing film franchises right now as Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, and a fistful of Michael Caine impressions hit the road in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip.

We inducted a movie into the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame this week that’s all about the way men are sometimes pressed together into unlikely friendships in suburbia, and how that can lead to a sort of spiraling collective insanity. I hope you love Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs as much as I do.

I hope Phil enjoyed his time in The Hip Pocket as much as we enjoyed having him, and I strongly encourage you to support him and the entire Fangoria team. They couldn’t be doing any better these days, and I am genuinely proud to be a subscriber.

Support The Hip Pocket over at Patreon, where we’re neck-deep in recording a full season of bonus episodes!

Support The Hip Pocket on BlueSky!

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

KATIE RIFE is a freelance writer and critic from Chicago who is best known for her deep focus on genre and exploitation fare. She was the news editor for The AV Club from 2014 to 2019, and then Senior Editor from 2019 to 2022. She is currently writing for outlets like RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, Indiwire, and Vulture. You can get a taste of what she’s like from her round-up of the best of last year’s horror films.

The minute Katie sent her list over, I knew we were in for a wild ride. Her first pick is the scuzztastic vigilante picture, A Gun For Jennifer. Somehow, that almost feels tame compared to her second pick, the international grindhouse classic, Female Prisoner Scorpion - Jailhouse 41. Even if you don’t know that movie, you probably know the theme song. Finally, she picked a straight-up exploitation masterpiece, the movie that put Russ Meyer on the map. That’s right… we’re talking about Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Our response film was chosen by Aundria, who took the “violent women” theme and went a different direction with it. It was a delight to dig into Rob Reiner’s Misery with Katie as a result.

Finally, my pick for this week’s Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry is a film that was a major jump forward for a filmmaker who got his start making women-in-prison films for Roger Corman. I dearly love the 1986 film Something Wild, and hope I’ve done it justice with this piece.

This is a great indication of what kind of guests and conversations we’re having this season. I am delighted by the way the show continues to evolve, and by the way our guests come in ready to play. Our thanks to Katie for taking the time.

Support The Hip Pocket over at Patreon, where we’re gearing up for a full season of bonus episodes!

Support The Hip Pocket on BlueSky!

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

C. ROBERT CARGILL was, of course, Massawyrm in his Ain’t It Cool days. He was also Carlyle over at Spill. Those are ancient credits, though. These days, he’s hard at work with his new film The Black Phone 2, and he’s got a story featured in the new anthology It’s The End of the World As We Know It, a collection of stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. He’s maybe best known for Sinister or the first Doctor Strange, and for doling out tons of sunshiney advice for screenwriters on social media. He picked three movies that approach nostalgia in different ways, and it’s quite a line-up.

First, there’s Masters of Time (or Time Masters, depending on how you see it listed), a French animated film from the director of Fantastic Planet. It’s a brain-bending science-fiction picture that you truly have to see for yourself. His second film is the blisteringly funny (and wildly influential) Hellzapoppin’, a massive success in its time that is now largely forgotten. We get into the reasons behind that before we move on to his final film, the uber-charming Roll Bounce.

Our reaction film to him was Drunken Master II, a film I picked because all three of Cargill’s films were just overflowing with joy, and that’s the way Drunken Master II makes me feel as well.

Finally, our addition to the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame this week is the strange, hard-to-categorize but easy-to-adore The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Like I said, we cover a lot of ground in this one, and I hope you guys enjoy it.

Support The Hip Pocket over at Patreon, where we’re gearing up for a full season of bonus episodes!

Support The Hip Pocket on BlueSky!

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

NICK “TIGER” WIGER is celebrating the tenth year of co-hosting Doughboys, where he and Mike review chain restaurants. He also co-hosts Get Played, a video-game podcast that has special bonus episodes that focus on anime, one of Wiger’s passions. He showed up ready to share that passion with us, and I thought it was a great trio of titles, representing three very different type of storytelling.

First up, there’s The Castle of Cagliostro, the first feature film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a unique title in his filmography because of the origins of the film, but you can feel his voice loud and clear in the film’s energy. His second film is one of the foundational classics of the genre, the great Ghost in the Shell. And to wrap it up, he chose Look Back, a film that came out last year and that should have gotten way more attention than it did.

Our response film is a movie I once discussed onstage with Roger Ebert at his film festival in Champaign-Urbana, Rin Taro’s Metropolis, and it was definitely interesting to revisit it after almost 20 years.

Finally, this week’s selection for the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame is a film that is not anime, but the way it used anime as an inspiration is dazzling, and the result is a film that I rewatch often and love more every time. Let’s talk about Speed Racer, because it is always a good time to talk about Speed Racer. Always.

Support The Hip Pocket over at Patreon, where we’re gearing up for a full season of bonus episodes!

Support The Hip Pocket on BlueSky!

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

Criterion reached out to me recently to talk about their new release of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. I was delighted to see them announce a 4K remaster of the film. My own copy is from so long ago that I’m pretty sure it was in 480p. At first, I was just interested in seeing the disc, but I saw them mention that François Girard was going to be available for a few interviews.

My thanks to Diana and the fine folks over at Criterion, who had to really work to pin the time down for my chat with Girard. The new 4K release is a thing of breathtaking beauty, so make sure you pick it up in stores now. My thanks to François Girard, who was every bit as interesting and erudite as I hoped he’d be. And my thanks to Craig and Aundria for continuing to indulge my efforts to try to turn The Hip Pocket into something special for film fans of all types.

We’ll be back with new episodes of The Hip Pocket on August 29, and we’re already watching movies, one after another, to get ready for the great guests we’ve got lined up. Here’s hoping you guys are enjoying all of this as much as we are.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

I’ve never met PETER FILARDI or had, to the best of my knowledge, any contact with him. I certainly know his work. Both Flatliners and The Craft were big movies when they came out, and Filardi was at Fantasia, the Montreal film festival I attended for several years, with his movie Ricky 6 the first time I went. He’s attending the Chattanooga Film Festival this year with his new short film, Damn Handy, and when they pitched him the basic premise of our show, he said he was interested.

As soon as we started communicating about his hip pocket choices, I knew we were in for a good show. Peter is thoughtful, a lifelong film fan who came to his craft (ha!) in a kind of odd sideways manner. We decided to talk about movies that he knew first as books because he didn’t live in a place where he had access to movies when he was young, and his three films are all big beautiful significant films.

First up, we talk about Roman Polanski’s brilliant and haunted adaptation of Macbeth. Next up, it’s The Black Stallion, a gorgeous piece of pure cinema. And finally, it’s the fantastic and feisty One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. All three of those films are incredible, and any one of them would be enough for a full episode, but to discuss all three in one conversation? Delightful.

Finally, we picked The World According to Garp as our response film, for reasons I explain in the episode, and it feels like it was a perfect punctuation mark to the larger conversation. While we may have started the conversation as complete strangers, by the time we wrapped things up with Peter, it felt like all of us had gotten to know each other a bit better, which is the exact point of the show.

A huge thanks to Dustin at CFF and to all the fine folks who work to put on such a great event for their audience every year. It is an honor to have been invited, and I suspect this is just the first in a series of festival appearances and live shows we’re going to do for The Hip Pocket. Here’s hoping the next time we work with CFF, it’s live and in person, all three of us together.

But wait! Would you like to actually watch this episode instead of just listening to it? Well, then, Chattanooga Film Festival has some terrific news for you. Visit their YouTube channel to see it!

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

BRIAN DUFFIELD is a writer/director who has been one of the most acclaimed (and busiest) screenwriters of the last decade. He has shown up on The Black List, the annual selection of the best-loved unproduced scripts in Hollywood, roughly 50 times in the last ten years, which is mathematically confusing but impressive. We talk about his unusual upbringing in this episode, and we dig into just how wild it is that he grew up denied of mainstream pop culture, only to become the creator of Spontaneous and No One Will Save You. His upcoming adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s wildly popular novel Whalefall is in production now, but he took some time to join us with one of the most personal line-ups of the season.

He chose three films that tell an unusual story about his desire to become a storyteller. First up, there’s the 1973 Christian exploitation film A Thief in the Night, a film that was new to all three of us. Then he chose The Prince of Egypt, the animated musical that kicked off DreamWorks Animation. Finally, he selected the sweaty Southern drama, Black Snake Moan, and he managed to tell us a story that tied all three of these films together in a way I found both surprising and completely logical.

Our reaction film for him is the Lars Von Trier feel-bad epic Breaking the Waves, one of the few films that ever stirred real feelings of faith in me, an avowed atheist.

And finally, for the last Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry for the season, I chose Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant, beautiful mediation on life, Ikiru.

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.
Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. 
It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

BEN HOSLEY is more than just a podcast producer. He runs his own fashion line, and he produces an annual Christmas album that has become a cult sensation. He met the Blank Check boys at UCB, where they first proposed a podcast that sounded like an extended bit, a show that would talk about only The Phantom Menace, as if there had never been another Star Wars film. Who knew that ten years later, they would have the most acclaimed movie podcast in the world?

One of the most popular recurring bits on the show is when they have Ben choose a movie between their longer miniseries, and over the years, he’s picked titles like Fletch, Under Siege 2, and Clifford, the Martin Short comedy. They’ve come to know those films as “porch movies” because of the way Ben watched them as a kid, and I knew when we invited him on that we’d get some eclectic picks. He did not disappoint, either, bringing us three totally different films to discuss.

First, he picked the 1997 survival thriller The Edge. He also picked Dennis Hopper’s searing 1982 film Out of the Blue. Finally, he wrapped things up in a big warm hug of a movie, the 1989 comedy Uncle Buck.

Our response film to Ben felt like a perfect bookend to Out of the Blue in the form of 1987’s harrowing River’s Edge.

Finally, we decided to add Rock’n’Roll High School to the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame. After all, David Fincher once declared it to be “a perfect movie.” Sounds like a recommendation to me!

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.

JOE LYNCH has directed movies, TV, and music videos for almost 20 years now. With his long-time buddy Adam Green, he was the co-creator and co-star of Holliston, a truly bizarre sitcom, and they have a long-running podcast called The Movie Crypt where they’ve talked to basically anyone who has ever made a horror film, and they also host an annual marathon to raise money for a Yorkie charity. You may have seen his movies Everly with Selma Hayek or Mayhem with Steven Yeun or Suitable Flesh with Barbara Crampton and Heather Graham. He is perpetually busy, so we were lucky to find a time for him to pick three movies to discuss.

First up is Short Time, a Dabney Coleman vehicle that doesn’t feel like any other Dabney Coleman movie. Then he picked the beautiful Wayne Wang film Smoke, starring Harvey Keitel. And finally, he takes a wild left turn to choose the disco era ensemble comedy Thank God It’s Friday.

Our response film is a big swing from one of our most flamboyant filmmakers, and I have loved it since the moment it was released, so let’s talk about Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

Finally, I decided to induct into the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame a movie that polarized audiences when it came out, and it still feels completely insane when you see it now. I get it if you don’t love Hudson Hawk, but I do.

If you’d like to support The Hip Pocket at Patreon, you can find us at https://www.patreon.com/c/DrewMcWeeny.

If you’d like to find us on BlueSky, you can find us at https://bsky.app/profile/itsthehippocket.bsky.social.

The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer. It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.