The Hip Pocket

DAN FIENBERG has been the Chief Television Critic at The Hollywood Reporter for a decade now and hosts TV’s Top 5, a weekly television podcast for the trade. He also writes the Now See This newsletter and was the president of the Television Critics Association. He was a co-founder of HitFix, one of the original writers for the site, and I have spent an enormous amount of time at film festivals and industry events with him. He was part of the Firewall & Iceberg podcast with Alan Sepinwall, and I felt genuinely lucky to work at a publication with the two of them. They are consummate professionals and good all-around dudes, and there was no way I was going to do this podcast without having them as guests eventually.

Anyone who follows Dan on any social media platform is familiar with his long-standing use of Gizmo as his icon, so it should not be a shock that he picked Joe Dante’s Gremlins as his first film. His second pick is another film he has always given a lot of public love, Chris Noonan’s magical Babe. Finally, he threw a real curveball at us with an intense ‘70s film that people don’t discuss nearly as often as they should, Sidney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Craig picked our response film this week, and when you hear his reasoning behind the choice to program Hot to Trot, a talking horse comedy from the ‘80s, I think you’ll be as entertained as we were.

Finally, my choice for the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame this week is a nod both to Craig’s unorthodox choice and my history with Dan, since he was at Sundance with me the year I saw Bobcat Goldthwait’s caustic World’s Greatest Dad.

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The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.

AKELA COOPER is a writer/producer who basically kicks a ton of ass. She is, after all, the writer of Malignant and M3GAN, and she has brought her exuberant nerd energy to a variety of projects over the years. She wrote Hell Fest and The Nun II, and she’s worked on TV shows like American Horror Story, Luke Cage, The 100, Grimm, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. She has been a horror fan since childhood, and that deeply-seated love of the genre shines through in all of her work.

She picked three delightful films for us, and they were all a delight to discuss with her. Her first choice this week is Stephen Norrington’s Blade, and we dig into the pulp delights of the picture as well as its influence on pop culture. Our second film is Adam Wingard’s The Guest, and we spend a good deal of time talking about Dan Stevens, Professional Freak, and the feelings he stirs up in audiences. Her final pick is the film that Ernest Dickerson made when he got bumped off of Blade, and there is much discussion of just how big a weirdo Billy Zane is in Tales From The Crypt Presents: Demon Knight.

Aundria’s the one who picked our response film, the haunting Luca Guadagnino film Bones and All, a dark, strange film that made a perfect dessert after the very full and fun meal that Akela laid out for us.

Finally, this week’s Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry is the deranged genre hybrid Brotherhood of the Wolf, a movie that is about class warfare as much as it is about kung-fu and monsters.

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

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The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.

Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.

SCOTT DERRICKSON is a writer/director/producer whose latest film The Black Phone 2 opened last weekend at #1. His breakthrough film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was in 2005, and his movie Sinister is often cited as one of the scariest films of the 2000s. He works frequently with our guest from earlier this season, C. Robert Cargill, and their partnership includes films like Doctor Strange, The Gorge, and the first Black Phone.

Scott made his picks quickly and confidently, and why not? He picked three great, totemic movies, films that feel like they were inevitable additions to this list. First up is Martin Scorsese’s amazing breakthrough classic, Taxi Driver, and I love that we’re publishing this one right now. I just watched Rebecca Miller’s fantastic new documentary series Mr. Scorsese, and I cannot recommend it more strongly. It digs in to his entire career, dispelling myths (including a few that I repeat during this episode) and clarifying relationships, and it’s a dream for fans of his work. We jumped forward ten years for Scott’s next pick, Michael Mann’s bad-vibes masterpiece Manhunter, the film that introduced Hannibal Lec(k)ter to the big screen. Finally, we wrapped up Scott’s picks with David Fincher’s Se7en, a film that I could talk about every episode.

That’s a rough trio of movies, so Craig’s response film almost feels reactionary. However, the more we talked about it, the more Paddington 2 felt like an entirely appropriate and thematically perfect pairing with the movies Scott wanted to discuss.

Finally, this week’s Hip Pocket Hall of Fame entry is a movie that’s just as demanding and stylistically daring as the three films Scott chose, William Friedkin’s brilliant Sorcerer.

While you’re at it, why don’t you wish Aundria a hearty congratulations, as she’s getting married this weekend. One of the best things about doing this show is the way it’s brought Aundria, Craig, and me together. I love these two, and I love doing this with them. We are so happy for her and her delightful husband.

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.

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!

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.

You can find us at drewmcweeny.com and on your favorite podcasting apps!