We've come down with a case of Limania for this episode -- that's right, we're talking about Doug Liman's 2014 sci-fi time guy, EDGE OF TOMORROW! This is another big one for the household. We're obsessed with the intersection of Tom Cruise's personal vs screen personas, Bill Paxton's intersection with JFK's assassination, and Emily Blunt's intersection of aliens and her Big Sword. We're getting into the title controversy and how this is film is so much greater than the sum of its parts. And...

It's our second spooky episode of spooky season and we've decided its finally time to cover a Gartbage touchstone, a part of our specific heritage: it's SHAUN OF THE DEAD from 2004. We're talking about the inspirations for the film, zombies in general, synthesizing genre convention vs parodying genre tropes, and the lost art of back-of-DVD writing. This movie hit at a very formative time for us, so we're talking teen years, the doors to film that this movie opened to us, and how it expanded...

We're back in our regular format just in time for spooky season and for one of Nick's favourite horror films. A tale of ambiguity, repression, and corruption: it's Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS from 1961! CW: due to the nature of this movie's story, child sexual abuse is discussed in general terms. It's a real Freudian time on the podcast this week as we discuss Truman Capote's "skull beneath the skin" gothic concepts, Deborah Kerr's masterful portrayal of psychosexual ambiguity, why you...

THEY (WE) LIVE! We've returned from our summer break with a big discussion on the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Get ready to add items to your watchlists because we've got recommendations for your 4th quarter film-viewing pleasure! We're talking robots, detectives, directorial debuts, cannibals, ghosts, nightbitches, Ralph Fiennes' dong, anti-colonial action, peacocks, ice cream truck drivers, game shows, organic buildings, Kafka-esque nightmares, punks, street fighter,...

The final episode of our Hong Kong mini-series takes us into the 21st century! It's the cop drama-thriller box office dynamo, INFERNAL AFFAIRS! We're going full spoilers on the movie discussion this week. Consider yourself warned! Nick's theory that all Hong Kong movies from the time were Handover Movies continues to be true as we discuss Buddhist hell, avoiding undercover cop clichés, Andy Lau's unfathomable superstardom, and Tony Leung's cute nicknames. To wrap up the Hong Kong series,...

Summer of Hong Kong continues, and today we're pivoting from the 80's and martial arts into the 90's and emotions! And who else could we be talking about but Wong Kar-wai and his 1994 breakthrough, CHUNGKING EXPRESS! While a touchstone for HK cinema today, Wong Kar-wai's big splash into the arthouse scene was anything but at the time. We're discussing how Wong found his way to his style leading up to CHUNGKING, how it captured the Hong Kong attitudes at such a precise moment, and the...

Welcome to the 80's! We all remember the time: lime green overalls, bolo ties, and dynamite doppelgängers. That's right, Kung Fjune continues with the Hong Kong movie that kicked off the Girls with Guns genre: Corey Yuen's YES, MADAM! from 1985! It was the high-five heard around the world: Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock's first starring roles. We're running down just how much these two women could kick one's ass, especially Rothrock's Grand Master status and how she was cooking fools...

We're back after a brief hiatus with another geographically centered mini-series, this time focused on the movies of Hong Kong! And to kick it off, Nick is finally making good on his longstanding threat to talk Shaw Bros: it's Lau Kar-Leung's THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN (1978)! 36th Chamber is an enormous tentpole in kung fu film, and one of the first post-Bruce Lee HK movies to break through to international audiences. We're probing into what made it so influential, how it established...

Welcome to the finale of our petit français mini-series, and we're going out with a bang! It's one of the biggest blueprint movies out there that firmly established the idea of the "cool" assassin, it's Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 crime masterpiece: LE SAMOURAI We've seen it all before: the taciturn, lone wolf assassin who is a perfect precision instrument has a hit go bad, his employer betrays him, and the police are on his tail. But this is the one that set the template! We're talking all...

We're continuing our exploration of some French-language favs with Ariane Louis-Seize's feature-length debut, 2023's HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON! If you dig any modern vampire story, from Let the Right One In to What We Do in the Shadows, you owe it to yourself to check this film out! Major trigger warning if the title doesn't give it away: we discuss suicide in this episode! Also, full spoilers. This is a film of major firsts, from directing through starring and...

Bonjour and bienvenue au Garbage Film's first installment in a short series on French films, and what better place to start than the film that defined the heist movie, Jules Dassin's 1955 classic RIFIFI! (If you've never seen it, you can check it out on the Internet Archive!) We're talking Parisian slang, awful crime novels, connections with Jean-Pierre Melville, how you adapt something you hate, pistol-toting authors, and the interpersonal dynamics of France's underworld More than anything...

It's a St Patrick's Day spectacular on Gartbage Film with the most Irish movie around: Andrew Davis' THE FUGITIVE! It's easy to forget now, but THE FUGITIVE was a craze in 1993 and had an outsized impact -- so easy in fact that we forgot about it! So we're reliving Andrew Davis' action heyday, praising the artistry of montage, running down its amazing accolades, and briefly getting into Roy Huggins' original 60's TV series and the real-life fugitive inspiration. It's an episode about...

The spring showers have begun their annual process of bringing May flowers, and thus we bid goodbye to Carp-winter on this final episode in the series. We're going back to the very beginning with what Carpenter refers to as his first "real" movie, the germ from which his career grew: it's 1976's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13! We're discussing Carpenter's humble-yet-cynical beginnings, his love of sieges, and his inspirations to create this movie before we dive into the ASSAULT's path from period...

Carp-winter continues with the final chapter in John Carpenter's Apocalpyse Trilogy: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS from 1994! We're sorry about the balls! Reality is on trial as we explore the obvious and not-so-obvious meta layers of Carpenter's Lovecraftian universe, aided and abetted by Sam Neill's villainous energy (complimentary) and Carpenter's propensity for Wet Evil. We're getting super deep into how the heavy lifting of the narrative's unreality is accomplished through Carpenter's...

It's week 2 of Carp-winter, our series on John Carpenter and his Apocalpyse Trilogy! Today's mammoth episode likely means excommunication from one or several religious institutions for the podcast. because it's the trilogy's middle-child: 1987's PRINCE OF DARKNESS! Carpenter is one of our best filmmakers who will notice a thing and make a movie about it, and this one is tied to his discovery of Quantum Mechanics. How much do you need to know about quantum mechanics? According to JC: nothing,...

It's the 100th episode of Gartbage Film! To celebrate we had to cover one of our very favourite movies from one of our very favourite directors including one of our very favourite dogs: it's John Carpenter's THE THING from 1982! We're covering it all: how Carpenter set out to create a different type of horror movie than Halloween, Dean Cundey's approach to lighting and framing, Ennio Morricone's 3 soundtracks, our theories of who gets Thing'd and when, and most importantly, Jed the wolfdog....

2023 is dead; long live 2023! We're here with our year end wrapup, talking about our favourite performances, movies we saw on airplanes, and our favourite theatrical experiences. But most importantly, we put together our respective top 5s of the year and bestow the 1st annual Trashie award for our favourite of 2023! And don't worry, we keep it spoiler free, so listen without fear! But just in case you want to be truly blind, here are the 2023 movies discussed: Blackberry Anatomy of a...

Happy holidays to all! We're here with the trashy counterpart of our holiday episodes, Richard Donner and Bill Murray's SCROOGED! Stop us if you've heard this one: a curmudgeon doesn't like Christmas and three ghosts want to fix that. Reviews have always been mixed since its 1988 premiere, so we're discussing what works, what doesn't, dapper Bobcats, and why we should thank Elaine May. Plus: the return of a foundational segment, and we explore whether or not this movie is subliminal...

It's the most sentimental month of the year, so we're turning to one of our most December-themed sentimental comedies: Ernst Lubitsch's classic tale of love and retail nightmares, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER from 1940! The Shop Around the Corner gets remade pretty often, and it's easy to see why: the movie's a timeless, breezy delight. We're discussing what makes it timeless, including how the retail experience of the 1940's mostly hasn't changed and the enemies-to-lovers tropes. We're...

Thrillvember continues with a title that many will know from its constant looping on cable. Beware what floppy disks you shove in your computer because you might get caught in 1995's THE NET. Just as last week's episode on THE PARALLAX VIEW captured the anxieties of the 70's, so does this week's dawn-of-the-internet film. Anxieties like: can Sandra Bullock trust pizza.net with her personal information? Where did I put my floppy disk? And is there a modem on the beach? Despite its...

This month we're spurning classic Noirvember fare for a month devoted to its stressed spawn: the investigative paranoia thriller! We're starting with the middle chapter of Alan J Pakula's paranoia trilogy: THE PARALLAX VIEW from 1974! Parallax is the least celebrated of Pakula's paranoia trilogy films, but we here on the pod love it: its (unfortunately) timely themes, how it feels about corporations, and its absolutely wild visual presentation. We get into deep discussion on the Parallax...

It's showtime! Gartbage Film is back just in time to squeeze in a spooktacular special. Before the main event we're discussing the perennial spooky movies we can't go a year without and new-to-us spooky movies we think you should squeeze into your schedules. But the real reason we're all here: to talk about the ghost with the most, BEETLEJUICE! Beetlejuice is the movie with something for everyone in its yet-to-be-famous cast and crew: Michael Keaton, goth Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton,...

We laughed, we cried, we TIFF’d. We’re here with a mini-episode to discuss what we watched at the Toronto International Film Festival, all spoiler-free. See below for the list of movies discussed, just in case you want to go into any of these blind! We’re discussing our favourite performances, what made us laugh the most, and the best soundtracks. We also break down our top 3 movies, along with some similar titles so you can decide if you’d like to see them too! Profit from the distress we...

This week we're heading to where the vampires hang out: it's Matt Johnson's period piece of comedic Canadiana, the 2023 sensation BLACKBERRY! Come with us on a journey through Canadiana as we discuss Matt Johnson's career and his breakthrough with Nirvanna the Band the Show, Nick's personal Blackberry use, the finer points of Kitchener-Waterloo, the Canadarm, Timbits, Don Cherry, and Jay Baruschel's stranglehold on 90's Canadian kid's lives. It's also the perfect opportunity to ask the...