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What’s the current candidate for TV G.O.A.T., critically or anecdotally? My picks fills the gap here: HBO’s post-9/11 show the last all the way till 2008, its most prescient in regards to the War on Drugs, Police Reform, and a genuine reeducation of the smarter public on civics: David Simon’s The Wire. On this episode, joined by Ted Heycraft, we discuss: How does the literary social novel survive into the genre of Peak TV, where a story might take a long, boring time, to setup its...

Before the advent of the current Peak TV era, television has seen its reputation burnished from the low idiot box cool medium to the novelistic adult venue for sophistication that, in especially the last few years, has been collectively stealing talent from and kicking the ass of its audio/visual counterpart, cinema. How did we get to Peak TV? What were the isolated beacons of quality before the era? In this first of a three-part and — as all G.O.A.T. naturally conversations go — highly...

Director Jonathan Demme had the reputation as one of the most humanist filmmakers — meaning his films had the ethos of “no one is evil” and everyone had their reasons — In another episode that doubles both as a movie appreciation and career retrospective, Also:

Quentin Tarantino's ethos was once described, efficiently, by the online writer Film Crit Hulk thusly: “Never hate a movie.” That ethos never had a better distillation than the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood except for one joyous example — its novelization.

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The one film in Michael Mann’s filmography that he rarely speaks about is his second theatrical feature and his one foray into fantasy, an unfortunate experience both with its production and post-production. On this episode, I’m joined by Ted Haycraft and Lani Gonzalez as we discuss: Also: blah Haycraft is film critic for Evansville’s WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page. Gonzalez writes about film for both Book and Film...

Deliverance author James Dickey’s final novel, an intense and primal WWII story about a crashed Air Force pilot trying to make his way through the Tokyo firebombing north to Alaska, was published in 1993 and promptly given to top shelf screenplay attempts at this nearly dialogue-free story. The first was in 1996 by David and Janet Peoples, fresh off the critical and commercial hit 12 Monkeys, with David himself solo having won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar (Unforgiven) the year of the...

Two filmmakers’ filmmakers, ones who both honed their craft in ’60s low-budget B drive-thru movies before achieving gradual and undeniable acclaim, died this past week: Monte Hellman and Richard Rush. I’m joined by Ted Haycraft to discuss Hellman’s most celebrated film and, arguably, Rush’s most interesting one.On this episode: blah Also: blah Haycraft is film critic for Evansville’s WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook...

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Famed as the movie that destroyed a studio and an Oscar-winner, writer/director Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate got its reputation replenished with a Criterion edition in 2012. But why do some sophisticated film-viewers still view it as an eye-roll-worthy indulgence? On this episode is Michael Epstein, director of the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate, as we discuss: United Artists’ executive Steven Bach’s book, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of...

All That Jazz is not currently streaming or available to rent online, but is on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion. Permalink

How does a movie get into Netflix’s Top 10, seemingly out of nowhere — especially an indie production? On this episode writer/director Anna Elizabeth James and editor F. Brian Scofield talk their film Deadly Illusions, which recently spent almost a week as the #1 film on Netflix both domestically and internationally. (As of this writing, it’s still #5 worldwide.) We discuss how the strong reactions of Film Twitter betray that viewers compulsively kept watching, James’s realization of needing...

Another cross-over episode! I’m joined by podcaster Ryan Whitten to discuss this new/old cut of the infamous sophomore film from the the creative and once-promising Richard Kelly, a cut first shown and panned by critics at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before being reedited into a shorter and (supposedly) more coherent domestic version that was panned by critics in 2007. On this episode we discuss how helpful it might be to read the volumes I-III of the film’s graphic novels (with the Cannes...

Four years before Pulp Fiction set off a trend of quirky, violent crime films in the ’90s, writer/director George Armitage adapted the first of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley novels with this violent, titularly Miami-based gem starring a gorgeous and unhinged Alec Baldwin. On this episode former guests Kyle Smith and Tyler Savage discuss this 1990 Jonathan Demme-produced film, its exuberant personality, the long-lasting influence of Willeford (Tarantino initially said he was aiming for the...

The best way we thought to celebrate the great writer Mark Harris’s new book Mike Nichols: A Biography, a book about the famed director filled with the instructive anecdotes he used as tools for directing actors, was to find the best examples the public has to those anecdotes in Nichols’ own voice. In the DVD audio commentaries for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and Catch-22, all conducted by audio commentary-innovator Steven Soderbergh, Nichols masterclasses his way through...

Literary-cinematic powers unite! — Cormac McCarthy with Ridley Scott. Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page. The Counselor is available on VOD. Permalink

Lani Gonzalez is back to discuss her favorite film star and his (un)surprisingly(?) charming 1964 film, Grant’s penultimate screen appearance, also his last starring role, and the willingness for the most debonair branded film-star to finally show silver hair, beard stubble, and an untucked shirt. Also: the juvenile delinquency of director director Ralph Nelson, Oscar-winning writer Peter Stone’s varied career, Leslie Caron, her character’s curiosity for the taste of blood, and two recent...