One of the stranger and most poorly-marketed films of the 70's is Nicholas Gessner's adaptation of Laird Koenig's 1974 novel 'The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane'. Far from the horror film the poster and trailer tried to sell audiences on, it's instead an unsettling but realistic portrait of a young girl in an uncertain situation, and a film th…

It's almost Memorial Day Weekend in the States and that means it's time for Yacht Rock! The term didn't exist before the 2005 web series of the same name was written, directed, and produced by J. D. Ryznar, David Lyons, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham. You can revisit their highly specific genius here. Before that, music of the type we now refer …

Some thoughts on gratitude and appreciation, and a few anecdotes about how quickly humans go from wide-eyed wonder and astonishment to entitled self-centered expectations, drawn from my three-concert experiences during Dead & Company's recent inaugural stint at MSG's groundbreaking new concert and film venue, Sphere Las Vegas.…

OK so today in Las Vegas I learned it's "Sphere" and not "The Sphere". And we're back recording for posterity impressions of the 2nd night of the inaugural 3-show residency kick-off for Dead & Company at Sphere Las Vegas.By Meetinghousetv.com

Some thoughts on an extraordinary in-person collective entertainment experience...remember those??By Meetinghousetv.com

The female actors of 'Blade Runner 2049' are a huge part of the brilliance of Denis Villenueve's 2017 sequel to Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'. They bring to life such wonderfully complicated, original, genre-bending, emotionally resonant, funny, and strong characters. In this special episode of the podcast, I take a look at all of the scenes featur…

Denis Villenueve's masterpiece 2nd part of his 'Dune' trilogy.By Meetinghousetv.com

Barry Sonnenfeld and Scott Frank's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1990 crime novel 'Get Shorty' was the 2nd film that John Travolta made after returning to top stardom with a bang in Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction'. This vibe-y, enjoyable, smartly-written and brilliantly-acted mid-90's example of the $20-30 million-dollar studio movie that now seems lik…

I'm joined again by multi-hyphenate Brad Caleb Kane for a discussion about Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's iconic 1950 satirical noir Hollywood cautionary tale 'Sunset Boulevard' and various other digressions!By Meetinghousetv.com

The second in my growing collection of episodes devoted to 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'...this time it's an episode celebrating all the brilliant Cliff Booth scenes...scenes representing some of Brad Pitt's finest acting to date and the heart and soul of Tarantino's greatest homage to the Hollywood of his youth.…

It's my annual Oscar Recap. And Killers of the Flower Moon wuz robbed!By Meetinghousetv.com

All of Leonardo DiCaprio's scenes as Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino's movie-making love-letter 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' If you're new to the podcast, there's an episode just for you. Previous All Their Scenes episodes: Phillip Seymour Hoffman in 'Charlie Wilson's War' Michael Keaton in 'Jackie Brown' and 'Out of Sight' as Special Agent Ray…

Alan J. Pakula deserves more attention and respect as one of the grestest American film directors of any era. His run of films in the 70's, from 'Klute' to 'The Parallax View' to 'All The President's Men'...all brilliantly shot by Cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather films)...are as impressive and of their moment as any films made in this t…

Carol Reed and Graham Greene's iconic post-war neo noir classic 'The Third Man'. A perfect movie. Steven Soderbergh calls it the only movie you need to watch in order to learn how to make a movie. In this episode I cover the making of, the battles between David O. Selznick, Alexander Korda, Reed and Orson Welles, the happenstance score to end all f…

In which my evolving, complicated relationship with the crowd-pleasing John 'Frenzy' MacKenzie's exuberant, vibe-y classic 'The Long Good Friday' is flayed open and nailed to the floor for your auditory enjoyment.By Meetinghousetv.com

Director Toby Amies and I discuss his excellent and unexpected documentary 'In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50'.By Meetinghousetv.com

Ridley Scott's brilliant 1979 sci-fi/horror classic 'Alien' burnished his deserved reputation as bold re-interpreter of techno-dystopian futurism and exploder of genres. But it made a lot of money and dollar signs in the eyes of 'Alien' producers Brandywine Productions led them to turn for a sequel to James Cameron, who had already done a similar t…

One of the most quotable and iconic of British films, born out of writer/director Bruce Robinson's personal experiences and shepherded to the big screen by George Harrison and his Handmade Films company. 'Withnail & I' is a beloved comedy but in this episode I talk as much about its forlorn, end-of-an-era wistful heart as I do the incredibly quotab…

Billy Friedkin's iconic 1971 game-changing NYC police procedural/car chase classic 'The French Connection' has a fascinating backstory and making-of history, and, hey: that's what I'm here for! To bring you all the best stories behind the scenes on the streets of New York and all the context and color that helps place this movie in the pantheon of …

Peter Yates was quietly one of the most interesting film directors of his time. His seminal 1967 British train-robbery film 'Robbery' got him noticed for the job directing Steve McQueen in 1968's 'Bullitt'. In that film, Yates turned in a car chase frequently mentioned as second only to the iconic one filmed by Billy Friedkin in 'The French Connect…

Martin Scorcese's new film 'Killers of the Flower Moon' is in many ways his magnum opus; it's a film carefully wrought with all of his and his production team's highest possible creative efforts, and it also marshals all those resources in the furtherance of a greater collective understanding and reckoning with yet another dark chapter in America's…

A particular interest of mine is phone calls in movies. I'm interested in them as plot devices, as examples of good or indifferent screenwriting, as opportunities for actors to show different sides of themselves in scenes where they're not opposite other actors, and on and on. In this episode we'll take a look at a few different genres of Movie Pho…

An appreciation of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and his brilliant portrayal of real-life CIA Most Interesting Man Gust Avrokotos in Mike Nichols' final film 'Charlie Wilson's War'.By Meetinghousetv.com

'Lost In America' was Albert Brooks' 3rd film as a writer/director/star and remains probably the most broadly-appealing of his films. It's one of two of his films to have been given the Criterion stamp of cineaste approval, the other being the often-underrated 'Defending Your Life', and now, and perhaps even more important, it's the first of his fi…

'Across 110th Street' is a 1972 Harlem crime film that contains many of the tropes of the exploitation films of the era...but it also contains incredible performances from black actors whose skills rise far above the material at hand, people like Paul Benjamin, Yaphet Kotto, Richard Ward, and Marlene Warfield. And Bobby Womack's title song was used…

Elmore Leonard's cocky, energetic ATF Agent Ray Nicolet is a key protagonist in his book 'Rum Punch'. For Quentin Tarantino's film adaptation of 'Rum Punch', 'Jackie Brown', the character, now named "Ray Nicolette" was embodied by the brilliant Michael Keaton with a perfectly cocky, energetic physicality. While cinematic universes are commonplace n…

Quentin Tarantino surprised fans with the release of his third film, 'Jackie Brown' coming as it did on the heels of the global phenomenon that was 'Pulp Fiction' in all its unprecedented Tarantino-ness. Devoid of gory violence, 'Jackie Brown' is a thoughtful, hilarious, insightful and moving crime story that manages to be incredibly faithful to th…

Billy Friedkin, maybe the weirdest (in a good way) major American director of his generation, almost doesn't make sense on paper; wait...the same guy directed 'The French Connection' and 'The Excorcist'? But the ups and downs of Friedkin's storied and somewhat haphazard career are what makes him one of the most interesting directors to consider. An…

A deep-dive into the semiotics of 'Barbie' and its post-feminist critique of corporate capitalism and American mores. Just kidding, I went and saw 'Barbie' with five 12-year-olds. Six, if you count me. But seriously, this episode unpacks some of the things I found interesting about the film, its very existence, its brilliant marketing and repositio…

I'm joined by legendary ad-man-turned brand-identity guru, author, screenwriter, and producer Ernest Lupinacci to talk all things 'The Godfather' and 'The Godfather, Part II' (with a sideways glance at 'The Godfather, Part III'), including our preferences, what II gained and lost in terms of casting and production, returning Mario Puzo to center st…

An episode about 40 years of fandom and learning to actively listen to music while being of an age that can appreciate the collective experience of Dead & Company's Final Tour for the singular happening it represents.By Chuckler.com

I went and saw the new Indiana Jones movie at the Drive-In.By Chuckler.com

An email from a listener got me thinking about film scores that I actually listen to and love, so this episode shares a handful of classic and contemporary scores I think are worthy of special consideration. Scores referenced in this episode: Get Carter The Taking of Pelham 123 Dirty Harry Out Of Sight Ocean's 11 Ocean's 12 Ocean's 13 Taxi Driver K…

This week's companion episode to my previous episode about Sidney Lumet's 'The Verdict' is for the craft purists, the Newman obsessives, and the acting completists out there. Much like I did with the amazing Sean Penn Spicoli scenes in my follow-up to the 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' episode, here I'm going deep on Paul Newman's brilliant, career…

One of my very favorite films and featuring one of Paul Newman's favorite performances, Sidney Lumet's 'The Verdict' has grown in stature and appreciation since its premiere in 1982. With a brilliantly adapted screenplay by multi-hyphenate David Mamet, a tortured development process encompassing stars like Redford and other directors named Sidney (…

Bennett Miller was the 3rd director attached to the adaptation of Michael Lewis' classic baseball non-fiction book 'Moneyball', after Steven Soderbergh was replaced by Sony, who got nervous over his plan for interspersing interviews with real-life characters from the book like Lenny Dykstra and Darryl Strawberry throughout the film. His rewrite of …

I'm joined by frequent FCAC Guest Star Richard Brown as we explore the many possible reactions to Robert Altman and Joan Tewksbury's 'Nashville'...a film that polarized pretty much everyone when it came out but that has settled into a comfortable middle-age of generally accepted masterpiece status. But...is it? In this episode Rick and I explore th…

The 2003 episode that David Letterman devoted entirely to a single guest, Warren Zevon, stands out as one of Dave's signature episodes and the frank and revealing conversation they had about Zevon's terminal lung cancer diagnosis is but one of many fascinating layers to that appearance that this episode of the podcast explores. Issues of ambition, …

Sean Penn's committed, beyond-his-years performance as Jeff Spicoli is one of the great and most-storied American film acting performances, full stop. After last week's episode about 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' opened my eyes anew to how astoundingly complete Sean Penn made Spicoli, I simply had to do something I've never done on the pod before:…

Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe's 1982 adaptation of Crowe's book 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' is a classic that rises above the low-brow teen-sex comedy that Universal executives probably expected when they green lit the Valley-set film with a bunch of no-name actors (outside of Mr. Hand, of course), a soundtrack of artists who just so happened…

Following his 1995 crime epic 'Heat', Michael Mann was in a position to do most any film he desired to do. So when Disney Studios ponied up north of 90 million dollars to help him bring a thorny, wordy, action-free journalism picture to life, they probably reasonably expected a 'All The President's Men' for a new generation. And while their efforts…

After a two-week hiatus...and a hilariously unexpected detour in our attempt to do "The Manchurian Candidate" on this episode, my guest Keir Graff and I pivoted to 'The Color of Money' and I'm so glad we did. This episode features a lot of great stories about the making of the film, and also includes plenty of necessary discussion about 'The Hustle…

In the late 90s three 28-year-olds with zero documentary filmmaking experience re-ignited a college dorm room pipe dream about making a documentary about the life and career of singer/songwriter/actor/activist Bobby Darin. What followed was equal parts kismet and catastrophe and might serve as a useful blueprint and cautionary tale for anyone conte…

James Cameron has made 3 of the top 4 highest-grossing films of all time, with a collective box office of more than EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS. Recently I had the occasion to watch both 'Avatar: The Way of Water' (currently the #3 highest-grossing film) and the 4K 3D re-release of 1997's 'Titanic' (#4). Collectively, that's about 7 or 8 hours in the Cam…

Joined again by Full Cast and Crew spirit-animal Richard Brown for a deep discussion about James L. Brooks' 1987 picture 'Broadcast News', a stealthily subversive rejection of Hollywood Rom-Com tropes and one of the greatest films about television ever made. Topics include: The great, troubled life and career of Polly Platt. Jim Brooks and 'Terms o…

Hey, where you been? I guess it's me, not you...where have I been? Sitting through Avatar! THREE HOURS AND TWELVE MINUTES! Feel my pain. In this catch-up episode we'll talk Oscar noms and snubs, Best Picture thoughts on 'Tar', 'The Fablemans', 'Top Gun: Maverick', 'Everything Everywhere All At Once', 'All Quiet on the Western Front', and 'Triangle …

A favorite on the podcast is 'movies about making movies' and Tim Burton's funny, moving, spot-on 1950's Hollywood cautionary tale/celebration of the business 'Ed Wood' is one of the best. Guesting on this episode is Brad Kane, Co-Show-Runner of HBO Max's forthcoming Stephen King 'It' prequel series 'Welcome To Derry'. Brad's been an actor, directo…

'Chinatown' has it all: premium 1960's and 70's counter-cultural bona fides in Jack Nicholson and Robert Towne. The ultimate Robert Evans production, as Producer AND head of the studio; a situation that allowed the barren earth from which 'Chinatown' sprung to be watered and tended to carefully despite strong headwinds against it ever coming to fru…

As we wrap up the Full Cast and Crew year, I'm sharing some off-beat Christmas cheer with you all in this, our first-ever Weird Christmas Spectacular. Frequent listeners to the pod have heard me say "weird is good" many times, and the picks in today's episode reflect not films or tv shows or songs that are weird for weird's sake; they reflect thing…

A heartfelt appreciation about how good and truthful Steven Spielberg's deeply personal, funny, and moving film 'The Fabelmans' is. Go and see this film in a theater. It's hard for the film's trailer to capture the unique and intelligent tone of the film, so I position this episode towards those of you who judge a book by its cover and a movie by i…