Happy New Year, everyone! 2025 is upon us so it might as well be as good a time as any to look back at the previous month and round up everything we’ve been up to over at the Uncut Gems Podcast, both the main show and the associated Patreon channel.
In December our 2024 Spike Lee Retrospective came to a close with a handful of great conversations on Chi-Raq and Da 5 Bloods. We also managed to record a special bonus episode where we sat down and talked about this journey more holistically, discussed a few of Lee’s documentaries and shared our best and least liked movies from this series. It was honestly a phenomenal experience and I can only say that my appreciation of Spike Lee as a filmmaker went sky-high as a result of that. In fact, I think I’d be willing to wager that most if not all filmmakers would grow immensely in my eyes if I actively subjected myself to watching all of their movies in order and then to have in-depth conversations about them. This, I guess, is what makes podcasting about movies (the way we do it at least) so special because it’s always a fascinating journey of discovery.
As far as the theme of the month is concerned, we jaunted from Statham-Ritchie action movies to a more holiday-adjacent action vibe as we decided to pick a handful of movies Shane Black wrote and/or directed to talk about this past month. Furthermore, we decided that this selection would follow a reverse chronological order but a progressively increasing level of Christmasiness. Therefore, we talked about The Nice Guys, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Long Kiss Goodnight. We paired these conversation with a bonus podcast where we talked about Shane Black’s breakout hit Lethal Weapon, just to round things out. In addition, because have run out of Kathryn Bigelow movies to talk about in November and we’d be launching a brand new marathon in January, we added a special extra bonus conversation to the mix that ties into the Christmas action theme and there’s only one big logical move to make in this space. Thus, we found a great excuse to talk about one of the greatest action movies ever made, Die Hard!
Episode 202 (Chi-Raq)
Spike Lee’s Major Joint 11 (Da 5 Bloods) (full episode on Patreon)
Episode 202.5 (Spike Fina-Lee)
Episode 203 (The Nice Guys)
Episode 204 (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang)
Episode 205 (The Long Kiss Goodnight)
Bonus Tie-in 42 (Lethal Weapon) (full episode on Patreon)
Bonus Tie-in 43 (Die Hard) (full episode on Patreon)
Thus, this is it for what happened in December and in 2024 as a whole. We completed the Spike Lee filmography, went through all Kathryn Bigelow movies and spoke at length about a whole bunch of some truly amazing movies. And some not so amazing. 2025 will see a few slight modifications to the format as we decided to commit each month to a different director while our Patreon projects will also include a comprehensive marathon of the filmography of one Mike Nichols and a survey of great movies released in 1995 and 1975. So I can only tell you that if you listen to our show, things are going to get quite exciting here. See you there and once again – Happy New Year!
Flasz On Film 
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