In this episode of the show we marked the arrival of 2022 by talking about the devil. And photos in pickle jars. And corpses in hydromassage bathtubs. In other words, we trained our sights on Peter Hyams’ 1999 Arnie vehicle End of Days.
In this episode of the show we celebrate Christmas by diving into the drawer of proper ‘deep cuts’ and fishing out a Christmas movie that probably nobody else knows, Abel Ferrara’s R X Mas.
If you’ve been keeping up with our show, you probably know by now that all throughout the last month-and-a-half we’ve been exploring films tied somehow to The Matrix, which we did in the run-up to the release of The Matrix Resurrections in cinemas. However, if you just discovered us, I thought it would be a good idea to gather everything we’ve done towards this goal in one place.
“Circling the Matrix” marathon continues on the show as we shift our weight a bit and – instead of a movie that may have inspired The Matrix – talk about a movie whose existence is partially (if not wholly) owed to the success of The Wachowskis’ breakout hit, namely Equilibrium.
In the last two episodes of the show (apologies for bundling them together here, but it almost works out because both movies discussed in these episodes are from the same year) we continued to circle The Matrix by jumping back in time and examining some of the movies that may have inadvertently served as parts of the cultural template upon the Wachowski film that indubitably reshaped the blockbuster landscape.
Quelle surprise, eh? Halloween is upon us and – guess what – we talked about Halloween movies on the podcast. Well, suffice it to say that I don’t think it will have been the last time this happened because this franchise has at least one or two more entries that are interesting (or controversial) enough to fit within the parameters of the show, but for this particular occasion we rolled out the big guns.
This is me being a bit of a lazy bugger because I am no over a week behind schedule with sharing the latest episodes of show over here, so I might as well do a composite entry and save myself the trouble of doing this twice (even though it takes literally 15 minutes to do it).
I don’t think I’ve ever done this much ‘homework’ while preparing for any podcast episode. But then again, is it even fair to call rewatching some of the most important American movies ever made as homework?
Rarely does it happen that all of the hosts on the show agree on a movie, let alone to this extent. And I don’t think I’d ever expect for this to happen while discussing something like… Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. But here we are.
I have to come clean: my relationship with Nicolas Winding Refn and his cinema is far from straightforward. I loved his early stuff as well asDrive, but knowing what kind of an artist he is today I have to say that I tend to enjoy movies that hardly represent his current artistic style. Therefore, I was somewhat trepidatious coming into this episode, because – as you may imagine if you listen to the show and read my ramblings – I see myself as a glass-half-full kind of person. Well…