Junk Filter

Latest Episodes:

TEASER - 87: Joe Piscopo (with Will Sloan) May 20, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 88 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/66652078

Will Sloan returns to the podcast for an in-depth discussion of the strange career path of comedian and impressionist Joe Piscopo: from his origins on Saturday Night Live and stardom as their second banana to superstar Eddie Murphy, his short-lived movie career, his bodybuilding phase, his various network tv specials, most notably 2012’s A Night at Club Piscopo for Showtime, to his current life as a conservative talk radio guy in New Jersey.

All of Piscopo’s eighties tv specials discussed on this episode are available to watch on YouTube, and A Night at Club Piscopo is currently streaming on Tubi.

Patrons of the Junk Filter podcast receive at least two additional exclusive episodes a month: some of our notable previous guests include Jared Yates Sexton, David Roth, Bryan Quinby, Sooz Kempner, and Jacob Bacharach. More to come! Sign up at https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Will Sloan on Twitter and subscribe to his great podcasts The Important Cinema Club and Michael and Us.

“Kimberly” - Joe Piscopo, 1997

The Vulture Transcript: Joe Piscopo Dissects His Career, From SNL to the Buff Era and Beyond - by Steve Marsh, August 2011

TEASER - 84: Under the Silver Lake (with Brian Buster) Apr 23, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 88 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/65467969

Writer Brian Buster joins me from Los Angeles to discuss David Robert Mitchell’s 2018 mystery Under the Silver Lake, Mitchell’s blank check film after the success of It Follows. Silver Lake played in competition at Cannes but for some reason its distributor A24 got cold feet and after moving the release date a couple of times, dumped it into a few theatres and VOD nearly a year later.

A disaffected and desperate young man named Sam (Andrew Garfield) meets a beautiful blonde (Riley Keough) who vanishes the next day. Sam plays detective to find out where she went, and descends into a mystery world of secret societies, coded messages and conspiracies just below the surface of sunny Tinseltown.

In our spoiler-heavy discussion, Brian and I talk about how Silver Lake anticipated Epstein Brain, this film’s placement in the sub-genre of Ambient Noir, the associations the film has to Hitchcock and Mulholland Drive, and the decoding of the cryptic clues and perceived secret messages of the film taken up online by its fans.

Follow Brian Buster on Twitter and stay tuned for Brian’s Patreon, coming soon!

Trailer for Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018)

TEASER - 81: The Power of the Dog & The Searchers (with Brenden Gallagher) Apr 07, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 82 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/64822370

Screenwriter and filmmaker Brenden Gallagher joins the program from Los Angeles to discuss two westerns about Toxic Masculinity: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she won Best Director at this year’s Academy Awards, and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).

In some ways The Power of the Dog seems to be a film in dialogue with The Searchers, both stylistically and in terms of being a psychological profile of a damaged and dangerous American male archetype. We also talk about the complex legacy of The Searchers, considered one of the greatest American films, but featuring an unapologetically racist hero.

And speaking of the perils of Toxic Masculinity, we also talk about this year’s Academy Awards!

Follow Brenden Gallagher on Twitter and visit his website.

Sacheen Littlefeather turning down Marlon Brando’s Oscar for Best Actor in The Godfather, 1973

Trailer for The Power of the Dog (Campion, 2021)

Trailer for The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

80: Red Heat (with Asawin Suebsaeng) Apr 03, 2022

Show notes

Asawin Suebsaeng, senior reporter for The Daily Beast and co-host of the Fever Dreams podcast, joins the show from Cincinnati to discuss Walter Hill’s underrated 1988 Cold War cop thriller Red Heat, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a KGB cop on the hunt for a Soviet gangster on the loose in the United States, forced to cooperate on the case with Chicago cop Jim Belushi. Arnold mentioned filming Red Heat in Moscow during his recent video address for the Russian people to tell them the truth about the war in Ukraine.

Swin and I talk about Red Heat as an amazing time capsule of the end of the Cold War and how the film holds a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union (in particular, their style of policing) and how in some ways this movie anticipated the current respect in some American conservative circles for the modern autocratic Russia of Vladimir Putin (himself a former KGB agent in the eighties!)

Plus: the secret connection Red Heat has to John Woo’s The Killer!

Follow Asawin Suebsaeng on Twitter and check out the Fever Dreams podcast!

Swin’s recent book with Lachlan Markay, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington, is available here.

Trailer for Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)

Trailer for Red Heat(Walter Hill, 1988)

TEASER - 78: We Are All Batmen, Part II (with Corey Atad and Ben Nash) Mar 18, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 58 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63901173

Part two of our Bat Panel on the Gotham Cinematic Universe focuses on Joker (Phillips, 2019) starring Joaquin Phoenix in his Oscar-winning performance as the Clown Prince of Crime, and how both it and The Batman lean heavily on signifiers from other characteristic filmmakers to tell their stories.

We also continue our discussion of The Batman, including the evolution of the character on screen, and how the latest film portrays Batman as “The World’s Greatest Detective”.

Follow Corey Atad and Ben Nash on Twitter.

Trailer for Joker(Phillips, 2019)

77: We Are All Batmen, Part I (with Corey Atad and Ben Nash) Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

Returning Junk Filter guests Corey Atad and Ben Nash join forces for a special Bat Panel, a two part episode on the latest films in the Gotham Cinematic Universe.

Part one takes a deep dive into Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022): what we liked about it, our issues with the film, a discussion of the film’s politics, and how DC and Warner Bros. continues to evoke the cinematic style of other filmmakers (in this case the work of David Fincher) to tell the Batman story.

Part two (available on the Junk Filter Patreon feed) continues the discussion with a focus on Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning Joker (2019), with additional observations on its relationship to The Batman.

Follow Corey Atad and Ben Nash on Twitter.

Trailer for The Batman (Reeves, 2022)

The Batman - Oreo commercial (UK)

The Batman - Little Caesar's Calzony commercial (US)

Trailer for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, 1993)

74: Harry Dean Stanton (with Justin Schneider) Mar 02, 2022

Show notes

One of the great American character actors, Harry Dean Stanton had over 200 acting credits but only played the leading role in two films, and my guest Justin Schneider (a patron of the podcast) pitched his way onto the show to discuss them: 1984’s arthouse classic Paris, Texas and the underseen 2017 comedy-drama Lucky (Stanton’s final film to be released before his death).

Along the way we discuss the healing power of cinema, and how beloved Harry Dean was with filmmakers, actors and audiences.

Follow Justin Schneider on Twitter.

Harry Dean Stanton promoting Paris, Texas and Repo Man on Late Night With David Letterman, October 16, 1984

Trailer for Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Trailer for Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)

TEASER - 73: Shattered Glass (with Aaron and Carlee from Hit Factory) Feb 21, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 92 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62861889

The hosts of the Hit Factory podcast return to Junk Filter for a discussion of the 2003 drama Shattered Glass, the directorial debut of screenwriter Billy Ray, starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s a great adaptation of the rise and fall of The New Republic's hotshot journalist Stephen Glass, who was exposed as a serial fabulist through the rigorous fact-checking of a competitive news outlet and then the magazine’s new editor, Charles Lane.

We discuss Shattered Glass as an underrated and compelling drama about ethics in journalism, how it serves as a distant early warning of a problem in media that’s only gotten worse, and how the film portrays how white collar sociopaths operate in the workplace and how to successfully confront one.

Follow Aaron Casias and Carlee Gomes on Twitter.

Subscribe to the Hit Factory podcast; you can also support the show directly through Patreon.

TEASER - 71: Double Troubles: Belfast & The Image You Missed (with Ben Nash) Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

Access the entire 89 minute episode (and additional bonus episodes) by becoming a patron of Junk Filter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/62244513

Ben Nash, a PhD student at Kings College London and a writer whose work has appeared at Mubi and Splice Today, joins the show from Colchester, England to discuss two recent films about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, each grappling in their own way with issues of history, family, memory and cinema.

Belfast (2021) has been called director Kenneth Branagh’s “most personal film”, a depiction of his childhood as sectarian violence gripped his neighbourhood. It’s a film that views the turbulent era from a Protestant child’s perspective, but it’s notably a story that for the most part omits the city’s Catholic population from the narrative.

In the excellent 2018 documentary essay-film The Image You Missed, filmmaker Donal Foreman grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American guerrilla filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, who shot documentaries about the conflict in Northern Ireland from the on-the-ground perspective of the Irish Republican socialist left.

Along the way we summarize the conflict in Northern Ireland, Branagh’s peripateticdirecting career, the idea of “personal films” and the challenges of mixing monochrome and multicolour in cinema.

The Image You Missed is available for rent at Vimeo On Demand

Follow Ben Nash on Twitter.

70: The Informant! (with Mike Mekus) Feb 01, 2022

Show notes

Actor and writer Mike Mekus joins the show from Manhattan for a discussion of Steven Soderbergh and his 2009 “comedy thriller” The Informant!

Based on the best-selling non-fiction book of the same name (sans exclamation point) by Kurt Eichenwald, it’s the story of Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland Company executive turned corporate whistleblower on price-fixing collusion in agri-industry, who turns out to have been embezzling from the company the entire time he was co-operating with the FBI.

We talk about what we love about Soderbergh’s career-long capitalist critique in his works, the many risks he takes in presenting The Informant! as a comedy, and we shake our heads at the irony of Matt Damon now repeating the role of the unreliable narrator but in real life, as the new pitchman for Crypto dot com. Father of daughters Matthew Damon, what are you doing?

Follow Mike Mekus on Twitter.

Mike writes for the9layground.com and has a blog!

Trailer for The Informant! (Soderbergh, 2009)

ADM (Supermarket to the World) "Original Impossible Burger" TV Commercial, 1990

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected