Special Report: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Writer, director, and star Joanna Arnow delivers one of the sharpest, most quietly uncomfortable comedies of recent years with The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023), a film that weaponizes awkwardness, deadpan humor, and emotional stasis. Arnow plays Ann, a thirty-three-year-old woman drifting through New York City, desperate for connection but seemingly incapable of advocating for herself. She works a job that barely registers as meaningful, endures social interactions that feel transactional at best, and navigates a BDSM relationship that has quietly slipped from consensual ritual into something emotionally hollow.Lisa Vandever and Keith Gordon join Mike to unpack Arnow’s deceptively modest narrative and the precision with which it captures a very modern kind of paralysis.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

31 Des 1h 6min

Mike Thompson and Rob St. Mary join Mike to step into the rubble, rhetoric, and Roman cosplay of Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed, forty-years-in-the-making cinematic fever dream. A film obsessed with power, legacy, architecture, and Great Men Thinking Great Thoughts, Megalopolis feels less like a movie than a manifesto—one that demands to be taken seriously while daring you to laugh at it. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), the troubled genius nobody appreciates (write what you know, Francis), strides through a New Rome built on vibes, speeches, and a miracle substance called Megalon. The episode also explores Megadoc, Mike Figgis’s fly-on-the-wall documentary which attempts to chronicle the chaos, conviction, and sheer force of will behind Coppola’s production. Seen together, the film and the documentary form a portrait of an artist betting everything—money, reputation, legacy—on a single idea. Love it, hate it, or remain profoundly confused by it, Megalopolis refuses to be ignored. And once it gets into your head, it doesn’t leave.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

26 Des 1h 56min

If you're not listening to the Chasing Chevy Chase podcast, here's an episode to whet your appetite... Chevy Chase takes an unexpected turn into sci-fi thriller territory with Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992). Directed by John Carpenter and adapted from H.F. Saint’s novel, the film follows Nick Halloway (Chase), who becomes invisible after a freak laboratory accident. As he grapples with the perks and pitfalls of invisibility, he also tries to evade ruthless CIA operative David Jenkins (Sam Neill) and connect with Alice Monroe (Daryl Hannah). It’s an ambitious mash-up of comedy, romance, and paranoia that didn’t quite land with audiences or critics at the time but remains one of the oddest entries in Chase’s career. Mike, Mark, and Chris break down the film’s tonal shifts, behind-the-scenes clashes, and its place in both Chase’s and Carpenter’s filmographies.Visit http://www.chasingchevypodcast.com for more... Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

24 Des 1h 10min

Spencer Parsons and Rob St. Mary join Mike to unpack Ana Kokkinos’s unflinching 2006 adaptation of Rupert Thomson’s novel. The Book of Revelation, a film that refuses easy provocation, using intimacy, trauma, and performance as tools for something far more unsettling.The story follows Daniel (Tom Long), a dancer who vanishes during a mundane errand for his girlfriend Bridget (Anna Torv). What initially plays as a mystery gradually reveals itself as a confrontation with sexual violence, shame, and the long aftermath of violation—rendered without sensationalism and without moral shortcuts.Mike also sits down with director Ana Kokkinos to discuss the making of the film, her approach to depicting male sexual assault, and her insistence on pushing past eroticism toward emotional truth. The conversation explores how The Book of Revelation challenges audience expectations, destabilizes gendered narratives of victimhood, and stands as one of the most difficult—and necessary—Australian films of its era.This episode wrestles with discomfort, representation, and empathy, asking what it really means when cinema turns its gaze on trauma.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

24 Des 2h 18min

Mike talks with director Claudio Fäh about Turbulence (2025), a tightly constructed thriller set almost entirely in the air. Fäh discusses the film’s development, the practical challenges of staging action in a confined space, and the decisions behind its restrained visual style and controlled pacing.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

22 Des 21min

Radley Metzger pushes the boundaries of erotic cinema with The Image (1975), a film that treats desire as ritual, performance, and provocation. Adapted from the infamous novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet—writing under the name Jean de Berg—the film unfolds as a stylized confession. Carl Parker plays Jean, the author surrogate recounting a charged encounter with his estranged friend Claire (Marilyn Roberts) and the young woman who becomes the focus of his controlled cruelties, Anne (Mary Mendum).Joining Mike are Jessica Shires and Heather Drain, as the conversation situates The Image alongside Metzger’s other works and within a broader lineage of European erotic literature and BDSM aesthetics. The episode interrogates authorship, consent, power, and the uneasy space between fantasy and autobiography that defines Robbe-Grillet’s writing and Metzger’s adaptation.Interviews with Rob King, author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, and filmmaker Lina Mannheimer (La Cérémonie) expand the discussion, connecting The Image to questions of female authorship and the gaze.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

17 Des 2h 27min

Jessica Shires and Samm Deighan join Mike for a deep, unflinching look at Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O (1975), the adaptation of Pauline Réage’s notorious novel. Corinne Cléry embodies O with startling vulnerability as she’s led by her lover René (Udo Kier) into the secretive Chateau at Roissy—an isolated world of ritual, discipline, and erotic power exchange.The conversation opens up the film’s legacy, its aesthetics, and its complicated relationship to the source text’s authorship and mythology. The episode also features two illuminating interviews: Pola Rapaport, director of The Writer of O, discusses the real story behind Dominique Aury and the creation of the literary sensation; and Maya Gallus, director of Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality (1997), explores the film’s place in a broader lineage of women’s erotic expression, taboo-breaking, and cinematic desire.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

10 Des 3h 36min

Stuart “Feedback” Andrews never whispered his opinions — he weaponized them. The longtime Rue Morgue Radio rabble-rouser and Cinephobia Radio agitator carved out a cult legacy with his mercurial personality, meticulous audio collages, and an manical belief that cinema deserved passion, noise, and occasionally a little chaos.Mike revisits one of Stuart’s deep dives: “Jungle Gate,” a two-part Cinephobia takedown of the marketing circus surrounding Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno and Knock Knock. The original broadcasts unraveled into sprawling tangents and media theory rants, so Mike presents a cut Stuart would absolutely hate — a leaner, sharper, “Feedback-but-Edited” version that preserves the spirit while cutting through the brush a bit. Before that, Mike shares personal stories of Stuart’s impact on horror media, the lost recordings that vanished into the void, the wild highs and combustible lows, and the legacy of a critic who could never stop stirring the pot. It’s messy, loud, obsessive, uncompromising, and fittingly infuriating — exactly the way he liked it.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

9 Des 4h