203. 'Hackers' (1995)

The Grateful Dead Movie, released in 1977 and directed by Jerry Garcia, is a film that captures live performances from rock band the Grateful Dead during an October 1974 five-night run at Winterland in San Francisco. These concerts marked the beginning of a hiatus, with the October 20, 1974, show billed as "The Last One". The band would return to touring in 1976. The film features the "Wall of Sound" concert sound system that the Dead used for all of 1974. The movie also portrays the burgeoning Deadhead scene. Two albums have been released in conjunction with the film and the concert run: Steal Your Face and The Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack. In this episode, Jason is joined by...well...another Jason, his long time friend Jason Blumklotz, for a discussion about the Dead and the various eras of their music and performances.  We detour into offshoots like Dead & Company, the Veneta, Oregon Dead documentary 'Sunshine Daydream', the Wall of Sound, Phil's giant 50-lb bass, and much more.  Not just a clubby discussion of the band, this episode presents the Grateful Dead Movie as an amazing time capsule of 1970's fandom.

13 Maj 20211h 55min

A quick recap and assessment of last night's Oscar telecast, which, to me, was a much-needed reboot and refresh of a format that had become stale, out of touch with itself and increasingly at odds with the stated mission of awarding creative efforts. In this episode I talk a bit about some of the conventional wisdom (or lack thereof) that's hampered the evolution of the Oscar telecast over the years, and highlight some of the innovations that the production team, which included Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher, Jesse Collins, Richard LaGravenese, Jennae Rouzan Clay, Dionne Harmon succeeded in implementing.

26 Apr 202141min

The Rockford Files is one of the most beloved tv titles and James Garner's Jim Rockford would become the character this veteran actor was and will forever be best known for.  There's a reason Garner, whose career began in the 1950's, titled his excellent, charming, and self-deprecating autobiography 'The Garner Files'.  In this episode, I take a look back at my own introduction to the series during a specific and off-kilter part of my life, and talk about what makes the series so special to so many. Then, in a bit of TV Nerd indulgence, I delve into how the show came to be and we hear from some of the key people involved: co-creator Roy Huggins, Executive Producer Meta Rosenberg, Rockford Files theme composer Mike Post, and Rockford Files Producer Chas. Floyd Johnson.  Plus: plenty of great Rockford clips and answering machine messages and a special guest appearance by the Ben Folds Five.

26 Mars 202148min

Is there a moment, a single day, a couple of hours even, in your teenage years that you could point to and say "that was one of the most important and formative times in my life"? In this episode, Jason is joined by two of his oldest friends, Chris and Roy, and they revisit a specific afternoon in 1985 when, as 15-year-olds, they began a friendship that opened up so much into all their lives. The movie they watched was Pink Floyd's 1972 concert documentary "Live At Pompeii" and it's mind-blowing contents represented the ways in which lives can be opened up and expanded through friednship, music, and a shared POV of the world around us

11 Mars 20211h 20min

Heather Thomson and Marianne Sierk are two of my favorite people and social media follows guaranteed to brighten your day with laughs.  They're talented and funny comedians and Marianne is also a Sorceress who somehow put a spell on my cinephile dude self and made me watch Practical Magic and talk about it for an hour and a half with two die-hard "Prac Mag" obsessives! Much fun was had and our conversation veered into all sorts of unrelated areas, like Heather's quarantine singledom, Marianne's thrifting, Dolly Parton, why the myth of the broken comic persona is just that...mostly..and more!   Practical Magic is a 1998 American romantic comedy fantasy film based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman. The film was directed by Griffin Dunne and stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest, Aidan Quinn, and Goran Višnjić. Bullock and Kidman play sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, who have always known they were different from other people - they are witches. Raised by their aunts after their parents' death, the sisters grew up in a household that was anything but normal — their aunts fed them brownies for breakfast and taught them the uses of practical magic. But being a member of the Owens family carries a curse: The men they fall in love with are doomed to an untimely death. Now adult women with very different personalities, the quiet Sally and the fiery Gillian must use all of their powers to fight the family curse and a swarm of supernatural forces that could take away all the Owenses' lives. The film is considered a cult classic

25 Feb 20211h 29min

Starman is a 1984 American science fiction romance film directed by John Carpenter that tells the story of an alien who has come to Earth and cloned a humanoid body (portrayed by Jeff Bridges) in response to the invitation found on the gold phonograph record installed on the Voyager 2 space probe. The original screenplay was written by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, with Dean Riesner making uncredited re-writes. Bridges was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role. The film inspired a short-lived television series of the same name in 1986.

11 Feb 202130min

A listener question prompted this episode about Peter Weir's excellent 2003 period naval-warfare epic 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World', and why it's one of my favorite films and a comforting re-watch at any time I encounter or am in the mood for it. The movie is an interesting demarcation line between a Hollywood that would make a movie like this for 150 million dollars...and a Hollywood that, post TLOTR-trilogy, would increasingly focus its efforts on movies costing two and three times that much designed and engineered to recoup in the billions-with-a-b and not millions. In almost any other era, 'Master and Commander', coming as it does out of a deep well of pre-existing IP (the 20 novels in the Aubrey/Maturin series by famed novelist Patrick O'Brian), would have easily been a repeatable franchise.  The film itself is top-notch, so it's not a question of a bad film failing to light the spark.  So: what happened? In this episode we take a look at what makes the film so special, praise the cast and crew for their efforts, talk a lot about the incredible music used throughout the film, and speculate a bit on exactly why this film, so beloved by those who love it, and returning a fully respectable return on the studio's investment...did not turn into the franchise everyone involved hoped it might. On thing I forgot to mention in the pod: after this experience, Peter Weir made exactly one more film.  He's certainly been at it quite a while, starting his feature career in 1973...and as Tarantino says, directing films is really a young person's game...but one wonders if after putting in ALL the effort, including a necessarily-grueling water shoot, and turning in an excellent film nominated for 10 Oscars....and having that all met with the popular audience version of a damp squib...he just decided that it wasn't worth it anymore, that if Hollywood wasn't going to allow a filmmaker like him to tell the stories he wanted to tell, at his price point...then it might have been time to step off the apple box. A shame, if that's what happened, because Peter Weir is one of the greatest film directors, with a lot to say and offer the medium.

4 Feb 202138min

In our first post-Trump episode, Jason is joined by Friend Of The Pod Richard Brown to discuss the 1979 Nick Nolte film North Dallas Forty. Before that, Rick and Jason catch up on withdrawing from political mainlining, growing up as children of single Mom's in the 1970's, and then get to the good stuff; a robust, detailed discussion of the genius of Ted Kotcheff and the singular pleasures of North Dallas Forty. North Dallas Forty is billed as a "sports comedy-drama" which just shows how hard to categorize this brilliant and subversive counter-culture take on battling corrupt institutions actually is.  And yes, it IS about professional football, and the NFL, and the Dallas Cowboys and what at the time was a rare behind-the-scenes look inside an NFL locker room.  But it's also, like many of director Ted Kotcheff's other films (First Blood, Wake in Fright, Fun With Dick and Jane) about the individual fighting against or being co-opted by unfeeling authority.   When Nick Nolte developed the movie, he hand-picked Kotcheff as a director precisely because Kotcheff admittedly knew next to nothing about football.  All the more impressive then that what few football scenes there are tend to be so impressively and bone-crunchingly filmed in North Dallas Forty. Featuring a fantastic supporting cast of character actors like Charles Durning, G.D. Spradlin and Dabney Coleman, all of whom plumb familiar territory with sometimes surprising depths.  And it was the film debut of country superstar Mac Davis, who turns in a remarkably nuanced and complicated performance as the QB who has made his peace, sort of, with the professional and moral compromises he has embraced thus far. North Dallas Forty is a great football movie, it's a great 70's movie, it's a great New Hollywood movie, and on and on.

30 Jan 20211h 38min