Episode Collection: Year 13

Addiction to normalcy. Moving demanding conversation: the style of the Sound of Metal debut could mark the return of the film festival style release (even if there was no festival). An entire way of life is threatened, and with it goes the sense of normalcy. The denial phase. How drug addition is the unspoken experience looming over Sound of Metal. Avant-garde music is the perfect choice for the film. The pain of audio in a visual-heavy medium. Manipulating language to keep the audience alienated. The notable consciousness-threatening first hour of Jacob’s Ladder. Michael believes the audience’s entire relationship with the film’s madness can be pinpointed to a single critical scene. What was happening in horror when Jacob’s Ladder came out and how it may have secretly helped pay the way for the new tone of the 90s. Continue reading →

Double Feature takes a trip to San Francisco to welcome its newest resident. Two films taking place in the city by the bay. Taking on the plot of Bullitt instead of spending twenty minutes talking about the edit of that infamous chase scene. Flying over the SF hills. The bizarre people people Bullitt. What The Last Black Man in San Francisco says about the city. Gentrification as a universal human issue. The ever-changing face of the golden city. The Paris of the West! Fog City, Gay Mecca, The City that Knows How, seriously, how many more of these could one want? American cinema would have you believe all its citizens live on farms and honestly it’s garbage. Continue reading →

Double Feature says goodbye to Texas! Two films with differing takes on Texas. Keeping the film community together. No Country for Old Men and the ever changing world in which we live in. Yellow Rose is a very modern Austin. On the ground insight. While both films are set in Texas and feature strong performances, one is known for its intense atmosphere and sharp dialogue, while the explores themes of immigration, family, and the pursuit of dreams in a more emotionally driven manner. Dig deeper into the unique stylistic choices and themes present in both films and how they contribute to cinema both intimate and broad. Continue reading →

Spontaneous tiny humans zombie double feature. The secret indie film pitch deck. How to see the lookbook for Cooties. The cast and that timing and the reaction. How films with kids can achieve an extra level of subversion. Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion are HONEST. Little Monsters, but not the one that two people are expected to spend 20 minutes breaking down. What is Little Monsters actually about. The pandemic catches up to Double Feature. Being alive is still hard (and it’s not even 2020 anymore). Continue reading →

Celebrating New York with a random sampling of New York drug crime. Half of Double Feature explores a brand new city! Starting on the streets with White Girl. A disagreement over the privilege of White Girl when also considering she’s the victim of various sex crimes, assault and harassment. Still, look who’s not in jail! The unique position of having to do more of the crime that got you in trouble in order to get out of trouble for that crime. King of New York provides that perfect contrasty 90s NYC mood. Who can believe Christopher Walken, Steve Buschemi, Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, it’s really just crazy town in here. A city with so much crime, only the criminals can stop it. Continue reading →

Double Feature takes a look at Los Angeles, old and new. Vibes. Alice makes an announcement about the immediate future of 50% of Double Feature. Magic adventures through Hollywood, DTLA, Silver Lake, and not The San Fernando Valley. The personal automobile: the festish Los Angeles just can’t quit. What do people do in the city? Go out to eat and drive around in their car. The most infuriatingly true part of L.A. Story: this thing you’re making isn’t wacky enough! Michael, a guy who didn’t love It Follows, thinks Under the Silver Lake is the best film of the year. The question of personal autonomy. Los Angeles in your twenties. Awful men, drifting through life. Continue reading →

Another look at exploitation. Newcomer William Grefé meets returning champion Herschell Gordon Lewis. How does southern-fried exploitation film feel after America’s 2020 swing back toward democracy? A look at the broader themes themes of revenge, violence, and the horror of the unknown. Low-budget, lurid films depicting controversial or taboo subjects. Popular with audiences looking for a cheap thrill. The history and significance of southern exploitation films. Lasting influence on popular culture. Continue reading →

Spending a little quarantine time with friends. Two films that are beyond gimmick. First up, Scare Me is a 2020 film that takes the anthology formula and then makes life even harder for itself. Breaking down the character arcs from the film’s logline. The secret anthology relationship Scare Me still has – hint: it’s not the segments, it’s the other part. Secondly, Creep. Alice struggles to describe Creep without asking if one of the characters is a Creep. An impossibly good found footage film that might be as good or better than all the other found footage films. Admit it already, found footage is interesting and you like it. Secret third double feature theme today: two films that have other films by the same name, and in Scare Me’s case, another film from this very year. What, were there just too many horror movies in 2020 for each one to have a unique title? Continue reading →

Try watching a movie the week voters in the United States finally defeated the president. After four long years of heartache – and with the pandemic now spiking again – Americans have decided to put someone new in charge. They’ve done so by casting the most votes than any candidate has received in history. Double Feature celebrates the decisive victory by taking an honest look at any otherwise throwaway joke with Joe + His House. First up, Nicholas Cage should be who everyone thinks of when you hear Crazy Joe. Michael has conflicts with the fly-over states. His House is a surprisingly deep and rich film with a multitude of layers. Internal conflict vs external conflict. Past vs future. A schism in the unit. Racism, immigration, ICE and the rest. Britain as a kind of Trojan horse. Continue reading →

Happy halloween! An trip through the decades of horror lands in the modern era. For all that is awful in the one, hold on to this one moment where two arthouse horror films had a wide theatrical release. It it utterly insane that Midsommar was a pop phenomenon. People took their nine friends to see Midsommar. It was an actual summer hit. And it’s fucking weird. Midsommar is about grief, it’s about relationships, it has a host of things an audience has never seen before (and a lot of them audiences probably wish they still hadn’t seen) and yet, here it is. A movie everyone saw. Isn’t it a great time to be alive? For those still not convinced, enter The Lighthouse! This poster was in theaters. People saw the trailer infront of the highest performing movies of the year. And it’s a constrained ratio, black and white, kitchen-sink insanity piece about two guys drinking late into the night and doing Continue reading →

Y2K Horror: scares at the turn of the millennium. Alice finds something very worth-while in his least favorite era for horror. Valentine was really successful and for some reason people ignore it. A sincere attempt (and a false start) at bringing the slasher genre back. Valentine walked so Adam Green could soar. Idle Hands is pretty fucking good and for some reason people ignore it. Michael over-explains numetal. Will you bite? The hand that feeds you? Will you stay? Down on? Your knees? The various stages of the hand. American Pie presents Idle Hands. There is only one idle hand in the film Idle Hands. What films escaped Y2K alive? Continue reading →

Straight into the heart of the 90s video films. Remember strolling through Video Value and taking a look at the covers of Ice Cream Man and The Dentist. Unorthodox Halloween continues! Another VHS, another film with renewed cult status. Clint Howard is the Ice Cream Man. The extended weirdness through sound and light. Reach back into Family Value’s discount section for the last copy of The Dentist. Straight to video does not mean unsuccessful – even financially! When a character just snaps, and then his snaps snaps, and that’s all before we even find out what’s going on with the poolboy. How many people can you fit in a dentist’s office? Continue reading →

Off the beaten path of early 80s slasher films. The weirdest Halloween of our lives continues with two non-traditional halloween horror films. Three robots get together for good old fashion mall-cop brutality. Their victim? No, not the Bloc in Downtown Los Angeles, but instead a mall in the valley that looks suspiciously like the Beverly Center. Bloody Birthday as an experimental slasher film that was released before there were rules for this kind of thing. What happened with the 80s slasher films no one wanted to franchise? Why did some slasher films get franchises and others did not? Continue reading →

A look at pageants, adolescence, and outrage. Cuties, the Sundance film from France, garnered needless controversy when it accidentally became a trending topic. People on Twitter who don’t know what a movie is. Originally titled Mignonnes, Cuties is a sometimes-sweet sometimes-heartbreaking story of an 11 year old girl using dance to break free from her family’s conservative religious values and find her own identity. Save-the-children-gate only seems to go after people who aren’t pedophiles and suspiciously over-targets black female storytellers. Probably just a coincidence. Drop Dead Gorgeous disappears from planet Earth. The ephemeral nature of streaming services. 90s casting and a miraculous group Continue reading →

And they say, where are the parents? Troubled kids in less-troubled times. Honey Boy has a lot to say about parenthood and what could be looked at as the grey shades of abuse. Pushing the logline further. The film as a secret insight into the mind and method of an actor. Super Dark Times, super good title. The new wave of movies about kids-on-bikes. A return to one of Double Feature’s favorite genres, something about kids and a raft. A single inciting incident creates extremely divergent paths for the two protagonists. The one person in Super Dark Times who just doesn’t get their due credit. Continue reading →

Exploitation films amidst a time of social justice. Falling in an out of love with exploitation. Chicago’s cult cinema scene in the early 2000s. Hard Ticket to Hawaii, sexploitation, and cringey stuff that’s still part of American football? The dirty feelings talking about the exploitation subgenre “blaxploitation” today. The Human Tornado is an underseen kunfu action comedy. Rap, hiphop, spoken word, jive talk, and whatever it is where you randomly break in rhyme during your action sequences. More than just Dolemite – the life and career of Rudy Ray Moore. When an artist has to die for people to learn about them. The influence of Rudy Ray Moore. Continue reading →

Fuck the law. The 2008 film Hunger, about the second hunger strike by Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands. Fassbender, not eating, and abusing the audience. After checking his car for bonds, a cop no one wants to hang out with exits the frame so audiences can hang out with Michael Fassbender. Liam Cunningham as a man with a beard sitting at a table talking and talking and talking. How context sets up a long take.The Silent Bob trick. If Beal Street Could Talk it would tell you not to make cheap obnoxious jokes about it’s title. How the non-linear narrative makes the situation even more crushing. Here’s a bunch of really specific bad things, the good time was there but yada yada yada, and then here’s some more really awful things to dwell on. Continue reading →

Existential dread, modern living and cosmic horror! Palm Springs as more than meets the eye. Copying once is theft, copying many times is a sub-genre. Each step of escalation. Having the cake and then also eating the cake you have (because what we be the point of having a cake if you couldn’t eat it.) Color Out of Space brings on the cosmic horror – but what really is it? The fear of infinite space without the actual space. Actually let’s go back to that cake thing. Who is out there having a cake and not eating it? Isn’t that. waste of a cake? What a stupid phrase. Not in the show: a shaggy dog! Continue reading →

Animals and poverty. First Cow and the struggle to start without capital. The Rider makes a case for unavoidable metaphor. When a cow is mysteriously the first, two double feature hosts with stumble through a longline exercise. Cookie meets the fugitive. There’s something suspect about this partnership. The best French fashions come into question as a pastry caper shines a new light on the bounds of human friendship. The Rider’s open embrace of southern American youth. Sympathetic masculinity, horse riding machismo, and the feeling when no GF. How modern day problems created added relevancy in a years-old film. Continue reading →

Movies that deserve a second look! The secrets overlooked with Jennifer’s Body and The Bling Ring. The creative triangle of Karyn Kusama, Diablo Cody and Megan Fox. What the original theatrical audience missed about Jennifer’s Body. The strongest voice in the room. The true story of The Bling Ring. A secret secret second theme. MySpace or whatever. The world in which this became a story. Who gets away with what. Hanging out in Paris Hilton’s house. While we’re at it, Paris Hilton was great in Repo the Genetic Opera. That’s just a fact. This isn’t an episode about Paris Hilton, though. It just takes place in her house. One of things – Emma Watson’s layered performance. Continue reading →

New to the podcast? Start here! In a brand new run of the podcast: considering canon in the multi-verse! How Into the Spider-Verse breathes new life into Spider-Man. Various animation tricks that work in both substantive and stylistic ways. Bringing the team together! Netflix presents Black Mirror presents Bandersnatch: one new clever tick to fight piracy. How long is Bandersnatch? Do you play or watch Bandersnatch, and whichever it is, how much do you have to do before you’ve really experienced it? Self-destruction in the arts. Training an audience to desire chaos. Continue reading →