Episodes
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Filmsuck co-hosts agree that this funny low-budget film by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, which is the first film of their "lesbian B-movie trilogy," represents a challenge to our dull American film era.
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Co-hosts grapple with the new Barbra Streisand memoir, a 900+ page tome called MY NAME IS BARBRA that came out in November 2023 but takes three months to read. Latest Filmsuck! Co-host Dolores, a devoted fan of the EGOT award-winning singer-actor-producter-director, brings impressive insight to the way Streisand "needs a hostile world" in order to thrive creatively. The memoir's fascinating early chapters charting Streisand's youthful rise to fame bear this out, as she overcame harsh prejudices against her offbeat looks and personality and working-class Brooklyn Jewish roots to produce sensational performances in nightclubs, and on Broadway, and in films and recording studios.
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We're wading into the Oscar nominations and the people who hate them!
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In this episode, we talk about the sad mess that is the biopic genre, with MAESTRO, currently playing on Netflix, as one of our main examples. Dolores takes a reasonable stance on the biopic, praising the good ones and indicating the fascination of the form for a certain type of audience, and Eileen says, "Kill it with fire!"
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Filmsuck co-hosts round out 2023 and blaze into 2024 with an epic hashing-out of the flamboyantly gorgeous new Yorgos Lanthimos film POOR THINGS that reunites him with his creative team from THE FAVORITE (2018), screenwriter Tony McNamara and lead actor-producer Emma Stone. Stone plays a kind of female Frankenstein's monster created in a laboratory by a reclusive "mad scientist" played by William Dafoe. In this outre feminist fairy tale, she soon escapes to the Continent with a hedonistic lawyer (Mark Ruffalo), and in the process of exploration and self-education escapes the control of the men in her life.
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Co-hosts agree that Todd Haynes gripping new melodrama MAY DECEMBER is one of his best! The film has been nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards including Best Feature, Best Director for Haynes, Best First Screenplay for Samy Burch, and Best Lead Actor for Natalie Portman. (But not Julianne Moore or Charles Melton? WTF?)
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Filmsuck co-hosts hash out the agonizingly compelling cringe-comedy series THE CURSE--created by Nathan Fielder and Bennie Safdie, who also star alongside Emma Stone--and arrive at amazing insights explaining all of contemporary life. This podcast is such a bargain!
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New Filmsuck episode! A Halloween celebration of Boris Karloff in two of his pre-Code films: THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE BLACK CAT! He's best known for FRANKENSTEIN, but Karloff gave so many great performances, it's a good time to appreciate his range. Many of his films are widely available, but these two more obscure ones are part of the current Criterion Channel "Per-Code Horror" series.
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Filmsuck co-hosts revel in a raucous low-budget comedy called Bottoms that's playing at a theater near you, and doing amazingly well with critics and young audiences. It's about a high school girls-only fight club--excuse me, "women's self-defense class"--and it's so refreshingly funny and irreverent about the tired cliches of the high school comedy genre, today's toothless feminism, America's cratering educational system, and a lot of other contemporary pieties, we recommend it highly.
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Latest Filmsuck! Our "Old Broads Hit the Road" episode features a discussion of a promising film/TV trend involving older women on the move seeking liberatory experiences in ELLE S'EN VA (ON MY WAY, 2013), JUANITA (2019), HACKS (2021-), and MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS (2021).
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Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that the relentless affect and unusual staying power of the FX/Hulu series The Bear makes it a rare example of popular art in the tradition of the family-torment plays of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee. A belated tribute!
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Latest Filmsuck! Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree on finding Greta Gerwig's BARBIE surprisingly funny and delightful, and Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER a ponderous, unenlightening snore. In order to argue these contentious views, we have to get into the gritty details, so this is a spoilers-galore episode!
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Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores fearlessly defy obsessive Wes Anderson fans in reviling his soul-deadening, seersucker suit sensibility!
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In this year's Filmsuck Pride Month episode, we’re talking about the fresh and funny HBO series Somebody Somewhere. It’s just wrapped up its second season and been renewed for a third, so if you haven’t been watching it, now is a good time to catch up with this offbeat show that fans have been raving about and wondering why it doesn’t get more attention. It’s about a forty-something ex-bartender named Sam Miller (played by audacious actor-singer-comedian Bridget Everett) who’s moved back to her small hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, to deal with a family emergency. She struggles to find a way to fit in again with her fractious family and the conservative locals, getting a lot of help from her new friend Joel (Jeff Hiller), a delightful churchgoing gay man who was actually a fellow Show Choir member with her back in high school. He’s wired into surprisingly vibrant LGBTQ scene in the Midwestern flatlands where Sam finds the misfit community that welcomes her in.
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Filmsuck co-hosts talk about two new documentaries that deal with two wildly different celebrities, each negotiating a lifetime of public performances beginning in childhood--Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields on Hulu, and Little Richard: I Am Everything, available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. Rejected by his father, a minister who also operated a bar and sold bootleg whiskey on the side, the blazingly talented and sexually fluid Little Richard left home early and soon combined the influences of gospel singers, raucous blues performers, and drag show sensations to become a rock 'n' roll pioneer of the 1950s. Adored and promoted by her possessive and increasingly alcoholic mother, Brooke Shields became a ubiquitous child model in the 1970s and the center of early scandals about the sexual exploitation of underage girls in photography and film. Her own acting goals were swamped by the overwhelming attention paid to her beauty as she became one of the representative celebrities of the 1980s. Both documentaries seek to retell the stories of these well-known figures in order to assert their lasting cultural significance beyond the limited time periods of their greatest fame, with Little Richard as, obviously, a hugely important and influential figure in the history of modern music, and Brooke Shields as the hardy survivor of a pre-"Me Too" era in the modeling and acting professions, which are still highly precarious and even dangerous to girls and women.
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Latest Filmsuck episode! Co-hosts Dolores and Eileen tackle the new Amazon Prime miniseries DEAD RINGERS, based on the 1988 David Cronenberg body-horror freakout classic, and featuring Rachel Weisz in the roles of disturbingly codependent twin gynecologists once played by Jeremy Irons. The miniseries oddly combines feminist topicality with the old good-vs.-evil-twin tropes of melodramas that used to star Bette Davis (A Stolen Life, Dead Ringers) and Olivia De Havilland (Dark Mirror).
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Latest Filmsuck episode! A tribute to Poker Face, the hit Peacock series created by writer-director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion) with a starring role tailor-made for the marvelous Natasha Lyonne. She plays Charlie Cale, Las Vegas cocktail waitress turned amateur sleuth with a special gift for detecting when people are lying, which is a lot of the time. But it's the lies about murder that obsess Charlie, a character inspired by the classic "howdunnit" mystery-of-the-week show Columbo, anchored by Peter Falk's memorable performance. Both co-hosts love Poker Face, but their discussion focuses particularly on co-host Dolores' appreciation of the show's great fantasy--the eternal road trip across America, and returning to an analog world.
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Filmsuck co-hosts disagree over the new Emily Bronte biopic, Emily, currently playing in theaters. Dolores likes the way the film depicts the creative development of the author of the towering Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, and Eileen--a Bronte Sisters devotee--hates it so much she's willing to see the world burn if only this film could be destroyed. Well, tastes differ.
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Since the recording of co-host Eileen's interview with Joel Coen and Frances McDormand about The Tragedy of Macbeth is not going to be widely released after all--a decision made by Coen himself in accordance with the curating team at the Pacific Film Archive where the screening and interview took place--here's a fulsome discussion of the event with co-host Dolores, who was in attendance that evening! Aspects of the entire "Joel Coen in Person" film series, which took place over two exhilarating weekends in late January, are thrashed through for your listening pleasure!
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The new Netflix film The Pale Blue Eye, featuring Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe when he was an eccentric young West Point cadet, here aiding an alcoholic detective (Christian Bale) to solve the grisly murder of a fellow cadet at the military academy. The film's a train-wreck, and a good opportunity for co-hosts Eileen and Dolores to rant about the strange dearth of Poe biopics and adaptations of his work, considering he was a master of horror and the detective-centered mystery, both thriving genres right now. WTF, entertainment industry?
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