Martini Giant (Christopher Nichols)

Crime movies are one of our favorite genres here at MG, from John Huston's grainy noirs to Michael Mann's sleek modernism.  But there's something extra special about the British crime pictures - their street-level view of a collapsing empire often feeling grand and gritty simultaneously - and today we take a look at two of the greats: The Long Good Friday, featuring Bob Hoskins' iconic performance as the ambitious-and-doomed Harold Shand, and Guy Ritchie's comic classic, Snatch, which we argue is top-3 Brad Pitt!

Hollywood has always had an originality problem: they'd always rather steal or repackage a successful foreign film than come up with something new - and the list of these junky remakes is a depressingly long one, from the slick genius of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita being turned into the tapioca Point of No Return, or Spike Lee's ill-advised reimagining of Park Chan-wook's legendary Oldboy. But tonight's double feature suffers no such generational loss - join us as MG takes on the epic Indonesian actioner The Raid, and its brilliant sci-fi rehash: Karl Urban's Dredd!

There are two types of Adam Sandler fans: those who love raunchy, dumb, slapdash, quick-turnaround, cash-grab, overlit junk - like Hubie Halloween, Ridiculous 6, Jack & Jill,and Little Nicky, and those who enjoy brilliant acting, thoughtful screenplays, and artful direction - as seen in The Meyerowitz Stories, Hustle,and Punch Drunk Love. MG is in the latter camp, but even we were unprepared for the insane intensity, crazy filmmaking, and the tour-de-force central performance of the film we're taking on tonight: Uncut Gems!

With a career as long, varied, and impressive as Denzel Washington's, it's almost inevitable that some great pictures are going to slip through the cracks of film history, so MG wants to shine a spotlight on two of the actor's most interesting, most forgotten films! First up, he's cool as hell in 1989's The Mighty Quinn, a seemingly breezy Jamaican mystery-adventure that mixes light 80's action comedy with a sinister colonial subtext - and next up, we have the should-have-been-a-franchise masterpiece Devil in a Blue Dress from 1995, featuring an all-time great team-up with the amazing Don Cheadle!

James Cameron's Avatar films own two of the top slots in box office history (alongside Thron's cherished Titanic), and The Way of Water's success has Disney on track to deliver three more trips to the ever-more-stunning world of Pandora. But tonight MG pairs it with another blue alien film you may not have heard of - and one, we speculate, that might have been an important influence on the filmmakers: René Laloux' visionary animated masterpiece from 1973, Fantastic Planet!

What better way to end the year than a double feature of end-of-the-world classics? First up we have Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring the incredible Peter Sellers as three of his greatest characters, and George C. Scott in what is arguably a career best performance as the infinitely quotable General Buck Turgidson - followed by the scrappy, little-seen New Zealand breakout, The Quiet Earth, which turns the standard wake-up-and-everyone's gone plot in bizarre quantum directions!

At first glance, Chris' pairing of Godard's New Wave groundbreaker Masculin Féminin with John Water's mainstream crossover Hairspray might seem a little bizarre.  In fact, they couldn't be further apart on the stylistic spectrum: the former is a wildly experimental art piece that captures Paris' pop culture with an almost documentary tone, and the latter is a seemingly-fluffy 60's satire shot in vivid color with cartoonish characters.  But in watching them back-to back, it became clear that the political themes behind both could not be more relevant to today!

AI's surprising growth has many people feeling nervous about the future - so tonight MG takes a look at two of the best in a long line of cautionary tales about renegade robots!  First up, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, about a very strange and dangerous Turing test - followed by the groundbreaking original version of Westworld from Michael Chricton, the master of theme-parks-gone-wrong!

Clint Eastwood has directed over 40 feature films, and is now working on what he says will be his last movie, called Juror No. 2 with Nicholas Holt and Toni Collette. So to celebrate, Erick, Chris, and Daniel have chosen three films apiece to serve to celebrate his towering and incredibly varied career. There are, of course, a couple of classics - but also a few picks might be new to many listeners! Come join Martini Giant in wishing this master a happy 93nd birthday!

As our listeners know, Martini Giant loves the films of the 1970s more than any other decade - and with tonight's double feature, we take a look at the one-two punch that saved the studios and changed our understanding of what movies could be: Arthur Penn's brutal, sultry, and utterly game-changing Bonnie & Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty - and the elegiac counterculture masterpiece Easy Rider directed by and starring Dennis Hopper, with iconic performances by Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson!

For decades, John Wayne's westerns created a vast mythology of America's early days that papered over historical truth in favor of heroic white male ego-fantasies. But towards the end of his career, two films stand out wherein he questions these narratives and his role in them - join us as we take a look at his masterpiece The Searchers, as well the Coen Brother's reinterpretation of his classic True Grit!

The list of Hollywood movies that roast Hollywood excess is a long one, with bona fide classics like Sunset Boulevard at the top of many critics all-time lists, and scrappy indies like The Big Picture throwing tomatoes from the cheap seats. But for our money, you'd be hard-pressed to find a one-two punch better than tonight's double feature: the Coen Brothers' love letter Hail Caesar! and Robert Altman's poison-penned The Player!

It's a special day when we discover that one of us hasn't gotten around to seeing a true classic, but it's doubly sweet when it's a film as legendary as the movie we've got for you tonight! That's right, Chris has never seen David Lynch's masterful takedown of the film industry - the dreamy, mazelike, and heartbreaking Mulholland Drive starring Naomi Watts and Laura Harring! So get yourself a fancy espresso and settle in for his powerful initial impression on what might be the first great film of the 21st century!

Romance-on-the-run is one of cinema's most enduring genres, from Gun Crazy to Wild at Heart - but tonight's selections are a strange breed all by themselves: films built to test the audience's relationship to their heroes, and make us ask why we identify with them and their sometimes ugly stories! First up: Terrence Malick's breakout hit Badlands, in which an innocent-seeming Sissy Spacek follows handsome newcomer Martin Sheen on a cross-country killing spree - then next up is Vincent Gallo's quirky indie Buffalo '66 - one of Erick's favorites!

Mid-life crisis stories are often dramas that keep both feet on the ground, but tonight MG looks at a couple of films that use comedic fantasy to break their heros free from their humdrum lives!  First up, Ben Stiller is all but forced to live out his adventurous daydreams when he must track down Sean Penn in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, followed by Will Farrel in Stranger Than Fiction, in which a dronelike accountant discovers that he's actually a character doomed to die in a novel being written by Emma Thomson!

We at MG love pop film - Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick are popcorn masterpieces. But these have been the rare exception to the wave of mindless, bland franchise pictures that have dominated film culture for more than a decade, and it's hard to believe there was a time - not too long ago - when a gorgeously crafted adult drama could hold its own at the box office. So please join us as we refresh our belief in film as art, and take a loving look back on Wong Kar-wai's achingly beautiful In the Mood for Love!

Every now and then, a film critic puts their money where their mouth is and makes a movie for themselves - and sometimes they even prove to be true masters of the craft: Paul Schrader and Francois Truffaut, for example. But MG argues that one of the most impressive debuts of all time is someone who is now a bit forgotten - film historian and Orson Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich - whose incredible one-two punch of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon made him the toast of the town in the early 70s!

Douglas Trumbull is a legend in the world of VFX; the iconic imagery and techniques he developed for such classics as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are landmarks in the history of the industry. But few know that he's also a director. His first picture was1972's cli-fi masterpiece Silent Running, and he had big ideas for his follow-up project - both conceptually and technologically. But this time the studios pushed back hard. Why did they try to kill this dream project before it could be released? Find out as MG dives into Brainstorm!

Fight Club was a bomb upon release, but has since worked its way so deeply into modern culture that it it's hard to imagine internet discourse itself, let alone film history, without it. But MG argues that even though it is an iconic point of reference for so many subjects, it's also one of the most profoundly misunderstood and misinterpreted films of all time, and it's subtle critiques (yep, it has 'em) have only gotten clearer as Fincher's filmography has grown more openly thoughtful and challenging. See what you may have missed as we get zen with David Fincher's masterpiece!

MG takes on a unique double feature with one of the best movies of the 70s and one of the worst movies of the 80's! That's right: John Badham's brilliant cultural landmark Saturday Night Fever, followed by Sylvester Stallone's epic fail of a sequel, Staying Alive! The first film made John Travolta's career, while the second one nearly buried it - it would be eleven years before his popular return in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction - but MG argues it's well worth getting back out on the dance floor with Tony Manero!

Beginning with 1954's Gojira, Toho Studios' Godzilla series went on to become one of the most beloved franchises in movie history - and over the decades, it's been many things: sometimes political, sometimes silly, sometimes scary. But with Godzilla Minus One we can now add...profoundly emotional? Join us as MG crowns the new King of the King of Monsters!

There are certain movies that if you see them at just the right age, become part of your cinematic DNA - you quote them with your friends, memorize every frame, and listen to their music until the cassette tape gets warbley. And this is even more true when that soundtrack is by one of the greatest rock bands in history, as is the case with tonight's fan-requested double feature! Join us as MG takes on the Queen-scored masterpieces(?) Flash Gordon and Highlander - and we see if they live up to our fond 80's memories!

Few actors have captured Gen-X's  grungy combo of ironic charm and misanthropic frustration better than John Cusack...or so MG argues with tonight's double feature! First up, Cameron Crowe's directorial debut Say Anything navigates a surprisingly subtle transition from goofy 80's high school comedy to thoughtful, realistic relationship drama; then our second feature, Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, gets even more real, following Cusack as an embittered burnout trying to figure out his trainwreck of a life! Join MG as we identify all-too-closely!

It's Chris' and Daniel's birthdays, so get ready to clutch some pearls! Tonight we have a hand-picked double feature that's both obscure and offensive! First up, if you thought Get Out Your Handkerchiefs was going to get us canceled, wait till you see Gérard Depardieu in Going Places! After that - if you're still watching - get set for the inappropriate, insane mess of Gene Hackman's Eureka!

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have teamed up on a number of 'learning-to-be-real' stories - and their collaboration went global this year with the year's undisputed megahit, Barbie. But MG argues that while it might not be in the billion-dollar club, their actual best team-up sits comfortably beside a defining classic of the genre: join us tonight for our pod on Frances Ha and The Graduate!

Paul Thomas Anderson has become one of the most respectable names in world cinema, with every new chapter of his filmography being greeted as a major artistic landmark whether he is working with legendary talents like Daniel Day Lewis or teasing out unexpected performances from megastars like Adam Sandler.  But for his breakout hit, he created a family of fresh faces, has-beens, and old pros all centered around the least respected side of the biz! Join MG in a lovefest for his masterpiece Boogie Nights!

Break out the eggnog and wrap tinsel 'round your headphones as we bring you an MG Yuletide double feature! And between these two inspirational flicks - one famous, one forgotten - we make the argument that it might just be time to crown a new winter classic! First up - the all-time champion, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart. The challenger? Well, you might not have even heard of it: Nicholas Cage's The Family Man… directed by *checks notes* Brett Ratner?? Wait - Is that right? Yep. But we're betting it will melt even the Grinchiest heart!

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are the heaviest of heavy-hitters in Hollywood history, each changing both the nature of the business and the global culture of film multiple times in their storied careers - but the first movies that they made for the studio system were nothing like the blockbusters with which their names became synonymous! Tonight MG takes on a double feature of Spielberg's Sugarland Express with Goldie Hawn from 1974, and Lucas' Boomer-defining landmark American Graffiti from 1973!

When people think of science fiction, they generally think of mega-budget spectacles - noisy junk that slathers on the expensive visual effects to cover for the fact that the scripts are terrible.  But when filmmakers keep the budget low, it can free them up to take more chances and tell more interesting stories. So tonight MG offers up a double feature of low-budget, high concept indies that manage to keep it smart while shooting for the stars: Duncan Jones' Moon and Jake Schreier's Robot and Frank starring Frank Langella!

Robert Altman has long been seen as one of the great geniuses of American cinema; with iconoclastic masterpieces such as The Long Goodbye and Nashville influencing directors as different as Paul Thomas Anderson and Judd Apatow. But even with those in mind, tonight's picks represent the core of Altman's deepest anti-establishment feelings, and not only in their themes, but in the productions themselves - which were wildly against the standard practices of both filmmaking and storytelling of the day! So get ready as MG takes on the anti-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the anti-war comedy, M*A*S*H!

From infinitely quote-able comedies like The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona to deep character pieces like Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man, the sheer number of classics in the The Coen Brothers' filmography is almost unmatched in American cinema, with barely a single miss in a run of eighteen films.  But even among that incredible list, tonight's films stand out!  First up, a page-boy-haircut-madman hunts Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men, then the unflappable Marge Gunderson solves crimes and eats Arby's in Fargo!

MG is excited to welcome Lily Nichols back to the show with a double feature of surrealist strangeness!  First up we look at a fascinating Belgian comedy called The Brand New Testament, in which God's daughter comes to Earth to fix everything he did wrong -  then we take on Jean-Pierre Jeunet's landmark romantic masterpiece Amélie, who's brilliant visuals and bold new filmmaking reinvigorated French cinema in the early 2000s nearly as much as Jean Luc Godard's Breathless did in the 1960s!

Break out the Pumpkin Spice martinis MG fans, because it's time for our (semi) annual horror triple feature!  Each October, your hosts all pick a shocker that the other two haven't seen, and we guarantee you have some deep cuts comin'!  First up, Chris goes for the gut with the low-budget gross out-comedy Bad Milo, starring The State's Ken Marino and Office Space's Stephen Root; then Erick unearths the long-forgotten bones of Fred Astaires' Ghost Story, and finally Thron takes us to the frontier for some cannibalistic fun in Ravenous, with Guy Pierce!

Tonight MG takes on a double feature based on two John Irving books, and the results couldn't be more different! First up, things start off beautifully weird with Robin Williams' dramatic breakout The World According to Garp, featuring an Oscar-nominated performance by John Lithgow - but then crash and burn as Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster do their damndest to save the tone-deaf mess of The Hotel New Hampshire!  What went wrong?  Join us as we talk about the difficulties of adaptation, and the risks of too much Wallace Shawn!

MG features a father-daughter team-up today as we are joined by Erick's daughter (and contributing website artist) Olivia Schieile! Together they've cooked up a double feature that covers a huge range of spooky flavors! First up: ghosts, saber-toothed sandworms, and demonic possession all come together hilariously in Beetlejuice -  the movie that introduced the world to the now-universally recognized stripes-and-nightmares style of Tim Burton, followed by Don Siegel's hugely unsettling black-and-white classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956 - a film that we feel is all-too relevant to today's politics!

Starting with David Fincher's The Social Network, corporate mythologizing has become a major genre, with more and more entries every year - from Danny Boyle's Jobs, to Apple's Tetris, to Hulu's Flamin' Hot movie - based on the creation of spicy Cheetos no less. Have we slipped a peg culturally, since the days of Ghandi and Ali? Or will tonight's double feature of Air - the Air Jordan story - or Blackberry, the fall of the world's most popular handheld device, change MG's mind?

For the third in our Time Travel series, we present two strangely similar films that were made at opposite ends of the budget spectrum, and had opposite fates at the box office! First up - Shane Carruth's five-thousand-dollar indie smash Primer, an incredibly complex thriller that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and invigorated young filmmakers everywhere - followed by Christopher Nolan's equally (pointlessly?) complicated Tenet, which studios hoped would save theaters, but instead might have been the last nail in the coffin for the theater experience!

Tonight we have the third in our Blind Spot series - first there was Chris with A Clockwork Orange, then Erick with Ferris Beuller's Day Off - but given his vast-yet-comically-undiscerning knowledge of movies, picking a movie for Thron was a real challenge. It was Chris that solved it though, with a picture that seems tailor made for Thron's tastes: indie, 80's, a first-time/only-time director, with an incredible soundtrack by a band he loves, plus a young John Goodman? Yep, it's David Byrne's lone directorial effort: the eclectic 1986 indie True Stories!

It's Chris and Thron's birthdays this week, so for tonight's double feature, they've each picked a film that has, like them, aged inexplicably well! First up, Chris brings us Sergio Leone 's epic reinvention of a classic genre: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Followed by Thron's choice: Michael Mann's feature-length paean to Colin Farrell 's glorious mustache: Miami Vice 2006! So mix up those mojitos, don those sarapes, and join us for a truly Giant celebration!

Alexander Payne's filmography contains some of the most bitter and hilarious films of the past twenty years, from Laura Dern's caustic abortion comedy Citizen Ruth to the movie that Thron calls the unofficial sequel to Ferris Beuler's Day Off: the merciless Reese Witherspoon showcase Election. But today we take a look at his softer side, with a double feature of Bruce Dern in Nebraska and George Clooney in The Descendants! Each was made to be much more audience friendly than his usual fair - but does MG think they are Oscar-worthy or Oscar-bait?

Since the 2010's, smart, slow-burn horror films have come steadily back into the spotlight, to the point where A24 has created a cottage industry for itself with arthouse-friendly hits like Midsommar, The Witch, and Saint Maud. But in reviewing Polanski's late-60's classic, MG feels there's still nothing like Mia Farrow in the spooky, funny, and weirdly upsetting Rosemary's Baby, which manages to both capture and criticize the zeitgeist of the decade in a way that is profoundly relevant even half a century later!

After a long four years and a nightmarish 2020, we still didn't know which path the country would take in November - so we picked movies that represented both choices! First up, a classic of 70's political-paranoia filmmaking: Alan Pakula's deep-in-the-weeds Watergate thriller, All the President's Men - starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in one of the great cinematic team-ups as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Then, to cleanse our palette and stoke our worst fears, it's Mike Judge's science-fiction satire Idiocracy, which has become all too relevant these days! MG - it's what plants crave!

With the betrayal of Watergate and the release of the Pentagon Papers, America in the 1970's was a haunted, disillusioned society, and much of that stress can be seen in the films of the period. But MG argues that, even in a decade that brought us Apocalypse Now and Three Days of the Condor, no director was more plugged into this paranoid zeitgeist than Alan Pakula! Join us for his twin masterpieces, Klute and The Parallax View!

The arc of Bill Murray's career has been fascinating -  beginning as the ex-SNL goofball slob of Meatballs and Stripes, then shifting to the snarky charmer of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, then finally morphing once again into the befuddled grouch of his Wes Anderson years.  But Murray himself has always been an introspective spiritualist, and tonight we take a look at two of the films where this comes through the most clearly: Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, and Erick's favorite, The Razor's Edge!

MG takes some inspiration from recent events - in this case, Reddit vs. the 1% - and looks back at Adam McKay's hilarious (read: wildly depressing) stock-market-horror movie The Big Short, starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt. Part documentary, part slick comedy, this incredibly inventive film is the rare example of a mainstream movie tackling an important and complex subject without dumbing it down or making it boring - and even more importantly, making it fun and rewatchable. Should we have expected this from the director of Anchorman?

Auntie Mame was a big hit for both star Rosalind Russell and Warner Brothers in 1958, winning best picture at the Golden Globes and getting nominated for six Oscars - in fact, the character's signature line "life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" was one of the most-quoted for decades...but for some reason, this winning comedy has fallen out of the public eye. Martini Giant thinks it deserves a fresh look, however, as in many ways, it's more radical and boundary-pushing than many films today!

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We dive into our second Time Travel episode with a double-dose of 50's nostalgia: Frances Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, and Gary Ross' Pleasantville. Now if you only watched the trailers, these movies might seem like polar opposites, with Peggy Sue seemingly wanting to glorify the past as Pleasantville sets out to mock it. But MG argues that both films wildly subvert these expectations, and each features far deeper character stories than almost any other entry in the genre. So buckle yourself into the way-back machine and get ready for some social commentary, poodle skirts, and a breakout performance from a very young (and very weird) Nicholas Cage!

When Julian Schnabel decided to make a film out of of Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he was taking on a radical film making challenge that was both technically difficult and emotionally challenging: the story follows Bauby himself as he writes the book - even though he had been completely paralyzed by a massive stroke in the prime of his life. Join us as we look at the unusual visual and storytelling techniques employed to put the viewer inside Bauby's first-person experience - and how watching this film played very differently for us in the time of COVID-19!

Steven Spielberg told Tom Cruise that he saved Hollywood with his and Joe Kosinski's magnificent sequel to 1986's Top Gun, and it's true that it both revitalized post-pandemic theatergoing - but it also served to remind us of that 80's feeling of much fun movies and movie stars could be, and served as a sort of swan song for one of that decade's unsung greats: Val Kilmer. So tonight MG takes a look at two of his Top films: the breathtaking Top Gun: Maverick, and the waiting-to-be-redicovered slapstick classic Top Secret!

It's a Texan double feature this time on MG - first is the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple, a seething neo-noir that rocked the indie world when it came out, introduced us to Academy favorite Francis McDormand, and secretly laid out a map of  the directors' greatest obsessions, hinting at Fargo, No Country for Old Men and more!  Next up is Wim Wenders gentle-and-upsetting Paris, Texas, which features Harry Dean Stanton in one of his finest, most understated performances!

Chris' daughter Lily is with us tonight to talk about the current state of anime! The iconic Japanese style of animation and storytelling began its slow crossover to American theaters in the late 80's, but for a long time it was seen here only as a sort of niche, art-house novelty. No one could have predicted how big it would get, though - today, young people around the world have embraced it as their generation's defining form of art! Join us as we compare the old and the new with our double-feature of 1988's classic Akira and Netflix's The Promised Neverland!

The Big Lebowski and True Grit have cemented Jeff Bridges' position as one of the greatest character actors in the history of film. But early in his career, he took some wild swings as he tried to figure out what kind of roles fit him best! Tonight we look at two of his strangest, most interesting choices - a pair of imperfect but intense thrillers that no ingénue would dare take on today: Cutter's Way and Winter Kills!

Robert Redford and Paul Newman were at the absolute peak of their charms when they teamed up with George Roy Hill for both of the films in tonight's double feature! First up, the duo play out the last days of a profitable friendship in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, often considered one of the best films of the period, and one of the greatest westerns ever made - then we follow up with the lighter and slighter caper picture The Sting, where they plan a crazy con against a hilariously frustrated Robert Shaw!

Ensemble comedies are usually light and breezy, and that's true of our double feature tonight as well - but even our picks have crowd-pleasing, sit-com-like setups, these films both use this to dig into far deeper material than is the norm for this genre. Up first: Kristen Wiig's megahit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig, which was sold as the female answer to The Hangover, but is so much more than that - followed by Pedro Almodóvar's outlandish indie smash Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which introduces us to baby Antonio Banderas!

This week we take on a french classic - and one of Chris' favorite movies - Bertrand Blier's bizarre, hilarious, and ever-more controversial social satire from 1978, Préparez vos Mouchoirs! (or as it's known in the US, Get out Your Handkerchiefs! ). Starring Patrick Dewaere, Carole Laure, and a young (and nearly unrecognizable) Gérard Depardieu, there's a lot of laughs in this one - but MG can almost guarantee that there's also something to offend everyone in the audience at some point, because even though it starts off as a light comedy of manners, it changes into a wildly different experience by the end!

Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen are two of the most successful leading men in movie history, yet they appealed to wildly different audiences: McQueen was the master of detached cool in road romances like The Getaway or the experimental Thomas Crown Affair, whereas Reynolds exuded easy, relatable charm in everything from Gator to Hooper. But their biggest hits came from a single genre: the car chase movie! So buckle up for tonight's double feature of Bullitt and Smokey and the Bandit

Charlie Kaufman has done what few screenwriters ever have: created a niche so unique - on display in strange masterpieces like Adaptation, Anomalisa, and Netflix's I'm Thinking of Ending Things - that when audiences see his name on the marquee, they know they're in for a special blend of funny, surreal and smart that it's hard to find in any other Hollywood film. So join us as MG takes on two of his very best: Jim Carey and Kate Winslet's dual career-best Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and John Malkovitch's legendary turn in Being John Malkovitch!

Steven Spielberg's masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a deeply personal film - it's one of the few screenplays he wrote himself, and debuts what would become his signature - broken families coming face-to-face with magical wonders. But when James Lipton asked how Spielberg's parents' jobs (a computer technician and a piano teacher) influenced the writing of the script… the director was dumbstruck - this obvious relationship had never occurred to him.  How much of our work as artists is this unconscious? Join us as we look at this and more through the lens of another brilliant film: Ethan Hawke's brilliant art documentary, Seymour: an Introduction!

Cross-dressing comedies were a Hollywood staple for countless decades, from Some Like it Hot to Mrs. Doubtfire - and many, for obvious reasons, have become pretty cringeworthy watches in modern times. But MG argues that Sydney Pollack's classic 1982 comedy Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman as Dorothy Micheals - while still 80's-dated in many ways - actually remains a powerfully empathic work of great depth and humanism - while still delivering on its slapstick conceit! 

From Pasolini to Mel Brooks, there's little that we at MG love more than films that offend the tender sensibilities of mainstream culture.  And rarely has mainstream culture been more in need of offense than today - so tonight MG takes on a movie that has Twitter clutching its pearls: Emerald Fennell's Saltburn!

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture in part because it was a rebuke of Oscar-bait pretension with its non-western story, diverse cast, and fun unpretentious style - whereas in the leadup to the awards, many avoided the frontrunner, Todd Fields' Tar, because it appeared to be old-school Oscar: a ponderous, self-serious reinforcement of the Great Art. But tonight, along with the gentle indie Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, MG argues that classical doesn't necessarily mean pretentious.

It's sort of amazing that Martini Giant has been going for years without covering one of the great film artists of the 20th century - Alfred Hitchcock - so we intend to make up for it by starting a new tradition with our first annual Hitch for the Holidays! Tonight we take on two of the master's finest collaborations with the perennially charming Cary Grant: first up, the moody postwar thriller “Notorious” with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, followed by the very blueprint for mistaken identity movies, “North by Northwest!”

Woody Allen's and Diane Keaton's Oscar-winning masterpiece Annie Hall was a major hit in 1977, and laid out the blueprint that rom-coms and relationship comedies have been following ever since, as its self-aware, realistic dialogue, hilarious cast of supporting characters, and postmodern structure have become a sort of international standard. So for tonight's double feature, we decided to pair it with one of the most recent and best examples: Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World!

MG takes on a cockney-crime double feature with two of our favorite tough guys! First on the list is Mike Hodges' grim gangster classic Get Carter from 1971, starring Michael Caine; a film that still tops many British best-of lists to this day and remains a major source of  inspiration to filmmakers on both sides of the pond, ranging from Guy Richie to Paul Greengrass… and the director of our second film: indie darling Stephen Soderberg, who reinvented the genre (and the way we edit movies) with his low-budget thriller The Limey in 1999, starring an iconic Terrence Stamp!

These days, Jack Nicholson seems to have settled happily into the role of world's-most-casually-dressed-Lakers-fan, but in the 1970's he was arguably the greatest new actor since Brando.  Even before he perfected his explosive rage act for Kubrick's The Shining, he had come to symbolize America's collective frustration, betrayal, and anger at the collapse of the Hippie dream - and no films capture that sadness more accurately than Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail!

Parasite's win for Best Picture in 2020 was a major breakthrough, representing a huge shift at all levels of the film industry. Audiences in America and around the world are demanding change, and the balance of power is starting to change rapidly - in fact, the movie's story can almost be seen as a symbol of this revolution. Join MG as we take a look at this Bong Joon Ho masterpiece, as well as similar power-flip: Harold Pinter's The Servant from 1963, a grim story about a very upsetting master-servant relationship - and a film made during a similar time of social upheaval!

Science fiction filmmaking was briefly set free of its genre constraints following Kubrick's 2001 - and in the early 1970s, flying saucers and rubber monsters were left behind in favor of experimental stories like David Bowie's The Man Who Fell to Earth and Saul Bass' weirdo ant-apocalypse, Phase IV. Sadly, it all came to a halt on May 25th, 1977 when Star Wars arrived to lock us into 35 years of Lucas-copycats - but recently things are starting to get strange again - join MG as we take a look at this new trend with Under the Skin and Annihilation!

Heist movies are a staple of the MG diet - and tonight we have a double-feature of offbeat choices that might just be on track to become new classics - first up: though it bombed in 1992, younger audiences have recently rediscovered Robert Redford's wildly ahead-of-it's-time caper comedy Sneakers, that features a plot tailor-made for our post-Snowden age - followed by a newer entry: Edgar Wright's stylish and action-packed semi-musical, Baby Driver, that is as violent as it is hilarious, and has one of the best car chases in modern memory!

Tonight MG kicks off its series on Originals vs Remakes! Our first matchup: 1997's brutally bleak crime masterpiece Insomnia, starring a sleezy Stellan Skarsgård as a detective who might be worse than the murderer he's chasing down - going up against Christopher Nolan's 2002 stylish remake of the same name! The first is a scrappy, sleek, small-scale Norwegian thriller, and the second is - predictably - a big budget, star-studded Hollywood affair. Tune in and find out if Nolan's follow-up to Memento keeps us up late, or puts us to sleep!

Have Margot Robbie and a dead theoretical physicist saved theaters from Covid? Are we recovered from the filmic scurvy of watching nothing but Netflix dating competitions for two years? It’s been a long time since we at Martini Giant have seen a packed house for would be blockbusters like these, so it looks like this brilliant bit of counterprogramming may have done the job! Let’s talk Barbenheimer!

With The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly, it could be said that director Andrew Dominik specialized in making box-office bombs that were only later discovered to be works of genius. According to Netflix's numbers however, he broke that trend with his next film, gathering 37,340,000 viewing hours...but unfortunately, that movie was also the most widely hated, critically savaged release of the year: the Ana de Armas starrer Blonde!  Will MG go with the crowd on this one, or has Dominik made another secret classic?

In 1984 David Lynch's disastrous adaptation of Dune seemed to prove the critics right - that this novel, even after decades of development in the hands of artists like Alejandro Jodorowski, Moebius, Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger had proved itself totally unfilmable. But Hollywood has never met a remake it could resist, so now they've laid a 165 million bet down on a new version by Blade Runner 2049's Denis Villeneuve! So was Jason Mamoa worth the money? Is Lynch's film really the secret classic some say it is? Join MG as we do the worm with Dune vs Dune!

Join us for a double feature of generation-centric murder mysteries: David Fincher's big-budget, dark-n-kinky version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Antonioni's alienating arthouse classic Blow-Up! MG finds plenty of crossover in these stories, and toxic men getting away with whatever they want is a theme that is central to both films - but things take a turn for the heated as Thron goes rogue and challenges Chris, Erick, and all of Twitch-chat with a theory on who the real worst villain is between these two thrillers! (Spoiler alert: nobody buys it, but it's a great debate!)

Whether it's wrestling or boxing, nothing conveys the brutality of the ring like film does - from Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight to Darren Aaronofsky's The Wrestler. But few have ever made it more terrifyingly tactile than Scorsese did with Raging Bull - and even fewer have made it more emotional than Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw! So join MG tonight as we take a look at these knockouts!

Barbie's Margot Robbie leads Damien Chazelle's three-hour epic Babylon, with a screenplay inspired by Gene Kelly's bona fide masterpiece Singin' in the Rain - and before its release, the studio thought they had the Oscars all locked up! But theatergoers felt very differently - alternately offended and bored by the endless over-the-top antics of the drug-dizzy plot, audiences stayed away in droves, making It the one of the biggest bombs of the past few years! Were they right? MG compares it and its source material in a double-feature bonanza!

No film in the history of American cinema casts as long a shadow as Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane - but was the magic really all Welles'? David Fincher's answer, Mank - based on a screenplay by his father - would argue no. But MG feels that this Netflix original has more to say than simply defending the credit of its title character, and that Fincher is using his streaming freedom not only to evoke old-time Hollywood glory, but also to shed some light on the business' future. Join us as we take a deep dive on the relationship between these two visionary films.

Using technology to get a second chance at life is one of the  great themes of sci fi, from Frankenstein to Charly to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But sometimes it's the movies themselves that need a second chance!  Tonight we take a look at two films that came with great pedigrees, but somehow failed to find their audience, and ask if they deserve another shot!  First up is George Segal in Micchael Chrichton's The Terminal Man, followed by Matt Damon in Alexander Payne's Downsizing!

James Caan has had an incredibly varied career, from mobster classics like The Godfather and Thief, to light-hearted comedies like Wes Anderson's breakout Bottle Rocket and Jon Favreau's Elf. But one of his best is also one of his least-remembered and strangest films - Norman Jewison's dark-future sports epic, Rollerball from 1975. Caan's patented tender-tough-guy demeanor is the moral backbone of this dystopian drama - and MG argues that's what makes its weird blend of 2001, 1984, and The Longest Yard work, turning it into something truly unique in 70s sci-fi!

By now, we're used to the Coen Brothers' penchant for goofy comedy, from the musical massacre in Buster Scruggs to the suggestive Navy dance number in Hail Caesar. But Blood Simple, their debut film, had been a grim, Sundance-friendly noir - so in 1987, no one suspected their sophomore effort would turn out to be a slapstick classic! Join MG as we take on Raising Arizona!

David Fincher has long been on the cutting edge of the killer/thriller genre, reinventing it many times over his career with classics like Se7en, Zodiac, Mindhunter, and Gone Girl. But with his latest Netflix-backed effort, he both cuts new ground - and, in a weird way, gets back to basics: join us as we look at The Killer, and its classic inspiration, Le Samouraï!

AI rising up and conquering humanity has been the subject of hundreds of films from Westworld to The Terminator - but tonight we feature a couple of films that suggest reality will be more insidious than that! Join us for the little-known 70s time-capsule Colossus: The Forbin Project, followed by Spike Jonze’s chatbot-gone-rogue love story, Her!

Few actor-director partnerships are as enduring or iconic as the one that Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese have enjoyed, from the visceral 70's masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, to iconic biopic Raging Bull, to the genre-defining criminal histories of Goodfellas and Casino - and with each outing, the pair has set new standards in character, performance, and storytelling that have changed the course of cinema. But tonight MG wants to spotlight the most-often forgotten collaboration: 1982's painfully awkward and socially prescient The King of Comedy!

Directors Michael Mann and Ridley Scott have each developed a strong brand for themselves, so when you see their name on the marquee, you feel you know what to expect. But early in their careers, they both decided to take on a decidedly different kind of movie - the fairy tale - and while the results are a bit mixed, they are still fascinating, and MG argues that many of their directorial signatures were born in these offbeat films. Join us as we check out the full-on pixies-and-unicorns adventure of Scott's Legend, and the World War II mythic horror of Mann's The Keep!

When the Coen Brothers’ comic-noir masterpiece The Big Lebowski hit theaters in 1997, it fizzled with both critics and audiences - but it has since cemented its position in the pantheon of classic sendups of Los Angeles culture to the point that nearly everyone these days knows "the Dude abides."  But Gen-Xers will remember that, for the longest time, the go-to for Los Angeles quotes was a movie that has now completely disappeared from the public consciousness: Steve Martin's LA Story!

Disney spent 350 million making the pretty-fun Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and 288 million making the downright awful Black Widow.  But even though the combined budget of tonight's double feature wouldn't have covered craft service for those movies, each packed to the brim with incredible concepts and beautiful images.  Join us as we talk about Gareth Edwards' Monsters and Brit Marling's Another Earth!

Tonight the fourth in our Time Travel series serves up a classic, a would-be classic, and a should-be classic… and all three share fascinating connections! Our first pick is Chris Marker's landmark stills-in-sequence short film La Jetée, a movie so compelling that none other than Terry Gilliam remade it as our second choice: 12 Monkeys, featuring Bruce Willis, which in turn made such an impression on the young Rian Johnson, that he cast Willis in our third pick, the mind-blowing sleeper hit Looper!

MG takes on a double dose of Jesse James! First up: Samuel Fuller's I Shot Jesse James from 1949, a film that many regard as the most studio-esque of the great directors' work - but MG believes there is a brilliantly subversive message motivating this western classic. Next: Australian auteur Andrew Dominik takes major inspiration from Fuller's work with his heartbreaking elegy The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck - which we argue is the most under seen, underrated movie of the past twenty years!

Prior to Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Oscars tended toward stately, serious picks. But now we see stranger and more daring fare creeping in - so tonight MG looks at how the Daniels' started clearing this path with their beautifully low-budget epic Swiss Army Man; and look at where it's led us - Emma Stone's Oscar win for her role as the wild Bella Baxter in Poor Things!

Tonight MG features a pair of brilliantly upsetting early films from a pair of brilliantly upsetting filmmakers! First up, Roman Polanski's lesser-known dark comedy Cul de Sac, featuring a young-n-skinny Donald Pleasence living in a lonely castle with his bored wife, followed by Under the Skin helmer Johnathan Glazer's first film, Sexy Beast - in which Ray Winstone lives in the more blissful isolation of retirement...but in both cases, a terrifying criminal guest arrives to shatter their world...and steal the show with a larger-than-life performance!

Now that's a lot of martinis! Join us as MG celebrates its 100th episode with the amazing DR. SCOTT ROSS, founder of legendary VFX house Digital Domain! We talk about the industry, his storied career, and of course we go deep on one of his very favorite films - one we can't believe we haven't covered yet, given that it's the culmination of everything we love about American cinema in the 1970s - Francis Ford Coppola's hallucinatory Vietnam masterpiece, Apocalypse Now!  This is an epic episode in every way, so ice up your favorite drink and raise a glass with us!

Join MG for a Halloween treat as we take on our first Twitch-based episode! Classic films always set a standard, but few movies are so groundbreaking that they create an entirely new genre, and Tobe Hooper's terrifying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the biggest game-changers in cinema history. Mixing a low-fi, almost documentary flavor with high-concept horror and a touch of political allegory, this panic-attack of a movie was a massive hit for its tiny budget, and it set the stage for a dozen horror franchises to come with its transgressive chills!

Happy Halloween from MG! Tonight, pour yourself a nice pumpkin spice martini and cozy up to our Exorcist double bill! First up is William Friedkin's 1973 masterful original, featuring a decade-best performance from Ellen Burstyn as a possessed kid's beleaguered mom - then we follow it up with the film's second (and darkly comedic) sequel, Exorcist III - directed by the book's author, William Peter Blatty!

Jake Gyllenhaal has had an incredible career, working with a wide range of directors from Ambulance's Michael Bay, to Okja's Bong Joon Ho, to Zodiac's David Fincher.  But two filmmakers in particular saw him as more than a great actor - they saw him as a muse, and built movies around his unique voice.  Join us tonight as MG takes on Richard Kelly's iconic Donnie Darko and Denis Villeneuve's underseen Enemy!

Alex Garland has always been on the forefront of sci-fi - exploring the future of technology in Devs, reinventing the zombie genre with 28 Days Later, questioning our basic identity Annihilation, and debating the nature of consciousness in the MG favorite Ex Machina. But his latest might be his most relevant and upsetting work yet - and certainly his biggest. Join us for his unnerving vision of Civil War!

Conventional wisdom tells us that prequels, sequels and reboots are never as good as the originals, yet franchise installments make up two-thirds of the biggest box-office hits of all time. Do they ever get it right? Tonight, MG takes a couple of contenders: Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which goes a long way to recapturing the original trilogy's magic - and the George Miller's wild reimagining of his own series, Mad Max: Fury Road, which some (read: Thron) think is one of the greatest films of all time!

Marvel and DC continue to dominate global box office, but with Michelle Yeoh's Oscar-Nominated indie darling Everything Everywhere All at Once and Brad Pitt's long-legged, star-powered Bullet Train, MG believes we might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!  These non-franchise hits suggest that audiences are finally craving more than just spandex-of-the-week storytelling, and Hollywood is starting to listen - but will it be enough to bring crowds back to the megaplex? 

Tonight MG has a Scorsese double feature - but it's possible that many listeners have never even heard of these two films, let alone seen them, as they are often lost in the director's flood of classics! First up is After Hours from 1985, featuring the underrated Griffin Dunne as a beige-souled corporate desk jockey who finds himself stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare version of the SoHo art scene, and then we follow it up with another crazed journey through NYC, as a wild-eyed and sleep-deprived Nicholas Cage works as an EMT in Bringing Out the Dead!