Martini Giant

James Mangold loves westerns - in fact, his own remake of 3:10 to Yuma is arguably even better than the original. So when decided to take on his first franchise superhero movie, he knew exactly what film to use as a guide! Tonight MG compares his X-men saga Logan with the classic that brought him inspiration: Geoge Stevens' foundational western, Shane!

With Goodfellas, Casino, Killers of the Flower Moon, and many more, Martin Scorsese has changed the course of the crime genre multiple times - and with each reinvention, has inspired a new generation of filmmakers. But what are the crime movies that inspired him? Tonight we compare his breakout hit - Mean Streets - to one of his all-time favorites: Jimmy Cagney's gritty melodrama The Public Enemy!

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!

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!

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!

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 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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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?

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!

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

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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? 

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! Our Website: https://www.martinigiant.com/ Threadless: https://martinigiant.threadless.com/ Discord: https://t.co/oNkfBkJyPo Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/martinigiant Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/martini_giant Twitter: https://twitter.com/martinigiant Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MartiniGiant/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martini_giant/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martinigiant #1958 #mortondacosta #rosalindrussell #comedy #drama #romance

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! 

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!

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!

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!

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!”

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!

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!

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?

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!