Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Writer and critic David Hering joins us from Liverpool to discuss the final film from the ingenious Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut. Originally conceived in the 1970s as a follow-up to Kubrick's landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey as a more straightforward sex comedy, the film adapts and updates Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story) into a visually stunning, phantasmagorical, and startlingly prescient dark night of the soul featuring one of Hollywood's then most famous couples that explores the psychosexual anxieties of masculinity and patriarchal power dynamics - upheld by loci of elite influence - that oppress, sublimate, and throttle our desires.We begin by examining the metatextual maelstrom surrounding the film, and how a series of distinct discourses (Kubrick's first film in over a decade, his sudden death shortly after the film's completion, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's tabloid-ready romance) united to produce a landmark film event that was met by a befuddled critical and commercial audience alike. Then, we discuss the film's milieu, its controlled artificiality, and Kubrick's masterful use of repetition to create a uniquely dreamlike essence that beguiles even as it suggests a disquieting world of influence operating just outside of our periphery. Finally, we unpack the film's mysteries and unresolved tensions; how the film's conclusion (and iconic final line) suggest a subtle defiance toward the systems of control that minimize and abstract our libidinal, desirous agency. Follow David Hering on Twitter.Check out David's work at his website.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
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9:29
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9:29
Benny's Video feat. Heather Landsman
Filmmaker Heather Landsman joins to discuss Michael Haneke's Benny's Video alongside a conversation about her latest film, the archival documentary The Best of Me, which chronicles Björk stalker Ricardo López through unvarnished, segments of his 1996 video diaries, created as a means of sharing his ideological convictions and his plan to mail the pop singer a letter bomb. The film shares some thematic connections with Benny's Video, exploring the potentially radicalizing effect of culutral ephemera, how mediation both reflects and proliferates the atomization of late capitalism, and how the distancing effect of the camera abstracts the boundaries between the incorporeal and the material. We begin with a conversation about The Best of Me, its creation, and how we should understand the case of the deeply disturbed López. Then we discuss Michael Haneke, his perspectives on violence and the media, and we take on some of the common criticisms of his work as overly didactic or sanctimonious. Finally, we look at Benny's Video, it's considerations of mediated existence in the late 20th century, and it prescience with regard to the digital unreality we all inhabit online every day in the 2020s. More info on The Best of Me can be found here. Watch the trailer for The Best of Me. Follow Heather Landsman on Twitter.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
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1:40:43
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1:40:43
The Faculty feat. Trevor Strunk
It's Halloween, so we decided to do a "scary" one! Podcaster, author, and emissary from the City of Brotherly Love Trevor Strunk joins to discuss Robert Rodriguez's 1998 Breakfast-Club-Meets-Body-Snatchers riff The Faculty. Boasting a memorable cast of young up-and-comers and a script written by Scream-scribe Kevin Williamson, the film is both playfully self-aware and slyly subversive in its explorations of social hierarchies and the omnipresent 90s fixation with conformity to the monoculture. We begin by exploring how the film updates the Body Snatcher narrative, borrowing (and explicitly citing) the literary works of Robert A. Heinlen and Jack Finney, as well as both previous Body Snatchers film adaptations by Don Siegel and Philip Kaufman. Then, we contend with some of the movie's most intriguing premises - its assertions about capitalist hierarchies and how they maintain the oppression of marginalized out-groups as well as how American society impedes gratifying sexual expression (especially for women). Finally, we examine the deceptively cynical ending and what it suggests about the stickiness of the neoliberal order, its structural hold on the horizons of our sociopolitical imagination. Follow Trevor Strunk on TwitterListen & Subscribe to No CartridgeBuy Trevor's book Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay between Consoles and Culture Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
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2:21:38
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2:21:38
After Life feat. Pod Casty for Me
The fine, upstanding gentlemen of Pod Casty for Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to discuss Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, which follows a group of recently deceased people entering a state of limbo where counselors (also deceased) help them locate their most important memory and then go about the work of turning that memory into a film that they will watch forever in eternity. The film adopts, at least in part, a docu-fiction quality, assembling talking head interviews with several non-actors telling their memories directly to camera before becoming a treatise on art-making itself, considering how cinema reflects and retains memory. We begin with a discussion of Kore-eda's formalism, and how the director embraces both the erudite affect of slow cinema and the melodramatic dramaturgy of classical narrative to mixed effect. Then, we engage the film's high concept premise, how its emboldened by its ambiguities and where the film still feels grafted to terrestrial quotidian experience. Finally, we ponder the wide array of films that deal with the afterlife as a bureaucratic machine, and whether applying systemic order to something like death is a comforting fantasy or a cloistering nightmare. Read Hirokazu Kore-eda's director statement on After Life.Listen & Subscribe to Pod Casty for Me.Follow Pod Casty for Me on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
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2:09:05
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2:09:05
Carlito's Way feat. Travis Woods *TEASER*
Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Film writer and author of the upcoming book De Palma Does Hollywood Travis Woods joins us to discuss the exemplary filmmaker and his 1993 crime masterpiece Carlito's Way, starring Al Pacino as the titular Carlito Brigante, an ex-hustler freed from prison after serving five years of a thirty-year sentence on a legal technicality who seeks to outrun the shadow of his past, resulting in tragedy. Reteaming with Pacino and producer Martin Bregman a decade after the success of Scarface, De Palma imbues his characteristically nimble, brilliant formal mastery with sweeping romance and stirring fatalism that remains one of the director's richest, most personal films. We begin with a long discussion about De Palma as filmmaker and unpack the inherent politicization of his form. Then, we talk about Carlito's Way and its place within De Palma's greater filmmography; how it splits the difference between his "one for them, one for me" routine, and how the film subverts our knowledge of De Palma's implicative form to embrace a gentler mode of his signature style. Finally, we consider the film's reflection of the political ideology of the 90s, warring between the filmmaker's materialist persuasion and the mytholigizing force of the End of History. Follow Travis Woods on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell. Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.....Our theme music is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.
A podcast about the films of the 1990s, their politics, and how they inform today's film landscape. Exploring the output of a seemingly bottomless decade. America's first and only movie podcast.
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