Filmsuck: Recent Episodes
Eileen Jones and Dolores McElroy
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A weekly podcast hosted by Eileen Jones, film critic at Jacobin magazine and recovering academic, and Dolores McElroy, diva enthusiast and lecturer in film and media at UC Berkeley.
In this podcast for the people, we bring you the truth about the rotten state of cinema, its often odious or ham-fisted relationship to politics, and its occasional wondrous bursts of courage and brilliance. We consider the glories of cinemas past, and wonder about lots of things: what’s the role of contemporary film in a time of bad art and worse taste; popular entertainment in a time of fragmentation, generalized disaffection, and PTSD; and media in a time when it seems to have lost its power to get us off our asses?
In short, what is to be done when film sucks?
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores provide a rundown on what's on TV, which starts off as a cheerful endeavor and ends up in a state of despondency over our grim cultural moment.
We report on the third season in twenty years of THE COMEBACK, the HBO Max cringe comedy starring Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, an eternally optimistic and terminally obtuse former TV sitcom star of the late 1980s-‘90s trying to get her career going again in the age of reality TV, AI, influencers, and online everything. Dolores also describes the "death-drive" third season of HBO Max's EUPHORIA, and Eileen despairs over an assortment of hellish offerings including the LORD OF THE FLIES miniseries (Netflix), the second season of BEEF (Netflix), the new David E. Kelley series MARGO'S GOT MONEY TROUBLES (Apple TV+), and the nostalgia-driven return of the hit aughts sitcom SCRUBS (Hulu).
Filmsuck co-hosts enjoy the old-fashioned movie-fun of watching what's essentially one long chase in the new Steven Spielberg action-adventure DISCLOSURE DAY. It's his return to sci-fi alien-invasion-themed movies that are a specialty of his represented by CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL(1982), and WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005). It's true that DISCLOSURE DAY might be sappy and absurdly implausible and have an ending that falls so flat it causes audience members to exclaim "What the hell?" But on the other hand, it's a Spielberg summer blockbuster just like we used to see in the olden times. Get it while you can.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores praise the complex and ultimately harrowing Susannah Herbert documentary NATCHEZ, currently streaming on YouTube and Apple TV+ and soon to arrive at PBS. It focuses on the engine driving this Mississippi River port town's economy, which is tourism—specifically the guided tours through plantation houses that have, for nearly a hundred years, "stuck to the script" of the romantic fantasy of the gracious Old South. However, new tour guides and local activists, several of them Black locals, have emerged recently who insist on factually accurate tours that include the history of slavery and the people held in bondage who actually built those plantation houses and kept them running. In exploring the tensions around this issue in Natchez, a town of complex demographics that is considered a politically progressive "blue dot in a sea of red," Herbert gets representative citizens to talk more and more freely—and sometimes appallingly—about what they really think of their fraught history and current experience.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores express their admiration and affection for comedian Chris Fleming and his hilarious new HBO special CHRIS FLEMING: LIVE AT THE PALACE. Highly recommended!
You may know Fleming from his dazzling comic flights on YouTube and Instagram, but as Fleming puts it, this special is designed to expand his audience beyond "women who brought a knife to prom." Wearing a four-way-stretch purple jumpsuit made by Prince's longtime costume designer Anthony Sartino, Fleming is able to prance, race, strut, flap, tumble, and moonwalk freely around the stage characterizing the freaky eccentrics and wanna-be-freaky normies who populate our world. He's pinpointed unerringly by the theater's spotlight operator who was "on the team that got Osama." Acknowledging his own unique appearance and category-busting affect that revives the old dream of queer liberation, Fleming says there's already been "a nationwide manhunt for my pronouns" and he/she/they will answer to any of them, leaving it up to the audience: "You tell me. You're looking at it."
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores resisted seeing HAMNET, so they both marvel at the emotional impact it achieves by the poignant ending, when almost everyone in theater audiences dissolves into tears. HAMNET is a period tragedy by Chloe Zhao (NOMADLAND) that’s been playing in arthouse theaters for two months. It’s still drawing crowds, and it’s nominated for a number of Academy Awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (by Zhao and the author of the source novel by Maggie O’Farrell), and Best Actress (Jessie Buckley). It deals with the relationship of husband and wife William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Buckley), which is tested by the death of their eleven-year-old son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). The film’s seemingly grandiose theme is the way art can transform experiences such as grief over the loss of a loved one into a sense of meaning in terms of human life in the universe. But don’t scoff. You’re probably more susceptible to this idea than you think you are. Just wait till you cry through the final sequence.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that the title character in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE!, played by Jessie Buckley (who also portrays the wry, raddled spirit of author Mary Shelley) is terrific. She has a brilliantly disheveled look of undead glamor featuring wild bleached-blonde hair, wonderfully garish orange dress, black lips, and the inky splotch that spews up from the corner of her mouth, a chemical stain left over from the process of reanimation. Dolores is forgiving of the way THE BRIDE!, especially in its addled second half, fails to live up to central character and best scenes, whereas Eileen can’t condemn Gyllenhaal hard enough for the dopey, unfocused, pretentious way she blows her opportunity to make an electrifying film.
Co-hosts disagree on THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, a new film about the title character (played by Amanda Seyfried) who founded the Shaker religion. Eileen liked it because she has a morbid religious streak that makes her obsessively interested in movies about old-time people who see visions and start mad spiritual communities. Dolores, on the other hand, hates movies set in the 18th century “when everything was so ILL” and found THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE a dull empty frustrating would-be-hipster work that makes the artfully simple utilitarian structures of Shaker architecture look like Restoration Hardware stores. A lively debate ensues!
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores found Jim Jarmusch’s new indie film Father Mother Sister Brother a sleep-inducing slog. It’sa comedy-drama anthology film in three chapters about difficult family relationships that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and stars Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Cate Blanchett, and Charlotte Rampling. Jarmusch calls it an “anti-action film” that avoids commercial expectations of such typically hard-hitting effects as “drama, violence, revenge, sex” in order to create a film that’s minimalist, focused, delicate, and deliberately simple, like “three flower arrangements.” So consider yourself warned!
In honor of the season, co-hosts Eileen and Dolores take on the made-for-TV holiday movie, focusing especially on the perennial Hallmark Channel favorite, A SHOE ADDICT’S CHRISTMAS (2018). It’s about a thirtysomething department store employee and shoe-lover named Noelle (Candace Cameron Bure) who’s lost both her creative and romantic mojo, which leads her guardian angel Charlie (Jean Smart) to use her Ghost of Christmas Past and Future powers in showing Noelle how to find a man and a plan. Naturally several Christmas miracles ensue. Eileen, a Hallmark Channel newbie, is appalled by these eye-hurting spectacles while Dolores points out how to read against the grain and discover the socially critical women-centered melodramas that survive in surreal forms in these ultra-popular movies.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores disagree when it comes to their basic reactions to the new FRANKENSTEIN, written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro and currently playing on Netflix. Whereas Dolores finds a number of aspects of the film compelling, such the opulent production design, the sensitive performances of Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, and the all-out melodramatic emotionalism typical of Del Toro, Eileen experienced such a blinding hatred of the whole thing she could only gradually realize that…yes, Mia Goth is always interesting.
Co-host Eileen Jones and special guest Conan Neutron of the Movie Night Extravaganza podcast enthuse about the wild and riveting new Yorgos Lanthimos film, Bugonia. It concerns a pair of rural cousins, played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, who abduct the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien come to destroy planet Earth through corporate means. Their plan is to force her to arrange a meeting between the cousins and the “Andromedans” on their mother ship in order to negotiate an agreement for the aliens to leave Earth in peace. Which is a fairly reasonable account of what’s happening on Earth recently, compared to some of the explanations we hear.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is a must-see movie and a model for American filmmaking right now. An adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel VINELAND, ONE BATTLE makes brilliant use of such dynamic genres as action, dark comedy, and the political thriller to drive this depiction of an aging radical leftist in hiding, hilariously played by Leonardo DiCarprio, who’s trying to protect his teenage daughter from his past. Then they’re targeted by rightwing political forces led by the repulsive Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and compelled to go on the run. Don’t miss it!
New Filmsuck episode! Dolores and I enthuse about CAUGHT STEALING. It's doing pretty badly at the box-office, though it's a timely dark comic noir of chaotic working class life, and Austin Butler has a delightful co-star in the cat actor playing Bud.
Special guest Asali Echols, documentary filmmaker, talks to me about the current state of documentary films. We discuss a recent trend toward reviving the strict "observational documentary," led by filmmakers like Elizabeth Lo, whose breakthrough film was the dog's-eye-view movie STRAY (2020). Her upcoming new doc MISTRESS DISPELLER, about a "love industry" in China involving wives hiring undercover operatives to break up the relationships of husbands and their mistresses, tests the limits of Lo's "observational not interventionist" documentary filmmaking ethics. https://www.patreon.com/posts/straying-into-136099786
New Filmsuck episode! While Dolores is making the world safe for opera in Santa Fe, I'm talking to my friend M Dalebout, whose area of scholarly expertise is identity construction in onscreen comedy. We start off with the 2025 HBO Max documentary PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF!
New Filmsuck episode! I rage against Lena Dunham, who cursed us all with GIRLS and is back doing further harm to impressionable minds everywhere with her new, semi-autobiographical Netflix romantic comedy TOO MUCH. Dolores has a more measured reaction to this low-stakes entertainment about an arrested development case played by Megan Stalter (HACKS) who tries to get over a bad breakup by relocating from Brooklyn to London and immediately starting a messy relationship with an indie rocker played by Will Sharpe (WHITE LOTUS 3).How high is your Lena Dunham tolerance?
Season 4 of Mike White's big hit show WHITE LOTUS might not be the most profound thing you've ever seen, but Dolores and Eileen still enjoy its excellent cast reveling in portraying the latest tales of ghastly behaviors of the rich.
Co-hosts Dolores and Eileen enthuse about the messy but compelling thrills of Ryan Coogler's delirious Deep South vampire extravaganza!
Action film enthusiasts rejoice! Special guest Forrest "Flacko" Miller of the lively and popular Movie Night Extravaganza podcast joins co-host Eileen Jones for an episode delving into the everybody's-a-killer world of JOHN WICK 1 - 4, including the new riotously violent spin-off BALLERINA starring Ana de Armas. Discussion includes wild speculation about the likely plot for the upcoming JOHN WICK 5, featuring the return of Keanu Reeves as everyone's favorite world-weary assassin.
All about that time Dolores interviewed her favorite living director Todd Haynes (SAFE, FAR FROM HEAVEN, I'M NOT THERE, CAROL, MAY DECEMBER)--which was only two weeks ago! Filmsuck co-hosts exult in all things Haynes, including his films, his academic background, his current political take, his unforgettable meeting with Barbra Streisand, his cocktail of choice, his upcoming projects, and much, much more.
Late in the narcotizing Oscars 2025 telecast, host Conan O'Brien made the oddly poignant promise that "Through trauma and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here." It was a weird, oblique, it'll-be-okay reference to the seismic upheavals in America, after the whole nearly-four-hour show had made a point of avoiding any reference to them. Notice the absence of any outspoken left-wing celebrities who would've been inclined to rail at the current administration's punitive tear through the government? Mark Ruffalo? Susan Sarandon? Jane Fonda, who just made a barnburner of a speech at the SAG Awards--where were you? Not at the bland and careful Academy Awards ceremony, that's for sure!
Talking about I'M STILL HERE, a new political drama based on the 2015 memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva about the fracturing of his leftist family in the early 1970s, during the right-wing military dictatorship in Brazil. It's the latest film by Walter Salles (MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, CENTRAL STATION), who knew the Paiva family personally, and it's Brazil's biggest film hit since the Covid pandemic. It's also up for multiple Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best International Film, and Best Actress for the formidable Fernanda Torres. Co-hosts aren't in total agreement about I'M STILL HERE--Eileen loved it while acknowledging Dolores's misgivings about the lack of class-consciousness and its extended structure following what happens to the family in the forty-plus years after the harrowing events of 1971.
It's a Very Special Filmsuck episode open to the public! Co-host Eileen Jones interviews writer and cinephile Alex Deley, who wrote a fantastic piece for JACOBIN magazine about the glories of Lynch films.
We've got a rare total disagreement between co-hosts when it comes to FLOW, the highly praised Latvian animated feature that's up for Oscars for both Best Animated Film and Best International Film. Dolores found this dialogue-free tale of a housecat and several other animals trying to survive a disastrous flood moving, inspiring, and perhaps the greatest film this year. Whereas Eileen—who generally despises the whole movie history of animals being terrorized so we can be entertained and learn dubious lessons, going back to THE YEARLING and OLD YELLER—defies all critical and public opinion to declare her deathless hatred for this film.
Can't get enough of that new NOSFERATU, so co-hosts Eileen and Dolores are debating its merits and demerits while at the same time embracing the film as a cinephile must-see.
Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores take the "Glicked" challenge and watch WICKED and GLADIATOR II back-to-back. Here are hilarious our survivor's tales.
Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores celebrate Halloween with a discussion of the witch films currently featured in the Criterion Channel series. They include such favorites as BLACK SUNDAY, SUSPIRIA, THE WITCHES, THE CRUCIBLE, and THE LOVE WITCH, but the most exciting discovery is IL DEMONIO (THE DEMON), a 1963 Italian Neo-realist film featuring a spider-walking peasant woman whose exorcism clearly inspired THE EXORCIST (1971)!
Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores celebrate the long-awaited sequel BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, thirty-six years after Tim Burton's beloved 1988 comedy hit. Michael Keaton is back as the high-living undead title character, a "freelance bioexorcist," along with Winona Ryder as former depressed teen Lydia Deetz, now a perplexed middle-aged woman with an alienated daughter of her own played by Jenna Ortega of WEDNESDAY. Add the divine Catherine O'Hara as Lydia's mother, the daffy conceptual artist Delia Deetz, and the stage is set for fantastical fun with the living and the "recently deceased" and the highly porous border in between.
Summer's nearly over and we're looking at the effect of carnivals and amusement parks in such hot-weather hits as ADVENTURELAND (2009), ZOMBIELAND (2009), THE LOST BOYS (1987), and SOME CAME RUNNING (1958).
Filmsuck co-hosts tackle the life and career of thorny but fascinating star Faye Dunaway, which is the topic of the new HBO Max documentary FAYE. Her long and turbulent stage and screen career includes such memorable films as BONNIE AND CLYDE, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, CHINATOWN, NETWORK, MOMMIE DEAREST, and BARFLY.
New Filmsuck episode! We're celebrating Scottish-born actor Deborah Kerr ("...rhymes with star!") whose stardom in 1940s England got her a Hollywood studio contract and a "ladylike" star image she had to fight in order to get better roles. She ought to be better known for her unusual air of compassion and worldly wisdom and her many great performances in such films as THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, BLACK NARCISSUS, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, TEA AND SYMPATHY, HEAVEN KNOWS MR. ALLISON, AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, THE KING AND I, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, SEPARATE TABLES, and THE INNOCENTS.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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?)
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!
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.
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.
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).
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!
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!
Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores fearlessly defy obsessive Wes Anderson fans in reviling his soul-deadening, seersucker suit sensibility!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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?
BONUS Filmsuck episode for holidays! Dolores and Eileen discuss the Christmas movies they can't or won't see because childhood trauma, and offer up some alternative holiday films for your viewing pleasure. Dolores suggests Goodfellas as heartwarming family fare, and Eileen recommends Curse of the Cat People a a lovely yuletide entertainment.
Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores grapple with their bewildering lack of love for White Lotus, the highly praised, much-Emmy-ed HBO Max series satirizing the vacationing ruling class. Sorry in advance to all those who revere it!
Filmsuck co-hosts enthuse about the new Martin McDonagh film The Banshees of Inisherin, a dark comedy that turns pitch-black by the end! Set in 1923 Ireland as the civil war rages on the mainland, this fable-like tale reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, the stars of McDonagh's 2009 cult favorite In Bruges, as former friends whose increasingly bitter estrangement creates severe consequences for the tiny island community of Inisherin. And that includes the animals--lotta animals involved!
For your Halloween pleasure and edification, this week on Filmsuck we're talking about the vampire film from Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), and Vampyr (1932) through Martin (1976), The Hunger (1983), Near Dark (1987), Let the Right One In (2008), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), in order to analyze how this popular movie monster represents such an array of human fears and desires, it can adapt easily to different eras and cultures.
Both Filmsuck co-hosts hated the new George Miller movie Three Thousand Years of Longing, a feeling shared by audiences everywhere, it seems, as the romantic fantasy wastes the talents of Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in the lead roles and becomes one of the biggest box-office failures of 2022. The film raises the question "Why can't mainstream filmmakers do emotionally powerful movies about love anymore?" as well as "How can a movie with such a shocking 'Magical Negro' storyline have been blandly accepted by so many critics who gave the film glowing reviews?"
This week on Filmsuck we're lamenting the shiny, busy, but oddly inert action comedy Bullet Train that mostly wastes the talents of an excellent cast. Bullet Train stars Brad Pitt as a sweet-natured assassin who's back at work after an extended interlude in therapy, and wants to do a nice, simple, non-violent "snatch and grab" job in keeping with his newfound peace of mind. Unfortunately, he's on a high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto with several other stone-cold killers who are either after the same silver briefcase or some sort of gory revenge.
Though if you talk to your friends and acquaintances you're likely hear a range of opinions on Nope--from 1) best Jordan Peele film so far, he's transcended himself, to 2) worst Jordan Peele film ever, Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) were so much better--your Filmsuck co-hosts agree on their pro-Nope stance. Dolores thoroughly enjoyed it, and Eileen thinks it's one of the most brilliant and thrilling genre films made in ages.
So calling all cinephiles, you need to get in on this public debate while it's hot! See the film, listen to the episode, argue with your people!
You may know writer-director-producer Baz Luhrmann from such expensive spectacles as The Great Gatsby, Australia, and Moulin Rouge! Co-hosts Dolores and Eileen talk about Luhrmann's hysterically melodramatic films and disagree sharply on how successfully his new biopic Elvis represents the life and career of legendary performer Elvis Presley, debating in particular how the film stands on the entrenched "Elvis authenticity thesis." (Short version of theory: young "real" pioneering rocker Elvis = good, and older "fake" Las Vegas Elvis = bad.)
In honor of Pride Month we're talking about the Emmy/Peabody/Golden Globe-winning HBO series Hacks, starring Jean Smart as seventy-ish stand-up comedy legend Deborah Vance, pushed into updating her act by hiring young Gen Z writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder, daughter of former SNL star Laraine Newman), whose career is also in trouble. It's hate at first sight until they begin to bond over their unexpected similarities: tremendous career ambition, troubled relationships with family and romantic interests, and struggles as women in the entertainment industry still dominated by men who never seem to age out of their positions of control. And it soon becomes pretty clear that, as co-host Dolores puts it, "The whole show is queer, and not just because Ava is pretty gay for Deborah."
This week we're discussing the new Viking epic The Northman in the context of writer-director Robert Eggers' brief but spectacular career, including his first two feature films, The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Deserving of the term "auteur" if anyone is, Eggers admits he had to deal with more creative interference than ever before with big-budget film The Northman, his attempt to widen his audience appeal by making the "most entertaining Robert Eggers film" he could manage. What affect has an attempt to go mainstream had on Eggers' idiosyncratic filmmaking?
In this Filmsuck episode we're talking about witches in film, a favorite subject of ours. We're focusing specifically on the revived figure of the truly frightening witch that is central to Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015) as well as the directorial debut of Goran Stolevski, You Won't Be Alone, which is currently playing in theaters.
These brilliant witch films are part of the "folk horror revival" of the past decade. Join us as we explore that cinematic context as well, covered in detail in the 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.
This week we're tackling another 2022 Academy Award nominee, Pedro Almodovar's Parallel Mothers. It's not nominated for Best Picture or even Best International Feature Film, which is weird--what the hell, Academy? But Penelope Cruz is nominated for Best Actress in her seventh film with the director, and longtime Almodovar collaborator Alberto Inglesias is nominated for Best Original Score. This is a more overtly political film than most in Almodovar's oeuvre, with a narrative concerning the Spanish Civil War and the lingering agony over those who were murdered by fascists. It's also a vivid film melodrama, with a wild central point of tension--were the two mothers' babies switched shortly after birth?
We're very keen on this audacious adaptation of Macbeth by Joel Coen, his first solo effort without brother Ethan. This might seem like an odd choice of project, but Coen stresses the link between Macbeth and earlier Coen "pulp noir" films. He also acknowledges his brilliant predecessors in making expressionistic black-and-white versions of Macbeth, saying in interviews that, while Akira Kurosawa's 1957 Throne of Blood is probably the greatest film adaptation, Orson Welles' 1948 Macbeth is the most emboldening: "That's a wacky movie. Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting, and inventing with Shakespeare. It was kind of liberating. You look at that and go, well, all right, he's doing it."
In this final episode of our "Favorite Film Genres" series, we take on what is perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most subversive, American film genre, film noir! We analyze the old and new versions of Nightmare Alley to help us define the dark, doom-obsessed, complex noir form: Guillermo del Toro's fantastical sin-soaked version currently playing in theaters, and the seemingly plainer but ultimately more searing and socially critical cult classic 1947 film noir. [WARNING: WE DO ALLLLL THE SPOILERS!]
In this week’s Filmsuck episode, our co-hosts throw down over which version of the great musical West Side Story reigns supreme. Eileen backs the 1961 version directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, while Dolores pulls for Steven Spielberg’s new version. That being said, co-hosts join forces to shake their fists at such Spielberg choices as overly CGIed and desaturated cinematography and some of the more egregious “social issue” scenes, like the lengthy one devoted to the purchase of a gun in order to point up the dangers of gun violence in a work that’s already taking on gang mayhem, racism, class hatred, abusive and corrupt policing…
Though Spielberg avoids the worst sin of the musical form, plugging in a random non-musically-gifted star and expecting them to pretend that they’re pulling off the singing and dancing you (don’t) see onscreen. Spielberg went for relatively unknown leads to at least secure good singers and dancers.
We hope you enjoy the latest installment of our “Favorite Film Genres” series with this wild series of rants on the musical!
Todd Haynes is co-host Dolores McElroy’s “favorite living director” for his films’ “meticulousness” and “visual splendor,” but above all the way he loves his subjects and makes them “vibrant and romantic”! Dressed for life at the front of a classroom, Haynes always projects the air of a nice, well-adjusted teacher--and indeed, he figured he’d wind up as a teacher who made experimental films on the side. But he made a splash in the late 1980s film world with his surprisingly moving film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, done in stop-motion animation using Barbie dolls as his cast, quickly became a leading light of the New Queen Cinema movement with his film Poison under conservative right-wing attack, and he’s been with us as a fascinating filmmaker ever since, with films as varied in content and approach as Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Mildred Pierce, Carol, Wonderstruck, Dark Waters, and the new documentary The Velvet Underground.
[MIND THE GAP: We got so embroiled in talking about Haynes, we talked right through a gap in the sound around the ten-minute mark. Just keep on listening, we come back strong!]
We know we’ve sung high praises for all our Great Old Broads, but wow, was Liza Minnelli an amazing talent! In our final installment of the series, we discuss this multi-media star, tailor-made for the New Hollywood of the 1960s. Even though she had famous Hollywood movie studio parents, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, Liza initially propelled herself toward life as a dancer and actor on stage. She had such early success, she won a Tony Award at age nineteen in her first leading role on Broadway, and the film industry quickly came calling. Ultimately becoming a star of all media--stage, screen, concerts, television--Minnelli gave her all in every performance, to the point that co-host Eileen notes that it’s exhausting just watching her sing-dance-act and do encore after encore. We talk about Minnelli’s extravagance and skill, her wild showbiz personal life, her admirable code of ethics, her relationship with her famous parents, and her investment in the glittering future. Minnelli poured every last ounce of herself into her performances, and we hope we returned the gesture this week on Filmsuck!
So much Liz that we needed two episodes to deal with all that stardom. Here we cover everything from the Liz-starring film epic Cleopatra that bankrupted 20th Century-Fox to near-death from pneumonia and an emergency tracheotomy to the scandalous Liz-and-Dick romance that included two marriages to Richard Burton plus one rebuke from the Pope to her Oscar-winning performance at age thirty-four as middle-aged harridan Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic to groundbreaking AIDS activism...
And a whole lot more besides!
Here's our very special Filmsuck episode featuring author and film columnist Jessa Crispin, who joins us in a gleeful, long-overdue takedown of Sofia Coppola films!
In the latest Filmsuck episode, we're talking scary-beautiful sorceress-star Vivien Leigh who played Scarlett O'Hara and Cleopatra and Anna Karenina and Blanch DuBois and many other iconic film roles. We also take on the recent, remarkably stupid film studies scholarship about her.
We're kicking off our "Great Old Broads" series with the fabulously overdressed silent screen star Gloria Swanson, who set out to become a definitive figure of excess in the highly excessive Hollywood of the 1910s and 1920s. You know her as Norma Desmond, the unforgettably mad has-been star determined on making a comeback ("I hate that word! It's 'return'!") in the great 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. Though she played the part so magnificently, even people who knew her personally became convinced Gloria must be Norma in real life, Swanson actually stayed very sane and very busy for decades after the Talkies revolutionized the film industry, working steadily in film, television, radio, and theater. But Gloria agreed with Norma in one major way--a star ought to look like a star!
In this Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS) episode we're focusing on horror films set in vacation settings. We discuss the beachy shock effects of Jaws and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and especially concentrate on the lakeside summer camp slasher terrors of Friday the 13th. Our special guest Ian Miller joins us to discuss the original Friday the 13th (1980), which was written by his father, screenwriter Victor Miller, whom Ian admits suffered from "Mommy issues." Hence his resentment of sequels featuring Jason as the iconic killer, when Jason's mother was meant to be the REAL killer.
We're kicking off our Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS for short) with a tribute to films and TV about teen girls making the most of their magical interlude of freedom. We're also sharing some partially hidden gems that you might not know about: 2018 indie film Skate Kitchen and its current HBO series spin-off Betty, both directed by Crystal Moselle, about the NYC adventures of a real-life female crew of skateboarders, and the 2019 directorial debut of Oliva Wilde, Booksmart, a hilarious comedy about two high-achieving nerd-girls who spent their high school years studying and decide, on the eve of graduation, to have all their teenage fun in one epic night.
This week we're taking on the Ryan Murphy Problem by examining the new five-episode Netflix series Halston, produced and co-written by Murphy. It stars Ewan McGregor as the famous one-name fashion designer whose spectacular rise backed by huge corporate money made him a king of NYC in the Studio 54 era, and whose equally spectacular fall in a cloud of cocaine powder stripped him of nearly everything, including the Halston name. It's great material. So the question is, how does Murphy manage to screw it up?
In this episode of Filmsuck we justify our love for Tallulah Bankhead, the sensational star of stage, screen, radio, and television whose outrageous wit, frank enjoyment of recreational drugs and alcohol, and wild sexual adventuring made her as famous as her acting from the 1920s to the 1960s. She used to tell reporters, "Say anything about me, dahling, as long as it isn't boring," and we do our damnedest to honor her request.
Happy 110th birthday, TW! In this episode of Filmsuck we're reveling in the mind-blowing film adaptations of Tennessee Williams' great plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1964). The most celebrated American playwright of the mid-20th century, Williams' riveting explorations of tormented sexuality, lacerating family trauma, the sick cruelty of the dominant culture, the desperation of the marginalized, and the "devouring" face of God make for a surreal and unforgettable cinema of excess.
This is, in a way, a continuation of last week’s special Anti-Valentine’s Day episode about “peak libido” and unsexy cinema and television, because we’re talking about the supposed counter-example of Bridgerton, which is getting raves for its red-hot period-piece sexiness. Special guest co-host Emily Robbins helps Eileen fathom the Regency romance subgenre in order to understand the phenomenon that is Bridgerton, which is such a huge hit on Netflix, it’s kind of…bizarre.
Today in honor of this awful holiday we're doing an anti-Valentine's Day episode, lamenting the dreary unsexiness of most film and television of our time. We're wondering if it's part of a much larger phenomenon--the depletion of erotic energy in our collective existence that's running alongside the depletion of other planetary resources. That's the topic of the book we're discussing entitled Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire by our very special guest, Dominic Pettman, university professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School for Social Research.
In the latest Filmsuck episode we take on the depressingly timely topic of fascist aesthetics, in terms of historical development and cinematic representations. For example, did you know that the success of the notorious white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915) inspired both a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan but also their adoption of the full white-hood-and-robe uniform featured in the film? And that before that point, KKK members had dressed in motley carnivalesque costumes more similar to the Q Anon rioter outfits worn to storm the capitol building on January 6th? Some other questions we consider include: why are the Nazis, whose professed ideology was arguably anti-art, anti-intellectual thuggery, frequently portrayed as highly cultured dandies in movies? And--if we consider the dapper Nazi villains of Hollywood as part of a fascist continuum with the Germanic tribe cosplay of the Q Anon rioters--is there such a thing as a fascist aesthetic?
Dolores and Eileen talk All About Fran--i.e. writer-humorist-raconteur-ultimate New Yorker Fran Lebowitz--in the new Martin Scorsese docuseries Pretend It's a City, now playing on Netflix. We celebrate Fran L., "public wit," mordant naysayer, and the last bohemian standing, representing a lost gritty urban paradise of art, books, music, and hanging out smoking, drinking, and eating with fellow creative types.
Happy 2021, all! Here's our first episode of the bright new year, featuring Filmsuck's new co-host, Dolores McElroy! We're talking about Oscar Wilde as wit, socialist, decadent, and aesthete, whose ideas about the fabulous lives that belong to the people by right and the importance of embracing the fantastical in art can readily be applied to the mass art of film. Part of the suckage of cinema in our time can be traced to the societal embrace of realism and moralism in art, both tendencies opposed by Wilde. We focus on the eerie and opulent black-and-white 1945 MGM adaptation of Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as our favorite of the many Wilde adaptations--you know, the one with the great, gruesome Ivan Albright painting shown in Technicolor? Take a listen.