Junk Filter Jesse Hawken

The Milwaukee-based film critic and programmer Chris Cassingham joins the show this week to discuss the great director George Stevens and his 1953 masterpiece Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, about a mysterious gunfighter who finds work with a homestead family in the open range of lawless Wyoming and is drawn into the community’s conflict against a gang of violent cattleranchers who are trying to take over the territory.

George Stevens’ life was transformed by his service in World War II as part of the military’s Special Motion Picture Coverage Unit, bearing witness to D-Day and the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and he returned to Hollywood to become one of the great American dramatic filmmakers with his unofficial fifties trilogy of A Place in the Sun, Giant, and this immortal western that serves both as a classic example of the genre and as a revisionist “psychological western” that questioned heroism, masculinity, the family unit and most importantly, the horror and the toll of gun violence on American life, a work that pushed cinema in the fifties forward towards the modern age, and is cited by some of today’s great directors as a key influence.

Plus: on the eve of the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, a discussion of what was once billed as Hugh Jackman’s final performance as the character in 2017’s Logan, a film that pays explicit (and in our opinion unearned) tribute to Shane.

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Follow Chris Cassingham on Twitter and catch up to Chris' film writing here.

Re-release trailer for Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Access this entire 86 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/174-costners-108247008

The film writer Corey Atad returns for a show about the return of Kevin Costner to the director’s chair with the first chapter of his planned four-part theatrical western epic Horizon: An American Saga.

Costner resuscitated his career as a leading man thanks to television with Yellowstone and then surprisingly left the series to begin work on Horizon (which may have been a factor in his wife’s filing for divorce after he started selling his properties to finance the production). Warner Bros. through its studio New Line Cinema agreed to release the first two instalments, initially scheduled to open within weeks of one another, but when the first chapter tanked at the box office the studio indefinitely postponed the release of Chapter Two.

Corey and I went to see the first one (in an empty theatre) and we talk about the film as Costner’s personal vision, how it compares to his other films as a director, and how this planned theatrical epic still cannot escape the shadow of television or transcend the history of the genre.

Follow Corey Atad on Twitter, visit coreyatad.com and subscribe to Corey’s Substack!

Teaser trailer for Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One and Two (Costner, 2024)

Sami Gold, an undergraduate political science student at George Washington University and contributor to Liberal Currents joins me from New York City to discuss some key texts of reactionary right-wing cinema from the post-Civil Rights era and the beginning of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon, what we could call counter-counter revolutionary cinema or Silent Majority cinema.

We begin with a discussion of the John Birch Society, a formerly influential wing of the Republican Party whose ideas we can see being indulged now in Donald Trump’s control of the GOP, including the JBS’s controversial propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A., which argues that the Civil Rights movement is a secret Communist plot to fuel a “Negro-Soviet” takeover of the United States.

John Wayne was once a member of the John Birch Society and we discuss his passion project of the late sixties, the controversial pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets which he co-directed, one of the only studio films about the war made during the war, released in the summer of 1968 in a climate of antiwar protests, assassinations and the rise of Richard Nixon.

And we also discuss the 1970 political satire Joe, starring Peter Boyle as a blue collar, racist, anti-hippie right-winger who strikes up a friendship with a conservative member of the executive class who in a moment of rage murders the drug-dealing boyfriend of his junkie hippie daughter, and how their search for her in New York leads to further carnage, with remarkable echoes to modern politics because these two men represent the two main voter blocks that support Trump today. 

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Follow Sami Gold on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack, Shmulik’s Takes.

Sami's article "Chris Rufo and the Great Liberal Threat" for Liberal Currents, Feb 27, 2024

"Barry Goldwater vs. The Swinging ’60s: The ‘Choice’ Film” by Daniel McCarthy, for the American Conservative, May 20, 2013

The suppressed 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign commercial Choice

The John Birch Society propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A. (G. Edward Griffin, 1966), courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation

Trailer for The Green Berets (John Wayne and Ray Kellogg, 1968)

UK trailer for Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)

Access this entire 93 minute episode (and additional monthly bonus shows) by becoming a Junk Filter patron for only $5.00 (US) a month! Over 30% of episodes are exclusively available to patrons of the show. https://www.patreon.com/posts/172-american-v-o-107059565

In the second half of our discussion about the 2016 FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Karen Geier and I dig into more of the great performances including Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, Sterling K. Brown as Christopher Darden, and Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and talk about some of the other highlights of the series, including the possible romance between Clark and Darden the show illustrates, and the episodes about the Bronco chase, the racism of the LAPD and the experiences of the sequestered jury members, and a salute to the other creative forces of the show, producers and showrunners Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, specialists in what they call “anti-biopics”, depicting the lives of people who wouldn’t seem worthy of the biopic treatment, with full immersions into these characters and their worlds. 

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson is available for streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally. 

Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.

With the recent death of O.J. Simpson and this month’s 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a look at the other great O.J. tv epic of 2016, Ryan Murphy’s 10 part series American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson:

On part one of our discussion we discuss the cottage industry of content that surrounded the Simpson trial, and how Murphy rose to the occasion in this series by approaching this story as history, tragedy and camp, infusing soap opera theatrics into the retelling of a true life televised trial that in turn led to the replacement of soap operas with reality television, and how the Kardashian family, through their involvement in the trial, directly benefited from this cultural sea change. 

We discuss in detail a few of the fine performances from the ensemble cast, including from some unexpected turns: Connie Britton as Faye Resnick, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey and Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J., and we dig into one of the best episodes, the one that centers on Marcia Clark and the one episode that deviates from the source material, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life, and dramatizes moments from Marcia Clark’s 1997 memoir Without a Doubt, focusing on the intense sexism she faced while trying to prosecute this case. 

Part two of this discussion, on more of the great performances and some of our favourite moments in the series, is available on the Patreon feed.

To support this show directly and to receive access to Part two of this discussion and dozens of exclusive episodes, consider becoming a patron for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) at patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson is available for streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally. 

The film writer David Jamell Moses joins the show for a discussion about a great nineties film that has been flying under the radar for too long, Boaz Yakin’s debut feature Fresh (1994) starring Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson and a 13-year-old actor named Sean Nelson making his film debut, in one of the greatest screen acting performances by a child.

Nelson plays Michael (aka Fresh), a quiet 12-year-old boy who runs drugs for rival gangsters in New York City, including one kingpin who has addicted his sister to heroin and considers young Fresh to be his heir apparent. When Fresh witnesses an act of horrifying gun violence, he takes inspiration from his estranged alcoholic father, a speed-chess master, and applies the principles of the game of chess to carry out a complex strategy to eliminate the gangsters and save himself and his sister from their fates.

Fresh isn’t as well-remembered as other urban crime dramas of the 1990s but David and I love it, and on this episode we go deep on the film’s many virtues; some may be surprised to learn this film was made by a white director but Yakin hardly takes a wrong or phony step to tell this Black story, which functions as a thriller and a tragedy, with magnificent performances and a devastating conclusion.

Plus: how to properly pronounce the name “Giancarlo Esposito”!

Become a patron of the podcast to access to exclusive episodes every month. Over 30% of Junk Filter episodes are exclusively available to patrons. To support this show directly for only $5.00 a month (U.S.) please subscribe at  ⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

Follow David Jamell Moses on Twitter, and check out his writing over at his blog Departures.

Here’s David’s appreciation thread for Fresh on Twitter that inspired this episode

Trailer for Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)