252 – Josie and the Pussycats

Tara Reid saw her future career

Jen and Tim get around to a cute cult film about exploitation and capitalism, Josie and the Pussycats!

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Get Russ Burlingame’s love letter to the film, Best Movie Ever! for 30% off with discount code SEENTHIS over at JosieBook.com! This comprehensive oral history of the film covers the beloved source comic, the production of the film, and the fierce devotion it inspired and continues to inspire in fans.

The reason Jen couldn’t find anything up-to-date on the lawsuit against Rosario Dawson is because it was dismissed in 2021.

It’s true, Archie really did meet the Punisher. They should invite him to appear on the Riverdale TV show.

251 – Dr. Caligari

Putting the “psycho” in psycho-sexual (also the “sexual”)

Tim and Jen host the freakiest guest they know, the lovable Bitter Karella of Midnight Pals fame, to chat about one of the freakiest movies she knows, Dr. Caligari!

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Screen Anarchy has a wonderful gallery of Caligari director Stephen Sayadian’s work, going all the way back to his earliest days as an editorial illustrator. Included are some reminisces about Dr. Caligari!

Read a 2024 interview with Caligari co-writer Jerry Stahl, in which he speaks candidly about sobriety and being an artist in a world ruled by money.

250 – The Tourist

Earth is a terrible place to visit… but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Jen and Tim unearth one of the most famous unproduced screenplays of all time, Clair Noto’s dark sci-fi tale The Tourist.

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Read the Clair Noto interview that reminded Jen that this screenplay exists!

Read the screenplay itself at the Internet Archive— highly recommended.

You can watch the BBC Moving Pictures segment on The Tourist, featuring the screenwriter herself, on YouTube.

See more of Giger’s concept art for The Tourist at the charmingly Web 1.0 official Giger website.

Shelley Hack?!

249 – The Oscar

Why the Academy Awards® night is called “the big game”

Tim and Jen experience a stodgy treatment of Hollywood avarice, The Oscar.

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Friend of the show Josh Olson does indeed appreciate the corniness of this movie— so much so that you can hear him join comedian Patton Oswalt and filmmaker Erik Nelson for the audio commentary on the Kino Lorber blu-ray!

If you’re dying to read an academic paper on The Oscar, have at it.

248 – Turn On

Turn-On turned viewers off

Jen and Tim unearth a cursed relic: the television show cancelled before the final credits even rolled, Turn On!

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Thanks to SoapsNThings on YouTube for archiving so many episodes of Peyton Place!

The offensive Aussie show Jen alluded to that also got cancelled during the first episode was Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos. You can see the singular episode at the Internet Archive!

The 7-second TikTok joke Tim referenced “Moving a photo in Microsoft Word“.

Finally, Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn” is kind of a bop.

247 – The Driver

Iggy and the Stooges’ prequel to The Passenger

Tim and Jen ride along with a taciturn Ryan O’Neal for Walter Hill’s sinuous neo-noir, The Driver!

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Walter Hill spoke with Deadline in 2024 about his influences, Tony Scott’s idiot brother, and of course, westerns.

Hill also talked about the controversy surrounding The Warriors in an interview for Esquire:

I think the reason why there were some violent incidents is really very simple: The movie was very popular with the street gangs, especially young men, a lot of whom had very strong feelings about each other. And suddenly they all went to the movies together!

246 – Heist

…my boat.

Jen and Tim examine some D-tier David Mamet: the by-the-numbers heist flick, uh, Heist.

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Chris Person of the worker-owned tech news site Aftermath dug up the previously unavailable special Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants in pristine broadcast resolution and made it available to the world once again. Read an interview with Person about the process and the importance of archiving conducted by David J. Roth and Dan McQuade of Defector, and watch the special at the Internet Archive. Fun fact: David Mamet directed the special!

Person also wrote a rundown of the cutting edge of analog media archiving (as of mid-2024, anyway) that is extremely worth your time.

245 – Casino Royale

Fred Schneider is John Waters as Salvador Dali

Tim and Jen suffer through a patchwork spy pastiche, Casino Royale.

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Errata: Jen attributed the anecdote about producer Charles K. Feldman removing the pay-offs to the jokes in the script to Joe McGrath, but it actually came from another director credited on the film, Val Guest.

Speaking of, you can look through some of superagent-turned-producer Feldman’s personal papers courtesy of AFI.

Robert Von Dassanowsky’s critical essay on Casino Royale just might be the final word on the film:

“Casino Royale’s relationship to Bond is only emblematic; it is a prismatic translation of Fleming’s milieu, not a linear adaptation. And it remains, even today, a wry and provocative sociopolitical satire. The often criticized inconsistencies of the film’s multiple James Bonds, including the banal 007 of Terence Cooper, brought in to cover Sellers’s unfinished characterization, intentionally work to confuse the issue of Bond, to overwork the paradigm until it has no value. As Walter Benjamin in his influential essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” would have it, the original artwork, with its auratic value, has been replaced by accessible but worthless copies. Here, the most unique icon of the era is intentionally made common – a fashion, a fad, a façade: the multiple Bonds are all copies of a first copy, Connery’s Bond.”

244 – I, Robot

I robot, doesn’t everybody?

Jen sends thousands of robots to compel Tim to discuss a film “suggested by” Isaac Asimov’s writings, I, Robot!

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The creepshot photographer Jen couldn’t remember the name of was Miroslav Tichý. You can see many of his surreptitious and admittedly beautiful works at ArtNet.

Speaking of Czech artists, we neglected to mention that Alex Proyas is currently working on an adaptation of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”). This play, of course, is the one that brought the word “robot” to the English-speaking world.

If you love arid Will Smith blockbusters as much as Tim does (lol j/k), check out our episode on Wild Wild West!

243 – Prince of the Sun

You enlightened little shit

Tim can barely hold back his excitement about a movie that (kind of) has Cynthia Rothrock in it: Prince of the Sun!

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View the (kind of) English dub of the film at the Internet Archive.

Jen forgot that her Letterboxd list was called “Anti-Girlboss Movies“, and any movie starring Mai certainly qualifies for it. (Protip: there’s also a list of every single movie we’ve talked about on the show, and sometimes it’ll give you a little hint as to what’s coming up next!)

“we’ll fix it in post,” they said