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Podcast #49: Picking Up The Pieces (2000)

In Podcasts on March 15, 2013 at 7:01 pm
It's impossible to understand exactly how bad the lighting situation is in this movie, but here's a taste.

It’s impossible to understand exactly how bad the lighting situation is in this movie, but here’s a taste.

There are only a dozen movies that Woody Allen appears in as an actor without having any creative input behind the scenes; of that dozen, almost half are throwaway cameos and supporting roles. Picking Up the Pieces breathes pretty rarefied air, being one of a handful of movies that The Bespectacled One appears in a leading role in; too bad it happens to be an enormous sack of crap, a Day-Glo hallucination of a dark comedy filled with recognizable faces and very few recognizable jokes.

David Schwimmer in various states of undress! Sacrilegious jokes! Elliott Gould doing a weird German-Mexican accent! Legendary DP Vittorio Storaro FUCKING LOSING IT! You can’t go wrong. Or you can go very wrong, depending on the way you look at this. Film critic / boy wonder / Fantasia programmer Ariel Esteban Cayer returns for a rootin’, tootin’ good time! Ariel’s fabled presentation on Joseph Gordon-Levitt (appearing here as a pimply kid with no real purpoe) is this Sunday at Katacombes.

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Music this week by We Were Not The Savages. You can find the track Let’s Talk About Me and You at their Bandcamp page and catch them when they launch their self-titled EP at L’Esco in Montreal on April 6th.

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Podcast #48: Malone (1987)

In Podcasts on February 24, 2013 at 5:44 pm
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This is what drew us to Malone in the first place. Note the puffy, Lego-like hair.

A half-assed attempt to put Burt Reynolds in another iconic franchise role, Malone has The Mustachioed One traipsing around the Pacific Northwest with his shirt half-buttoned while attempting to take down a vaguely Mitt Romney-esque villain (played by Uncle Ben from the first Spider-Man movie, Cliff Robertson) with vague nefarious plans. He drives to and fro, sometimes getting into altercations. Suffice to say that this was not enough to make Malone a household name. Comedian and journalist Walter Lyng (of Go Plug Yourself) joins me for a short and sweet  analysis of a movie with very little plot, lots of hair and at least one gross underage kiss from Burt.

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Music this week provided by Dany Laj & The Looks. The song Take It Away off their EP Telepathic Voices can be found here. You can catch them tonight at Barfly in Montreal and at 3030 Dundas St. W in Toronto on March 29th, 2013.

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Podcast #47: Crazy Six (1997)

In Podcasts on February 7, 2013 at 1:59 pm
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Reminder that this is a sci-fi thriller, not a dusty Western.

The hallowed tradition of FeBURTuary seems as good as time as any to return from the will-they-won’t-they hiatus of the last few months. We are back with a rig that doesn’t sound like a lawnmower and a bevy of Burt movies for your listening pleasure. First up is Crazy Six, a post-apocalyptic (in name only) science-fiction (in name only) thriller in which a shabby junkie (played by Rob Lowe at a very confusing time in his life) is pitted between a couple of European monarch gangsters (played by Ice T and a flamboyantly pimped out Mario van Peebles, who speaks most of his lines in French).

Burt appears throughout as a good-ol’-boy cowboy/cop who’s somehow found his way to a job in bombed-out Eastern Europe. It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Well, if you were thinking ‘I really wish that a boring junkie movie like Candy was set in a vague science-fiction dystopia’, have I got a movie for you.

Returning as a guest this week is Cult MTL’s screen editor, Malcolm Fraser.

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Music this week courtesy of Karneef. The track ‘Space’ off the album In Error can be found on Karneef’s Bandcamp page. Many apologies to Karneef for taking a hiatus in the middle of saying I would play the song.

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