The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
Jen and Tim jack freely over a rote 1992 sci-fi action thriller, Freejack, starring Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger. Your hosts kind of forget to talk about Jagger, but Tim does reminisce fondly about Four Loko.
Jen says “Psycho Ninja” when she was actually thinking of Psycho Kickboxer. The latter film is absolutely delightful, by the way.
If you’re curious about the gory details of Denise Richards’ divorce from Charlie Sheen, you can read them here, directly from the court document.
Tim and Jen remain in the 90s for a look at a dire courtroom drama leavened with gauzy sex scenes, the 1992 Madonna vehicle Body of Evidence.
There are no page numbers in Madonna’s book Sex, but it doesn’t take long to flip through on the Internet Archive if you want to see her eating pizza in the nude!
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers beat Jen to it with a panoply of fake erotic thriller names during the credits for Outlaw [of Gor], episode 519. A personal favorite: “Murder Most Moist.”
Jen and Tim nineties nineties nineties nineties Denzel Washington nineties nineties virtual reality, nineties Russell Crowe nineties, nineties nineties nineties Virtuosity nineties!
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Read the AV Club interview with Kelly Lynch where she describes Denzel’s motive for doctoring the script for Virtuosity, as mentioned in the episode.
Per Tim’s recommendation, you could do a search on the World Wide Web, or you can check out an article about Kai’s Power Tools if you’d like to see some screenshots of that bonkers interface!
Also, if you missed it the first time around, listen to our episode about The Lawnmower Man, another cheesy 90s film from the director of Virtuosity.
Tim and Jen enlist animal expert Emma Bowers (Hyenas and Gin on YouTube) to explain why the fascinating story of two man-eating lions resulted in a boring movie called The Ghost and the Darkness.
Watch a 1996 documentary about the man-eaters of Tsavo, which includes brief interviews with stars Kilmer and Douglas and director Stephen Hopkins. One interviewee theorizes that the local lions’ taste for human flesh stems from generations of slave traders who left injured or dying captives to their fate in the bush.
This 1996 Entertainment Weekly article sums up how bad Val Kilmer’s reputation got to be in Hollywood.
As Richard Stanley, who directed Kilmer for three days in The Island of Dr. Moreau before being fired, recalls, “Val would arrive, and an argument would happen.” Says John Frankenheimer, who replaced Stanley: “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.” And Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher calls his onetime star “childish and impossible.”
Entertainment Weekly, May 31st, 1996
You can watch the tiger attack video Tim mentioned, with added context. Rawr!
There’s even a mineral named Tsavorite which was discovered in Tanzania and named in honor of the area.
Finally, listen to our episode on the shockingly ill-conceived movie Roar, with special guest Emma!
Jen and Tim welcome returning guest Darren Herczeg to go to bat for an almost universally loathed Netflix feature, Blonde. Naturally, the trio revel in the film’s grotesque and overt misogyny while twirling their mustaches.
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Jessica Kiang’s review of Blonde over at Film Comment sums up the critical reaction well:
Dominik’s film is a technical marvel, but it’s cold and not a little sinister. It’s also an utterly heartless hoodwink.
There’s no word on whether or not the French documentary that revealed the identity of Marilyn’s biological father will screen in the US. However, according to Variety, an English-language version exists and has been sold to international distributors.
Tim and Jen try and fail to recall the name of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps as they discuss Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas’s sole feature film, Gymkata.
Jen’s half-assed inaccurate anecdote about Phelps being considered to play Tarzan is actually true, albeit not the way she told it. Producer Jerry Weintraub (no relation to Gymkata producer Fred Weintraub) believed that he’d found the new Johnny Weissmuller in Phelps. However, the swimmer’s appearance on SNL in 2008 immediately disabused him of that notion, as Phelps appeared to Weintraub as little more than a “goon.”
Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz has only five minor credits on IMDb, incidentally, none of which involve starring in a feature film. In case you were wondering.
You can hear our interview with martial arts superstar Cynthia Rothrock here!
Jen and Tim welcome Speed Racer evangelist Paul Jay to talk about, uh, the 2008 flop Speed Racer.
Over at culture blog The Sundae, Dean Buckley makes a case against Speed Racer as “art film” and for the Wachowskis as purveryors of schlock (in a positive way). Agree or disagree, it’s a thoughtful piece.
The Daily Beast has details of Emile Hirsch’s attack on a Paramount executive at a Sundance party, although the headline’s assertion that he “starred” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a slight exaggeration (he had a small part as man-about-town hairdresser and murder victim Jay Sebring).
The documentary Riding Balls of Fire: Group B, The Wildest Years of Rallying presents a nice overview of that brief era of rally car racing, plus it’s free on Tubi!
Paul guested on the show many moons ago to talk about The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. Listen to that episode here!
They just can’t stop witchin’! Tim and Jen continue the unending spooky season with a franchise entry that pleased no one, Halloween III: Season of the Witch!
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Chris Evangelista defended the movie over at SlashFilm, as part of that site’s The Unpopular Opinion series.
Let’s all thank Sean for his partial preservation of hotep public access show Spearman’s Addiction.
Jen and Tim attempt to purge the lingering memory of a certain occult-y art film with a viewing of an early George Romero work, Season of the Witch.
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In case you had no idea what he was getting at, Tim’s latest thing is calling Chantal Akerman’s feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles “the Jean Teasdale movie.”
Marxist art critic John Berger’s analysis of western media, Ways of Seeing, is available on YouTube. He casts a critical eye on the depiction of the female nude in European oil painting in the second episode.
Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look, or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
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