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222 – The Rocketeer

Burning out his fuse in a failed Disney franchise

Tim and Jen are surprisingly hard on Disney’s amiable comics-based misfire, The Rocketeer!

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See Rondo Hatton in The Brute Man, but let the MST3k crew accompany you through this murky noir.

The Cocoanut Grove fire has been widely covered in media. The Fascinating Horror channel has an excellent recounting of the disaster, in the dispassionate and non-sensationalized style of the best YouTube channels.

This 1979 BBC biography of Errol Flynn offers illuminating interviews with people who knew him, including David Niven, Olivia de Havilland, and his daughter Deirdre.

You can purchase a copy of the Traveller supplement featuring “Vehicle Handbook: Airships of the Imperium” by a certain Tim H. at DriveThruRPG. Intrigued by the endless possibilities of tabletop space travel? Find more resources Tim created for Traveller at his personal website!

214 – Centurion

Several Species of English Actors Gathered Together in a Cave and Hiding From a Pict

Tim and Jen enlist Gaius of the wonderful Tribunate channel on YouTube to help unearth a Romans-vs.-Picts historical epic that vanished like the Ninth Legion, Centurion.

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Jen’s personal favorite video from Tribunate is this savage takedown of Cato, but this examination of Roman concepts of race and how radically they differ from ours is another great example of the high caliber of material from Gaius’s channel. Also the triggered reactionary crybabies in the comments are extremely funny. Finally, don’t miss this compilation of filthy Roman words!

If you perked up your ears when Jen mentioned Carry On Cleo, go check out our survey of the Carry On franchise, featuring the inimitable Bitter Karella!

212 – Argylle

Tim and Jen invite their favorite internet crank Bitter Karella to help them analyze a bewildering major release that no one liked, Argylle. It’s so confounding a project, it leads Karella to use the phrase “Brechtian distancing mechanism.”

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Listen to our Apple TV+ episode, in which we rend the entire platform to filth. Fuck you, Tim Apple!

Read this Deadline article about the production and marvel at how out of touch these people sound. At the end, director Matthew Vaughn throws in an enthusiastic endorsement of the Apple Vision Pro.

Read the incisive opinion piece Tim invoked when discussing the sexlessness of Argylle, R.S. Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” via Blood Knife.

211 – The Phantom

Jen and Tim just can’t figure out why audiences were so lukewarm about this fun pulp adventure, The Phantom from 1996.

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Phantom creator Lee Falk enthused about the movie in a 1996 interview, singling out Billy Zane for particular praise.

As Tim mentioned, The Phantom struck a chord with the people of Papua New Guinea. See examples of war shields of the PNG highlands featuring the character.

191 – Sorcerer

For audiences clamoring for Star Wars, Sorcerer was a bridge too far

Tim and Jen finally give the departed William Friedkin a proper sendoff with a discussion of his once-maligned masterpiece, Sorcerer. Guest Darren Herczeg provides his usual able assistance.

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To clear up an anecdote Jen related during the episode: she says that Paramount president Charles Bluhdorn freaked out when he spotted himself in the group photo of oil company executives in a scene from Sorcerer. The source of this story is screenwriter Walon Green, who describes Bluhdorn as having had a “shit hemorrhage” during the screening. However, a review of the offending scene reveals only other Gulf+Western execs, not Bluhdorn.

“To me, they looked like a bunch of thugs,” Friedkin said (as quoted in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls).

Catch the documentary Friedkin Uncut on Tubi, where the man himself evokes Hitler in the first five minutes. We’ll miss you, Billy.

Want to hear about another Friedkin flop? The Guardian very much fails on its own merits.

177 – Johnny Mnemonic

Information wants to be free, but entertainment is $5/month.

Jen and Tim struggle to understand the newly-minted cult status of a flop from Keanu Reeves’ himbo era, the cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic. They also put on hazmat suits and delve into the horror that is the comment section on Dina Meyer’s website.

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Director Robert Longo talks about the rationale and process that led to his black-and-white edition of Johnny Mnemonic over at Screen Slate.

Screenwriter and god of cyberpunk William Gibson reflects on the film shortly after its U.S. release.

For more Dina Meyer discussion, listen to our The Evil Within episode!

166 – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Russell Crowe aboard the Surprise in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Tim and Jen discuss a beloved epic whose time has come, the Peter Weir masterpiece Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World!

The GQ article mentioned appears to be yet more proof of the widespread affection for this film.

The doctor who pioneered sanitary practices in medicine was Ignatz Semmelweiss, although these ideas didn’t take hold until the time of Joseph Lister. Additionally, other medical men (like Oliver Wendell Holmes, for one) arrived at similar notions independent of Semmelweiss. The latter, in fact, refused to publish anything about hand washing because he believed these practices to be “self-evident.”

If you want to read about Grover Cleveland getting surgery at sea and see some icky-yet-illumunating photos, the New York Academy of Medicine has a good blog post about it. If you want more, the book Jen mentioned is called The President is a Sick Man, and author Matthew Algeo answered questions about it in this C-SPAN presentation.

And finally, if you love Russell Crowe as much as we do, listen to our chat about an early starring role for him, Virtuosity!

163 – Freejack

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.

161 – Virtuosity

Russell Crowe menaces a hapless TV technician with a gun against a blue background in Virtuosity (1995)

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.

160 – The Ghost and the Darkness

Val Kilmer, John Kani, and Michael Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

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!