Filmsuck

Todd Haynes’ Mature Take

Co-hosts agree that Todd Haynes gripping new melodrama MAY DECEMBER is one of his best! The film has been nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards including Best Feature, Best Director for Haynes, Best First Screenplay for Samy Burch, and Best Lead Actor for Natalie Portman. (But not Julianne Moore or Charles Melton? WTF?)

Blessings on THE CURSE

Filmsuck co-hosts hash out the agonizingly compelling cringe-comedy series THE CURSE--created by Nathan Fielder and Bennie Safdie, who also star alongside Emma Stone--and arrive at amazing insights explaining all of contemporary life. This podcast is such a bargain!

Pre-Code Halloween Party: Two From Boris Karloff

New Filmsuck episode! A Halloween celebration of Boris Karloff in two of his pre-Code films: THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE BLACK CAT! He's best known for FRANKENSTEIN, but Karloff gave so many great performances, it's a good time to appreciate his range. Many of his films are widely available, but these two more obscure ones are part of the current Criterion Channel "Per-Code Horror" series.

Bottoms: New Teen Comedy is Tops

Filmsuck co-hosts revel in a raucous low-budget comedy called Bottoms that's playing at a theater near you, and doing amazingly well with critics and young audiences. It's about a high school girls-only fight club--excuse me, "women's self-defense class"--and it's so refreshingly funny and irreverent about the tired cliches of the high school comedy genre, today's toothless feminism, America's cratering educational system, and a lot of other contemporary pieties, we recommend it highly. 

Old Broads Hit the Road

Latest Filmsuck! Our "Old Broads Hit the Road" episode features a discussion of a promising film/TV trend involving older women on the move seeking liberatory experiences in ELLE S'EN VA (ON MY WAY, 2013), JUANITA (2019), HACKS (2021-), and MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS (2021).

Go Bears: Why We’re Still Thinking About THE BEAR Seasons 1 & 2

Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree that the relentless affect and unusual staying power of the FX/Hulu series The Bear makes it a rare example of popular art in the tradition of the family-torment plays of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee. A belated tribute!

BARBIE and OPPENHEIMER: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Doll

Latest Filmsuck! Co-hosts Eileen and Dolores agree on finding Greta Gerwig's BARBIE surprisingly funny and delightful, and Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER a ponderous, unenlightening snore. In order to argue these contentious views, we have to get into the gritty details, so this is a spoilers-galore episode!   

Asteroid City: Wes Anderson’s Alien Affect

Filmsuck co-hosts Eileen and Dolores fearlessly defy obsessive Wes Anderson fans in reviling his soul-deadening, seersucker suit sensibility!

Somebody Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Hangin’ in the Heartland

In this year's Filmsuck Pride Month episode, we’re talking about the fresh and funny HBO series Somebody Somewhere. It’s just wrapped up its second season and been renewed for a third, so if you haven’t been watching it, now is a good time to catch up with this offbeat show that fans have been raving about and wondering why it doesn’t get more attention. It’s about a forty-something ex-bartender named Sam Miller (played by audacious actor-singer-comedian Bridget Everett) who’s moved back to her small hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, to deal with a family emergency. She struggles to find a way to fit in again with her fractious family and the conservative locals, getting a lot of help from her new friend Joel (Jeff Hiller), a delightful churchgoing gay man who was actually a fellow Show Choir member with her back in high school. He’s wired into surprisingly vibrant LGBTQ scene in the Midwestern flatlands where Sam finds the misfit community that welcomes her in.

Retelling the Stars: Little Richard and Brooke Shields

Filmsuck co-hosts talk about two new documentaries that deal with two wildly different celebrities, each negotiating a lifetime of public performances beginning in childhood--Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields on Hulu, and Little Richard: I Am Everything, available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. Rejected by his father, a minister who also operated a bar and sold bootleg whiskey on the side, the blazingly talented and sexually fluid Little Richard left home early and soon combined the influences of gospel singers, raucous blues performers, and drag show sensations to become a rock 'n' roll pioneer of the 1950s. Adored and promoted by her possessive and increasingly alcoholic mother, Brooke Shields became a ubiquitous child model in the 1970s and the center of early scandals about the sexual exploitation of underage girls in photography and film. Her own acting goals were swamped by the overwhelming attention paid to her beauty as she became one of the representative celebrities of the 1980s. Both documentaries seek to retell the stories of these well-known figures in order to assert their lasting cultural significance beyond the limited time periods of their greatest fame, with Little Richard as, obviously, a hugely important and influential figure in the history of modern music, and Brooke Shields as the hardy survivor of a pre-"Me Too" era in the modeling and acting professions, which are still highly precarious and even dangerous to girls and women.