On this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to be joined by Ric Roman Waugh, the director of the new film Shelter, starring Jason Statham. We talked a lot about making that movie and how he best utilized Statham’s skills as opposed to Dwayne Johnson’s in the movie Snitch or Gerard Butler’s in the Greenland films, Kandahar, and Angel Has Fallen. Shelter, which is in theaters now, is a little more meditative than some of Statham’s recent work, though no less effective for it. We discussed why Statham was attracted to the part and how his fatherhood helped inform his role as the protector of an orphaned young girl.

Then we discussed making the transition from stuntman to director: Waugh worked with Tony Scott on a number of pictures, and had some interesting insights into the methods of the great action director. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to practically restrain myself from just doing 30 minutes on Waugh’s Shot Caller, a gritty prison drama.oo

The Oscar nominations dropped yesterday morning and I grabbed our favorite Oscar prognosticators, Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen of The Ankler’s Prestige Junkie, to chat about what it all means. Does Sinners’s 16 nominations mean it could upset One Battle After Another for best picture? What does it mean that Wicked: For Good took home zero nods? Perhaps most importantly: Will Delroy Lindo get his dang Oscar, as we demanded back in October? All that and more on this week’s episode, including a SHOCKING prediction by Christopher at the end of this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out their podcast. And please share this one with a friend! (And Delroy Lindo’s agent, we gotta get him on this show to talk about his career, amirite?)

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss all things football and his new book, aptly titled Football. (Please buy a copy for yourself and your friends; you’ll thank me, and then your friends will thank you.) We hit on an array of topics, including but not limited to the potential demise of the sport, the ways in which television and football are a perfect match, why streaming services are spending billions to acquire the rights to NFL and NCAA games, how gambling and fantasy football have fundamentally changed our relationship to the sport, and trying to think through how we think about football and why it matters. 

On this week’s episode, I’m pleased to be joined by W. David Marx, author of the new book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. Alongside Marx’s Status and Culture, this book is one of the key texts to understanding how and why the culture has shifted so radically so quickly: the combination of “poptimism” (we discuss what, precisely, this is early on) and cultural omnivorism (the merging of all genres and all forms into a sort of equally viable mass entertainment) and the internet’s flattening of culture have led to a stagnant culture and a revanchist counter-counterculture eager to exact revenge and facing no real opposition in that effort. 

If you enjoyed our conversation, or simply want to understand how we wound up in the world we wake up to every morning, I strongly recommend picking up Marx’s book. And if anything was unclear from our chat, drop me a line in the comments and hopefully I can help clear things up!

On Monday, Sam Stein DMed me and asked if we could put together a little livestream event celebrating the work of Rob Reiner; he described it as sitting shiva, and I was happy to take the lead on putting this group of mourners together. I was joined by my colleague Bill Kristol, The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (whose great column on Reiner you can read here), and Semafor’s Dave Weigel (whose book on prog rock is a must-read for fans of the genre). 

On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Vulture’s Nicholas Quah to discuss his and Savannah Salazar’s piece on what Netflix might do with Warner Bros.'s tie-ins with Universal Studios and Six Flags, and then expanded the conversation to consider the vast universe of WB’s entanglements. The studio also owns an enormous video game company, the second-biggest comic book company in DC Comics, and all sorts of other stuff. What is Netflix going to do with all these disparate pieces? Who knows! But we do some rank speculation.

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Scott Mendelson of The Outside Scoop, whom I’ve tasked with answering a very simple question: Is there a good business case to be made for rebooting the Rush Hour franchise or is it merely a (very odd) sop to Donald Trump and his wife’s chronicler, Brett Ratner? (:47). Then we discussed Zootopia’s crazy popularity in China. (14:16) We taped this episode before news broke that Netflix had completed its purchase of the studio and streaming assets of Warner Bros., but we were prescient enough to discuss what might happen if Netflix picked up a controlling stake in WB. Spoiler: Nothing good for competition in Hollywood! (33:15)

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by David Coggeshall (previously on to discuss Orphan: First Kill and the first Family Plan) to discuss his sequel to the surprise 2023 hit for AppleTV+. We talked shooting in London and Paris, the inspirations this holiday-season film, and what might come next for this series (and his career!). If you enjoyed this episode—or need a “drunk uncle movie” to watch with the family, as David described his film—make sure you check out The Family Plan 2, streaming on AppleTV now. And please share this with a friend!

For a goofy franchise that started with gangsters stealing DVD players and wound up with a Pontiac Fiero going into space, The Fast and the Furious movies are a pretty fantastic lens through which to view the last quarter-century of Hollywood economics. From the DVD boom and bust to the internationalization and diversification of ticket-buyers to questions of propriety surrounding the digital resurrection of deceased actors to the desire for all-encompassing franchise-based “cinematic universes,” the series has ridden every economic wave buffeting the movie business since the original’s release in 2001. 

Author Barry Hertz does a wonderful job of weaving that story amidst the tangle of egos and artistic energy that makes up the Fast series in his new book, Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World. Full disclosure: I’m not a particularly big fan of the series, so I was a little skeptical when I agreed to check out Barry’s book. But even if you don’t really care about the Fast and Furious movies, there’s more than enough behind-the-scenes drama and economic intrigue to keep you riveted. And it’s a must-buy stocking stuffer for anyone in your life who lives their life a quarter mile at a time.

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Chris Yogerst, author of the new book from the University of New Mexico’s “Reel West” series on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. We discussed the making of the film, its place in the western canon as a sort of natural ending point for the traditional westerns made by John Wayne and John Ford, and the surprisingly political nature of the film’s central struggle between the frontier and civilization. If you enjoyed the episode, check out the book (or pick up the pristine 4K, on which Paramount did a fine job of making the film look good as new). And make sure to share it with a friend!

I’m joined by Dave Itzkoff on this week’s episode to discuss Paddy Chayefsky’s classic film, Network. Dave literally wrote the book on Network in his history of the film, Mad As Hell, and had lots to say about the making of the movie, the minds behind it, and its ongoing relevance to our daily lives. I know what you’re thinking, I can practically hear your thoughts: A movie about corporations taking over news divisions and fearing problems from the FCC holding up mergers because they don’t like coverage? What does that have to do with anything happening today? But I think we can squeeze out a similarity or two to our current moment.