John Travolta, Nancy Allen and director Brian De Palma teamed up to make the brilliant horror flick Carrie in 1976, but the team was nearly at their best 5 years later in this one about movie-makers. The show-offy De Palma, who mostly made thrillers, loved his characters to be all kinds of shades of gray. Mission possible here. Blow Out's set-ups & pay-offs are excellent...and the ending is operatic, symbolic and powerful. That perfect scream is heartbreaking. This violent tragedy is well-crafted, with inspirations from Antonioni's Blow-Up and the incident at Chappaquiddick. So go get some sound effects for the foley department as this 752nd episode of Have You Ever Seen examines the suspense/conspiracy thriller Blow Out.

Well, Actually: at around the 44-minute mark, it should have been The Black Dahlia "was at the end of a pretty poor (box office) run" in 2006, not Femme Fatale. That was released in 2002.

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Will Ferrell's popularity peaked right around 20 years ago, but he was about as huge as comedy stars got in 2006. In Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, he isn't goofing around...although maybe that was to his fans' discontent. And he's not in tragedy or a comedy, but a dramedy...and the man who had always gone big proved he could also play quiet, nerdy and sad. Emma Thompson is a famous author writing & narrating everything he does...and it upends his life. Falling for the woman he's auditing--the Maggie Gyllenhaal character--upends it too. Stranger Than Fiction also has Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah and Tony Hale doing good work in a pretty great movie. So, taxman, strap on your trusty wristwatch as I dig into a touching filmic experience in this 751st edition of Have You Ever Seen.

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The French Foreign Legion called the 3 Geste boys and they trekked off to Africa to end up in William Wellman's tense adventure flick. It's an action-war film that ends with a long, but well-paced siege inside a fort. Gary Cooper is miscast as the title character (he's too old and too American), but he has pretty good chemistry with Ray Milland and Robert Preston, who play his brothers. Susan Hayward is briefly in this too, although Brian Donlevy steals the movie as a jerk sergeant...and got an Oscar nomination for it. There's also a movie-long mystery here after someone steals their benefactor's expensive sapphire. But who...and why?! So tune in for episode #750 as white bros go on assignment in Africa and play war with the locals in Beau Geste.

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Let's go back to December 2016 when John Lee Hancock's The Founder and Martin Scorsese's Silence were positioned as Oscar contenders. Neither won a gold trophy, but Hancock made the better movie. The Founder is a big-business biopic about Ray Kroc sharking Dick & Mac McDonald out of their own fast-food creation, then franchising McDonald's worldwide. The product isn't so good now, but the film about it is very entertaining, especially Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch's chemistry as the McDonald's brothers. Then I reviewed Silence, although that section is really an evaluation of the noted gangster maestro's religious passion projects...and how Marty is just not at his best when his movies are explicitly about faith. So get drive-though as you swallow this 749th episode where I preach about The Founder & Silence.

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June started on this podcast with a fast-cutting musical in Moulin Rouge. Now I end the month talking about an old-school Technicolor song-and-dancer...and it was an award-winning mega-smash. The King And I is Walter Lang's crowning achievement as a director and the King is the part Yul Brynner played thousands of times onstage. He won an Oscar for playing this hardheaded chauvinist on celluloid opposite Deborah Kerr's Anna, the headstrong English widow hired to teach his many kids. The culture clash leads to a curious "love" story where they barely touch each other until that...well, let's say head-scratching climax. Not a fan of that ending! The lavish production is entirely set-bound, but this is still quite an experience. So settle in for my 748th episode as I investigate the et ceteras in The King And I.

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The podcast rulebook says you have to cover a plane movie for episode #747, so I went with the daddy of the '70s disaster craze. The planes are 707s in Airport, but oh well. George Seaton writes & directs a cast of stars & Oscar-winners (including Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, George Kennedy and Jacqueline Bissett). He was rewarded with a blockbuster hit that snagged 10 Oscar nominations (Helen Hayes even won for her adequate supporting performance) and it started a run of Airport flicks. Those 3 sequels and the various disaster films this influenced followed the formula of intertwining stories, romance, some humour and a lot of peril (in this case, there's a Heflin bomb onboard). This is one of the better ones. It's entertaining and has a thrilling climax. So spend some time hearing about Airport.

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F.W. Murnau didn't live long enough to direct a huge slate of films, but the man bullhorning The Last Laugh also has Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise on his resume. Like those, The Last Laugh is a silent picture And THIS one infamously uses very few intertitles to explain dialogue or motivations. So Emil Jannings went very big! The story is that he loses his job as the doorman of a swanky hotel, leading to depression and shame. The artistry by Murnau and his team are terrific. Their movie is slow-paced and extremely melodramatic, but there's poetry...until an irrational deus ex machina in the last 15 minutes. The story in episode #746 ends up leaving much to be desired. So enjoy the rare Friday show the next few months as I hand out towels and talk about The Last Laugh.

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The key word is charming in the 745th edition of Have You Ever Seen. Only The Lonely has John Candy playing a single Chicago cop who lives with his widowed mother (Maureen O'Hara). He's an extroverted sweetheart who falls for shy Ally Sheedy, but while his bigoted mom might love her son(s), that love is on HER terms. Candy didn't get to play the romantic lead very often (or ever?) before Chris Columbus gave him that chance in the Mama's Boy movie, but he showed he had the chops to evolve as more than just a laugh machine. Then he was dead only a few years later. Only The Lonely wasn't very popular 35 years ago, but it works really well as a dramedy...and it's nearly impossible not to like the 2 leads. In any case, it's good to be a cop in love in a sweet little movie.

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It's as if 007 went to prison for decades, was let out by government guys played by John Spencer & William Forsythe and then he had to help a nerdy Nicolas Cage save hostages on a deserted island. Well, hold up, that IS the plot of The Rock! Michael Bay's action movie is deeper than you might expect, with Ed Harris playing a superstar Marine general who becomes a terrorist…with sympathetic complexity. Cage is the out-of-his-element expert on chemical weapons who teams with Sean Connery's Bond-like ex-spy who once escaped from Alcatraz. The flick is a Bay/Bruckheimer/Simpson collab so it's gaudy, loud, tart-tongued and very exciting. Those 2 Mexican stand-offs are phenomenal scenes. There's death and destruction in The Rock, sure, yet it's just fun. So, yesh, cut Agent Goodspeed some slack as he battles the guy threatening to launch deadly gas while mourning his men (and "his wife") in this 744th episode.

Well, Actually: Mason uses SF Information to find his daughter...he doesn't just magically remember a phone number he never had. Also, the funny line about bailing on lemons is in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, not I Love You, Man. Also also, it DOES seem like Tony Todd's character knocks over a rock on purpose to start a massacre in the shower scene...and also at least SOME of Hummel's marines are killed when that "all enemies…foreign, sir, and domestic" melee is over.

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The first episode of a non-theme month here in June (and the 743rd overall) gets loud about Baz Luhrmann's bombastic Moulin Rouge. It's the kind of zany project where the director and star of this Paris-set movie are both Australians (Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman) while the co-lead is Scottish (Ewan McGregor) and a Colombian (John Leguizamo) plays the real-life French writer Toulouse Lautrec. Kidman and McGregor are well-matched as gaga lovers and, while she got most of the raves, he's just as good...if not even better. Baz's main hook is to use anachronistic pop hits on the soundtrack in his frantic, garish musical that's absolutely in love with love. Either you're all in...or you won't be able to put up with more than 10 minutes of it. But put up with me talking baout the sickly courtesan and her idealistic writer who l'amour things up in the spectacular (spectacular) Moulin Rouge.

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I put a jaunty bow on Heroes Month with another multi-movie episode. For #742, I'm mostly talking about John Ford's My Darling Clementine, but there's a bit at the end about John Sturges' Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and George Cosmatos' Tombstone. Clementine stars Henry Fonda as the stoic marshal Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as the uber-talented but sickly Doc Holliday. Linda Darnell is in the mix too and they're all surrounded by a smorgasbord of character actors. Doc, Wyatt and his brothers team up to take on the Clantons in what's considered to be one of the greatest westerns. Then it's onto a much-shorter analyses of Gunfight and Tombstone, where I got to do what so many have done for 33 years: rave about Val Kilmer. So let's go, boys, to where they keep the horses and draw some guns as I give you my 3 takes on the world of Wyatt and Doc.

Well, Actually: Elia Kazan was the one who took over directing Pinky after Ford was fired. Also, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson is the name of the actress in Tombstone who plays Wyatt's wife Mattie.

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