Ten years ago, Gareth Evan’s fists-and-fury action thriller busted out of Indonesian theaters and took the world by storm. Showcasing the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat, the film garnered international recognition for its stars Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim, praise for its frenetic, claustrophobic style, and imitation from films like 2015’s Dredd. Retitled The Raid: Redemption for American cinemas, the film won the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award at Toronto International Film Festival ...
Sep 14, 2022•55 min•Ep. 592
Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome… to the 1972 film adaptation of the 1966 Broadway musical set in the last days of Weimar Germany. Starring Liza Minelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey, the film version was directed by choreographer Bob Fosse and won eight Oscars - more than The Godfather. Most people forget that Bob Fosse beat Francis Ford Coppola for Best Director. In fact, the movie won the most Oscars of any film that didn't win Best Picture. Now we're visiting the Kit Kat Klub for the fiftieth a...
Sep 11, 2022•55 min•Ep. 591
This week, we’re wrapping up the month with the direct-to-video sequel to one of our first Aug-Heist movies. Spike Lee’s 2006 film Inside Man was his most financially successful film, but a follow-up was stuck in development hell for over a decade, despite strong interest from all parties. However, in 2019, a sequel starring Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn and Sense8’s Aml Ameen was released on streaming and VOD. But with a 35% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Inside Man: Most Wanted was not a...
Aug 31, 2022•41 min•Ep. 590
This week, we’re getting wetter with Mikael Salomon’s natural disaster movie meets heist thriller from 1998. When a group of robbers led by Morgan Freeman try to steal the payout from an armored car in a town evacuated due to flooding, it’s up to rookie driver Christian Slater to stop them. Dumped into theaters in January, this film never got its head above water and bellyflopped at less than $20 million against its $70 million budget. It’s not hard to explain that Hard Rain resurfaced with home...
Aug 24, 2022•52 min•Ep. 589
This week, we’re hitting the beach and hanging ten with Kathryn Bigelow’s bank robbery-slash-bromance film from 1991. Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah, an ex-college football quarterback-turned-rookie FBI agent tasked with taking down a gang of thieves led by Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, the cast also includes Lori Petty, Gary Busey, and John C. McGinley. The movie made bank at the summer box office, earned a cult following, and inspired The Fast and The Furious as well as its own poorly-recieved re...
Aug 17, 2022•57 min•Ep. 588
This week, we’re going abroad with a bunch of bumbling burglars in Britain in Charles Chricton;s 1988 caper. Starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin, this comedy won big at the box office and scored multiple awards, including a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Kline. Following the aftermath of diamond robbery, the film tracks the multiple double-crosses, triple-crosses, and multiple canine assassinations as four crooks and one philandering lawyer try to claim the il...
Aug 10, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 587
This week, we’re paying tribute to James Caan, who passed away last month at age 82, with his starring role in Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut. Co-starring Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson and Robert Prosky, the film also features the big screen debuts of Dennis Farina, William Petersen and James Belushi. Mann brought in real-life professional thieves to consult on the film, which was co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and features a synth-heavy soundtrack by German electronica group Tangerine Dr...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 586
In 2013, director Edgar Wright concluded his Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, all co-written with Simon Pegg, produced by Nira Park, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost. Alternatively called the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, the first two films, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, riffed on zombie movies and the buddy cop genre. For the final entry in the trilogy, Wright and Pegg tackled sci-fi alien invasion flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a film centered on five high school mates reuni...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 585
Seventy years ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s famed producer Arthur Freed, the force behind hits like The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, released one of the most adored movie musicals of all time. Starring Gene Kelly (who co-choreograhped the film’s extensive tap numbers), Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds, the film is set at the dawn of “talkie” films and follows the trio through the reinvention of motion pictures. The film largely features songs from previous MGM musical films of the 192...
Jul 20, 2022•47 min•Ep. 584
STAND BY ME (1986) This week Lobster is out, so ......... {Insert written intro here} For more geeky podcasts visit GonnaGeek.com You can find us on iTunes under ''Legends Podcast''. Please subscribe and give us a positive review. You can also follow us on Twitter @LegendsPodcast or even better, send us an e-mail: LegendsPodcastS@gmail.com You can find all our contact information here on the Network page of GonnaGeek.com Our complete archive is always available at www.legendspodcast.com , www.le...
Jul 13, 2022•53 min•Ep. 583
In 1985, Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner, and Chris Columbus teamed up to make a movie: The Goonies . That’s it. That’s the intro. The movie was, needless to say, a major hit, and a childhood-defining one for many ‘80s kids - but not Lobster! Starring Sean Astin, Corey Feldman, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Jonathan Ke Huy Quan, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, and John Matuszak, with Anne Ramsey, Robert Davi, and Joey Pants, the film was selected into the National Film Registry in 2017 for being “cult...
Jul 06, 2022•55 min•Ep. 582
It’s Pride Month and Legends Podcast is celebrating all colors of the cinematic rainbow with four films featuring LGBTQIA+ stories. This week, we’re capping off the month with a 2022 release set in the gay resort destsination Fire Island. Written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, the film was directed by Andrew Ahn and features a diverse cast including Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, James Scully, and Margaret Cho. Originally pitched as a Quibi series (hashtag #QuibiSucks), the movie was picked up ...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 581
It’s Pride Month and Legends Podcast is celebrating all colors of the cinematic rainbow with four films featuring LGBTQIA+ stories. This week, we’re headed to the Land Down Under, where the wind does blow and men dress like sheilas in Stephan Elliott’s 1994 jukebox musical-slash-road comedy film. Starring Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terrence Stamp, this movie was a box office hit, won the Oscar for Best Costume Design (werk!), and became an instant cult classic. It also served as the inspirati...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 580
It’s Pride Month and Legends Podcast is celebrating all colors of the cinematic rainbow with four films featuring LGBTQIA+ stories. Next up is Barry Jenkin’s 2016 look at black and queer masculinity throughout three phases of a young man’s life. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, with Mahershalla Ali making history as the first Muslim to win an Oscar (for Best Supporting Actor), but it almost missed its moment to celebrate its Best Picture Award after La La Land was mistakenly anno...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 579
It’s Pride Month and Legends Podcast is celebrating all colors of the cinematic rainbow with four films featuring LGBTQIA+ stories. First up is a lesbian crime caper from 1996 that also happens to be the directorial debut of the Wachowski siblings. Starring Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, the film was a critical success and won several festival awards, but it failed to run away with the box office. Nevertheless, the film proved to studio financiers that the Wachowskis could mak...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 578
Twenty years ago, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man swung onto the big screen for the first time. A cinematic version of one of Marvel Comics' most prominent heroes had been in development since the '80s, with names like James Cameron attached. Sony ended up with the rights and developed a movie with Darkman director Sam Raimi and Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp. Starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, the film was a smash hit, taking in the biggest box office opening of all-time (at ...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 577
Before Top Gun: Maverick jets onto movie screens this weekend after a two-year delay, we’re rewatching the original blockbuster that earned Tom Cruise his action hero wings. Co-starring Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer, and Tom Skerrit, it was the highest-grossing movie of 1986 and drove a 40% increase in sales of Bomber jackets and Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses after its release. Now we’re taking a ride into the DANGER ZONE to talk Top Gun - but does it still take our breath away, or is...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 576
Imagine if podcasting had existed 20 years ago, before streaming video was readily available. If all three of us wanted to watch the same movie at home on the same day, unless it was on TV, we’d have to go to the video store. Most likely, it would have been a Blockbuster Video, the world’s largest chain of home video rental establishments. We’d have to leave our homes, get in our vehicles, drive across town, go in a store, and find the movie on a shelf (if they had it) and then pay to take home ...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 575
This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was nothing if not surprising. You could even call it, if you will, an about-face that rocked the Oscars, where the most powerful statement was made not with words, but with hands. I’m referring, of course, to Troy Kotsur’s acceptance of Best Supporting Actor as the first Deaf man to win an Oscar. Director Siân Heder’s film about a child of deaf adults, her family, and her love of music also took home the statues for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. T...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 574
Director John Landis and actor John Belushi had already made a hit film together - 1978's National Lampoon's Animal House - when they teamed up with Dan Ackroyd to make movie based on Belushi and Ackroyd's Saturday Night Live characters. The resulting film was one of the most expensive comedies ever made, with cost overruns (including a de facto budget line for cocaine) attributed to Belushi's behavior. The film also features well-known musical artists like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, shot-...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 573
We’re back with another take on DC’s Comics’ Caper Crusader. This time, Dawn of the Rise of the War for the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves offers his film noir spin on the World’s Greatest Detective, starring Robert “Robbat Battinson” Pattinson as a youngish Bruce Wayne in his second year beneath the cowl. Also starring Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle, Jeffery Wright as Jim Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred, Paul Dano as the Riddler, and an unrecognizable Colin Farrel as the Penguin, this Bat-fl...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 572
Among the nominees for Best Picture at last month’s Academy Awards was director Guillermo Del Toro’s follow-up to his 2017 Oscar winner The Shape of Water. Starring Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck carnie with a mysterious past, this remake of the 1947 film noir also stars Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara, and David Strathairn, with Del Toro regulars Ron Perlman and Richard Jenkins rounding out the cast. The film didn’t win any Oscars, but production designer Tamara D...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 571
Director Kenneth Brannagh released two films in 2021. One of them was nominated for seven Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and six BAFTAs - winning Best Original Screenplay, Best Screenplay, and Outstanding British Film, respectively. The other one is Death on the Nile. Brannagh’s second turn in front of and behind the camera as Agatha Christie’s inimitable sleuth Hercule Poirot sees him back on the case in Egypt. A wealthy wedding party featuring an heiress, a con man, some lesbians, Russel...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 570
The swingin’ Sixties have long been Hollywood’s playground. Most films romanticize the era’s free spirits and even freer sexual attitudes in a time of social change and historical upheaval. While recent nostalgia trips like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hint at but ultimately gloss over the era’s darker side, Edgar Wright’s latest film pulls no punches in showing that some things are better left in the past. Co-written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and starring Thomasin Mackenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, ...
Apr 06, 2022•56 min•Ep. 569
Betty White’s film and television career spanned seven decades and was filled with reinvention. From radio actress to game show staple, from a Golden Girl to being Hot in Cleveland, she never failed to leave us laughing. In 1999, she played a foul-mouthed pensioner with a penchant for reptiles in a creature-feature from Fox and Stan Winston Studios. Co-starring Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt and Brendan Gleeson, written by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley, and directed by horror he...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 568
Fifty years ago, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel premiered in movie theaters to near-universal acclaim, spent twenty-three consecutive weeks at number one at box office, and became the highest-grossing movie of all-time. Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall, the film won the Oscars for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Brando - which he refused to accept. In the years since, it became the first chapter of a trilog...
Mar 23, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 567
Twenty years ago, Eminem was one of the most successful - and divisive - recording artists in the world. He was a white rapper from the poor suburbs of Detroit whose meteoric rise to fame was perhaps only eclipsed by his ability to cause controversy with his lyrics. Director Curtis Hanson (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, L.A. Confidential) and screenwriter Scott Silver (Joker) created a movie based on Eminem’s true-life beginnings, starring the rapper as himself. Co-starring Kim Basinger, Michae...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 566
Director Matthew Vaughn’s series of Kingman films, based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, focus on a secret British intelligence agency. A prequel, also directed by Vaughn, telling the origin story of the Kingsman during The Great War, was released last year after being delayed eight times by production issues and the pandemic. With an all-star cast and the series’ signature hyper-fashionable - and hyper-violent - style, does The King’s Man prove to be worth the wait? Or, given...
Mar 11, 2022•49 min•Ep. 565
Canadian treasure Ryan Reynolds has gone from rom-com star to failed DC superhero to successful Marvel anti-hero, as well as doing action movies with The Rock and playing a Pokemon. He returned to the video game genre with his most recent film, playing a non-player character in an online video game who levels up to save his virtual world. With cameos and pop culture references galore, this film by Shawn Levy also stars Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer, Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, and New Zealand’s Taik...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 564
Director Jeymes Samuel’s debut film brings together the all-stars of the American Wild West - Nat Love, Rufus Buck, Marshall Bass Reeves, “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, and “Treacherous” Trudy Smith, among others - all real-life historical figures, and all of them black - in a team-up movie for Netflix. And befitting an Avengers-style Western, Samuel assembled an all-star cast including Jonthan Majors, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, Zazie Beetz, and Regina King to bring these figures to life. Big stars to...
Feb 25, 2022•46 min•Ep. 563
