Podcast
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Episode 58 – The Power of the Dog (2021)
This week on What's On the Pile we ask the question "what was your eureka moment?" When did you realize the actual intentions of a movie? We also play some more of Hsien's games! Then, we discuss The Power of the Dog (2021), Jane Campion's film about toxic masculinity (amongst other things) starring Benedict Cumberbatch, currently on Netflix.
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Episode 57 – Drive My Car (2021)
We're back from vacation with another Oscar contender (it didn't win) about a month after the Oscars finished: Drive My Car, the 2021 film based on Haruki Murakami's short story works, about a husband whose philandering wife dies suddenly. It's a deeply depressing and melancholy film.
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Episode 56 – Nightmare Alley (2021)
It's Guillermo Del Toro night on What's on the Pile with another Oscar nominee, Nightmare Alley (2021), starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, freaking Ron Perlman and Mary Steenburgen, this cast is stacked! And although the Oscars are over and we know all about the outcomes and slaps that happened, we're going to continue with our Oscar viewings because we still really want to see the movies!
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Episode 55 – Licorice Pizza (2021)
This week we take on another Oscar contender with Licorice Pizza (2021), Paul Thomas Anderson's coming of age film.
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Episode 54 – tick, tick… BOOM! (2021)
It's musical theater night on What's On the Pile as we take a look at another Academy Award nominee, this time for best actor in Andrew Garfield, playing Jonathan Larson, writer of the Off Broadway sensation Rent. We'll also be discussing other musicals, so join us for the conversation!
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Episode 53 – Don’t Look Up (2021)
Join us this week as we start taking on some of the Academy Award nominees from this year, starting with "Don't Look Up" (2021), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and directed by Adam McKay. Don't Look Up tells the story of an extinction level event and the society that could give less of a shit. It's super cynical!
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Episode 52 – Earl explained it to me
No movie this week folks as we, instead, answer some questions and have a general discussion around different movies that we might not otherwise get to talk about on the show. It's a fun episode, so join us! Movies discussed: "Stand By Me," "The Devil's Advocate," "Wonderboys," "Tremors," "E.T.," "Amadeus," "Ghostbusters: Afterlife," multiple Spider-mans, and a bunch more!
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Episode 51 – A Knight’s Tale (2001) and The Green Knight (2021)
This week chivalry is only kind of dead with A Knight's Tale, the story of William (Heath Ledger) and his friends and their quest to find food through fraud, with fun anachronisms throughout. Following that is The Green Knight. This A24 release is a telling of the Arthurian legend "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" starring Dev Patel as Gawain.
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Episode 50 – The Wages of Fear (1953) and Sorcerer (1977)
This week we delve into Henri Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), a nihilistic film about four ex-pats taking a job driving trucks filled with nitroglycerin to an oil fire. Along the way they have philosophical adventures. After that is Sorcerer (1977), the William Friedkin remake starring Roy Scheider. It tells the same familiar story, only with the experimental nature of 70s filmmaking and a lot more backstory.
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Episode 49 – Shattered (1991) and Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)
Get ready for some hard-boiled ridiculousness starting with Shattered, the 1991 Wolfgang Peterson romantic thriller starring Tom Berenger, Greta Scacchi, and Bob Hoskins about a man who is in a terrible car accident and lost his memory. Or was it really an accident? After that is Cast a Deadly Spell starring Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, Clancy Brown, and David Warner. This tells the story of private detective H. Philip Lovecraft, a man in 1948 who refuses to use magic, which is all the rage. When he takes a job searching for the Necronomicon, a book of great power, his past catches up with him as he's forced to figure out who's betraying who.