Hit Factory

It's Halloween, so we decided to do a "scary" one! Podcaster, author, and emissary from the City of Brotherly Love Trevor Strunk joins to discuss Robert Rodriguez's 1998 Breakfast-Club-Meets-Body-Snatchers riff The Faculty. Boasting a memorable cast of young up-and-comers and a script written by Scream-scribe Kevin Williamson, the film is both playfully self-aware and slyly subversive in its explorations of social hierarchies and the omnipresent 90s fixation with conformity to the monoculture. We begin by exploring how the film updates the Body Snatcher narrative, borrowing (and explicitly citing) the literary works of Robert A. Heinlen and Jack Finney, as well as both previous Body Snatchers film adaptations by Don Siegel and Philip Kaufman. Then, we contend with some of the movie's most intriguing premises - its assertions about capitalist hierarchies and how they maintain the oppression of marginalized out-groups as well as how American society impedes gratifying sexual expression (especially for women). Finally, we examine the deceptively cynical ending and what it suggests about the stickiness of the neoliberal order, its structural hold on the horizons of our sociopolitical imagination. Follow Trevor Strunk on TwitterListen & Subscribe to No CartridgeBuy Trevor's book Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay between Consoles and Culture Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

The fine, upstanding gentlemen of Pod Casty for Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to discuss Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, which follows a group of recently deceased people entering a state of limbo where counselors  (also deceased) help them locate their most important memory and then go about the work of turning that memory into a film that they will watch forever in eternity. The film adopts, at least in part, a docu-fiction quality, assembling talking head interviews with several non-actors telling their memories directly to camera before becoming a treatise on art-making itself, considering how cinema reflects and retains memory. We begin with a discussion of Kore-eda's formalism, and how the director embraces both the erudite affect of slow cinema and the melodramatic dramaturgy of classical narrative to mixed effect. Then, we engage the film's high concept premise, how its emboldened by its ambiguities and where the film still feels grafted to terrestrial quotidian experience. Finally, we ponder the wide array of films that deal with the afterlife as a bureaucratic machine, and whether applying systemic order to something like death is a comforting fantasy or a cloistering nightmare. Read Hirokazu Kore-eda's director statement on After Life.Listen & Subscribe to Pod Casty for Me.Follow Pod Casty for Me on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell.Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Film writer and author of the upcoming book De Palma Does Hollywood Travis Woods joins us to discuss the exemplary filmmaker and his 1993 crime masterpiece Carlito's Way, starring Al Pacino as the titular Carlito Brigante, an ex-hustler freed from prison after serving five years of a thirty-year sentence on a legal technicality who seeks to outrun the shadow of his past, resulting in tragedy. Reteaming with Pacino and producer Martin Bregman a decade after the success of Scarface, De Palma imbues his characteristically nimble, brilliant formal mastery with sweeping romance and stirring fatalism that remains one of the director's richest, most personal films. We begin with a long discussion about De Palma as filmmaker and unpack the inherent politicization of his form. Then, we talk about Carlito's Way and its place within De Palma's greater filmmography; how it splits the difference between his "one for them, one for me" routine, and how the film subverts our knowledge of De Palma's implicative form to embrace a gentler mode of his signature style. Finally, we consider the film's reflection of the political ideology of the 90s, warring between the filmmaker's materialist persuasion and the mytholigizing force of the End of History. Follow Travis Woods on Twitter.Join us on Thursday November 6th, 2025 6pm PT/9pm ET for a virtual screening of FAILED STATE + Q&A w/ Dir. Christopher Jason Bell. Purchase tickets HERE.Hit Factory Patrons can RSVP at Patreon from our pinned post.....Our theme music is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.On the occasion of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Anotherin theaters, we look back at the director's ambitious, unwieldy, and under-loved 1999 feature Magnolia starring a massive ensemble that includes returning PTA collaborators Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Melora Walters, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall alongside a career-best Tom Cruise in a showstopper supporting turn that would net him his third (and, to date, last) Academy Award nomination for a performance. Still his longest, most sprawling effort, Magnolia is a definitively Paul Thomas Anderson picture in both milieu and concern setting its sights on flawed, idiosyncratic characters living in and around the San Fernando Valley. But Magnolia also represents a distinctive pivot in Andersons career, as he begins to operate in a decidedly more minor key that would come to define the second act of his career in the 21st century.We begin with a thorough examination of Paul Thomas Anderson as filmmaker, his strengths and his shortcomings. Then, we ask an obvious, but slyly difficult question - What exactly is Magnolia about? Finally, we discuss the film as it relates to Anderson's oeuvre, how it informs and supplements his later work and how its flaws become more apparent as his filmography evolves.Read Nick Pinkerton's piece The Master? at The Point....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

We inaugurate the late Japanese master Shinji Sōmai with a discussion of his beautiful, melancholy coming-of-age drama Moving. The film follows the young Ren as she navigates her parents' recent separation, balancing loyalties to both her mother and father, dealing with gossiping classmates, and making attempts to reconcile the marriage. With a characteristic sensitivity and perceptiveness for the experience of youth, Sōmai excavates a universe of detail from the film's simple premise, arriving at a profoundly moving and cathartic emotional climax. We begin by discussing Sōmai as director, his style, and what we think might have drawn him to stories about the occasionally painful experiences of youth. Then, we explore how the film elicits nuance within the childhood experience of familial separation, acknowledging both the grief intrinsic to such experiences and the role children play as emotional anchors for their parents. Finally, we examine Sōmai's considerations about modern Japanese life and how he rallies against conservative social positions on divorce through the film's delicate character work. The Roxie kicks off The Dream Will Never End, a career retrospective of the films of Satoshi Kon THIS FRIDAY, beginning with the new 4K restoration of PERFECT BLUE on Friday 10/3 introduced by Hit Factory Podcast! You can purchase tickets to the screening or the entire retrospective here.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

Film writer and critic Brendan Hodges joins to discuss Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a self-proclaimed love letter to the filmmaker's WWII veteran father and all the fighting men of the Second World War. Visceral, upsetting, and deeply conflicted, the film formally disavows many of Spielberg's more populist tendencies as director and creates a tension between the valorizing, mythic tone of its war movie forebears and its own aims as a subjective, hyperreal chronicle of boots-on-the-ground combat. Is the film a viscious, jingoistic piece of propaganda? A formally exhilarating but ideologically dubious piece of late 20th century moviemaking? Or is it, as our guest asserts, one of the most misunderstood texts in popular American cinema? We begin by reflecting on Saving Private Ryan's legacy and cultural context, its place as a cultural behemoth and its application as a load-bearing hagiography for American militarism that found new purchase in a post-9/11 context just a few years after its release. Then, we examine Spielberg's formalism, how images contradict text within the film, and what to make of the movie's propositions on its own terms. Finally, we address the movie's evocation of difficult realities of warfare, and ask if the film meets the mandate and responsibility of such images; how history and contemporary context color our interpretations, and what value there is in continuing to return to such questions in our current moment. Follow Brendan Hodges on TwitterRead Peter Labuza's Radical Democracy: Mythos and Politics in Saving Private RyanGet access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.CW: Discussions of cinematic sexual assault and violence.Film Critic Lex Briscuso joins us to discuss Satoshi Kon's masterful animated psychological thriller Perfect Blue. The film follows Mima, a former J-Pop idol who has recently left the music group Cham! that made her famous and beloved in order to pursue a career as an actress. As Mima struggles to adapt to the demands of her new profession, she becomes the victim of an obsessive stalker and steadily begins to lose her grip on reality. Visceral, confounding, and richly layered with considerations about celebrity, artifice, and the toll of creating a public persona, Perfect Blue represents the very best animated cinema has to offer and showcases what the medium is capable of in the hands of a brilliant artist.We begin by unpacking the film's contemplations of public image and the fledgling internet; how Kon anticipates the production of digital avatars and how these versions of ourselves skew people's perceptions of our interiority. Then, we discuss Perfect Blue's perspective on patriarchal, predatory systems within entertainment and art, as well as how the film conveys the top-down proprietary relationships that we build around celebrity. Finally, we examine the film's core tragedy - the loss of agency and sense of self that necessary follows any participation within a larger system of public visibility and the subsequent collapse of solidarity these losses breed.Follow Lex Briscuso on Twitter.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish.

Filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell (Miss Me Yet, Attention Shoppers) joins us to discuss Last Action Hero, a meta action comedy featuring too many ideas, a healthy serving of great jokes, and a fascinating reckoning for its star Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was aging into the second act of his movie star career. We begin with a conversation about the action hero vehicle, its dominance in the 1980s, and its turn to self-reference and parody in the early 1990s. Then, we explore Last Action Hero's bizarre combination of action movie tropes and lighter cartoon comedy logic that makes its satirical targets more difficult to identify. After, we address the ways the film incidentally exonerates itself from some of the more ideologically thorny tendencies of police films by embracing fantasy and drawing attention to its artifice. Finally, we spend some time discussing Chris's latest brilliant and beautiful film Failed State, how its component parts all came together, and what it means to be a filmmaker in our moment of constant crises and social alienation.Follow Christopher Jason Bell on TwitterWatch Chris's films on Means.tv Watch the trailer for Failed StateGet access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

Get access to this entire episode as well as all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.Associate Editor at Roger Ebert Robert Daniels joins to discuss the latest Spike Lee joint Highest 2 Lowest, a loose reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 procedural masterpiece High & Low that marks the fifth collaborationg between Lee and the inimitable Denzel Washington. Thematically rich, unabashedly confrontational and occasionally baffling, Highest 2 Lowest is everything you would hope for from a late period Spike Lee picture, as Lee grapples with personal concerns about masculinity, the contradictions of Black capitalism, and the generational divide around the nature of authenticity in art when success has finally come your way.We begin with a discussion of the bold formal choices of Highest 2 Lowest, including the stylistic gambit of dividing the film firmly into two aesthetic halves; the first half marked by an austere, antiseptic, and artificial atmosphere that finally gives way to a more daring, brash and musical rhythm when the film descends on the streets of Spike's native New York, escaping the Dumbo high rise apartment of the film's early chapters. Then, we explore the film as autocritique, with Lee and Washington examining their positions as elder statesmen of Black artistry, and the push-pull of working within systems of capital built upon racialized heirarchies. Finally, we tackle the film's thorny political propositions, its conservative tendencies, and the thrill of trying to parse where exactly an artist like Spike Lee stands on the issues and questions he presents within the text.Read Robert Daniels on Highest 2 Lowest at Roger EbertRead Alphonse Pierre on Highest 2 Lowest at PitchforkFollow Robert Daniels on Twitter.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish

We inaugurate (and conclude) our coverage of Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène with a discussion of his 1992 feature Guelwaar, the late filmmaker's only work of the decade. In essence a minor comedy of errors revolving around the misplaced body of a departed community leader and political agitator, Guelwaar transforms several times over into a profound and moving chronicle of national identity, religious conflict, and the material politics required to resist colonial rule. We begin with an explication of Sembène's politics and how his Marxism informs the social milieu of his works. Then, we praise the film's feminism, its many nuanced women characters, and the director's progressive standpoint on sex work . Finally, we relate Sembène's invocation of aid as a tool of imperial oppression to current situations ongoing in Gaza.Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish