Special Guest: Radu Toderici Guest Co-Hosts: Andrei Idu, Spencer Parsons
In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie completed his second film, Reconstituirea — known in English as The Reconstruction or The Reenactment — and, within a month of its 1970 release, it vanished. Not banned outright, but buried: withdrawn, never televised, never revived for nearly two decades. By the time Romanian audiences could see it freely in 1990, it had acquired near-mythological status. A 2008 critics' poll ranked it the greatest Romanian film ever made.
The premise is deceptively simple: two young men, Vuică and Ripu, get drunk at their graduation party, brawl with a bartender, and are offered a deal — reenact the fight for an educational film about the dangers of alcohol and walk free. What follows is a sustained, darkly comic, and finally devastating examination of what happens when institutional power turns a camera on the people it controls.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and Andrei Idu about Pintilie's deliberate subversion and why this film became the foundation for the entire Romanian New Wave. Guest interview Radu Toderici -- whose essay about the film will be featured as part of the upcoming book ReFocus: The Films of Lucian Pintilie.
Mike joins hosts Rob Spencer and Joe Odber of Caliber 9 From Outer Space for a hard-boiled double feature spanning two very different crime cinema traditions. First up is Across 110th Street (1972), Barry Shear's gritty portrait of violence and dread on the mean streets of New York. Then the conversation shifts to Milan for Gambling City (1975), directed by Sergio Martino.
The episode includes a Spoiler Territory section for both films. Listeners who haven't seen Across 110th Street can skip ahead to the 1:16:42 mark, and those avoiding spoilers for Gambling City can jump to 2:10:17.
Mike talks with filmmaker Kimi Takesue, whose work — spanning documentary, fiction, and experimental forms — is now collected on the Criterion Channel. Takesue grew up shuttling between Honolulu and Massachusetts, and that cross-cultural, biracial upbringing informs every frame she has made, from early shorts rooted in identity politics to acclaimed features documenting cross-cultural encounters in Uganda, Laos, and Hawaiʻi.
Her films, including Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, examine those encounters through an observational lens, tracing the power dynamics and unspoken tensions that emerge when tourists and locals share the same unequal terrain. Takesue discusses her practice of traveling without research or agenda, letting one thing unfold into the next, and how a devastating failed fiction project directly led to the making of Where Are You Taking Me? She also talks about the rhythm and formalism of Onlookers, the tension between aestheticizing beauty and critiquing the tourist gaze, the influences she only fully embraced later in her career, and her current work-in-progress following tour guides at Cambodian atrocity sites.
Orson Welles spent thirty-five years trying to put Sir John Falstaff on screen. Chimes at Midnight (1965) is the result: a film drawn from five Shakespeare plays — primarily the two Henry IV parts, with passages from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor — that lifts Falstaff from comic supporting player to tragic protagonist. Welles plays the knight himself, a lumbering, larger-than-life tavern dweller and unlikely father figure to Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), heir to the guilt-haunted Henry IV (John Gielgud). When Hal must choose between loyalty to Falstaff and the demands of the crown, the film becomes what Welles called a lament "for the death of Merrie England." Dismissed by critics on its 1966 Cannes premiere and barely distributed in the United States, the film spent decades trapped in rights disputes — finally reaching audiences properly through the Janus Films/Criterion restoration in 2016.
Mike talks with Spencer Parsons and David MacGregor about the film's three-decade gestation across stage and screen, the filmmaking ingenuity behind its legendary Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, the autobiographical dimensions of Welles's performance, and why Chimes at Midnight now stands for many critics as the greatest Shakespeare film ever made.
Special Guests: Lloyd Kaufman, Andrew L. Miller Guest Co-Host: Rob St. Mary
In 2025, New Jersey's favorite hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength returned — twice. Writer/director Macon Blair's big-budget reimagining, The Toxic Avenger (2023), finally received a wide theatrical release in August 2025. Peter Dinklage voices Winston, a terminally ill janitor at a corrupt pharmaceutical company who falls into a vat of toxic chemicals and emerges as Toxie — a mop-wielding mutant vigilante. Kevin Bacon stars as the company's scheming CEO and Elijah Wood as his security-minded brother, in a film that wraps its splatter comedy around themes of healthcare, corporate greed, and unlikely heroism.
Also in 2025, Troma's own Andrew L. Miller and Adam Peltier reconstructed The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989) and Part III (1989) into the single film they were always meant to be. Titled Mr. Melvin, the 127-minute cut restores the narrative logic Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz originally intended — following Toxie's post-heroic depression, a manipulated journey to Japan, and a Faustian deal with Apocalypse Inc. that turns him into a corporate sellout before the ultimate confrontation with the Devil himself.
Mike talks with Rob St. Mary about both films, and the episode includes interviews with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman and Mr. Melvin co-producer and co-editor Andrew L. Miller.
Special Guest: Lauren Lloyd Guest Co-Hosts: Heather Drain, Rob St. Mary
Comedy Month wraps up as Mike talks with Rob St. Mary and Heather Drain about Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Lauren Lloyd joins Mike for an interview about working on the film that was almost universally trashed on release.
Green wrote, directed, and stars as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist who heads to Hollywood to sell his drawings as an animated series. After a catastrophic pitch meeting, Gord retreats to live with his parents—long-suffering father Jim (Rip Torn), mother Julie (Julie Hagerty), and younger brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas). Also along for the ride: Marisa Coughlan as Betty, a wheelchair-using rocket scientist.
Closer in spirit to Dadaist provocation than anything else at the multiplex in 2001. Mike, Rob, and Heather dig into Green's career, the film's reception, deleted material from the trailer and behind-the-scenes footage, and the question of what Freddy Got Fingered is actually trying to do.
Todd Solondz's disowned debut finally gets its day. Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989) follows Ira Ellis (Solondz), a bespectacled, self-deluding playwright adrift in the last gasp of the East Village art scene — too busy pining after a performance artist named Junk to notice the woman who actually loves him.
Mike Sullivan and David Rodgers join Mike to dig into the film Solondz famously begged a friend not to rent, examining what makes it both a fascinating time capsule of downtown New York bohemia and an unmistakable preview of the tragicomic sensibility that would eventually produce Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse. They also make the case for why this orphaned debut — unavailable on any legitimate platform since its 1990 VHS release — deserves a proper restoration and re-release.
Special Guests: Timothy Galfas, Albert S. Ruddy, Gary Morgan, Elliott Gould Guest Co-Hosts: Cullen Gallagher, Mike Sullivan
Paul Gallico's 1970 novel Matilda told of a male boxing kangaroo who becomes an unlikely heavyweight contender, upending the worlds of sports promotion and organized crime. Producer Albert S. Ruddy, fresh from his Oscar-winning triumph with The Godfather, acquired the rights and brought the story to the screen in 1978, co-writing with Timothy Galfas.
The resulting G-rated family comedy stars Elliott Gould as Bernie Bonnelli, a small-time talent agent who discovers the boxing kangaroo and sees his ticket out of obscurity. Clive Revill plays Billy Baker, Matilda's devoted owner and former British boxer, while Robert Mitchum turns up as Duke Parkhurst, a manipulative sportswriter, and Harry Guardino heads the mob contingent scheming to control the outcome of Matilda's fights. The kangaroo himself was portrayed by Gary Morgan in a $30,000 suit.
Mike talks with co-hosts Cullen Gallagher and Mike Sullivan about the film, then brings in interviews with actors Gary Morgan and Elliott Gould along with two posthumously-released interviews with producer Albert S. Ruddy and screenwriter Timothy Galfas,
Special Guest: Radu Toderici
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