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: Noah Isenberg Guest Co-Hosts: Heidi Honeycutt, Keith Gordon
Comedy Month continues as Mike talks with co-hosts Keith Gordon and Heidi Honeycutt about Billy Wilder's Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959).
Chicago, 1929. Musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are barely scraping by when they stumble onto the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, witnessing Spats Colombo (George Raft) and his mob gun down a rival gang. With the killers on their tail, the two desperate musicians disguise themselves as women and join Sweet Sue's Society Syncopators, an all-girl band heading to Miami. Aboard the train they meet Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe), a ukulele-playing singer with a weakness for saxophonists and a dream of marrying a millionaire.
Mike also talks with scholar Noah Isenberg — author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We'll Always Have Casablanca and currently completing a cultural history of Some Like It Hot for Norton — about the film's origins, its enduring legacy, and what it still has to say.
Adapted by Preston Sturges from Ferenc Molnár's play and directed by William Wyler, The Good Fairy (1935) is a screwball fairy tale built on mistaken identities, comic misfortune, and the peculiar moral logic of someone who genuinely wants to do good but hasn't quite figured out how the world works.
Luisa (Margaret Sullavan) has grown up knowing nothing of the world outside the orphanage walls. When she's finally released into Budapest society, she proves as well-meaning as she is naïve — and as prone to catastrophe as she is to kindness. A chance encounter with the wealthy and lecherous Konrad (Frank Morgan) sets off a chain of complications, chief among them the lie that she's already married. The problem is that she isn't, but she soon will be — to a bookish, bearded lawyer named Dr. Sporum (Herbert Marshall) who has no idea any of this is happening.
The film showcases the range of Margaret Sullavan's screen presence — radiant and funny and heartbreaking in equal measure — alongside Frank Morgan's gloriously stammering comic turn.
The episode also looks at the 1947 remake I'll Be Yours, starring Deanna Durbin, and the 1951 Broadway musical adaptation Make a Wish, with music by Hugh Martin and a book co-written by Sturges and Abe Burrows.
Special Guest: Mackenzie G. Mauro Guest Co-Host: Ben Buckingham
Mike and Ben Buckingham take a look at Exposure 36, the 2022 film written and directed by Mackenzie G. Mauro. Charles Oudo stars as Cam, a photographer spending the last three days on Earth selling drugs and wandering the streets of New York City, encountering a colorful cast of characters along the way.
The apocalypse here is background noise rather than spectacle — a quiet, meditative film that doubles as something of a Rorschach test, with different viewers latching onto entirely different aspects of the story. Mike and Ben dig into the episodic, wandering narrative, the film's mysterious blue figures, its use of photography as a distancing mechanism, and the way the story shifts from meditative sci-fi into neo-noir thriller territory before it's all over. Mauro joins the show to discuss the film.
Special Guest: Annapurna Sriram Guest Co-Hosts: Payton McCarty-Simas, Rob St. Mary
Mike is joined by Payton McCarty-Simas and Rob St. Mary to dig into Fucktoys , the 2025 SXSW Special Jury Award winner written, directed by, and starring Annapurna Sriram. Sriram plays AP, a sex worker adrift in Trashtown — a candy-colored dystopia of industrial decay and pastel skies — after a swamp-dwelling tarot reader tells her a curse can be lifted for a thousand dollars and the sacrifice of a baby lamb. What follows is a picaresque night of surreal encounters, escalating absurdity, and a collision of intimacy, exploitation, and class in a pre-millennium alternate universe.
The gang explores the film's John Waters–adjacent sensibility and its candy-coated production design, debating whether the aggressive tonal shifts and theatrical performances sharpen the film's satirical edge or tip into pure indulgence. They also dig into what the curse might actually represent, how Sriram's central performance holds the chaos together, and where Fucktoys fits within a lineage of underground feminist and transgressive cinema.
Also featured is an interview with writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram.
Mike joins Jim Laczkowski of The Director's Club alongside the great writer, commentator, and historian Heather Drain to dig into the work of one of cinema's most singular visionaries.
The conversation centers on two landmark films — The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre — though Jodo's broader filmography weaves its way throughout. Jodorowsky has something in common with filmmakers like PT Anderson, David Lynch, and Sam Raimi: he treats cinema like a playground of the subconscious, an empty canvas reflecting an uncompromising reality that is equal parts bleak and beautiful.
The first hour focuses on The Holy Mountain, while the second jumps into Santa Sangre and much more. There are laughs, fireworks, acid trips, and digressions galore — all in the spirit of a true artist who has likely changed lives, befuddled others, and created remarkable work that is entirely his own. No timestamps necessary for this one. Be sure to also seek out another Jodorowsky masterpiece, El Topo.
Owen (Justice Smith) is a quiet kid on the outskirts of everything — his school, his family, his own life. When he meets Maddy (Jack Haven), a fellow outcast devoted to late-night supernatural TV show The Pink Opaque, something stirs in him that he can't quite name. Together they lose themselves in the show's mythology, its heroes Isabel and Tara battling the dream-warping Mr. Melancholy from within The Midnight Realm. When Maddy disappears and the show gets canceled, Owen finds himself alone in a suburb designed to swallow people whole — watching years pass like seconds.
Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow (2024) asks what it costs to not know yourself, wrapping that terror in the hypnotic glow of '90s television and the specific dread of adolescence that never ends. Horror film, coming-of-age film, and something harder to name — it builds a portrait of a person burying themselves alive.
Lu Etienne and Maxi Breckwoldt join Mike to trace Owen's journey from the bleachers to the Fun Center and beyond, unpacking the film's psychic static, its suburban uncanny, and the question haunting every frame: what if you're already suffocating, and you just don't know it yet?
Special Guest: Bertrand Mandico Guest Co-Hosts: Kyler Fey, Michelle Kisner
Kyler Fey and Michelle Kisner join Mike to dig into Bertrand Mandico's striking 2017 feature debut, The Wild Boys (Les Garçons Sauvages). A fever dream of transgression and transformation, the film follows five privileged boys who rape and murder their literature teacher — then are spirited away by a mysterious sea captain to the strange and sensual Dress Island, where nature itself begins to reshape them.
The trio explores the film's roots in transgressive literary tradition, its place within a rich lineage of queer underground filmmaking — from Jean Genet and Kenneth Anger to Guy Maddin — and Mandico's bold formal choices: tactile black-and-white cinematography, analog practical effects, and the provocative decision to cast women as the "wild boys," destabilizing gender from the very first frame.
The conversation ranges across Mandico's developing filmography as well, examining how After Blue and She Is Conann extend the obsessions on display here: artificial worlds, collapsing gender binaries, and the body as a site of punishment and desire. More than a debut, The Wild Boys emerges as a manifesto for a wholly singular cinematic vision.
Special Guests: Timothy Galfas, Albert S. Ruddy, Gary Morgan, Elliott Gould
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