Reel Roulette

Lady Luck blesses the podcast with the classic:  Memento.  Christopher Nolan directed this film about an insurance agent (Guy Pierce) who gets in an accident and loses the ability to make new memories.  He spends his life tracking down his wife's killer.  Or does he?  This brilliant film moves forwards in one half of the movie, backwards in the other.  Finally the stories collide in great ending that won't be easily forgotten...unless your the main character.

An American ex-patriot in Belgium is on the run with his daughter after his past in the CIA comes back to haunt him.  Aaron Eckhart stars in Erased, a thriller that Lady Luck threw at us.  Zac and Biggs change the pace and do this film as a commentary that you don't necessarily need to watch while listening.

A man sells his Fantastic Four issue #1 for a ring and goes to propose to his girlfriend.  He finds her nailing a guy named Steve...and even worse...she doesn't know who Johnny Storm is.  Heartbroken, he returns his stalker father's rented tape and discovers a magic VHS tape that allows him to be attractive to the ladies.  Along the way he finds true love.  That's right, Lady Luck has given Zac and Biggs the throwback comedy Screwed:  The movie.

Shia Labeouf plays the title character, Charlie Countryman, an aimless man who suddenly finds himself without his mother or any direction (and a really bad last name).   He meets a cellist (Evan Rachel Wood) who he feels a connection to because of a series of events put into motion by his ghost-mom, and her ghost-dad.  Then he does some drugs, gets hit by a car, has his life threatened multiple times, and nearly gets killed.    And there's some random souls floating around...and a Harry Potter kid suffers from priapism.  Hooh boy, Lady Luck, it's going to be a long one.

Godzilla director Gareth Edwards made this independent film about monsters, which isn't about monsters at all.  Scoot McNairy plays a photographer trying to scrape by off of taking pictures of tragedies committed by tentacled monsters in Mexico.  His boss forces him to help his daughter (Whitney Able) back over the border into America.  Along the way they learn about the creatures, humanity, and love.  They even learn a thing or two.  And if you're not careful you may learn something too.  Lady Luck's gonna have a good time.

Kevin Costner, Anthony Quinn, and Madeline Stowe star in Lady Luck's new picture:  Revenge.  A fighter pilot and Mexican king pin are best friends who have a falling out over a little matter of his wife being banged.  Costner gets the crap kicked out of him, heals up, and gets...well...revenge.  Sort of.

Lady Luck takes us back to 1922 for the silent movie that first ushered vampires to the silver screen.  Nosferatu, played by Max Schreck, goes by the name Count Orlock.  He has his minion, Knock, summon the film's protagonist named Hutter up to his castle.  He soon learns that his host is a vampire feeding off of him nightly.  He escapes to rush home and help his somewhat suicidal wife before Orlock moves in next door.  The body count rises and horror ensues.

Lady Luck decides to drop some knowledge on Zac and Biggs.  We review Happy People:  A Year in the Taiga.  This Werner Herzog documentary accounts for a year in the life of a trapper in Siberia.  We see him set traps, catch fish with a shotgun, abuse his dogs, and unwind with a spot of tea.  And all of this is under the shadow of bears--big...scary...evil...devious bears.  What else would you expect from the director of Grizzly Man?

Lady Luck smiles upon Zac and Biggs as they draw the 1968 classic science-fiction flick:  The Planet of the Apes.  Charlton Heston plays an astronaut who travels forward in time to see what becomes of the human race.  To his shock the spaceship crash lands on a planet where apes have supplanted humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder.  The film explores issues of race, religion, and the human condition in addition to having apes riding horses while netting people or stabbing them with tridents.  The film ends in an iconic spine-tingling scene that won't be forgotten in cinematic history.  Zac and Biggs also spend a few minutes discussing all the sequels and reboots to this amazing movie.

Pam Grier and Sid Haig star in the grindhouse film about women so hot they melt the chains that enslave them...but not really...The Big Bird Cage.  This movie from 1972 was produced by Roger Corman and marks the second of his Women in Penitentiaries Trilogy.  Django and Blossom go from robbing night clubs to starting a revolution in...Hanoi?  They sweep up an actress having an affair with the prime minister into their madness.  She gets locked away in a prison camp run by guards where conjugal visits are never allowed...except when they are.  Django and Blossom wind up infiltrating the camp in an attempt to free all the women for their revolution.  Lots of skin, offensive stereotypes, and hilarity ensues.

This week Lady Luck has lead us to the highest grossing movie in Russian history:  Night Watch.  The director of Wanted, Nine, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter put together a big budget looking Hollywood style movie for 1.5 million dollars.  It's the tale of light vs. dark.  Good vs. evil.  Psychics vs. vampires.  This is a foreign film that you won't want to miss.

This time we review the movie that IMDB rated as the 21st worst movie of all time:  Zombie Nation.  A police officer with a German accent born and raised in Los Angeles (to an American mother who is obsessed with cleanliness and runs a mental institution) lives in an ex-asylum / furniture store / apartment and begins murdering women there.  Yes this is what the movie's about.  Yes I felt weird typing that sentence.  Eventually the women become zombies who don't look like zombies (but apparently do and don't look like zombies), and enact their revenge after walking into the police department and getting jobs there.  Lady Luck hates us, she really hates us.

Zac and Biggs have apparently upset Lady Luck.  She punishes us this week with Unstable Fables:  Tortoise vs. Hare.  See what happens when the Jim Henson company slums it by animating Jay Leno, Danny Glover and Vivica A. Fox in an unfunny take on the fable we all know...but never asked for.  We watched it so that you don't have to.  You're welcome.

Lady Luck has Zac and Biggs watch the enduring drama:  What's Eating Gilbert Grape.  Find out what happens when a man young adult is saddled with a morbidly obese mother, a mentally challenged brother, a nomadic girlfriend, a crazy cougar on the side, and a job at a grocery store with no lobster tank.  This pull from 1993 stars Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis, Crispin Glover, John C. Reilly, and Leonardo DiCaprio in his first Academy Award nominated performance.

Welcome to the podcast where Alex "Biggs" Small and Zachary "Zac" Lachenbruch pick a movie off of Netflix at random.  Sometimes the movies are wonderful;  sometimes the movies are wretched.  Today we go into great detail covering arguably one of the greatest movies in cinematic history:  The Godfather Part II. Francis Ford Coppola  directed Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Bruno Kirby, and Diane Keaton in this gangster epic that tells tales from the twenties and fifties concurrently.  The movie won Best Picture in 1975, nabbing five other Oscars along the way.