050 Die Hard

Yippee-ki-yay, Mother F****rs, It's Christmas movie time! In 1988 Bruce Willis starred as the venerable John McClane in Die Hard, paving the way for a decades spanning action enterprise that refuses to *cough* die. A script loaded with one-liners, overly campy character archetypes, and a little touching sappiness to boot, Die Hard achieves what it set out to do: epitomize all that is 80's action. Bruce Willis would never be the same afterward and neither would we. Sparing us the stilted accent of Schwarzenegger and the punchy slur of Stallone, Willis offered us a "thinking man's" action star...or at least a coherent one.

Download: 050 Die Hard

049 Swingers

We're all so money, and we don't even know it! This week we review the 90's zeitgeist 20-something indie hit Swingers, starring a young Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Ron Livingston and an ever beautiful Heather Graham. After his first viewing, Mark delves into the existential and the futile of what it is to be truly "money", while Matt embraces his inner Vince (aka Trent). With a heavy dose of 60's lounge nostalgia, Swingers is couched in the heydays of the past. But Mark's not buying any of that hipster crap. Stay dead Sinatra!!

Download: 049 Swingers

048 Oldboy

Revenge is a dish best served as a live octopus in a Seoul sushi restaraunt. Oldboy is a Korean psychological thriller from Chanwwok Park that exploits the idea of revenge to full effect. Where violence always takes the forefront in revenge tales (and there is a decent amount of violence in Oldboy) this film deconstructs the idea into a form of brutal shared empathy that gets to the heart of the vengeance concept. A mix of Hitchcock and Tarantino, smart and poetically objective, Oldboy is cinema that reinvents its genre.

Download: 048 Oldboy

047 Glengarry Glen Ross

It's all about the fucking leads!!! This week Matt and Mark review the boiler room Mamet classic Glengarry Glen Ross directed by James Foley and starring a rock star "super group" of Oscar talent including Al Pacino, the late Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, and Kevin Spacey. Like a meat grinder, this film shows you what happens when you take the weak pulpy bits of human pride and process them through the steel teeth of capitalism. To be a salesman is to be an actor, a character fueled by seduction and confidence, and if your act isn't honed, as Baldwin's character Blake puts it, "You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, *you are* shit, hit the bricks pal, and beat it, 'cause you are going *out*. "

Download: 047 Glengarry Glen Ross

046 Taxi Driver

"You lookin' at me? ARE you lookin at me?" ... is strangely the most quoted line of the gritty 70's New York City classic Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert Dinero. Armed with a skewed morality concocted from a lonely paranoid mind, Dinero's Travis Bickle embarks on a manic crusade to "clean the scum off of the streets." With an ending, nicely wrapped up with a bow, the director maps a path of violence from which redemption is achievable. Laying the groundwork for the Tarantinos of current cinema, Scorsese shows us the gutter and revels in it.

Download: 046 Taxi Driver