FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

By 1988, the Brat Pack phenomenon was starting to feel a little tired. Audiences had spent years watching Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy navigate teenage angst, prom stress, and upper-middle-class privilege in high-gloss John Hughes productions. Fresh Horses tried to be something different. Directed by David Anspaugh right after his massive hit with Hoosiers, this film attempted to strip away the pop-synth gloss and throw those same iconic faces into a darker, sweatier, and far more cynical look at class divides and bad decisions. It did not hit with audiences back then, and it remains one of the weirdest artifacts of late 80s youth cinema. Now that it is available to own on Blu-ray from Alliance Entertainment, it is worth taking a look back at why this strange little melodrama lands the way it does. Andrew McCarthy plays Matt Larkin, a squeaky-clean Cincinnati college student who has his entire life mapped out on a silver platter. He has a rich fiancee, a solid family path, and an...

Blake Edwards was always at his absolute best when he was backing himself into a corner where the only way out was pure, unadulterated absurdity. By 1984, the man had already given us the slapstick mayhem of the Pink Panther movies and the Hollywood satire of S.O.B. , but Micki & Maude might be one of his most deeply chaotic setups. It's a comedy about a guy who gets two women pregnant at the exact same time, panics, marries them both, and then spends the next hour and a half trying to keep them from finding out while managing two wildly different domestic lives. If you pitched that script today, it would probably get tossed out the window before you even finished the logline, or at the very least, it would be turned into a dark, gritty psychological thriller about a pathologically dishonest liar. But back in the mid-80s, with Dudley Moore in the lead role, it somehow becomes a breezy, hysterical, and surprisingly charming farce. It shouldn't work. The protagonist is, on ...

If you only know Judd Nelson as the rebellious, soft-hearted criminal from The Breakfast Club , watching him in William Lustig's Relentless is going to give you some serious whiplash. He is still playing a guy with a bad attitude and a leather jacket, but this time around, there is no redemptive dance sequence at the end. Instead, he spends ninety minutes sweating, staring with massive dark circles under his eyes, and strangling random people he finds in the white pages. Relentless came out in 1989, right at the tail end of a decade that was absolutely obsessed with gritty, sun-bleached Los Angeles crime thrillers. It sits in that comfortable, slightly greasy space between a theatrical police procedural and a straight-to-video slasher. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it has a raw, mean energy that makes it incredibly easy to watch, even when the plot logic starts to stretch thin. The movie follows two LAPD detectives who are trying to track down a killer the media has...

The history of early Hollywood is filled with fascinating intersections where the raw mythology of the American frontier crashed headlong into an emerging film industry that traded squarely in make-believe. Perhaps no intersection is more evocative than the genuine, documented friendship between silent film megastar Tom Mix and the legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, who spent his final years in Los Angeles serving as an occasional, unpaid technical adviser on early Westerns. This bizarre piece of historical trivia forms the bedrock of Sunset, a highly ambitious, deeply eccentric 1988 genre hybrid written and directed by Blake Edwards. Coming off a string of broad comedies, Edwards attempted something remarkably complex here, trying to fuse a nostalgic period piece, a breezy buddy comedy, and a dark, hard-boiled murder mystery into a single cohesive experience. While the resulting film famously tanked at the box office and divided critics, looking back at it reveals a flawed, deeply ...

The year 1990 was a transitional crossroads for Hollywood romance. On one side of the ledger, audiences were treated to the glossy, heavily sanitized fantasy of Pretty Woman, a film that corporate capitalism could easily digest. On the other side stood director Luis Mandoki’s White Palace, a sweatier, rowdier, and fundamentally more honest look at human connection. Based on Glenn Savan’s novel, the film is an interesting, deeply authentic artifact of an era when major studios still made explicit, character-driven adult dramas. While it falters under the weight of traditional Hollywood expectations in its final act, the picture remains an incredibly compelling study of how social class, profound grief, and ageism warp the architecture of a relationship. At the center of this collision are two individuals who should never have crossed paths. Max Baron, played with cold, repressed elegance by a twenty-seven-year-old James Spader, is a successful St. Louis advertising executive. Max is a n...