Matt's Movie Lodgecast

Meg Ryan has a new movie out! It was in theaters for a minute, and we caught it. Meg stars in it and also wrote and directed it. It's a romantic comedy called What Happens Later and stars her and David Duchovny. They're exes who bump into each other at an airport. When their flights are delayed, they are forced to stay in the airport all night together. We'll let you know our history with Meg Ryan and if her new movie warmed our hearts or froze our souls!

Just in time for Thanksgiving, we slipped into a screening of Eli Roth's new slasher film Thanksgiving! This movie is based on the superb fake trailer from Grindhouse (2007). One year after a Black Friday sale goes awry and numerous people die, a John Carver-masked axe-wielding maniac is killing the citizens of Plymouth, Massachusetts. It sounds like a layup, but does director Eli Roth rise to the occasion?! Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Nell Verlaque, Rick Hoffman, and Gina Gershon star! Happy Thanksgiving! If you enjoy our podcast, feel free to buy us a popcorn. We're on Venmo at @movielodgecast.

The second highest-grossing tour of all time is now a concert film at your local AMC theater! We weren't sure if we were gonna Lodgecast this one, but by the time we walked out of this 2 Hr. 49 Min. concert movie, we had some things to say. When we finally got to the AMC Burbank Prime cinema to see this, all the Swifties had apparently already watched it because we had the theater all to ourselves. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour unfolded before our eyes in ten acts (eras) from Lover to Midnights. We came in knowing little about Tay Tay's life or music, so we learned a lot. We found out the most popular, beautiful, richest girl in the world gets all she wants and all her dreams come true. Join us for our review of this musical adventure!

David Fincher's The Killer is dropping on Netflix! It received a limited theatrical release, so we had to catch it on the big screen at the Laemmle Glendale. The film stars Michael Fassbender as an ascetic assassin who sticks to his plans and never improvises. But when a hit job goes awry, he's forced to go on the run while killing off some loose ends. The script is by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, 8mm, Brainscan), and it's perfect material for Fincher, who directs the hell out of it. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide the synth score. The cast also includes Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O'Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton. Fire up your Netflix and watch it, and then hear our hawt take!

Director Martin Scorsese returns with a 3 Hrs. 26 Min. epic Western crime drama called Killers of the Flower Moon. We spent an entire Sunday confronting this motion picture in IMAX! It brings together Marty's two favorite actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, who haven't starred together in a movie since This Boy's Life (1993). Lily Gladstone also stars as DiCaprio's wife. The film is based on the 2017 nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, with a script by Eric Roth. In the film, the Osage Nation has struck it rich with oil on their reservation in 1920s Oklahoma, but a series of murders of Osage members is disturbing the community. Could Uncle Bobby De Niro and his nephew Leo DiCaprio be involved in the murders? We'll spoil everything in our review of this lavish $200 million production! It will be nominated for absolutely everything at the Academy Awards, so you should see it at some point. Prestige Season has begun!!!

Four boys with an extremely shaky grasp on the lore of the 10-film SAW franchise attempt to take on the latest installment, featuring Tobin Bell as Jigsaw in a way you’ve never seen him before! Prepare to be grossed out by this sick and twisted Hawt Take just in time for Halloween!

Those burly boys known as The Expendables are back almost a decade after their last outing in Expendables 3 (2014). We were definitely not going to cover Expend4bles, but then it scored a remarkably low 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, which made it essential viewing. The cast is getting downright geriatric, with a 77-year-old Sylvester Stallone, a 65-year-old Dolph Lundgren, and a 67-year-old Andy Garcia all trying to pull off some late-career stunts. Jason Statham does the heavy lifting in the action department, and he's lazily supported by Randy Couture, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Megan Fox, Tony Jaa, and Iko Uwais. This movie bombed hard for many reasons, which we will illuminate in this Hawt Take!

What up Stonk Kingz?! New movie out about Roaring Kitty AKA Keith Gill who took the apes to the moon with his WallStreetBet on GameStop. We'll tell you our retailer investor stories and how to invest your money, before we see this stonk movie. Paul Dano plays Stonk King Keith Gill, along with a stacked cast including Pete Davidson, Vincent D'Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, and Seth Rogen. While the dream of taking Dogecoin to $1 dollar have faded, we still have a glimmer of hope that one day AMC Theaters will be saved by the little guys like us. HOLD!!!

Earlier this year, a film was released called Hypnotic, directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring Ben Affleck. It was a major box office bomb with bad reviews and was only in theaters for a blink of an eye. But we caught a screening of it and, like hypnotized victims, we scarcely remember what we saw. Join us in examining our recollection of Rodriguez's head-scratching thriller. The movie also stars William Fichtner, Alice Braga, J.D. Pardo, Hala Finley, Dayo Okeniyi, Jeff Fahey, and Jackie Earle Haley.

Oh hai Tommy! Some brave Lodgers traveled to Westwood for one of the first screenings of Tommy Wiseau's new movie Big Shark (2023). Twenty years ago writer/director/actor Tommy Wiseau released one of the all-time greatest bad movies called The Room (2003). If you haven't seen it, then it is your duty to watch it immediately! It's now 20 years later, and Mr. Wiseau still looks and acts about the same. He was in the house to introduce and answer questions about his new horror comedy Big Shark. This one is set in New Orleans and features many CG shark attacks. Tommy plays a firefighter alongside Isaiah LaBorde and Mark Valeriano, and they take it upon themselves to kill the shark. This movie is probably not coming to video-on-demand anytime soon, so see the movie through our eyes! Oh hai Shark!

Comedy is back in theaters with the new teen sex romp Bottoms! We joined a packed house of youngsters for this high school flick about two senior girls who start a fight club. The girls are Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, and they're committed to losing their virginity with cheerleaders Havana Rose Liu and Kaia Gerber. Former NFL running back Marshawn "Beast Mode" Lynch oversees the fight club. Emma Seligman directs this zany comedy! Hear our hawt take!

77-year-old writer/director Paul Schrader returns! We haven't given up on Uncle Paul, and we'll keep covering his movies as long as he's alive. This is the third Lodgecast outing for The Schrader Patrol. In the past, we've covered The Card Counter in Episode 109 and First Reformed way back in Episode 10. Now, we cover a new chapter in Uncle Paul's diary entitled Master Gardener. Joel Edgerton plays a horticulturist and former White supremacist. He's presided over by a rich Southern widow played by Sigourney Weaver. He grows close to gardener apprentice Maya (Quintessa Swindell). It's about as exciting as it sounds. Keep 'em coming Paul!

It's been a minute since we saw this in theaters back in March. But we remember having a good time at this D&D fantasy comedy. Based on the popular and Satanic role-playing game from Hasbro. This game brand adaptation stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Rege-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, and Hugh Grant. Directed by the talented duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who brought us Game Night (2018), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), and Horrible Bosses (2011). If you liked any of these, then you might like Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!

Beau Knows High Anxiety in the nightmarish dark comedy from filmmaker Ari Aster! Joaquin Phoenix plays the hell out of Beau in this epic three-hour fever dream. A24 seemingly gave Ari Aster complete creative control with a $35 million budget to put this crazed vision on the screen. We saw this movie back in April in IMAX and in this episode we'll break down for you every act of this five or six act film. Along with Joaquin, the movie features Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, and Richard Kind. While the movie received wildly different reviews from the Lodgers who attended this screening, it absolutely demands to be seen! Watch Beau Is Afraid and then listen to this Lodgecast!

You haven't seen Mindcage? You haven't heard of Mindcage? Lodgemaster was determined to watch this VOD homage to Silence of the Lambs, starring Martin Lawrence and John Malkovich. After months of dragging our feet, we finally sat down to watch it. The movie was filmed in Arkansas and also stars Melissa Roxburgh, Robert Knepper, Jacob Grodnik, and Aiden Turner. We'll let you know what we witnessed in this hawt take!

It's a movie that was seemingly made for the Lodgecast. It opened on July 4th, 2023, and has since grossed $170 million! The child trafficking sleeper hit of the summer called Sound of Freedom. Produced by Angel Studios (creators of The Chosen), Sound of Freedom stars Jim Caviezel as real-life anti-human trafficking vigilante Tim Ballard. Before we headed into this movie, we talked about our latest findings on Ballard and Caviezel. Then we joined a sold-out crowd for this 2-hour and 10-minute action movie. Is the movie really a MAGA Q-Anon adjacent piece of propaganda like the mainstream media is conveying it to be? Or is it merely an innocent revenge flick shining a light into the darkness of the global sex trafficking trade? We'll let you know everything we saw. Sound of Freedom was directed by Alejandro Monteverde and stars Caviezel, Bill Camp, Jose Zuniga, Eduardo Verastegui, along with a very small role for Mira Sorvino. God's Children Are Not for Sale!

At long last, the Barbie Dreamcast has arrived! Find out what our sparkling crack team of pink-clad ladies think of this hotly-anticipated Greta Gerwig joint!

Booking our tickets months in advance, we scored hot seats for the opening weekend 70MM IMAX screening of Oppenheimer! We were in the third-row center face-melt zone for the Trinity test conducted by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his friends at the Manhattan Project on July 16, 1945. Director Christopher Nolan captured it in all its horrifying glory. And Nolan captured much more than Trinity and Los Alamos in this three-hour epic biopic. Cillian Murphy pours his heart and soul into portraying the tragic Oppenheimer. He's accompanied by a stacked cast including Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Alden Ehrenreich, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek as Chee-Chee. Feel the heat with us as we deliver this 100 million degree Celsius Atomic Bomb of a Hawt Take! Not only is this Hawt Take 100 million degrees, but according to our calculations, it's also our 100th Hawt Take!

Way back in April of 2018, the Lodgecast reviewed a documentary by director William Friedkin called The Devil and Father Amorth. The doc was about Father Gabriele Amorth, who performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, including one on screen which William Friedkin filmed. It was an unforgettable night at the movies. Little did we know that five years later, Russell Crowe would burst onto the screen playing Father Gabriele Amorth in the horror film The Pope's Exorcist (2023)! It has been a number of months since we recorded this podcast, but we had a blast watching this and then talking about it. We can only hope for a Father Amorth horror franchise!

We're back in the saddle again! Galloping along with our archeologist friend Dr. Indiana Jones played by Harrison Ford, who just turned 81 years old! We prepared for this adventure by recently rewatching the first four Indiana Jones movies in one day. The first three Jones movies from the 1980s were wonderful. But needless to say, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) did not hold up, and our expectations for this fifth installment of the Dr. Jones saga were low. Director James Mangold takes the reigns from Spielberg this time, along with many credited screenwriters. This time it's 1969, and we're searching around the globe for Archimedes' Dial of Destiny. Harrison Ford leads the cast, which includes Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore, and Mads Mikkelsen. Returning characters include John Rhys-Davies as Sallah and Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. Composer John Williams does some heavy lifting, scoring the heck out of this one at the age of 91!