Secret Movie Club Podcast

Mar 06 2025 100 ep. 46 mins 11

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Movie theaters by movie makers for movie lovers.

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SMC Pod #175: Adaptation Part 1: Frankenstein (novel) to movie (1931, James Whale, Universal)

Mar 06 2025 40 mins

Adaptation from one storytelling medium to another is key to cinema. Be it a novel, a play, a TV show, an opera, or beloved legend, the work adapted MUST be molded and changed to suit the strengths of cinema. Ironically, faithful adaptations are often the least successful. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the classic 1818 romantic Gothic horror nov

SMC Pod #174: Dialogue-less Movies (Pure Cinema)

Feb 27 2025 37 mins

Today, we look at some of the great "pure cinema" movies with little to no dialogue. Now listen-dialogue is great. Dialogue is cinematic. But to scale the heights, a moviemaker needs to know how to communicate cinematically (image + sound) without using dialogue as a crutch to convey information. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at F.W. Murnau's 1924 masterp

SMC Pod #173: The state of cinema, 2025 (it's rough)

Feb 20 2025 37 mins

Movies have always had their ups and downs. Every time it looks like cinema is gonna give up the ghost, it somehow roars back and a new era is born. But is that true in 2025? Or has cinema finally come to the end of the line? Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes stock of the state of cinema. He tries not to pull punches or manufacture a conclusion. Where are we?

SMC Pod #172: Is this Cinema? I: Pasolini's Salo or 120 Days of Sodom

Feb 14 2025 33 mins

Today, we inaugurate an occasional series "Is this Cinema?" in our podcasts. We'll look at a controversial, shocking, and/or divisive movie that divides cinephiles. There may be no better place to start than famed Italian moviemaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, 1975's SALO or 120 DAYS OF SODOM adapted from shocking source material written by the Marquis De Sade. Pasolini adapt

SMC Pod #171: Watershed movies

Jan 30 2025 45 mins

Today, we look at watershed movies: movies that changed the culture. That became juggernauts. Where cinema was clearly changed/different AFTER the movies. These movies aren't always enjoyable still to watch. OR. . .they were so big, it's hard to enjoy them as movies. They have become markers on the road of cinema. Yet some still offer up endless joys. While others have not aged wel

SMC Pod #170: Bill Murray, the Agony & The Ecstasy

Jan 23 2025 42 mins

Of all the Saturday Night Live TV actors who have gone on to the movies, Bill Murray has had possibly the most fascinating, long lasting, unpredictable run. Murray is complex, known equally for great performances, hilarious in-real life stunts, endless restlessness, and difficult personal behavior. Yet, very few actors have built up the reservoir of good will Murray has with his fa

SMC Pod #169: David Lynch, an appreciation

Jan 16 2025 42 mins

On January 16, 2025, cinema lost one of its greatest lights. David Lynch passed away in Los Angeles at 78 years old. Like all master moviemakers, Lynch contained multitudes. The writer/director behind Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and many other films crafted a dreamlike, surreal, spiritual, emotional tone with intense lights and darks tha

SMC Pod #168: The Lubitsch Touch, a prologue

Jan 10 2025 32 mins

First and foremost, Secret Movie Club sends everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires (this podcast is posted January 2025) the best. We're here as a community to help rebuild. If it can bring a smile to your face in a helpful way, we offer this podcast on "The Lubitsch Touch". Master classic Hollywood filmmaker Ernest Lubitsch developed a cinematic shorthand storytelling style fu

SMC Pod #167: Akira Kurosawa, Master Filmmaker, 2025 Edition

Jan 02 2025 42 mins

Realizing we've all ready done several podcasts on Akira Kurosawa, we're treating this like an addendum to a revised edition. Today, we work to fill in some of the gaps by focusing on some of Kurosawa's amazing but lesser seen works like his 1943 debut feature Sanshiro Sugata, his incredible I Live in Fear (1954)where actor Toshiro Mifune plays an aging industrialist who loses his

SMC Pod #166: 2024, the year in movies

Dec 26 2024 47 mins

Furiosa, Hundreds of Beavers, I Saw the TV Glow, Anora just to name a few showed that 2024 had lots of genius, fight, promise, vitality, relevancy still for cinema. And movies like Dune Pt II, Hit Man, Conclave, Juror #2 were worthwhile, stimulating additions to the annals of moviedom. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the year in movies 2024...and finds t