Secret Movie Club Podcast

Christopher Nolan's just released The Odyssey is another Nolan juggernaut, having made $700 million in just 12 days of release. It's also the first movie shot fully on IMAX film. And it's a certified classical epic. Often, cinema has pulled a kind of miraculous magic trick by finding technologies and film formats and the right epic material to make a movie in the theater a must see experience.  Every time the naysayers write off movies or the movie theater, sound (1920's), color (1930's), widescreen (1950's) or 70MM (1950's-1960's) or immersive 3D (2000's Avatar) and now IMAX (2000's-present) somehow brings folks back. And makes believers out of us again. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at this history of epic-film format-rejuvenation. And wonders what we might be able to learn from it. 

A cult classic movie often wasn't a mainstream hit upon release. But over time, a devoted committed subculture grew around the movie with the belief, nay, the knowledge that this was a masterpiece movie.  Cult classics like Elvira Mistress of the Dark, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Eraserhead, The Big Lebowski, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, may never get the mainstream recognition or popularity of an Avatar or Sinners but to its fervent audience, the cult classic is as beloved as great literature. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill explores what makes a cult classic movie. And what we, as movie lovers and movie makers, can learn from them.

There are so many ways to end a movie. Some of the most powerful, yet hardest to do, are movie twists. This is where your entire reality and understanding of what has come before gets a kick to the head. Movies like The Sixth Sense, Psycho, Fight Club, even the wonderfully hysterical and nutty I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsey Lohan fall in this category.  The shock ending is different-it doesn't reconfigure reality but it leaves us gut-punched and stunned. Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Frank Darabont's The Mist. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at these kinds of endings and more. He also offers a COMPLETE LIST OF MOVIES DISCUSSED at beginning of pod because he's going to talk/spoil many of them. If you want, see them first, then listen here.  

Aristotle in his POETICS made a simple yet incisive claim-good dramatic work has a 3 act structure-a beginning, a middle, and an end. Horace in classic Rome expanded this to a 5 act structure.  In the age of cinema, a slightly modified three act structure has been the dominant approach in American screenwriting. Yet many, if not most movies, actually deviate from this structure. And filmmakers like Kurosawa and Kubrick embrace other structures like the symphonic structure-4 movements. Yet, ultimately, many variations can still be harmonized to a progression of 3 distinct parts. Secret Movie Club programmer.founder Craig Hammill looks at Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Thin Red Line, 2001, Mad Max and many others to discuss all the different kinds of successful and discovered structures. And what that might say about an even more profound structure in successful cinematic work. 

Lesson learned. Each year produces so many fascinating movies; it's better to wait and see as many as possible before recording a pre-emptive "Movies of 2025" podcast. So Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill to make up for this mistake records "Movies of 2025 Part 2". SIRAT, THE SECRET AGENT, MARTY SUPREME, SOUND OF FALLING get discussed. And Craig enters the fray with his thoughts on Spielberg's new release DISCLOSURE DAY (spoiler, ultimately he liked it). 

John Carpenter explained it best. We're all seated around a campfire. The storyteller says, the evil is. . .out there and points into the darkness. That's external horror. Think Jaws, The Birds, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now same scenario but the storyteller says the evil is. . .in here and points to us, our own hearts. That's internal horror. Think Black Swan, Psycho, Twin Peaks etc.

Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about the interesting differences and rhymes between external and internal horror movies. And how, ultimately, most great horror movies are a combination of both. 

One of the most clever ways moviemakers make new movies is to take a movie they love and invert it-do the opposite of key aspects of the movie and problem solve how to make that work. Peter Jackson famously took George Romero's zombie classic Night of the Living Dead where zombies are outside trying to get into a house and made Dead Alive where zombies are inside a house and the hero is trying to keep them from getting out. The first three Indiana Jones movies are all clever inversions of classics like Casablanca, Gunga Din, and From Russia with Love. And Casablanca gets another crazy inversion in the form of the 1946 classic Gilda starring Rita Hayworth. Secret Movie Club founder Craig Hammill dives into this fascinating way of flipping a movie on its head to make a totally new movie. 

In the 1980's and 1990's, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, among many others honed their craft and proved their vision directing 3 minute music videos for MTV.  While the "music video" aesthetic was sometimes attacked as hurting cinema, in retrospect, the best directors of that generation brought a much needed innovation to movie language from which we can still take inspiration. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at this video work and notes how often the master moviemakers of a generation come out of a looked down upon medium. 

Adaptation is a tricky thing no matter the source in cinema. Novels, life stories, historical events, original ideas, short stories. Adapting live theater plays is an especially tricky business. Something written to be performed live, often in 1 location/set, with concentrated poetic dialogue, plays different as a movie. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at everything from Sidney Lumet's adaptations of 12 Angry Men and Long Day's Journey into Night to all the various Shakespeare adaptations to experimental one location minimalist adaptations like Richard Linklater's 2001 Tape. His conclusion? It might help moviemakers to direct some plays to be better prepared to adapt them to the big screen.

The precision, patience, and technical know how needed to sell action filmmaking is underrated and under appreciated. Action directors like Michael Curtiz, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Miller, John McTiernan, even. . .Michael Bay get treated differently than art house canonically revered moviemakers. Yet what is accomplished in action hits like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Aliens, Die Hard, Mad Max Fury Road, even Bad Boys II is a cinematic miracle. Very carefully planned illusion becomes reality. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a filmmaking-centric approach to talk about the technical tools and tricks used to sell stunts, sequences, cinematic danger.