This week’s theme is BADASS CG CREATURES WITH SCALES!!!! No but really: Josh and Alex break down the first four episodes of this season of Game of Thrones, in a new segment that doesn’t yet have a name. Then they make themselves and everyone else feel old by discussing the 20th anniversary of Jurassic Park, which they just relived in the theatre (in three whole dimensions!). It’s basically hug a reptile week.

PODCATS FOREVERRRRRRRR. It’s true, Alex and Josh saw Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and they’re kind of obsessed with it now. They discuss it in depth, along with Chan Wook Park’s Stoker, and concede that one was way more interesting than the other. Additionally, Alex quibbles with Rifftrax’s poll designation of Twilight as the worst film of all time and gets out of breath explaining why Queen of the Damned is a way way way worse film, while Josh just tries his damnedest to explain some Kickstarter campaigns.

Kneedeep in research on 1980s cinematic styles and color palettes, I took a sick day. Sometimes you just have to. Camped out in bed, halfheartedly read some articles, and fired up Hulu for a background soundtrack of related—but not too related—films to get me through the day.

Criterion was featuring several Jim Jarmusch films, so I took the opportunity to dig through his back catalog.

Alex and Josh discuss the hullabaloo surrounding the Veronica Mars kickstarter and the upcoming SyFy channel “transmedia experience”, Defiance. They also throw out some fresh rhymes for Lee Van Cleef movies, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Justified and Chan-wook Park’s American debut, Stoker. Then they get super arthouse and shit with Alex’s take on Devyn Waitt’s Not Waving But Drowning and The Taiwan Oyster. There’s so much jaw-flappin’ in this pint sized episode that you’ll swear there’s a frakkin’ helicopter about to take off. Worry not, for it’s just the confabulation of two nerds, fixin’ to grease the grimey gears of gossip and highest of high-brow, eye-brow lifting conversation for the delight and contentment of the populace of this great U. S. of Internet.

We’re back! This month inaugurates both a new format and our new podcast! What better time than Halloween to discuss the films that have inspired our nightmares?

Apocalypse Now is one of those films we’ve been knocking around since the inception of TFL. On the surface it’s an obvious choice, but it’s also an exceedingly complex film by modern standards.

Please welcome our very first, and most hated, Quentin Tarantino film! Jackie Brown was a major letdown for film audiences looking for more accidental shootings and comical heroine overdoses. We had a decidedly different opinion of the film, and have decided to make it our spotlight film for March 2012.

We selected Garcia from the Peckinpah catalog because of the filmmaker’s claims that it was his only untarnished cinematic vision. The early days of film saw a great many Hemingway inspired, man’s man, blowhard directors and Peckinpah may have been the last in that great line of hollow men. A great actor in his own story, fighting the light of day with a flask and a syringe, his cult of personality being almost certainly larger than any of his films. Like many of his contemporaries, Peckinpah’s gruff demeanor harbored a fragile ego, and a distorted sense of self that might never have been mended. What is left of the man is his work, which is as much as we need to understand his own view on the world.

You might have seen this one coming. It’s difficult to spend a lot of time talking about filmmaking without bumping up against the formidable career of Alfred Hitchcock. We’ve considered doing a Hitchcock film from the inception of The Film League, the question was always just which one it might be. In the end, we chose Hitch’s penultimate film Frenzy because it seems to be one of the most undervalued of all his successful thrillers. At the same time, the film represents Hitchcock’s career put through a duck press.

Sifting through the myriad of holiday films to settle on Miracle on 34th Street, was no easy decision. In the end, we were drawn to the films optimism, in a plot that essentially pits fantasy against bureaucracy, imaginative thought against the status quo. It’s a film that shakes us. The film subverts our sense of belief, loyalty and faith, and asks us to trust the instincts of our youth. To be wild, thoughtful and just naive enough to allow adventure into our lives.

TFL will be taking a month long holiday beginning this November, but we’ll be back with great new content come December!

There were a few less obvious reasons to pick The Shining for our October 2011 film of the month. The film, based on Stephen Kings novel, is in a class of its own when it comes to narrative complexity. It’s said that King flat-out hated the film, and perhaps with good reason. Under the tenacious eye of master auteur Stanley Kubrick, the novel was transformed from another handful of cheap scares into a haunting, maze-like film that has put viewers in a trance for the last three decades.