Breadline Optimists: A Film Podcast

This year I saw 63 films theatrically. Just under half of those were revival screenings. The Loft theater here in Tucson (very early into the year) began showing classic Hollywood films on Thursday mornings and I partook in some of those. All in all, for the purposes of this annual list, I saw 180 2023 releases. As I go month to month, I will put cinema lessons that I learned when applicable.  This year, I am not considering a film made to have its premiere on a streaming service  for inclusion on either list. I certainly have nothing against those films, but since only one such film, Tina Satter's Reality , was deserving of top ten placement for me, I decided I would rather just highlight good, new 2023 streaming content first and save the list work for films that got some sort of theatrical. For television/stream recommendations, the US premiere of Naked Attraction  was an extreme water cooler moment. John Larroquette still has it and then some on the modern Night...

My friend Scott and I played this game nearly two years ago. I only just found the notes. I have not seen Dream Scenario yet and am not sure,  new release wise,the list would be any different if played today. Butcher's Crossing looks pretty amazing. I did see Wild at Heart  again for the first time since it came out recently and thought it was an amazing. The game we played to determine the best Nicolas Cage films is based off of the Incinerator podcast. The premise is two people make individual top twenty lists on any given topic (for instance vampire films). The host takes a look at the lists and sees what titles the two players have in common. Let's say the players have 8 in common picks. Each player must now pick 6 out of the 12 they did not have in common and submit those. That makes up a top twenty list. There is an engineer who adds five films that he/she feels are lacking from the list and that makes a top 25. For this game we had 9 in common. Mom and Dad , Mandy ,...

Screen Drafts is a popular podcast.  This is a version of the screen drafts game where 3 people chose the best (ideally) 13 films that fit into a draft topic with trivia and vetoes thrown in to keep the game interesting. My name is Dennis. My wife chose the topic for this game, found footage horror films, and played as did our friend Scott. The only real rules were it has to be 75 percent or more footage captured by cameras that the a character in the film is aware of, and the films could not veer towards mockumentary because that is its own thing. With that in mind, we spent weeks and weeks watching films and no discussing or letterbox rating them so as not to give anything away. Then I contacted radio personality and film critic (https://www.stevepulaski.com/) Steve Pulaski because We needed a person with a vast film knowledge to provide trivia to determine who got which picks.  He asked some very good questions (about films ranging from August Underground to The Virginity H...