Best Film Ever

“Get off my lawn.”

Join Ian, Liam & Megs for our 348th episode as we pull the Gran Torino out of the garage and spend some time with the angriest man on the street for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008) — a film about racism, masculinity, community and the legacy we leave behind.  Kev isn’t with us this week — Walt caught him looking at the Gran Torino and has been sitting on the porch staring at him ever since. Kev assures us he'll be allowed to move eventually.  And we're delighted to welcome BFF of the BFE Hermes Auslander to help us unpack one of the most fascinating — and occasionally deeply uncomfortable — films of Eastwood's later career.

This week we discuss:

Clint Eastwood and legacy — how much does Gran Torino deliberately trade on everything Eastwood has represented on screen for the previous forty years?

Where does this rank among our Clint Eastwood films? We put Walt Kowalski up against the other Eastwood performances and movies we've covered on the BFE.

Masculinity according to Walt — tools, cars, beer, work and absolutely no discussion of feelings. Is the film celebrating this version of manhood or slowly dismantling it?

The creation of “the other” — Walt begins with an entire community reduced to stereotypes and slurs.

And the dismantling of “the other” — what happens once the people Walt has spent years categorising actually become people to him?

Walt and Thao — a mentorship that begins with an attempted car theft and becomes the emotional heart of the movie.

Sue — is she actually the person most responsible for breaking through Walt's defences?

The language of Gran Torino — can the film use racism to interrogate racism without occasionally becoming too comfortable with the joke?

The performances around Eastwood — does the decision to cast inexperienced Hmong actors add authenticity, or expose some pretty significant gaps in performance?

And is there one acting moment that nearly ruins the entire film? When Walt locks Thao away, does Bee Vang give us anything close to the desperation that this enormously important scene requires?

Walt's biological family versus the family next door — the people he's related to seem increasingly distant while the people he initially despises become his community.

Father Janovich is more important than he first appears — what begins as Walt mocking an inexperienced young priest develops into a relationship that becomes crucial to understanding the ending.

What does Walt actually leave behind? The Gran Torino matters, but his real legacy might have considerably less to do with the car.

Clint Eastwood playing Clint Eastwood — brilliantly weaponising his own screen persona, or occasionally drifting into self-parody?

That ending — after a career built around armed men solving problems with violence, Eastwood gives Walt one final confrontation and refuses to let him fire the gun.

But does everything finish a little too neatly? Walt gets his redemption, Thao gets the car and the gang problem gets wrapped up remarkably cleanly for a film that has spent so long dealing in messier realities.

Hermes joins us to tackle the redemption question — does learning to love a handful of people actually undo a lifetime of prejudice?

And finally, whether Gran Torino is the Best Film Ever — or Clint Eastwood putting his own cinematic legacy on trial.

Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at
https://www.patreon.com/BFE

We are very thankful to the following Patreon backers for their generous support:

Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM

Hermes Auslander

James DeGuzman

Synthia

Shai Bergerfroind

Ariannah Who Loves BFE The Most

Paul Komoroski

Duane Smith (Duane Smith!)

Andy Dickson

Aashrey

Chris Pedersen

Randal Silva

Nate The Great

Rev Bruce

Richard

Ryan Kuketz

Dirk Diggler

Stew from the Stew World Order podcast

NorfolkDomus

John Humphrey's Right Foot

Timmy Tim Tim

Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank

Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/.

Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of Mistake by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor, at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor

Also, massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/

Are you ready for some (fantasy) football?  We're back with our Patrons once again and invited a returning special guest to join us to fill out the field  We've got your BFE favourites - Ian, Liam, and KevDog, drafting live.  We're also joined live by some of the BFE Patreon personalities, adding to the merriment and we've got a very special guest.

It's a peak behind the curtain as you catch the BFE group just kicking it as we pretend we know what we're doing with Fantasy Football.  In between bites of Pizza and Chicken Nuggets we provide commentary on the picks by our absent drafters - whether they're drafting remotely or letting the computer do the heavy lifting)

There's pizza, banter, and a behind-the-scenes perspective that might help you know your BFE peeps a little bit better.

“All you motherfuckers are gonna pay.”

Join Ian & Liam for our 347th episode as we climb into a beat-up car, head for Hollywood and return to the View Askewniverse for Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) — a film containing approximately seventeen thousand celebrity cameos, several decades’ worth of jokes that have aged with varying degrees of dignity, and considerably more discussion of internet commenters than anyone in 2001 could possibly have realised would become relevant.

Megs isn’t with us this week — Justice invited her to join the girl gang and she immediately decided their road trip sounded considerably better than ours. Kev has gone to Hollywood to hunt down everyone who’s ever said anything mean about him on the internet. We tried to explain the scale of the task in 2026. He went anyway.

This week we discuss:

Are Jay and Silent Bob actually big enough characters to carry an entire movie? They work brilliantly wandering through the background of Kevin Smith's other films, but what happens when the supporting act suddenly has to become the main event?

Is the road trip the worst part of this road trip movie? The strange thing about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is that it seems to get more entertaining the closer it gets to abandoning its actual plot. We ask whether everything involving getting to Hollywood is simply standing between us and the movie we really want to watch.

The more meta it gets, the more fun we're having — once Ben Affleck starts explaining the View Askewniverse, actors start playing themselves, Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season appears and Kevin Smith begins openly taking the piss out of his own career, the film suddenly finds another gear.

Kevin Smith celebrates his own cinematic universe years before Marvel made everybody obsessed with cinematic universes — characters, actors, locations and jokes from across his previous films all collide here. Is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back effectively the Avengers: Endgame of dick and fart jokes?

We've aged out of this movie. But is that actually the movie's fault? There are jokes here that probably would have destroyed us twenty years ago and now generate rather more complicated reactions. Does no longer being the target audience make Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back a bad film — or did we simply make a questionable choice reviewing it in our forties?

Jason Mewes finally gets the entire stage — Jay has always been loud, crude and ridiculous, but can Mewes turn that into a character we actually want to follow for 100 minutes?

And then there's Silent Bob — Kevin Smith gives himself considerably less dialogue but considerably more responsibility. Does the Jay/Bob dynamic still work when the film can't simply deploy them for five minutes and move on?

What exactly did they say to Carrie Fisher? Princess Leia turns up as a nun, picks up two hitchhikers and finds herself involved in exactly the kind of joke you imagine her agent having several questions about. We investigate how on Earth Kevin Smith got her into this movie.

The cameos become an entire storytelling language — Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Mark Hamill, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, Jon Stewart and seemingly everybody Kevin Smith had ever met. Which ones still absolutely kill, and when does recognising somebody become the joke?

Mark Hamill versus Cock-Knocker — because if you've somehow convinced Luke Skywalker to appear in your film, obviously you give him an enormous fist and make him fight Silent Bob.

The internet stuff has aged strangely well — the specific websites may have changed, but people anonymously saying horrible things about strangers online certainly haven't. Was Kevin Smith accidentally making a movie about the next quarter-century of internet culture?

The women of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back — Justice and the diamond thieves give the film something resembling an emotional storyline, but how well does that entire section survive a 2026 viewing?

Kevin Smith making a movie for Kevin Smith fans — there's almost no attempt to make this accessible to somebody walking into the View Askewniverse for the first time. Is that self-indulgence, or exactly why the film works when it works?

And finally, whether Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is the Best Film Ever — or a film we might have absolutely adored at 22 and have made the potentially catastrophic decision to revisit at 47.

Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at
https://www.patreon.com/BFE

We are very thankful to the following Patreon backers for their generous support:

Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM

Hermes Auslander

James DeGuzman

Synthia

Shai Bergerfroind

Ariannah Who Loves BFE The Most

Paul Komoroski

Duane Smith (Duane Smith!)

Andy Dickson

Aashrey

Chris Pedersen

Randal Silva

Nate The Great

Rev Bruce

Richard

Ryan Kuketz

Dirk Diggler

Stew from the Stew World Order podcast

NorfolkDomus

John Humphrey's Right Foot

Timmy Tim Tim

Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank

Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/.

Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of Mistake by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor, at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor

Also, massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/

FIRST 34:30: Spoiler-Free Review with our See It/Skip It Verdict
AFTER 34:30: Full Spoiler Review

It’s another edition of See It or Skip It and this time Ian is joined by James as they head to The End of Oak Street — David Robert Mitchell’s strange new collision of suburban family drama, science-fiction mystery and dinosaur-filled survival adventure.

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the Platt family, whose perfectly ordinary neighbourhood suddenly finds itself ripped out of suburbia and deposited somewhere very, very different. But does throwing a family, their house and apparently their entire street into the impossible make for a thrilling original blockbuster — or is The End of Oak Street trying to cram too many different movies into the same 99 minutes?

Ian and James dig into whether Mitchell — the filmmaker behind It Follows — can make the leap into big-budget spectacle without losing the sense of unease and mystery that made his earlier work so distinctive. Does the film actually have something interesting to say about family, home and what happens when everything familiar is suddenly stripped away? Or are we really just here to watch Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor run away from dinosaurs?

How well do Hathaway and McGregor sell the central family dynamic? Do Maisy Stella and Christian Convery give the younger Platts enough personality of their own? And when the film finally starts explaining exactly what has happened to Oak Street, does the answer make the mystery more satisfying — or was wondering what the hell was going on more fun than actually finding out?

The pair also get into the film’s action, Michael Giacchino’s score, its use of IMAX-scale spectacle and that wonderfully odd mixture of Spielbergian adventure, creature feature and domestic drama. Is this the kind of original studio blockbuster people keep insisting Hollywood doesn’t make anymore — and, if so, will audiences actually turn up when somebody finally makes one?

Can a movie about a suburban family transported into the unknown balance genuine emotional stakes with the simple pleasure of DINOSAURS? Does David Robert Mitchell successfully go big without losing what makes his filmmaking interesting? And perhaps most importantly: once your entire street has been transported through space and time, does the homeowners’ association still have jurisdiction?

All this and more in this week’s See It or Skip It review of The End of Oak Street — and of course, Ian and James will let you know if you should SEE IT or SKIP IT.

“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.”

Join Ian, Liam & Megs for our 346th episode as we head into the bleak, terrifyingly plausible Britain of 2027 for Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). Humanity hasn’t produced a child in eighteen years, society is collapsing, Britain has become an authoritarian state, and Clive Owen would really just like everyone to leave him alone. Kev isn’t with us this week — he attempted to enter the country without the correct paperwork and is currently enjoying the hospitality of the British government's immigration system.

And stick around for the Endgame, where we're joined by BFF of the BFE Synthia to help decide whether Children of Men deserves a place among the Best Films Ever.

This week we discuss:

How many screenwriters does it take to make Children of Men? Five credited writers had a hand in adapting P.D. James' novel. Does the finished film feel like the product of that many voices, or is Cuarón's vision strong enough to make it feel completely unified?

Clive Owen as Theo — an excellent actor giving a wonderfully understated performance, but was he a big enough movie star to carry a film this ambitious at the box office?

Michael Caine's Jasper becomes our most debated performance of the week — warm, funny and providing some desperately needed humanity... or playing in a completely different film from everybody around him?

How much world-building should the audience have to do? Children of Men famously refuses to stop and explain its dystopia, instead burying information in news reports, advertisements, background details and production design. Is that masterful "show, don't tell" filmmaking, or does the movie occasionally expect us to construct too much of its world on its behalf?

Ian digs into the screenplay — for a film with an enormous premise, why is the actual story remarkably simple, and does that simplicity allow the themes to become much bigger?

Liam explores hope in a hopeless world — when civilisation has effectively accepted its own extinction, what does the existence of one child actually represent?

Megs examines Kee's place within the story — is she given enough agency of her own, or does her importance as a symbol sometimes overwhelm her importance as a character?

Alfonso Cuarón's direction — those extraordinary long takes aren't simply technical flexes. How does keeping us trapped alongside Theo change the way we experience the violence around him?

The car sequence. We discuss how one seemingly impossible shot transforms from casual conversation to absolute nightmare without giving the audience a moment to escape.

The politics of Children of Men — refugees, nationalism, terrorism, state violence and fear of outsiders. Nearly twenty years after its release, has the film become even more uncomfortable to watch?

The production design — perhaps the film's greatest world-building weapon. From advertisements and graffiti to cages and buses, how much storytelling is happening in the corners of the frame?

The ceasefire — one of the most powerful sequences in the entire film. Does that brief moment of silence earn its enormous emotional impact?

And finally, with BFF of the BFE Synthia joining us for the Endgame, whether Children of Men is the Best Film Ever — or an extraordinary piece of filmmaking whose technical brilliance sometimes asks the audience to fill in more blanks than we'd like.

Become a Patron of this podcast and support the BFE at
https://www.patreon.com/BFE

We are very thankful to the following Patreon backers for their generous support:

Juleen from It Goes Down In The PM

Hermes Auslander

James DeGuzman

Synthia

Shai Bergerfroind

Ariannah Who Loves BFE The Most

Paul Komoroski

Duane Smith (Duane Smith!)

Andy Dickson

Aashrey

Chris Pedersen

Randal Silva

Nate The Great

Rev Bruce

Richard

Ryan Kuketz

Dirk Diggler

Stew from the Stew World Order podcast

NorfolkDomus

John Humphrey's Right Foot

Timmy Tim Tim

Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank

Buy some BFE merch at https://my-store-b4e4d4.creator-spring.com/.

Massive thanks to Lex Van Den Berghe for the use of Mistake by Luckydog. Catch more from Lex's new band, The Maids of Honor, at https://soundcloud.com/themaidsofhonor

Also, massive thanks to Moonlight Social for our age game theme song. You can catch more from them at https://www.moonlightsocialmusic.com/