David Bell

John Hughes month concludes on Cracked Movie Club! By 1989, John Hughes was closing out a decade of wild success with teen comedies and had been steadily branching out into more adult-oriented fare, most of which starred John Candy. Hughes kept that train rolling with Uncle Buck, starring Candy as the titular uncle who has to care for his brother’s kids after a family tragedy. Out of the surprisingly few films of which Candy was the star, Uncle Buck was the most successful, and its production inspired John Hughes to create Home Alone, which isn’t bad for a movie most of you probably haven’t seen.

On this week’s episode, Tom is joined by Cracked’s David Bell and The Bechdel Cast’s Jamie Loftus as they discuss how the movie was almost not filmed in Hughes’ home state of Illinois, whether or not Uncle Buck is in the mob, and why every teen in Winnetka is goth.

John Carpenter month begins on Cracked Movie Club! Way back in 1981, John Carpenter was an emerging low-budget horror director with a few modest successes to his name when he released his dystopian action masterpiece Escape From New York, the movie that launched Kurt Russell’s career as an action star by casting him as the most objectively ridiculous character in cinema history on a mission to rescue the president from the prison island of Manhattan.

This week, Tom is joined by guest host David Bell and comedian Brodie Reed discuss the incredibly innovative miniature work that went into creating Escape From New York, the film’s post-Watergate anti-government themes, and exactly how many terrible snake tattoos Snake Plissken probably has on his body.

This episode is brought to you by Bombfell (www.bombfell.com/MOVIECLUB).

Last year, of the ten highest grossing films at the American box office, nine were adaptations of one of the following: a Marvel property, a Disney property, a line of toys or a fantasy novel. You could easily guess what movies these were – your X-Men, your Hobbits, your Legos and Transformers – but what was that one outlier, that one movie that didn’t fit the mold of mass-produced comic book movies or animated films? That movie was in fact the highest grossing film  of last year, and it was an adaptation itself, ‘American Sniper.’

As you would assume, ‘American Sniper’ wasn’t the runaway hit overseas as it was in the States, but neither were the rest of the films from the American top 10. Every major foreign market only featured a small handful of American blockbusters in their top 10. The rest of the spots in each country went to smaller adult comedies and dramas, the types of movies we almost never see atop our box office. Why is that, and where are those movies in America? It feels like we’re told in the US that the reason we only have blockbuster movies here is because the rest of the world craves big, American spectacle. Then why does it feel like our main exports are comic book movies that half of the world doesn’t even really want to see?

This week on the podcast, Jack O’Brien is joined by Cracked editors David Bell and Josh Sargent to discuss the seeming disparity between the size and the quality of modern-day blockbusters, their effectiveness internationally, and how the process of developing movies has changed over the last hundred years.

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