Hello “Fun City Cinema” subscribers - long time no see! The show is still on hiatus, as your hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull have been working very hard on “A Very Good Year,” a new podcast with a simple premise: each week we invite a guest (filmmakers and actors, critics and historians, comedians and musicians) who loves movies, and ask them to select their favorite year of movies. We then spend (about) an hour talking about that year: we ask them to share their top five films of the year; we look at the year’s news headlines, award winners, and box office champions; and we finish with ..read more

Heads up: Jason and Mike were lucky enough to contribute an audio commentary to Fun City Editions’ new Blu-ray of “Born to Win,” one of the great unsung gems of early ‘70s fun city cinema. This seriocomic drama from 1971, directed by Ivan Passer (“Cutter’s Way”), tells the story of a high-class hairdresser turned low-rung junkie. George Segal stars, alongside Karen Black, Paula Prentiss, a young Hector Elizondo, and an even younger Robert De Niro.   In this bonus episode, we’ll tell you a bit about the movie and our experience doing the commentary; we’ll also play you a brief excerpt from ..read more

How two New York classics captured the essence of Times Square then – and what they tell us about it now.   No two films capture the urban grime and desperate time of New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s like John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Both films set much of their action in Times Square (and specifically on “The Deuce,” the block of porno houses and grindhouses on 42nd between Seventh and Eighth Avenues), evocatively documenting that district in its heyday – or its nadir, depending on who you talk to. In this episode, we’ll examine the ..read more

One of the mainstays of NYC cinema is the subway, which serves as an immediate visual cue to not only the city’s setting, but its mood. But the subway is also, conveniently for dramatists, a microcosm of Gotham. The city and its subway are both places where people of all walks of life – race, class, gender, temperament – rub shoulders and try to get along. In this episode, we look at the production of two iconic examples of NYC subway cinema: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and The Warriors (1979). But we also look at the complicated history of the subway – where it came from, what i ..read more

The 1974 Charles Bronson vehicle “Death Wish” is far from the best New York movie of the era – but it may be the most influential. Its story of a mild-mannered upper-class Manhattan resident who responds to the rising crime rates by taking the law into his own hands, hitting the streets and taking out muggers and criminals of various types (but mostly black, brown, and poor) hit a nerve in the city, and across the country.  Its influence was reflected not only in movies – where it beget a series of sequels, imitators, remakes, and rip-offs – but in the culture, where its noble image of th ..read more

When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001, New York City was changed forever: its skyline, its people, its mood. And its films were changed as well – some more immediately than others, as filmmakers struggled to determine how to deal with the now ghostly presence of the towers in films completed but not released before 9/11. 
Some films edited them out, some digitally removed them. But Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee went the opposite direction, adding the tragedy into his film “25th Hour,” which was slated to shoot in the city that fall and winter. In doing so, he end ..read more

We thought it would be fun to do a nice, light Christmas episode, focusing on one of the many beloved Gotham holiday movies. Just take it easy for an episode, right? Kinda phone it in?  So we settled on Chris Columbus and John Hughes’ 1992 smash "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" – and ended up talking about Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, “Broken Windows,” the Central Park Five, and 9/11, along with the film’s total geographical inconsistency and the spectacular tonal failure of its violence. Our guests are “Close-Ups: New York Movies” author Mark Asch, Pitchfork senior editor Jilli ..read more

Heads up: Jason and Mike were lucky enough to contribute an audio commentary to Fun City Editions’ new Blu-ray of “Born to Win,” one of the great unsung gems of early ‘70s fun city cinema. This seriocomic drama from 1971, directed by Ivan Passer (“Cutter’s Way”), tells the story of a high-class hairdresser turned low-rung junkie. George Segal stars, alongside Karen Black, Paula Prentiss, a young Hector Elizondo, and an even younger Robert De Niro.   In this bonus episode, we’ll tell you a bit about the movie and our experience doing the commentary; we’ll also play you a brief excerpt from ..read more

How two New York classics captured the essence of Times Square then – and what they tell us about it now.   No two films capture the urban grime and desperate time of New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s like John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Both films set much of their action in Times Square (and specifically on “The Deuce,” the block of porno houses and grindhouses on 42nd between Seventh and Eighth Avenues), evocatively documenting that district in its heyday – or its nadir, depending on who you talk to. In this episode, we’ll examine the ..read more

How a riot in Manhattan reconfigured a New York exploitation classic – and American politics for half a century. John G. Avildsen’s 1970 New York drama was originally titled The Gap, dramatizing the white-hot topic of the generation gap through the story of a white-collar businessman searching for his hippie daughter in New York’s seedy youth underbelly. But when it came out in that summer, its ad campaign focused on the supporting character of a loudmouth, bigoted hardhat, and it had also been retitled after that character: Joe. In this episode, we’ll look at how the May 1970 “Hardhat Riot” i ..read more