We’re booking guests now for season three, and one of the things that will be different is we’re going to have a lot more guests who are going to be brand-new to all three of us, people we’ll be meeting through these conversations about the movies they love. That’s very much the point of the podcast, and I look forward to making new friends on a weekly basis. But for this first full season of guests, I wanted to pull in people I already knew, people who I felt would put together good fun lists.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I invited Kevin Biegel to join us, though, and the result was the most insane list we were sent by any guest this season. Our final episode of this season gives him some competition, but I think in the end, pound for pound, this is the weirdest group of films we’ve discussed so far and it sets a very high bar for the future as well.
One of the reasons I love that is because it underlines the whole point of the show. This isn’t about trying to impress someone with how good your taste is. It’s about the movies that stick to us for whatever reason, and sometimes those are great movies and sometimes they’re terrible movies, and sometimes that distinction doesn’t matter at all. If you see a movie with the right group of people at the right time in the right venue, anything can feel transcendent, and understanding why it felt that way is exactly what we love discussing.
I’ve been sharing movies with Kevin for 20 years or more at this point, and while we live on different coasts now, we still talk almost every day, and we still love bringing each other crazy-ass movies worth seeing. I hope this episode gives you a little glimpse into the particular kind of cinemania that I share with my closest friends, and putting Kevin together with Aundria and Craig was exactly as much fun as I hoped it would be.
KEVIN BIEGEL is one of the eight hundred writers who worked on A Minecraft Movie, and that’s just the latest highlight in a career that has been dedicated to making people laugh. He broke into the industry working for the Farrelly Brothers on Me, Myself & Irene, and he has moved from one great situation to the next. He worked on South Park before landing on Scrubs, where he worked for a number of seasons before he went on to create Cougar Town with Bill Lawrence, his boss at Scrubs. He also created Enlisted, a passion project that was as much about his own brothers as it was the US military. More recently, he was the screenwriter of The Machine, a film that brought the stand-up of Bert Kreischer to life.
Kevin was also the host of a long-running Movie Night here in Los Angeles where he was eventually hosting about 50 people every event, showing triple-features of carefully curated lunacy, and this week, he drew from some of the highlights of his time attending festivals and hosting his own events to pick a list of three films that were all part of unforgettable screenings. First up is Neil Breen’s Fateful Findings, a bit of outsider art that you have to see to believe. Then we’ve got Action USA, a long-lost local Florida film that Kevin literally rescued from obscurity. Finally, it’s the fantastic Daryl Duke film Payday, starring Rip Torn, a must-see for anyone obsessed with the work of Danny McBride and Jody Hill.
Our response film is an example of what happens when you don’t program a film festival the right way, the harrowing Dowdle Bros. movie The Poughkeepsie Tapes.
And finally, after the conversation we had, I felt like there was only one possible addition to the Hip Pocket Hall of Fame this week, the underseen but outstanding caper film Gambit, starring Michael Caine and Shirley McClaine.
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The Hip Pocket is hosted by Drew McWeeny and Aundria Parker.
Craig Ceravolo is the show’s bandleader and producer.
It is a Formerly Dangerous Production.
COMING SOON
There are only three more episodes this season, so it’s a good thing we’re already hard at work on season three. Coming up, you’ve got an indie horror filmmaker who isn’t interested in talking about horror, an unexpected guest from one of the biggest movie podcasts around, and a writer/director who ends up bringing us the most personal list of movies so far. I am so happy with the way this season came together, and I genuinely think every single episode is a banger. I’m excited to release all of these, and even more excited about starting to make more episodes for you soon.
If you like what we’re doing, PLEASE rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. When you do that, you’re helping us find new listeners. Share the show with your friends. Whatever you can do to spread the word, right now, you are our only advertising. Thank you for listening and for supporting the show in any way you can. It means the world to us.
As always, The Hip Pocket is a 100% human production. No AI tools are used in the recording or production or writing, and never will be. This is just human beings talking about art made by other human beings, a celebration of something that AI could never hope to regurgitate.
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