There’s no crying in baseball, as friend of the show Renee Marie joins for a wide-ranging discussion of the iconic A League of Their Own, which remains the pinnacle of Women’s Sports Movies. Films that live with us are our bread and butter. This is especially true for this episode, as Renee has a close personal relationship with the film, informed by hosting trivia nights, meeting one of the film’s stars, creating cosplay for conventions, modeling her cosplay for the film in magazines, and most resonantly, the idea of films being tied to important people in our lives and how they help us process feelings at just the right moment. All this, and in-depth discussions of Pokémon GO, Douglas Sirk & Hallmark Films… It’s time for a seminal sports movie classic on this week’s The Twin Geeks! Enjoy the show.

Our friend JD Duran from InSession Film joins the show to discuss the complete works of James Cameron’s filmography, why he is the king of sequels, and how his career as a foremost technician has advanced the course of filmmaking.

Every Best Picture winner in Oscars history enters and all are ranked according to your hosts, Calvin and Matt, organized into tidy tiers for your viewing and listening pleasure. Every movie has been watched, evaluated, and slotted into careful placement in our lists, including all but this year's eventual winner.

The Twin Geeks co-founder David Punch presents his list in this The Twin Geeks podcast special, presented by Stephen Gillespie

It's a The Twin Geeks tradition! Our resident Halloween expert Jesse joins the show to talk Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween Ends, seasonal horror watches, and... Radiohead's In Rainbows (2007). See you next year!

Over the course of nearly 50 active years in the film industry, Robert Altman created a total of 35 unique and creative feature films. It has been a long journey to catalog the trajectory of that storied course, but we come now, some four months later, at the end of the road. From an early peak in the mid-1970s, he was churning out an unmatchable string of masterful ensemble contemplations, to a rough era of uncompromised artistic efforts in the '80s, which suffer significantly in spite of his rejection of rigid studio control. The '90s saw a triumphant return for Hollywood's most notorious maverick, with both audiences and backers alike. A revived interest in Altman as a creative force allowed him to finish out his career in splendor, working up 'till his dying days on his latest project of eminent interest. Altman proved with his late-career successes that his creative well never dried, but were his final creations of the same caliber and interest as his greatest masterpieces? Tune in for our final episode discussing the entire career of the late, great, Robert Altman. 

It's not often, in Hollywood, that our heroes find a second wind. It's true that everyone loves a happy ending, but they love a devastating tragedy just as much, if not more. Some of the industry's most treasured pioneers spent the later halves of their career languishing out in the cold, and after more than a decade of relative isolation from the bigwigs in California, it seemed like that same familiar fate was destined for Robert Altman, too. But in 1992, Altman had his comeback, and in such a way that couldn't have been more perfect for the man who spent his entire time in the sun bucking the profit-driven conventionality of the Hollywood system. The Player was an incisive mockery of Hollywood using the tools of its myriad stars and rote ideas against itself, and it was a resounding success. Because even more than a happy ending or a tragic downfall, Hollywood loves to be cynical about itself.

Throughout his career, Altman had always prioritized an interest in his actors, and that reputation now returned its favor in a career-saving way. Everyone in Hollywood wanted to work with Altman, and so when the time came to enlist a gargantuan cast of Hollywood's most famous names, everyone came on board, solidifying the inside-nature of The Player while also building its audience appeal for an artistic swing that couldn't miss. Altman carried over this clout and size to subsequent projects throughout the '90s, following up his massive hit with an amalgam adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories in Short Cuts (1993) and a comic exposé of the Paris fashion scene in Prêt-à-Porter (1994). He returned to his roots with a jazzed-up gangster flick set in his home town, Kansas City (1996) before trying something completely new by making a conventional no-frills thriller. The Gingerbread Man (1998) was adapted from an incomplete John Grisham novel, and its failure to impress either audiences or critics dampened the high Altman was riding from his nominal comeback, already on the downslide thanks to the middling reception of his previous two films.

Altman's continued trend of adapting stage plays into feature films proceeded into the end of the '80s with mixed successes. On one hand there were films like Secret Honor (1984), a scaled-back character study of a fictional Richard Nixon contemplating on the missteps and bitter grudges of his tumultuous political career, carried by an astounding one-man performance from Phillip Baker Hall. On the other you have something like Fool for Love (1985), an oddball testimony of toxic relationships that occasionally dips into the surreal and esoteric, with no clear reasoning or well-defined characters to ground its unaccountable departures. He did make at least one studio film between now and his eventual Hollywood comeback, a supposed satire on the burgeoning teen comedy genre called O.C. and Stiggs (1985), based on a beloved National Lampoon article from the time. Altman himself considered it a total failure, and the questionable politics and sensibilities of the story somewhat call into question the sensitive and socially intuitive Altman we thought we knew from a few films back.

And if that doesn't assure you completely of his lack of consideration for marginalized characters, then the unmitigated offenses of Beyond Therapy (1987) will surely remind you that the '80s were a time bereft of needed allies. Fear not, though, as promises of the breakthrough to come manifest in a television mini series he did with Tim Roth and Paul Rhys on the life of Vincent van Gogh that was later truncated and released theatrically, appropriately called Vincent and Theo (1990). There's something about the tragic arc of the famous Dutch artist's failed career that fascinates us cinematically. He's been the subject of so many films, even to this day. It seems only natural that as individual an artist as Altman would take a stab at capturing his life and emotions on celluloid, with greater insight and sensitivity towards his plight than most other hagiographic renderings have lent him.

The legacy of Robert Altman presides mostly in the '70s, based on the strength of his back-to-back run of multiple masterpieces in the early part of that decade. That trend did not continue for him on into the '80s, as a series of previous flops put him in a precarious scenario of needing a big commercial hit that studio executives were praying would allude him. Peculiar oddities like A Perfect Couple (1979) and HealtH (1980) estranged him from producers in Hollywood, on top of already being something of a pariah for his maverick-like approach to directing his pictures, and they were looking for any reason to box him out for good. After the perceived disaster of his big-budget Popeye adaptation (which was actually a financial success), Altman was booted from Hollywood and forced to take up work on the stage. Subsequently, he adapted Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) and Streamers (1983) into critically successful works that, while no boon with audiences nor studio heads, revived his flagging reputation in the eyes of critics around the world. The '80s was certainly no high point for Altman's directorial career, but it was certainly not a wash either.

If the central thesis of Altman's directorial bent has always been an investigation of what America means, then Nashville (1975) is his ultimate statement on the matter. This sprawling opus of the country musical capital of the country brings together all the disparate, intersecting elements of our culture into an overlapping menagerie of cultural curios and distinct personalities, clashing and interacting with one another as political tensions broil in the background. Altman produced this film on the eve of American's bicentennial anniversary, and he must have been obsessively aware of the nation's foul spirit of patriotism clogging up the air, because he followed Nashville with another incisive examination of American culture. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Altman turns to the past to discover the roots of America's performative history. The origin of the Wild West show, and its myth-making, is put on blast here, exposing the charlatan Wild Bill as the revisionist and exploitation artist he is, reliving the subjugation and erasure of the Native Americans from their land now through popular entertainment. It's a worthy satire for Altman, but one that may be already apparent from the film's lengthy title alone. 

The origin of 3 Women (1977), Altman always said, came to him in a dream, but he pitched the story to producer Alan Ladd Jr. claiming it was a story he read and wanted to adapt. As ever a master he was at gaming the system as he was at making some of the greatest films of all time, it never ceases to amaze how Altman managed to convince these big studios time and time again to take risks on these odd and esoteric art films, all of which inevitably lost money. 3 Women may be the best of the bunch, with strong themes of identity and thick, surrealist atmosphere to match the dreamlike nature of its conception, Altman delivers an incredible, interior work of art that leaves you with just as many questions as the most enigmatic of dreams often do. While doing publicity for 3 Women Altman was asked what his next movie would be. Glibly, he responded, "a wedding," as amateur recordings of events was a recognized craze. But the more he thought about the off hand remark the more he realized how good an idea it actually was. A grand, centralizing setting with a large cast of characters; a perfect opportunity to create a cacophony of overlapping dialogue and stories; a coming together of two socially distinct sects of society under the umbrella of a religious tradition core to the practices of the American people -- what's more Altman than that?

A Wedding (1978) is all of those things, and more, but for once the outsized nature of Altman's ambitions seems too large for even him to wrangle in. The cast is twice the size of that in Nashville, an intentional challenge on behalf of the film's writer to outdo the grandeur and spectacle captured in masterpiece. But when you're writing characters to hit an arbitrary quota instead of following what the demands of the story call for, it's inevitable that many will fall by the wayside or feel underdeveloped. A Wedding retains all the hallmarks of an Altman epic, losing none of the deftness of his directorial talent in the process, but a certain ineffable elements remains missing all the same. Such is the case as well in Quintet (1979), a bizarre, unknowable effort from Altman in which he is clearly as present as ever behind the camera, but the audience is left out in the cold. As his only true work of fantastical science-fiction, Quintet is at least notable in its total departure from convention for Altman, fixating itself on the quasi-near future in which a new ice age has overtaken the planet and the small clique of surviving humans occupy themselves with the titular game of life and death. It's so erratic and offbeat that it's difficult to even describe, as the setting and nature of the game are never made particularly clear by the film itself. But, Altman seems to understand it all in spite of how he attempts to communicates with us, only failing in the sense that it made no money and both audiences and critics rejected it out of hand. Even today, Quintet is far from a beloved cult classic of Altman's oeuvre -- but who knows, maybe Altman buried some sincerely true revelations within the bedrock of this singularly outlandish art film, and all of us are simply incapable of seeing through the frosted glass of his camera lens to perceive it as the masterpiece it is... but probably not.