It was high noon, and the tumbleweed were tumbling by when I first saw him... The Man With No Name... his steely glare burning into me brighter than the white hot sun reflecting off the scorched, arid dirt... Nah... not really.  I was a teenager in an air conditioned basement... A drifter follows the tumbleweed into a small one road town.  At one end was the Baxter family, and at the other end, the Rojo family.  Both families were fighting for control, with the average citizen suffering in between. Seeing an opportunity to make money, the drifter proceeds to play a deadly game of tug of war with the two families... " A Fistful of Dollars ", directed by Sergio Leone, is a masterpiece of the Spaghetti Western genre.  Compared to most of the North American Westerns filmed at the time, it stripped away the idealistic sheen off of the genre.  It was gritting, sweaty, dirty, with very complex and morally ambiguous characters.  It dropped the "white hat/bla...

Jason here. It's Father's Day, my first as a dad (woot!), and in honour of The Man Who Taught Me Everything There Is To Know About Being A Man, I thought I'd pay him homage be celebrating one of the many loves he instilled in me at a young age -- a love of film. Dad has been dead 21 years now, more than half my life, but his love of movies lives on. He was a big guy, a contractor, and he loved his hockey. But he enjoyed film as well. Some of my favourite memories of him are the times we went to the movies. If he hadn't introduced me to the films below, I wouldn't have become a student of film and this site/show/podcast probably wouldn't exist. So Happy Father's Day to my dad and all the other dads out there. Make it a good one! Star Wars: My dad saw this with my mom in Hawaii before he took me to it, and called it the best Western ever made. You guessed it, Han Solo was the man to him. I remember seeing it at a local drive-in. We sat in the cab of hi...