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For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched the 1996 action thriller slash high school drama The Substitute, directed by Robert Mandel — a prolific television director — and starring Tom Berenger, Ernie Hudson, Diane Venora, Marc Anthony, Luis Guzmàn and William Forsythe. In The Substitute, Berenger plays Jonathan Shale, a Vietnam veteran and mercenary who takes a break from the business of wet work after a botched operation in Cuba where several of his men were killed. He returns home to Miami to stay with his girlfriend, Jane Hetzko played by Venora, who is a teacher at a local, troubled high school. Jane becomes a target of the largest and most dangerous gang at the school, Kings of Destruction, and its leader Juan, played by Anthony, directs his men to attack her. She is seriously injured and while in the hospital, Shale maneuvers to become her substitute. His plan? To take down the gang, which is using the school as essentially an open air drug market. As he moves to confront Juan, Jonathan discovers that the gang is working with the school’s ambitious and corrupt principal, played by Ernie Hudson, to move and distribute ever larger shipments of drugs from foreign supplies. Eager for revenge after a friendly teacher is killed by Juan, Jonathan gathers his men to make an assault on the gang, its suppliers and their allies. The tagline for The Substitute is “The most dangerous thing about school used to be the students.” You can watch The Substitute for free on Amazon Prime or on Tubi or Pluto or one of those services.

For this week's Patreon episode, we watched the 1976 thriller "Marathon Man," directed by John Schlesinger, written by William Goldman, and starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, William Devane and Marthe Keller.

Welcome back to Unclear and Present Danger! It’s our first episode of the new year and we’re here with a pretty fun movie — “Executive Decision,” directed by Stuart Baird, produced by Joel Silver and starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, Steven Seagal and many others. Music by, as you might expect, Jerry Goldsmith. In “Executive Decision,” an intelligence analyst played by Russell and a group of commandos, led by Seagal, must infiltrate a passenger jet bound for Washington DC that has been hijacked by a terrorist group. On board the jet is enough nerve toxin to kill everyone on the eastern seaboard. Most of the film is a tense standoff on the airliner, as the commandos try to defuse the nerve bomb and take down the terrorists, while the terrorists move forward with their mission. The tagline for Executive Decision was “Five miles above the earth, an elite team of six men must make an air to air transfer, in order to save 400 lives on board a 747... and 40 million below.” You can find Executive Decision to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon. Our next episode of the podcast will be on “The Substitute,” otherwise known as “Stand and Deliver if the teacher body-slammed the students.”

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger — the last episode of the year! — we watched Tony Scott’s 1995 submarine action thriller, “Crimson Tide,” starring Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Viggo Mortenson and James Gandolfini, among many others. And to discuss “Crimson Tide,” we have an esteemed guest! Tony Gilroy, who you may know from his work on the Bourne films, political thrillers like “State of Play,” “Beirut,” legal thrillers like “Michael Clayton” or the recent Star Wars Disney Plus series “Andor.” Now, if you haven’t watched “Crimson Tide” — and you should, stop this episode and go put it on — here’s the score. In “Crimson Tide,” the crew of the USS Alabama, a nuclear submarine, is put on high alert as civil war breaks out in post-Soviet Russia. Military units loyal to the ultra-nationalist rebel have taken control of a nuclear missile installation and have threatened nuclear war if threatened. The USS Alabama is commanded by Captain Frank Ramsey, a career veteran of the submarine corps. He has chosen the cerebral and inexperienced Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter to serve as his new executive officer. The two clash, eventually coming to an impasse over an Emergency Action Message order a missile launch against the Russian base. Ramsey wants to move forward while Hunter wants to delay action until the USS Alabama can clarify a second message received but interrupted as the crew confronted an enemy submarine. What follows is a confrontation, a mutiny, and a race to confirm the Alabama’s true orders lest they fire the shot that starts a nuclear conflagration.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Jamelle and John watched “City Hall,” a 1996 political drama directed by Harold Becker and starring Al Pacino, John Cusack, Danny Aiello, Bridget Fonda, David Paymer and Martin Landau. You’ll also notice a beardless Richard Schiff, Lauren Velez, and Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. In “City Hall,” Cusack plays Kevin Calhoun, the loyal deputy to Mayor John Pappas, played by Al Pacino. After a young boy and a police detective are killed in a sting gone wrong, Calhoun has to navigate a tense political situation in effort to bring the crisis to a resolution without harming the rising prospects of his boss. Unfortunately, as he soon discovers with the help of Marybeth Cogan, a lawyer for the slain cop played by Fonda, behind the deaths are a tangled web of corruption that reaches from the political machine to the courts to the mayor’s office itself.

On this week’s podcast, Jamelle and John watched the legendary Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1996 action thriller “Broken Arrow,” starring John Travolta, Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Delroy Lindo and Howie Long. In “Broken Arrow,” a rogue pilot, Air Force Major Vic Deakins, played by Travolta, steals two nuclear weapons with the intent to sell them back to the United States government for a profit. His co-pilot, Captain Riley Hale, played by Christian Slater, is left for dead during the theft of the weapons. When Hale is found by park ranger Terry Carmichael, Samantha Mathis, the two race to stop Deakins, who eventually decides that he is going to detonate one of the weapons and irradiate the Southwest. The tagline for “Broken Arrow” was “Prepare to go ballistic.”

This week on the Patreon, Jamelle and John were joined by Beverly Gage — a professor of history at Yale University and author of "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century" — to discuss Clint Eastwood's 2011 J. Edgar Hoover biopic, simply titled "J. Edgar." We had such a good time discussing the movie with Professor Gage that we thought we should share this episode on the main feed as a bonus!

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John watched Oliver Stone’s 1995 dramatization of the life and career of President Richard M. Nixon, appropriately titled “Nixon.” Like Stone’s other mid-century political film, “JFK,” it stars a murderer’s row of A-listers and character actors: Anthony Hopkins, Joan Allen, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, Paul Sorvino, Mary Steenburgen, James Woods, Powers Boothe, Tony Goldwyn, J.T. Walsh and many, many others. To talk “Nixon” we were joined by the great Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, the author of two great books on conservative politics, and one of the co-hosts of the PastPresent podcast. You can find “Nixon” to rent or stream on iTunes or Amazon Prime. The tagline for “Nixon” is “Triumphant in Victory, Bitter in Defeat. He changed the world, but lost a nation.”

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “The Enemy Within,” a 1994 remake of John Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May,” starring Forest Whitaker and Jason Robards. Like the original film, “The Enemy Within” concerns a military plot to depose the president and take control of the U.S. government. Like the original film, our hero is an Army advisor who would rather defend the Constitution than his superiors. And like the original film, the story is a race against the clock as the president and his allies try to stop their adversary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from executing his plan. “The Enemy Within” stars Forest Whitaker as Colonel “Mac” Casey, Sam Waterston as President William Foster, Dana Delany as his chief of staff Betsy Corcoran, and Jason Robards as General R. Pendleton Lloyd.

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “Hidden Assassin” — also released under the name “The Shooter” — a 1995 action drama directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Dolph Lundgren and Maruschka Detmers. In “Hidden Assassin,” Lundgren plays a U.S. Marshall, Michael Dane, tasked with arresting a woman, played by Detmers, suspected of assassinating the Cuban ambassador to the United States. Time is of the essence; the Secretary of State will meet with his Cuban counterpart in Prague — where the movie takes place — in an attempt to ease tensions between the two nations. But Lundgren isn’t so sure that Detmers’ character, Simone Rosset, is the shooter. What unfolds is a conspiracy that threatens Dane’s life and implicates some of his closest allies. The tagline for “Hidden Assassin” is “Seduction is a deadly weapon!” Which doesn’t have much to do with the actual movie.

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “12 Monkeys,” the 1995 science fiction film from Terry Gilliam starring Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer. “12 Monkeys” is an adaptation of sorts of a 1962 French short film “La Jetée,” in which scientists in a post-nuclear apocalypse future send a man back and forward through time in an effort to save their present. The man eventually succeeds in his mission, only to be killed — his death being an image he had seen again and again in his dreams. And in the film “12 Monkeys,” Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a prisoner living in an underground compound beneath Philadelphia, in a future where the human race has been nearly wiped out by viral plague. He is selected to go back in time to find the original virus to help scientists in his present develop a cure. During multiple trips back in time, he encounters people — a patient at a mental health institution played by Pitt, a psychologist played by Stowe — who all seem to have a role in the events that will end the human race. Cole struggles to resolve whether his life and experiences are real or not, but comes to understand that the virus is real, and that the man responsible is in his orbit. He attempts to stop him but is shot and killed, fulfilling the vision he had seen, in his dreams, of his own death.

For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John were joined by Linda Holmes of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Our to discuss the 1995 political romantic comedy “The American President,” directed by Rob Reiner, written by — you guessed it — Aaron Sorkin, and starring Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, David Paymer, Samantha Mathis and Michael J. Fox, among others. “The American President” stars Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd, a widow, who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist, played by Annette Bening, while he also runs for re-election and attempts to pass major legislation. The film is both a romantic comedy, depicting the president’s courtship, and a political drama, depicting the effort to win votes, dodge criticism and shore up the White House’s political position.