Ford Focus
It’s always nice when the title of a podcast pretty much sums up what it’s all about. Keith Phipps and Mike Ryan will be going through the filmography of Harrison Ford, film by film, from the blockbuster action films to the romantic comedies and everything in between—sometimes with the help of special guests. Why Harrison Ford? The most obvious reason is that he’s been the star of some of the biggest, and most beloved movies of the past 50 years. But if someone can be at once one of the biggest movie stars in the world while also being a little bit underrated, it’s Ford, who’s only been nominated for a single Academy Award over the course of his career, which he did not win. We feel this is an injustice. If you feel the same way you’ve come to the right place. Mike Ryan is a veteran entertainment writer whose work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Uproxx, Indiewire, Empire, and numerous other publications. Mike's current work includes The Hard Pass, a frequently published newsletter about the world of entertainment. Keith Phipps has served as a writer and editor at The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, and Uproxx. His writing can be found at Vulture, TV Guide, Slate, The Ringer at elsewhere. Keith also serves as a co-host of The Next Picture Show podcast and, with Scott Tobias, as co-writer of the film newsletter The Reveal. If you're enjoying this podcast and would like to unlock our bonus episodes dedicated on related topics in the world of Harrison Ford, hear ad-free versions of our main-feed episodes, help us choose what films we cover next, and more, please consider supporting us on Patron. And don't forger to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast to help others find it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
TV critic Alan Sepinwall—writer of the What's Alan Watching? newsletter and the upcoming Serling: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary—joins us to discuss his favorite Indiana Jones movie: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Released in 1989, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade found Harrison Ford dawning his famous fedora for what seemed like it might be the last time for a globetrotting adventu...
Harrison Ford has made a lot of great movies. Hollywood Homicide is … maybe not one of them? It must have sounded great on paper, though. Drawing from the experiences of a real-life Hollywood cop, writer/director Ron Shelton made a buddy comedy set on the fringes of the entertainment industry.
Screen Drafts' Clay Keller joins us to talk over this 2003 entry, with its bizarre cast to its numerous plots. Also ...
Writer, podcaster, and content strategist Wynter Mitchell joins us to discuss Harrison Ford's first big post-Star Wars movie: Force 10 from Navarone. A sequel to The Guns of Navarone, Force 10 features none of the original cast, but it does have a star of Jaws (Robert Shaw), a star of Rocky (Carl Weathers), a Bond villain (Richard Kiel), a Bond girl (Barbara Bach) and a Django (Franco Nero). Critics thought it played like a film ou...
Michael H. Weber, co-writer of 500 Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now, and The Disaster Artist (for which he earned an Oscar nomination with his partner Scott Neustadter, joins us to discuss Apocalypse Now, in which Harrison Ford plays a nervous colonel who sends Martin Sheen's Captain Willard on his way. We discuss Ford's small but important role but also what happens when you see a great movie under the wrong conditions, the cur...
Writer and producer Eric Haywood (Empire, Law and Order: Organized Crime) joins us to discuss Patriot Games, the first of Harrison Ford's two Jack Ryan films. Does this contain the best finger-pointing work of Ford's career? Maybe, but there's more than one such moment in the competition here. Also discussed: Night Ride Down, the film Ford was supposed to make instead of Patriot Games, satellite warfare, and the film's weird cliffh...
Veteran entertainment journalist Anthony Breznican joins us to talk about the film that earned Harrison Ford his only Oscar nomination to date, Witness. Directed by Peter Weir, the 1985 film begins as an intense, stylish police thriller before transitioning to an unexpected romance between a man and a woman from extremely different cultures. Kelly McGillis co-stars as the Amish woman who falls for Ford's straight-arrow cop. We talk...
In this comedy western, Harrison Ford plays Tommy Lillard, a fairly gentle and polite Old West outlaw whose life takes an unexpected turn when he meets Avram Belinski (Gene Wilder), a rabbi making his way from Poland to San Francisco where a new congregation and a new bride await him. But getting there won't be easy. Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) directs a film that didn't do all that well at the box office in 1979 but found app...
The Wall Street Journal's Esther Zuckerman joins us to talk about Working Girl, the 1988 rom-com classic in which an ambitious woman named Tess (Melanie Griffith) tries to make it in the go-go '80s business world. Sigourney Weaver and Harrison Ford co-star as, respectively, Tess's seemingly helpful boss and a handsome (but kind of dorky) exec who might be Tess's ideal partner in and out of the office. Topics include the awesomeness...
Keith and Mike are joined by Katey Rich, Ankler Media's Awards Editor to discuss Age of Adaline, a Lee Tolland Krieger-directed romantic fantasy released in the summer of 2015 in which Blake Lievely plays a woman with more years under her belt than her 29-year-old face would suggest. May more years. Like more than a century. How does Harrison Ford's character, a man named Dr. Jones but not that Dr. Jones fit into this? You should w...
When Harrison Ford and director Peter Weir teamed up for the 1985 film Witness their efforts met with great acclaim and earned Ford his sole Academy Award nomination to date. When they teamed up a second time for this adaptation of a Paul Theroux novel the following year the results were not the same. And yet, as Mike Ryan and Keith Phipps discover, that's not really fair to a strange, provocative film filled that features another ...
For this episode, Mike Ryan and Keith Phipps are joined by New York magazine writer Lane Brown to discuss the Harrison Ford movie of his Blade Runner... The Devil's Own. There was a little bit of confusion putting this one together, so instead of watching one of Ford's most-famous movies we weeded up watching and discussing a film probably still best known for all the bad press it received before it even came out. Released in March...
On the premiere episode of Ford Focus: A Ford Focus Podcast, Mike Ryan and Keith Phipps discuss The Fugitive, a massive hit in 1993 that, by all reports, was more or less created as it was filmed.
Discussion topics include: Does Harrison Ford look good in a beard or kind of weird? What director Andrew Davis gets right about his hometown of Chicago. What the film gets wrong about Illinois geography. Tommy Lee Jones, and where thi...
If you've been waiting for a podcast dedicated to all things Harrison Ford, relax: The wait has ended. Ford Focus: A Harisson Ford Podcast is here for you.
It’s always nice when the title of a podcast pretty much sums up what it’s all about. Keith Phipps and Mike Ryan will be going through the filmography of Harrison Ford, film by film, from the blockbuster action films to the romantic comedies and everything in betw...
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