School Of Movies

[School of Movies 2019]  This one is going to be a challenging listen. Arrival is a story about humanity utilising alien contact as a way of looking inward. It's an examination of our fears, our sacrifices, of language and of time. It's astonishingly powerful and perhaps the greatest performance of Amy Adams' career, requiring her to experience emotions that -as Mikey Neumann pointed out- we don't even have names for yet.  Get yourself a quiet 80 minutes to listen, and some time afterwards to reflect upon it. And for the love of God see the film before you take in our show. This episode was commissioned by Andy Rodriguez.

[School of Movies 2019] After a heavy couple of weeks, it's a welcome break to call in at a ridiculous, black comedy. This is a mockumentary investigating a house of vampires. They're a hapless collection of preening nincompoops, fragile egos and buckets of outdated neurosis (in other words very normal people). This film, directed by mad Kiwi Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok) takes many trappings of how vampires have been classically depicted in horror, and even the later subversions and flips them further by adding a layer of ludicrous, embarrassing mundanity to how they unlive. Next Week: Arrival  

[School of Movies 2019] A new direction for School of Movies. We've listened to our harshest critics and paid attention to what they seem to want from us and the overwhelming weakest aspect of our show is apparently our tendency to come at movies from a personal perspective, which in turn leads to heavy politicising of films where politics aren't present and don't need to be discussed. The result is we go off on tangents when we should be talking about the pure mechanics of a film. So the first movie we chose to exercise our new discipline of zero-political rhetoric is Zack Snyder's accurate historical document of ancient Sparta, and how these perfect male specimens fended off the might of the Persian Empire, 300. Guest: Lorin Grieve

[School of Movies 2019] This was an unexpected one. We geared up for a Quick Review mere minutes after coming back from the cinema and then stuff just came flooding out. We send that recording to a few people to see if it was Main Event material and they pretty much demanded we get this out for everyone. So we added new sections and recorded a companion piece round-table session with two new guests (being released this week as a Cutting Class episode). Quentin Tarantino's ninth film has made critics very happy (garnering massive positive buzz and 85% freshness) but also provoked a slew of think-pieces about some of the more crass decisions made in filming.  What you've got here is what Sharon and I felt very strongly in the aftermath, before we'd read anything else. 

[School of Movies 2019] The second commissioned show of our summer quickly grew from a film we liked a lot to one of our absolute favourites. This little-seen gem about teenage rebellion in Dublin, Ireland, 1985 is something we would love more people to know about. Directed by John Carney, the man behind Once and Begin Again, this is semi-autobiographical and features a measure of authenticity and respect for young people that the very best films about growing up thrive on. It's also got some of the most accurate portrayal of the clothes and music at the time, giving both context for a deeper meaning that 80s punk pop usually doesn't get afforded. Guests Mackenzie Easton  @KenziePhoenix of Rainbow Connection @MuppetsPod   Nathan Bertram @bertnerdtram of Video Game: The Movie: The Podcast  @VGTMPodcast 

[School of Movies 2019] It feels like a lifetime since 2015. Back then, during the tail end of the Obama administration we were enjoying the run-up to new Star Wars movies and Mad Max was about to blow everyone away with one of the greatest automobile stunt-fests of all time. But also Sharon and I were getting back into the Fast & Furious films very late after drifting away for a while. We were able to appreciate films 5, 6 and then the real life tragedy of 7 with a sharp immediacy.  Since that fairly amazing experience the series has diverged in some strange new directions and we pick up with 2017's eighth film and the first official spin-off in 2019. Once again Neil Taylor is our wingman, guiding us through the furious and testosterone-soaked road. Neil Taylor of TheKidDogg @KidDogg  

[School of Movies 2019] One of the worst, most disgusting animated movies of all time. This obscure yet notorious exercise in soulless corporate shilling dressed up as punky rebellion is a collaborative work of supreme incompetence. Begun in the early 2000s to surf in on the Pixar wave, but eventually released after Wreck-It Ralph in just a few cinemas, most people will thankfully never have heard of this. We are here to tell you the whole sorry story of what plays out like a nightmare before your reeling eyeballs.  Guests Brenden Agnew of Cinapse  @BLCAgnew   Aaron LaCluyze of Monday Night Magic  @lacluyze  From Sequentially Yours  Kaoru Negisa  @Moonpanther22  and Debbie Morse  @bastet8300 

[School of Everything Else 2019] This began as a short, thirty-minute Patreon-exclusive Quick Review just of Season 3. We didn't want to go all out since we hadn't actually covered Season 2 and the two-part Season 1 spectacular we recorded in 2017 was a Herculean feat of podcasting.  However, this is a strong TV show that never ceases to delight us and that Quick Review soon got deeper, before we went back and watched all of Season 2 again, this time with our daughter. The lighter, more comedic and campy third season effectively gave way to a more dramatic series of arcs about recovering from trauma, which means we ended up going back and forth between both seasons for the second part of this show, and hit some surprising revelations which made this what I'm going to call 'Main Event' podcasting. Due to some health issues mentioned at the beginning we are holding back the three remaining summer Commissions for a few weeks, but I have a bunch of banked shows for you folks that you're hopefully going to love

[School of Movies 2019] The seventh live-action Spider-Man movie, but the eleventh big-screen outing for the wall-crawler. Following on from the creative magnificence of Spider-Verse was going to be a tough gig, but this movie seemed to please a lot of people.  This show is about how planet Earth is bouncing back from cataclysmic disaster, the key reasons Marvel villains differ from its heroes, how Peter Parker is not Iron Man, and how deception is a key enemy of our age.   Guests: Theo Leigh of The New Century Multiverse   Maya Santandrea @mayasantandrea Brenden Agnew of Cinapse 

[School of Movies 2019] The first of our Summer 2019 Commission Season is this beloved 1982 Rankin Bass animated cult classic. This episode acts kind of as a sister show to our early 2016 Flight of Dragons ep.  It's the story of a unicorn who ventures from the safety of her lilac forest out into a dangerous world to search for the rest of her kind. And it's the kind of story that while dismissed by most means the whole world to a select few.  So we recruited two of them to give us their accounts of how important this has always been to them. Also a big thank you to Holly Dotson who provided us with reference materials and a short essay for this one.  Guests Brenden Agnew of Cinapse  @BLCAgnew  Theo Leigh of The New Century Multiverse    

[School of Movies 2019] One of the most difficult film productions of all time, the 1996 adaptation of the H.G. Wells book drove the cast and crew to the brink of madness. In many ways paralleling the infinitely-more-celebrated Apocalypse Now this was an ill-considered jungle shoot with a tyrannical director and Marlon Brando causing friction with his weird, selfish behaviour.  Few have seen this film, and those in the know who might have seen the excellent making-of documentary "Lost Soul" will be aware that before Wolfgang Petersen came on board there was a little-known English chap named Richard Stanley (pictured here dressed as a dog) who was fired from his own passion project after Val Kilmer failed to materialise.  The story just gets weirder. And fairly dark too. Be warned. 

[School of Movies 2019] We haven't covered Pixar for an astonishing eight years, since the Toy Story trilogy of early 2011, so rather than starting from A Bug's Life and continuing through their entire library in the style of our Disney series we're going to cherry-pick our favourites when we have something to really say about them.  In this case we begin anew with our top choice, the 2015 story of emotions embodied within the head of a tween girl. And to get the best angle we brought in a pair of psychologists Guests: Dr Hunter Mulcare @realhuntermmm   Amy Donaldson of @TwoShrinksPod

[School of Movies 2019] Time to close the book on the Fox X-Men movies and the podcast series that Sharon and I started in 2014. If you haven't seen the film (and statistically this is the case) we will talk you through it. We can't spoil anything. There's no surprises TO spoil. It might sound like we're furious and that we hate this thing, but our response is something more like intense disappointment spread over two decades, so that it becomes *expected* disappointment. It stems from a place of frustration that it was THESE people who got handed the keys to such a potentially fascinating city for so very long. But we always like to look for the good in things and accordingly we root out the best aspects over the years and give credit where it's due. 

[School of Movies 2019] A film that immediately filled the majority of critics with derision, disdain and disgust. Now we don't want to say the majority of critics are wrong, but if they're saying there's no character to this and nothing below the surface then we don't have much choice, do we? Because what we have here is a joyful epic, a loopy sci-fi about the old Gods coming back to reclaim the Earth, leaving mankind running around their gargantuan feet just hoping the more benevolent ones win. But those Gods are representational, and that conflict means something.  For fans of kaiju movies this is the big-budget fun-fest they've always dreamed of. For us, we see a measure of depth and detail that is being overlooked by almost everyone (much like with Pacific Rim) and spotlighting that nuance is what this show was made for.  To help us out and put things in perspective we recruited a crew of Godzilla fans who adored this film. Guests: Bob Chipman  @the_moviebob  of The Escapist & Geek.com Brendan

[School of Movies 2019] With Godzilla II: King of the Monsters releasing this week, since we've already done a Godzilla show, we decided to cover his opponent in next year's long-awaited rumble of the Titans; Godzilla vs. King Kong.  That meant going back and examining essentially four versions of the same story. A boat-full of humans journeys to Skull Island for spurious reasons, encounter monstrous creatures and are both threatened and occasionally saved by a giant gorilla worshipped by the natives as their protector.  Three of these movies drag his enormous simian ass back to New York City where he is put on show and then killed by their military. Only the most recent of these four broke this cycle (mainly so he can fight Godzilla). So we look into what is going on in each age of the retelling.  1. (0.30) King Kong 1933 2. (5.35) King Kong 1976 3. (12.00) King Kong Chat W/Sharon 4. (19.45) King Kong 2005 5. (31.30) Kong: Skull Island 2017 6. (1.04.45) The future of the Monsterverse The first thre

[School of Movies 2019] With the release of Men in Black: International we went back to the original trilogy starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones and Mr Jones' younger model Josh Brolin. And what a wildly mixed bag we have here. The first is excellent, though almost too brief, the second is an atrocious unfunny mess and the third (which most people didn't see because they were so put off by the second) is actually quite a dedicated time travel sci-fi tale with a sudden, disarming emotional punch at the end. We recommend seeing 1 and 3 if you haven't yet. Just hearing about 2 will be quite enough.  0h 01m Men in Black  0h 57m Men in Black II 1h 40m Men in Black 3

[School of Movies 2019] The first ever live action Pokemon movie turned out to be one of our favourite films of 2019. A modest-yet-fleetingly-epic tale of a lonely young man searching for his father, uncomfortably partnered up with a coffee-addled, yet determined talking Pikachu. We go into why this choice of focus was ideal to introduce the wider audience to this world, the myriad tiny details that were there if you looked, the surprisingly powerful performances and the absolutely bonkers master plan of the eventual villain. PLUS your casting choices for Jessie, James & Meowth, sent to us via #SOMhandsup Guests Mackenzie Easton  @KenziePhoenix of Rainbow Connection @MuppetsPod   Nathan Bertram @bertnerdtram of Video Game: The Movie: The Podcast  @VGTMPodcast 

[School of Movies 2019] Since the third one is released this week and the series is not only continuing but branching out into TV and spin-offs we figured we'd journey back to the beginning and look at the 2014 original, examining what made it so powerful, relentless yet elegant. The YouTube channel which we reference several times is Film Joy, the musical act we showcase is Kaleida, the YouTube video to watch is Nerf John Wick. And this episode owes a great deal to the masterful scoring of Tyler Bates, whose music bears you up like a river and propels you through the experience of this movie, from reflective eddies to savage falls.  Guest: Lorin Grieve

[School of Movies 2019] How could we possibly sum up this immensely important, densely packed three-hour odyssey that closes out eleven years and 22 movies worth of continuity? The solution we came up with was a feat of organisation, collaboration and editing elegance that focuses on character arcs resolving and continuing with viewpoints from the biggest assembly of guests we have ever had in a single sitting.  Appropriate, wouldn't you say? Plus a wildly speculative Patreon bonus show all about the plot mechanics and the future of the MCU. This is one of our very best.  Guests Brenden Agnew of Cinapse  @BLCAgnew  Maya Santandrea of Hollywoo  @mayasantandrea  Jesse Ferguson of Recorded Tomorrow @TheDapperDM  Neil Taylor of TheKidDogg @KidDogg  Jerome McIntosh of GameBurst @JeromeMci Mackenzie Easton  @KenziePhoenix of Rainbow Connection @MuppetsPod   From Sequentially Yours  Kaoru Negisa  @Moonpanther22  and Debbie Morse  @bastet8300  "The Men by the Lake" written and read by Alasdair Stuart of

[School of Movies 2019] Back when the movie launched in late 2018 I put together a 50-minute Quick Review for Patreon. It was so entertaining and full of detail that I've been meaning for a while to expand on it and bring that show to the main feed. So this is that, with 45 minutes of new material added, including Sharon's take on Venom, recorded in early 2019 and my reassessment of what worked about the film. A space mission crashes back to Earth, bringing with it various gooey aliens of questionable morality. One crazed, underwritten billionaire seeks to create the perfect being by combining these aliens with hobos via symbiosis. And one jittery, journalistic loser represents a spanner in the works. Venom was poorly reviewed upon release, but audiences flocked to it nonetheless, generating an unlikely $855 million global box office. Part of this show is about examining why that might have been the case.  Next Week: Avengers Endgame