School Of Movies

[Digital Gonzo 2012] NOTE: This is a reissued episode from over 12 years ago. Please forgive the lower production values and boneheaded things I say. Finally we get to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. After eight years away from cinema screens, and multiple stalled attempts at relaunching the franchise, Warner Bros knocked the Bat out of the park with the best film so far and arguably the most compelling and mature adaptation of Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego. Many aspects are discussed and deconstructed including Christian Bale’s intense portrayal, ace cinematographer Wally Pfister’s erotic endeavours and why Hollywood on paper is a senile, avaricious old psychopath. Guests: Sharon Shaw of School of Movies Taylor Nova of TheKiddDogg Joshua Garrity of Cane and Rinse Jerome McIntosh of GameBurst Aquila Edwards of Eyrie City Paul Gibson of Gonzo Planet

[School of Movies 2024] Kicking off Nolan-Vember with a tale of obsession, revenge and the untrustworthy, ephemeral nature of memory. Things play out in nonlinear fashion as Nolan executes his second film with the deft surety of a man who can see the final arrangement within all the misaligned frames. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man afflicted with a rare brain disorder that resets his short-term memory every five to ten minutes or so, with his mid and long-term memories almost completely blank, following a terrible tragedy. For those of you feeling alone and scared right now, we will do our very best to keep on making utterly engrossing podcasts over the next few hard years. Whatever helps listeners get through the goddamn day is a job well done. Guest: Greg Downing of Through the Wind Door

[School of Movies 2024] A perennial Halloween favourite for our family, this was Tim Burton's Sophomore effort, after his debut with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure but before he became a Hollywood Titan with Batman (starring Beetlejuice). And I know we give him a hard time a lot, as a purveyor of populist Goth chic to the masses, but when he hits right you get this movie. And it really does hold up after three and a half decades. Possibly because it's so much fun and so child-friendly that new generations can embrace this ghostly monster party every few years, giving it an evergreen quality. Certainly Willow has loved it since they were tiny, and goes into why on this episode with us. Each member of the cast and crew are firing on all cylinders. It's visually stunning, wickedly gruesome, wildly quotable and utterly hilarious. And this weekend we get to visit the messy but enjoyable 2024 sequel for the Patreon bonus podcast feed.

[School of Everything Else 2024] This is a special episode I've been planning for many years, ever since the notion that 'Horror' as we know it is largely a marketing construct, and that stories that deliberately jab at our Fear-response can be found pretty much everywhere. This is why I decided to go with my favourite metaphor; food) and hone in on the precept that Horror is not a story type, but a spice (or indeed a series of differently flavoured spices with differing properties) that can be sprinkled in lightly or ladled in heavily to produce wildly varying results. This would be why de facto Horror film series' like Friday the 13th don't frighten me in the slightest, but Shallow Grave, which would be classified as a Thriller in cinematic terms, chilled me to my core, and why the most frightening film I ever saw isn't in the Horror genre at all! We and our guests work our way up the scary Scoville Scale (the Screamville scale) to establish some genuinely thought-provoking new, fresh and flavourful perspec

[School of Movies 2024] This was a commissioned episode for Dean R who was very keen for us to examine this 1983 follow-up to the 1960 classic. This film brings back Anthony Perkins after Norman has served his time and behaved well in crazy-jail, with the 'Mother' persona seemingly dormant. But now we, as the audience may find ourselves strangely onside with the mild-mannered, respectful man, seemingly genuinely trying to go straight, and surrounded by people who want to give this multiple-murderer a piece of their mind (knock it off, idiots, it's crowded enough in there!). Meg Tilly (sister of Chucky's bride, Jennifer) plays Mary, a down-on-her-luck waitress whom Norman really seems to want to help back onto her feet, as this torrid story circles into an operatic and tragic conclusion. We close out with a synopsis of the entirely unrelated book "Psycho 2" by Robert Bloch; a novel so hated by the studio that they made their own sequel here.

[School of Movies 2024] For this rather special episode, we firstly welcome to the show for the first time, director Alfred Hitchcock, as we examine his most famous and most revisited film, Psycho (1960). This became the wellspring from which modern-day detective thrillers emerged. But it also has tangled roots in Horror and the grubby stepchild of its sub-genres, the slasher. While other films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) and John Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962) -both weirdly starring Robert Mitchum- were also hugely important, Psycho was less about the stalking killer as it was a torrid dive into the swampy waters of their mind. Deriving from a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, who lived down the road from Ed Gein as he was being arrested for trying to make a woman-suit, this story, along with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs (1988) assisted greatly in the lurid, pulp sensationalism of the twisted deviant killer-man-in-a-dress mythology

[School of Movies 2024] If New Empire is the best Kong film, this one qualifies for us as the best Japanese Godzilla film. Kaiju fans are being blessed with an embarrassment of riches in this era (check out the charming and dazzling animated Ultraman Rising for even more of this) and there has never been a better time to wrap your head around why this enormous nuclear lizard is such an enduring icon in his home country. Journeying back to the 1954 original Gojira, this film re-stages those events in different ways that even more deeply parallel a nation reeling from the mass-traumatic aftermath of World War II. Right now these people are at zero in terms of ability to cope, and Godzilla is set to slam them back even further to minus one (I didn't come up with that, some YouTube channel obsessing over his toughness stats did, but it's rather good). And yet, while this could be another funerial and mournful lamentation of death and destruction, and abandonment by our leaders, the disgraced kamikaze pilot at the

[School of Movies 2024] Fixed the title on this one, to both distinguish it from 2021s Godzilla vs. Kong, AND to give the rightful prominence to the Great Ape whose movie this most definitely is. Willow suggested the original title would be as misleading as "Loki x Thor: Ragnarok". This is my favourite of the new MonsterVerse films, by a narrow margin, considering Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is still absolutely magnificent. Just like that 2019 entry, it's also one of my favourite films of the year, for reasons I will elaborate upon in depth here. Rejoining us for this Hollow-Earth saga of deposing one of several gorilla dictators we've seen on the big screen this year is the chap who knows more about kaiju films than I know about not treading upon the sensitive tootsies of Godzilla fans, who will hopefully be happy to hear we will be back next week for the incredible new Japanese film, 'Minus One'! Guest: Dan Hoeppner  @MightyMegatron0  of Leftover Army Monsters

[School of Movies 2024] The initial and glowingly positive reviews are coming in for Transformers One this week. It's the first entirely-animated Transformers movie since the infamous Optimus-Prime-slaughtering 'The Transformers: The Movie' in 1986, and I am happy and hopeful for the future in that regard. But what of the state of the live action films? The fifth and final Michael Bay-directed mess was The Last Knight in 2017, which did almost HALF the box office of the obscenely successful Age of Extinction in 2014. Then came Bumblebee in 2018, very purposefully different in tone from the leery MacGuffin hunts of the Bay films. It made less again, despite being the only one with heart and soul. Then in 2023, this seventh entry sought to split the difference with a return to the MacGuffin hunt and big, noisy robot battles of the earlier entries, but with an injection of the humanity and spark of Bumblebee. This episode contains a bonus; the previously Patreon-exclusive exploration of my re-edits of the five B

[School of Movies 2024] One of the biggest films of the year, and the greatest success for the MCU... which weirdly seems to avoid going anywhere near Earth 616, instead acting as either a swansong for the X-Men series, begun in the year 2000, or possibly a phoenix-cry. It really depends on how Marvel handles the Mutants in the next few years. However, as a focused distillation of some of the greatest strengths of those 13 movies this one succeeds where so many others fail, not by being eye-rollingly insincere, as many publications have asserted disapprovingly, but by balancing (not always magnificently) the snarcasm and fourth-wall assault and battery of the irrepressible Deadpool, once again using humour to mask his pain and anxiety, and the impeccably serious and authentic Hugh Jackman, playing the ruin this Wolverine's life has become entirely straight. It's a grower and  a shower. In a year otherwise mercifully cape-free, it straps on the spandex in the most form-fitting of ways. Guests: Jesse Ferguson o

[School of Movies 2024] This one is special on a level I am going to find challenging to articulate in a medium as clumsy as the written word. It is a show that has been promised for well over a decade, it took me four recording sessions and a protracted edit over the month of August. It is so densely and richly layered that I would put it in the same category as our shows on Guillermo del Toro and the Lord of the Rings (ironic, since that was the book the writer/director used to convince his mother Alice Crowe that rock music wasn't all just sex and drugs). This is the fourth film from Cameron Crowe, after Say Anything, Singles and Jerry Maguire, and you will hear in this show just how much his autobiographical experiences and outlook on the world influenced and resonated with me in the late 90s and early 2000s, in a way that has absolutely informed upon not only my character, personality, writing, editing and philosophy, but the way I engage with music itself. Put simply, this movie goes beyond masterpiece

[School of Everything Else 2024] This is a very special episode, and might be a lot of folk's favourite of the year. What is a “FELLAS…” scenario? It feels like most of us will have encountered them in the wild as we doomscroll our way through the doldrums of the Misinformation Age. Simply put, it’s when a man asks other men if it is in fact gay to do something in particular, OR it is when a man (and a very cis man at that) makes an empirical statement pronouncing something in particular that a man shouldn’t do as now the act of a gay man. Invariably these somethings in particular are laughably commonplace and the aversion to them is rendered tragicomic as a result. These turn up in our Discord channel, usually in the 'Bad Reviews Against Humanity' thread. Discord members Tripas, Alejandra Vargas, Chris Finik, Greg Downing, Selfproclaimed, Toby Skeels-Jungius and TransientModeLincoln worked diligently to compile several years worth into one organised list. And we brought in the now-16-year-old Willow Shaw to

[School of Everything Else 2024] This was a commissioned show for Tylor and Chris Finik. It covers the first two seasons of this animated show which can be found on Netflix, Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. You can listen to the whole thing without fear of anything being made worse, and we keep a lot of secrets and surprises under wraps since statistically most of you won't have seen this. On first inspection it might seem like Star Trek for Babies or Star Trek: Rebels, however, spend some time with it and you'll find a show that is not only a splendid introduction to this seminal mythology, but a fine new way of looking at The Federation from the outside, wrapped around some exceptional and emotionally-driven character-focused science fiction. The short of it is, seven young misfits on the run in a stolen Federation starship prototype. There's a threat coming from the future and they have to get the warning to Earth in time. What they become is exemplary of what intergalactic peacekeeping could be, in the hands o

[School of Movies 2024] What is a "hangout movie"? It's a film that concerns itself far less with telling one grand, overall story of one or two people's development or journey, and far more on literally spending time with the ensemble cast of characters. In this show I draw the comparison between the characters we see here and animals in a safari park, but I don' mean they are simply placed there for our amusement, and don't matter. What I mean here is that we are experiencing a world based on memory and authentic experiences being described to us through the medium of what might be a dopey comedy where nothing happens. It is the last day of school in Texas 1976, America is at a fragile place and the young people, following the mess of the Vietnam war, the betrayal of their government and under increased scrutiny from adults just itching to banish them from Civilisation if they so much as inhale a wisp of pot smoke. This is Richard Linklater's second film, his first under the critical eye of a studio with fi

[School of Movies 2024] This is a special show for Chris Finik. It would have been a relatively straightforward endeavour for Sharon and I to delve into this one. It's a story that feels familiar and contains many of our very favourite elements; A betrayed lady thriving on her own untapped resourcefulness with help from a chain of women begun long ago, a dragon with an AMAZING voice and a Royal Family squatting on an exploitative predatory system that all needs to be burned down. Plus, we love Millie Bobby Brown. But we went one further, twisting around to examine the novelisation by Evelyn Skye, based on the early screenplay by Dan Mazeau. Both versions are lacking in certain departments, which the other compensates for... but there's some crazy business that folks who have only seen the film on Netflix will definitely want to know.

[School of Everything Else 2024] This was a commissioned show for Self AKA Selfproclaimed. Ever since The Legend of Aang wrapped in 2008 there have been comics expanding upon what followed the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai. This, however, was a pair of books; 'The Rise of Kyoshi' and 'The Shadow of Kyoshi' detailing what occurred four centuries prior to the adventures of Team Aang. And the 2019-2020 release of these two novels, penned by F.C. Yee with consultancy from co-creator of Avatar Michael Dante DiMartino was met with wild adulation. Both books have astronomical five star reviews on Amazon, with more than 9K ratings corroborating that. What I personally got from the books was a lot more of a mixed bag. There is amazing potential here, however, not all of it was fulfilled. Luckily we also have longtime friend of the show Nama Chibitty on, to counterpoint my hang-ups. And this episode launches on the same day as School of Movies unveils the second in our series of short story anthologies, written by members o

[School of Everything Else 2024] This was a commissioned show for Dean R who just happens to sit at the ideal age to have discovered Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Vale on PlayStation 2 in 2001 as a kid. After it had a profound effect upon him, he went back to examine the original Klonoa: Door to Phantomile on PS1 from 1996. And while these puzzle-platformers with their poochified, Sonic-looking rabbit/cat thing might on first inspection hold nothing of particular interest I was glad to have been contracted to dig deeper. There's an existential element beneath the surface that left a lot of kids bewildered, introspective, maybe even depressed. And I played through both games in their Phantasy Reverie Switch remakes (as well as completing the original on PS1, part of the second on PS2 and the ill-fated first remake of the original on Nintendo Wii, that many Klonoa fans HATE for resons we will go into. So, strap in, grab your ring, and do not trust your friends, they're lying to you!

[School of Movies 2024] This is a commissioned show for Chris Finik. And unlike the marketing for this straight-to-Hulu film our show is going to be a little more mysterious about the details, because it definitely was worth going in completely ignorant like we did. I even made some arresting artwork for this episode to better convey that this is not your regular thriller. If you have Disney+ that's your evening. It's a silent movie, and I say that as A Quiet Place: Day One is doing quite well in theatres, and having watched the Mel Brooks comedy "Silent Movie" (1976) only last night. It keeps us, the audience in a state of tense, breathless isolation along with intense and extremely compelling leading lady Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Justified, Dear Even Hansen) as Brynn. Directed by Brian Duffield, writer of The Babystitter (2017) and its sequel, both of which we liked, along with Love and Monsters (2020) an under-watched Lockdown gem on Netflix. This gentleman is one to watch.

[School of Movies 2024] After many years of thinking about how to tackle these two absolute idiots, we found the best angle for us. Ostensibly this is about the 1996 movie, which still holds up today and makes for an appealing, surprisingly general-audience-friendly and brisk hour and 21-minute comedy. This is an achievement, considering their extremely sketchy first incarnation as a pair of cruelly observed Texas teenagers being horrible to frogs. What Sharon and I do here is fill out the absence of texture in this rare 2D American-animated adult(ish) film by delving into who the boys are, and their pitiful background, as portrayed in various key episodes of the original show, which ran for only four years, but made two comebacks -both solid- with the current one still ongoing on Paramount Plus (which means most people can't see it, or the 2022 sequel movie which propels them into the 21st Century). If you HATE Beavis & Butt-Head this podcast probably won't change your mind, but if you have never delved

[School of Movies 2024] Cloon June finally comes to a close with a magnificent romantic thriller, written by Elmore Leonard, the author of Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma and Rum Punch, which became Jackie Brown. This one hit at the tail end of the 90s, and became a significant landmark in the careers of George Clooney, director Steven Soderbergh and George's co-star, a relative newcomer named Jenifer Lopez. Deliberately stylised to evoke the crime thrillers of the 1970s, we do time with smooth-talking bank robber Jack Foley, finally hitting a point of realisation that he is going to die of old age in prison. However, in striking out against that eventuality with an audacious piggybacked prison jailbreak he crosses paths with Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal with a shotgun and a Chanel Suit. Against all odds, after spending time in the trunk of a getaway car, the two of them wind up separated, with thoughts dwelling on each other. Karen pursues Jack from Miami to Detroit, but does she want to lock him up forever or bed h