Genre Reveal Party!

In this bonus episode we reflect on the season and the films and shows we watched, our awesome guests, and our plans for next season. Thanks for listening! Spoilers: theme for next season, " lens" crafting, the end of Casablanca, self-critique, uninformed feelings about Bo Burnham, thoughts about stan culture, RIP Pee-wee, RIP Sinead, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Follow us @genrereveal...

To conclude our first season on "Family Matters," we watched Jerrod Carmichael's 2022 comedy special Rothaniel with special guest Tim Barnes. Tim helped us unpack this incredible special and Carmichael's discussion of family secrets, Black kinship and family experiences, coming out, and more. We also talk about Carmichael's relationship to other iconic Black comedians, especially Richard Pryor. Sp...

This week we discussed Cruising, William Friedkin's highly controversial 1980 film starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover to catch a serial killer who's targeting gay men in the underground subculture of S&M and leather bars of New York City. Joining us this week to help us think about this confusing, confused, and fascinating film is writer, editor and translator Max Fox. We talk abo...

We are them and we watched Us. Jordan Peele's 2019 movie Us. Spoilers: Santa Cruz housing crisis, Hands Across America bookkeeping, the Jordan Peele trilogy, Madeline thinks infamous horror villain Jason is a ghost. Follow us @genrerevealpod on Instagram and Twitter , and email us at genrerevealparty@gmail.com with your thoughts, suggestions, guest requests, and genre reveals. Follow Madeline @la_...

This week we took some time to revisit The Royal Tenenbaums, a film neither of us had seen in about twenty years, but which falls very clearly into this season's theme of films about family with lots and lots of genre troubles. We chatted about Wes Anderson's career, the politics of his aesthetics, and also what we didn't notice about this film in our late teens. Spoilers: hot pink, hot goss on Ge...

This week we discussed Caché, the 2005 French film by Austrian director Michael Haneke, starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, and Maurice Bénichou, and suggested by our guest Bettina Johnson. Caché is about a well-off French family terrorized by a series of surveillance videotapes left on their front porch. This terror reverberates from the Paris Massacre of 1961, which had only recently been...

We learned so much in this episode about the meaning of family, freedom, and driving real fast. While Dave was a fan already, Madeline had never seen a Fast & Furious movie, so we called on two experts to fulfill this mission: Em Gonzalez and Jo Giardini. Em and Jo help us unpack everything from the geopolitical to the penis allusions of the entire franchise. Most of the discussion is about th...

This week we talked to author M.E. O'Brien about the final season of Picard, and her forthcoming book Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care (Pluto Press 2023). We discussed the political legacy of Star Trek and recent series in the franchise, and the ways that sci-fi can help us better understand what exactly it might mean to "abolish the family." Spoilers: woke mob borg, the...

This week we're getting into some cringe-rotic territory with a conversation about THE MICHAEL DOUGLAS TRILOGY: Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Disclosure (1994). Spanning from the Reagan era into the Clinton years, this trilogy features so many flavors of feminist backlash. These films have different directors, writers, producers, and co-stars, but what they have in common is...

Back by popular demand, we're doing an encore discussion of Succession! We've got some emails and social media polls to share as well. In our first episode of the podcast, Dave and Madeline made some provisional genre reveals (Dave said "American satire accordion," and Madeline said "at worst, cluster-fuck, at best, meta-cluster-fuck"). Now that we've reached the conclusion of Succession, we're go...

This week we're talking about A Serious Man, the 2009 Coen Brothers film starring Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor whose family mostly hates him, and whose bad luck just keeps getting worse. While A Serious Man is certainly Coenesque or Coensy, we wanted to think more about the film's genre and the politics of Jewish humor with our guests, Daniel and Sheera. Spoilers:...

This week we've got our first double-feature on Genre Reveal Party: Juno & Junior. These are two of the weirdest movies about pregnancy, weirdly made by a father and son. Spoilers: home skillets, moldy peaches, steifens, Emma Thompson stanning, bromancing, pro-life but maybe accidentally, gender abolitionist but maybe accidentally, The Jason Bateman Character. Follow us @genrerevealpod on Inst...

This week we're discussing Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2018 masterpiece Shoplifters. It's a film deeply concerned with the question of what makes a family. What does it mean to be a family? How is 'family' defined by the state and private property? And how might we describe forms of care and survival in other terms? We talk about how the film grapples with these questions and more. Spoilers: noodles, chil...

To kick off our first season on the theme of "Family Matters," we're talking about HBO's Succession : a show about daddy that's got a lot of mommy issues. While clearly positioned among HBO's prestige dramas (and currently Emmy campaigning as such), many critics and fans have made the case that Succession is quite clearly a comedy. So how do we read Succession ? And what is it trying to say about...

Here's the trailer for Genre Reveal Party. Writer/cultural critic Madeline Lane-McKinley and comedian/actor Dave Maher host this podcast exploring tv and movies through the lenses of politics and genre. Season 1 is "Family Matters," focusing on family stories like "Succession," "A Serious Man," "Star Trek: Picard," and "Fast X." Episodes drop on Fridays! Subscribe now, so you don't miss a single o...