A Degree Absolute!

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" Yippe kai yay, Christmas lovers. It's your buddy Chris — sans Glen this time — with yet another installment in the metronomically reliable and stereoscopicaly hi-fi-able yuletunes eclectic and inexplicable compilation series. This is installment 18 — they grow up so fast! Which makes it the Ulysses S. Grant...

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. Each side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. Break off those recording tabs...

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. Each side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. Break off those recording tabs...

It's a Y2K-pop extravaganza as Chris and Glen emerge from their unplanned and unannounced hiatus to dissect 72-year-old Patty McG's brief-but-memorable guest appearance reprising the role of Number Six for (the final eight minutes of) the Season 12 Simpsons episode "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes." Cowabunga! The Simpsons, season 12, episode six — "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" Written by John S...

Our guest Keith Phipps is not just a sterling critic and a dad — an essential component when we cover a movie as openly paternal as 1978's post-WWII espionage thriller Brass Target . He is also the author of new book examining the career of a singularly idiosyncratic actor. A Degree Absolute! endorses Keith's book Age of Cage absolutely. And Brass Target? Well, minute-for-minute, it has the most u...

It's More Talk About A-Frames and Holes as we slog dutifully through the back half of The Prisoner 's 2009 Jim Caviezel -and- Ian McKellen -starring update.  It turns out Chris did review Serenity , the Steven Knight film he referes to 54 minutes into this episode. Read that review if you wish! Darling, Schiozid , and  Checkmate Written by  Bill Gallagher Directed by  Nick Hurran Initial airdate:...

We've got good news and bad news for you, Villagers: After a long sojourn examining Patty McG's eclectic-not-checkered filmography, we've returned to Prisoner content… in the form of the 2009 Jim Caviezel -and- Ian McKellen -starring update. At Glen's suggestion, we are devoting a mere two episodes to this six-episode series, because inflation. Who's hungry for a wrap? Arrival, Harmony , and Anvil...

Matty McC meets Patty McG in the battle you didn't know you wanted to McSee! Look, A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and prob...

Terrible fonts! Racist tropes! Puppetty brontos! A doomed marriage! A movie that was made for no one! Plus Paddy McG phoning it in - hardly a single trilled R! Listen, and catch the opposite of a fever! Prolific podmedian & Eisner Award nominee Jordan Morri s joins us to carbon-date a seminal document of his dino-loving youth, BABY, SECRET OF THE LOST LEGEND! Starring Rachel the Replicant , The Gr...

MOOR COWBELL! Slip into your cardigan, roll yourself a jazz cigarette, and prepare to savor one of Patty McG 's most sinister heel turns as our lovely theme-song singer Casey Erin Clark joins us to deconstruct All Night Long , director Basil Dearden 's 1962 adaptation of Othello set in the London jazz scene. PLUS! Casey draws upon her expertise as a voice coach and musician to examine several of M...

A movie for McGoohan die-hards that creator Alexis Kanner the Once-Boxed sued the makers of Die Hard over! Paddy McG and Kanner! Squaring off, with a Montreal radio show as their Thunderdome. A film with all the makings of a taut thriller involving hostages, a building wired with explosives, and McG in fine form: Rolling them Rs! Slamming them consonants! Playing drunk! Almost evincing sexual-adja...

Patty McG's first major project after The Prisoner wrapped up in early 1968 was The Moonshine War, for Sex and the Single Girl director (and title-song lyricist!) Richard Quine . Quine did not write this film's remarkably concise and descriptive title song, "The Ballad of Moonshine," leaving that to Hank Williams, Jr. The great crime writer Elmore Leonard adapted the screenplay of The Moonshine Wa...

Does Mister-not-Doctor Andrew MacDuhui ( Paddy McG ) hate pets? (He does not, no matter what his low-information neighbors in the fictional Scottish town of Inveronoch think.) Did Walt Disney hate cats? (Our very special guest Disney expert, Josh Spiegel , makes a compelling case.) Were animals harmed during the making of this motion picture? (Most certainly, regrettably.) Our principled stand aga...

On February 9, 1964, Ed Sullivan introduced a band from Liverpool, England formerly known as The Quarrymen to an estimated 73 million viewers of his primetime CBS variety show. And down the dial on NBC, the anthology series Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color drew an audience of something less than 73 million for the first installment of its three-part The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, an adaptati...

Pop some vitamin E before listening, because it's gonna be hug 'n' munch all the way to Chicago! Solvable host Ronald Young, Jr. joins Glen and Chris to examine Silver Streak, ostensibly a hybrid romantic thriller / buddy comedy that gave the world the long-running Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor screen partnership and was a huge hit upon its release in 1976. America's bicentennial anum was a great a ye...

CAUTION: This is not an episode of A Degree Absolute! This is a halldecking aid. Happy Boxing Day, Degree Absolutionists! With Glen still waging his one-man war on Christmas from the sunny heathen hinterlands of Miami, I, Chris, have made an executive decision to use up our vacant server space this month to re-present my 2019 holiday mixtape, "Let's Talk About Christmas!" And if you don't want to...

#Yulemix21 ABIDES! In this second half of my XVIth senses-shattering installment in the apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, Chris attempts penance for preempting your regularly-scheduled podcast with my mixtape by roping Glen & Casey in for some festive preamble before we get to the damn tape. Those halls aren't going to deck themselves, merrymakers!

This is not an episode of A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! This is a halldecking aid. A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! shall return. What this is is the sixteenth installment in what has become a venerable holiday tradition that invariably makes me feel unhinged in the final couple of months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast. The Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable compilation series, most installments of which remai...

It's primae noctis for your ears because we can put it off no longer: The quintuple-Academy Award-winning a-historical epic Braveheart is the most widely seen and, your hosts agree, best latter-day expression of undiluted Patrick McGooted. The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri returns to discuss her journalist doppelganger, the New York Times' Alexandra Petri , and to share with Glen the virgin Br...

THERE CAN BE ONLY TWO(s) as Chris & Glen rank their top six on this week's exciting episode! Thanks to @UrbanSpaceMan64 for suggesting the topic. Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin...

It's the Notorious V.R.G. v. the founder of the Jackson Fivehead in this 16th century showdown among two dope queens—and we don't mean Timothy Dalton & Ian Holm ! PLUS: Jimmy Stewart ! Current Release Corner! Dispatches from the French of Liberty, Kansas! Mary, Queen of Scots Written by John Hale Directed by Charles Jarrott Released December 1971 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsol...

It's Patty McG v. Lee Va C as Original Cast host Patrick Flynn joins Chris & Glen to discuss the existential 1980 thriller The Hard Way. Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark an...

Chris and Glen discuss Dean Motter & Mark Askwith's 1988 four-volume comic book sequel to the unclassifiable and unforgettable TV series. The A Place to Hang Your Cape interview with Dean Motter we discuss in this episode is here . Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod!...

An increasingly besotted Glen & unceasingly bemused Chris wax purple on THE PHANTOM, 1996's two-fisted failed franchise starter with Billy Zane as the 30s comic strip hero who coulda been called WHITE PANTHER & Patty McG as the Ghost Who Walks™ 's… Ghost Dad? The Phantom Written by Jeffrey Boam Directed by Simon Wincer Released June 7, 1996 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute do...

Democracy dies in dorkiness this week as the brilliant Washington Post columnist, essayist, playwright and retired (?) Emo Sith Lord Alexandra Petri joins us to autopsy David Cronenberg's 1981 explosive migrane of a cult classic Scanners, featuring 24 minutes of a possibly first-billed, maybe third-billed, but unequivocally box-named-on-the poster Patty McG as a, um, North American mad scientist n...