Magellans at the Movies

It’s the waning days of World War II and Nazi Germany is in a bad way. The Allies have squeezed them out of Africa and Asia and have begun pushing deep into Europe. Berlin is being slowly suffocated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union and the American and British forces are not far behind. A setting like that usually calls for a grand, explosive film about the heroic Allies delivering the final, d...

It’s hard getting old. There’s the usual complaints: things like weakening bodies, fading memories, and the looming shadow of death, but getting old also means seeing things change. McDonald’s starts selling breakfast all day, they make the capes for LEGO figures out of cloth instead of paper, and everyone and their grandma wants you to scan a QR code to access their business even though I don’t h...

Welcome to Los Angeles, the seat of the American film industry! Here you can learn about astronomy at the Griffith Observatory, see the Pacific from the L.A. Boardwalk, and walk across the greats of moviemaking on your way to the TLC Chinese Theater. And of course, no visit to the city of angels would be complete without a glimpse of the Hollywood sign, keeping its steady watch over the humble bor...

The world is full of stories. Legends and larks abound across the globe, from Eastern European folk tales, to the plays of ancient Greece, to the ongoing storylines of MMOs like Destiny. Some of these tales are inevitably swallowed by the content machine of Hollywood and end up on the silver screen, but in a world as rich with fables as ours it is equally inevitable that a great many deserving sto...

An epitome is a person or thing that is the perfect example of a particular quality or type. The nuclear bomb is the epitome of manmade destructive power, McDonald’s is the epitome of nothing, Magellans at the Movies is the epitome of movie podcasts, etc. Sometimes the classification of something as an epitome is more controversial than others, but when it comes to Westerns, few would argue agains...

Everyone feels a little crazy sometimes. Maybe the guy in front of you in line at Burger King seems to be dealing with the concept of a menu for the very first time. Maybe everyone is showering praise on a film you just don’t like. Or maybe you’re having vivid dreams of your dead wife interspliced with flashbacks to a traumatic experience liberating the Dachau death camp at the end of World War II...

James Bond is undoubtedly one of the most iconic characters in all of fiction. Based on a series of novels by Ian Fleming, ever since the 60s our theaters have never been long without a sharply dressed, smooth-talking womanizer saving the world from all manner of eccentric criminals and sinister clandestine organizations. Despite being British through and through, James Bond’s appeal has spread to...

I think one of the benefits of living in a post-lockdown era is that our time cooped up indoors has made us more sensitive to the dangers of cabin fever and the limits of a familial or friendly bond. You may love your child more than breathing, but there’s nothing like constant proximity to make you realize just how irritating the way they eat truly is. Unfortunately for the folks living in The Th...

It’s a big, scary, lonely old world out there, ladies and gents, full of nasty and uncomfortable things like trigonometry, team building exercises, and pineapple pizza. If you’re looking for refuge from any of those things, you may find comfort in the pages of a book, but not necessarily anything by David Foster Wallace, the literary titan whose fiction and non-fiction work was frequently heavy of...

Dinosaurs! Who doesn’t love dinosaurs? There’s just something inherently cool about the idea of an ancient, mysterious kingdom of animals preceding us on Earth before being obliterated in a geological instant, leaving only bones behind for scientists to piece together. Dinosaurs have long been a source of awe in children and adults alike, so it’s no wonder that the titanic lizards (Or maybe titani...

The entertainment world is awash with dystopias these days, probably because the real world is as well. Crack open a book or sit down for a movie and there’s a non-zero chance you’ll be treated to a gray, sad main character inhabiting a gray, sad world meant to reflect some potentially harmful aspect of our gray, sad lives exaggerated to enhance danger but not so much that the similarities to pres...

It’s unlikely that any one movie, book, or play can lay legitimate claim to having single handedly invented any given genre. Storytelling has a long history that creators draw from consciously and unconsciously, but in the case of George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, the argument for genre progenitor is probably as strong as it gets. The modern zombie movie, indeed, the figure of the mod...

Scream is one of horror’s most celebrated and popular franchises. Acting as a kind of State of the Genre address for decades now, Scream intermittently returns from periods of quiet to deliver updates on the tropes and trends of scary movies, as well as the men and women who make them, all wrapped up in an enduring who-dun-it formula wherein a group of friends/suspects is whittled down by the ende...

From Saturday morning cartoons to the evening news to science fiction classics, television programs offer up more information, entertainment, and validation than social media, with the caveat that you have to remain relatively stationary while your sense of self-worth is obliterated. TV shows can be self-contained and episodic, or essentially long-form movies telling much more in depth, expansive...

Silence. According to tired parents, librarians, and corporations accused of using child labor, it’s golden, and you’ve probably agreed at one point or another in your life when the noise just gets overwhelming. For Christians facing torture and execution in Japan during the Tokugawa period, however, God’s apparent devotion to the sanctity of keeping a lid on it probably wore a little thin. How do...

Reality. Most people don’t think about it very much, content to just live in it and let that be the end, but philosophers have been asking questions about reality and its nature since before Socrates was debating his nanny. Answers and theories abound, many of them fairly colorful, but none so colorful as the leather-bound, green-tinted, trench coat-bedecked, sunglasses-at-all-times-no-matter-the-...

Planes. They are big and fast and make loud noises and the ones used by the United States military can shoot things. This was the central conceit of Top Gun, a deeply 80s action movie about said big, fast, loud planes shooting things for your viewing pleasure and not much else. Despite a critical panning Top Gun became a mainstay in many a dad’s list of movies he would rattle off to demonstrate ho...

This week was Valentine’s Day, so it’s a week for thinking about those people who make your heart go pitter-patter. The people who give you butterflies every time you see them and get your pulse up into the hundreds. But wait, that isn’t your beloved, it’s the horrifying serial killer Hannibal the Cannibal and you aren’t a doe-eyed high school girl falling for Brock the football captain. No, you’r...

Treating mental health problems is a tricky project. The mind is a staggeringly complex structure, composed of layers of experiences and biology that, when overlaid on and enmeshed with each other, create systems that are extremely difficult to understand or even articulate, much less fix when something goes wrong. Consequently, treating the mind requires discipline, empathy, and years of hard wor...

It’s the end of the second World War and things are looking up! The Nazis have been defeated and their leaders are on trial for unspeakable war crimes, China is recovering from the brutal Japanese invasion while the Japanese are entering a period of national introspection and revitalization, and the long conflict has made the world powers of America, the U.K., and the Soviet Union into fast friend...

Tar-an-tino-ism n. 1 a self-indulgent, protracted conversation, usually on a topic no one cares about, with copious amounts of swearing and racial epithets between two or more characters in a film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantionisms are generally pretty popular, many would argue that they’re what make his movies so enjoyable, so it’s no surprise that Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s 1994 classic...

A lot of stuff happened in the American West from the late nineteenth century, unfortunately most of it was either pretty depressing or pretty tame. People took stuff that wasn’t theirs, but mostly from Native Americans rather than the local bank in daring heists, and you were more likely to die from disease than a tense quickdraw duel with the man that shot your pa. We’re not here to talk about h...

Pirates. During their heyday in the 16th-19th century when the combined rises of mercantilism, imperialism, and naval technologies sparked an explosion of commercial, exploratory, and political sea-travel, piracy was synonymous with murder, thievery, and rape, but in one of history’s most impressive spin campaigns, the modern image of the historical pirate has had a thorough cleansing resulting in...

2022, what a great year it has been for people who haven’t been elected British Prime Minister or for people who haven’t bought Twitter. Really, it’s been a good year who did very little proactive. Unfortunately the Magellans have been very proactive this year, taking in a multitude of cinematic offerings and in this gigantic episode they will be bringing their thoughts on the superlatives of thos...

Christmas, according to the song it’s the most wonderful time of the year. The holiday’s superlative status is derived from different factors according to different people. Maybe you’re really into cholesterol and enjoy stuffing your face. Maybe consumerism is more your thing, and you just love adding to your material wealth. Or, if you’re a pair of emotionally stunted young men from rural Iowa wh...