Pop & Locke

In the spring of 1997, a teenage girl and her Scoobies started defending the town of Sunnydale and the world from previously unimaginable demons, all while being on time for chemistry class. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, has never been fully appreciated for putting the teen soap era of television on the map.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kevin McCallister was left home alone when his large family rushed to the airport to fly to their Paris Christmastime vacation. At first he was enjoying himself, staying up late, watching tv, and eating pizza until a duo of burglars, the Wet Bandits, try to ruin his holiday.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Netflix’s horror series about a small fictional island community, a mysterious visiting priest, and unexplained “miracles” is the latest Mike Flanagan horror hit. Though this show received a wide variety of praise and criticism, it certainly caused people to think about the role religion plays in their lives.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1953, under the Great Terror’s heavy cloak of state paranoia, the ever‐​watchful Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, collapses. When they discover his body the following morning, a frenetic surge of raw panic starts spreading like a virus amongst the senior members of the Politburo, as they scramble to maintain order, weed out the competition, and take power. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...

Matthew Feeney and Caleb Watney discuss Denis Villeneuve's 2021 film adaption of Frank Herbert's Dune. Frank Herbert’s 1965  Dune is a futuristic geopolitical allegory that was anti-corporate and pro-eco-radicalism. Villeneuve's film adaptation of the book stays pretty true to the original story, it's set in the very distant future, in which humanity has evolved in many scientific respects an...

Jamelle Bouie and Julian Sanchez join the podcast to discuss John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi cult classic, The Thing, a film that made our skin crawl with paranoia. Based on the 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There? , The Thing, tells the story of a group of American scientists in Antarctica who encounter the eponymous "Thing", a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates,...

The hook-handed son of a slave summoned by the chanting of his name 5 times, Candyman, was originally created by horror legend writer Clive Barker. But the legend has since been adapted for the big screen many times, first in 1992 and most recently in 2021. Peter Suderman and Jesse Walker help us dissect both films as part of a larger discussion about how horror movies tackle social issues. ...

The Simpsons is an American adult animated sitcom created by Matt Groening that follows the Simpson family who live in Springfield. The show parodies American culture, society, and ultimately the human condition.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Hurt Locker was the first narrative feature to make full, unnerving dramatic sense of the war in Iraq, and it does so without polemics or speeches or phony melodrama. In fact, the director, Kathryn Bigelow, has been praised for making a war movie that is apolitical in nature. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychologi...

In Pulp Fiction, two hit men, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega work for the crime boss Marcellus Wallace. The film is really comprised of six different stories that are very loosely connected to one another. And the title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

Pan's Labyrinth is a 2006 Spanish-Mexican dark fantasy war film. The story takes place in Spain during the summer of 1944, five years after the Spanish Civil War, during the early Francoist period. The narrative intertwines this real world with a mythical world centered on an overgrown, abandoned labyrinth and a mysterious faun creature, with whom, Ofelia, interacts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel that was written by Ray Bradbury and turned into a film in 1966 and 2018. It’s a story about Guy Montag, a fireman, whose job it is to actually destroy illegal belongings, like books. Montag never questioned his job until he met his neighbor, Clarisse, who tells him about the past where everyone saw the world and its endless possibility...

A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered. Julian Sanchez, Jake Laperruque, and Richard Theime join us to discuss how Coppola's The Conversation tells a story of a man caught between his own technological power and the nightmares of his personal responsibility. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mo...

Winston Smith is a minor government employee, living in Oceania, whose job involves the rewriting of history in a manner that casts his fictional country's leaders in a charitable light. And in this closely-monitored society, there is no way to escape from Big Brother. A classic novel written by George Orwell and published in 1949 was adapted for the big screen in 1984. Hosted on Acast. See acast....

A Linguistics professor Louise Banks leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 seemingly random locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life and qui...

One of Hollywood's greatest critical and commercial successes, The Godfather, released in 1972, is the quintessential American crime film. Early on in this film we are introduced to the patriarch of the Corleone family and as he ages it's clear that he wants to transfer control of his clandestine empire to his very reluctant son.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is set in the year 2027. No one has had a child in over 18 years. Infertility threatens mankind with extinction and the last child born has perished. The U.K. is one fo the few countries left with a functioning government, but it is deluged by refugees fleeing from chaos in their own countries.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every television series based in the White House inevitably has to grapple with one fundamental question: what motivates politicians? Vice President of the United States, Selina Meyer, finds that her job is nothing like she expected, but everything her largely incompetent staff had feared. How does Veep compare to House of Cards and the West Wing? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more in...

The narrative of They Live follows the social-democratic political story described by George Monbiot in his book Out of the Wreckage . This story explains how the world fell into disorder as a result of the self-seeking behavior of the unrestrained elite. Julian Sachez & Jesse Walker join the show to discuss how John Carpenter’s underrated sci-fi horror movie, They Live , did more than skewer...

Idiocracy centers an extremely average Army librarian who wakes up from a centuries-long cryogenic sleep to find that America has gone to seed, with all intelligence bred out of society and the most loudmouth and insipid elements ‎now dominating. A former pro wrestler with rage issues and particularly inane tendencies is now the president. Originally released in 2006, this film is perhaps more pol...

A sitcom with two Avengers living out their best suburban lives, what could be better? But we all know by now that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's always a catch. We discuss what could be next for Scarlet Witch and whether or not Wanda is redeemable after her mind control run amok throughout Wandavision.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the year 2157, on the outskirts of the system, far from alliance control, nine people look into the blackness of space and see nine different things. Joining us today are three people who see three different things in Joss Whedon’s cult classic series, Firefly, including; Julian Sanchez, Trevor Burrus, & Jennifer Huddleston.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer from Harvard when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non‐profit law firm in Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned. One of Stevenson’s first clients was Walter McMillian, a Black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. With Michael B. Jordan portraying Stevens...

In a post‐​apocalyptic wasteland, Furiosa rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her lost homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshiper, and a drifter named Max. This movie has been hailed as the ultimate feminist action movie, but does it deserve that accreditation? Kat Murti & Lester Romero help us unpack all of the action...

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is an epic adventure based on the novels written by J.R.R. Tolkien. Set in Middle‐​earth, the story follows the young Hobbit, Frodo Baggins, as he and the Fellowship embark on a quest to destroy the One Ring, to ensure the destruction of the Dark Lord Sauron. What is the Lord of the Rings story actually about? And, why is it so popular? Hosted on Acast. See acast...