Reel Politik Podcast

The first of two episodes on Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison - this one covering In The Heat of the Night, Fiddler On The Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, Rollerball and F.I.S.T., his films from 1967-78. Jewison was a fine filmmaker if not a great one, and used his cinematic podium to espouse agreeable liberal values in a far less didactic way than quintessential "message" directors like Stanley Kr...

In the nineteenth GAPECAST, Mike Gapes gives the listener an exclusive tour of his private portrait gallery, deep in the bowels of Cownadu manor. His collection is vast and eclectic, encompassing minor works by such third-rate hacks as Caravaggio, da Vinci and Van Gough, as well as more significant pieces depicting the long and noble history of the proud Gapes dynasty, including portraits and cave...

Live debates on the major issues of the day, originally hosted on friend of the show Sinan Kose's Twitch channel @ http://twitch.tv/skthecrusader. These are the streams Sinan has hosted so far featuring members of the RP team. There was also going to be another one with Jack, but he slept through it. Hopefully there will be many more to come!

Live debates on the major issues of the day, originally hosted on friend of the show Sinan Kose's Twitch channel @ http://twitch.tv/skthecrusader. These are the streams Sinan has hosted so far featuring members of the RP team. There was also going to be another one with Jack, but he slept through it. Hopefully there will be many more to come!

Tying up loose ends. A ragtag collection of stray material. Only sounds terrible for the first 10 mins. Covered herein: Trump's Milk Speech, The Dersh, melt scientist Brian Cox, and our hash out our beef with the latest in a long line of terrible journalists to come at your kings (us): potato-esque Conservative Willard Foxton Todd.

Labour members aren't the problem. https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/labour-members-arent-problem/

And now, the third and final instalment of our prestige documentary miniseries on Ilford's notorious GAPEFEST music festival, commissioned by the Ilford South FM radio station and written and presented by Jimothy Baker, the greatest - and only - journalist in all of Ilford. This follows the festival to its ghastly denouement, with Mike Gapes failing to rope Bill Clinton and Tony Blair into his nef...

Jack is joined for this episode by special guest, filmmaker Alex Cox. Alex was director of such films as Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell and Walker in the 1980s, Highway Patrolman, Death and the Compass and Three Businessmen in the 1990s, and has made films such as Revengers Tragedy, Repo Chick, Searchers 2.0 and Tombstone Rashomon since the turn of the century. He's the author of numerous...

In the conclusion of a lengthy discussion, Jack is joined by New Socialist editors Tom Gann and Josie Sparrow to finish digging deep into superb French political drama Baron Noir, and then talk about the NS relaunch and its new 'Bad New Times' issue, out now. Check out the new New Socialist here - https://newsocialist.org.uk - including a lengthy article on Bob Dylan by Jack, and much, much more!

In the second instalment of our three-part documentary miniseries on the infamous Ilford music festival GAPEFEST, the festivities begin as the music kicks off with a performance by "Oasis". We check in on the various tents, musical or otherwise, spread around the festival site - wrestling, jazz, country, vaporwave, "alternative" comedy - and watch in horror as a series of uncontrollable fires clai...

Listen to the full episode here - https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-163-40431088 - by subscribing to patreon.com/reelpolitik. Jack and Yair on HBO's classic prison drama Oz, and Netflix's flawed documentary miniseries on Jeffrey Epstein (and a bit on how the Ep Files were covered in the most recent season of legal drama The Good Fight). Plus - Jack reviews Queen & Slim, an apposite film for ra...

Go to https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-rp-who-of-40219617 and subscribe to hear the full 12-min diatribe about a shitty hack that we cut from episode 161.

More than 200 people lost their lives at Ilford South's infamous "GAPEFEST" music festival, and the festival has been dogged by allegations of widespread financial corruption, endemic drug abuse and creating an environment for violence for thrive. In the first of three parts, Ilford investigative journalist Jimothy Baker tells the full story of the doomed festival, talking to some of the principal...

Subscribe to patreon.com/reelpolitik and hear the full thing - plus we've already released a brand new Patreon exclusive since this one dropped! Yair recently watched Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled for the first time. He produced this minisode, in which he talks to Jack - who watched the film a few years ago - about how it's one of Lee's most underrated pictures, and one of the most hard-hitting...

Jack and Geraint are joined by longtime friend of the show Matt Zarb-Cousin; former spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn - and, subsequently, one of the few reliably left-wing pundits to get a hearing in the media - current spokesman for the Clean Up Gambling campaign, aide to Rebecca Long-Bailey on her sadly unsuccessful leadership campaign, and, most importantly, repeat RP guest. In his first appearance...

New Socialist editors and longtime friends of the show - and also, married couple - Josie Sparrow and Tom Gann join Jack to do two things, neither of which involve metal sex horses: 1)to promote the forthcoming 'Bad New Times' issue of NS and 2) to discuss the French political prestige television drama Baron Noir, which captured our hearts and minds over the lockdown period. Baron Noir depicts the...

It's Geraint's birthday. Here is an emergency episode featuring he, Jack and Tom, on the never-ending character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn. Check out our pal Sinan Kose's Twitch stream, which Jack was supposed to appear on, but slept through, here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/689491000

Jack & Geraint talk the travesty & tragedy of Starmerism

The Guardian's North of England Editor Helen Pidd recently visited Leigh, an erstwhile "Red Wall" town that went Conservative in December's election, to interview first-time Tory voters from working class backgrounds, some of whom she had interviewed two months previously. One was a child who could not have voted for anybody, another an enormous racist, and the third, one Andrew Twentyman, an arti...

Listen to the full minisode @ patreon.com/reelpolitik Hey everyone, Jack here. Apologies - this minisode was supposed to be with you a few days ago, and was already pretty dated then. But you might still enjoy what we have to say on a bunch of the cultural dimensions of the Black Lives Matter movement's 2020 manifestation: on the corporate motherfuckers belatedly trying to show some basic human de...

Ilford investigative journalist extraordinaire Mr Jimothy Baker is approached by mysterious source, "DeepShoe", with news of a vast conspiracy underway in the Ilford area; a conspiracy to make shoes not look like feet. Jimothy approaches this vital story with investigative verve, but what if the *real* conspiracy was under his nose the whole time? What is the 5G plan? Is it really just a pledge to...

Jack, Yair and Geraint are joined by returning RP guest, Toronto's own Luke Savage, and his fellow Torontonian and co-host of the esteemed Michael & Us podcast, Will Sloan. The topic of discussion is the film released as The Ghost Writer in the United States, and The Ghost in most other territories, in 2010; a conspiracy thriller based on Robert Harris' thinly-veiled account of his former friend T...

Listen to the full episode by subscribing @ patreon.com/reelpolitik Yair and Jack ON more shit to do with antisemitism and the Holocaust - David Simon's HBO adaptation of Philip Roth's Plot Against America, the BBC's 1997 queer Holocaust drama Bent. Then more shit to do with the JFK assassination - spaghetti western The Price of Power, a 1969 film that transposes the details of the Kennedy conspir...

Subscribe to patreon.com/reelpolitik to hear the full minisode (not technically a contradiction in terms) Jack, Yair and Geraint recently sat down with friends of the show Will Sloan and Luke Savage to talk about The Ghost Writer, a film about a thinly veiled version of Tony Blair played by Pierce Brosnan, written by the hated ex-PM's erstwhile friend Robert Harris, and directed by international s...

In another instalment in what seems to be developing into a kind of loose series on the far-right on film, Yair and Jack look at two touchstone pictures in the 1970s Nazi conspiracy thriller subgenre: 1974's The Odessa File and 1978's The Boys From Brazil. Neither are among the best conspiracy thrillers from that decade - probably not even Nazi ones, as Marathon Man (1976) takes that crown - but t...