School of Movies

[School of Movies 2022] This is an exploration on the more personal, less studio-based films of Thor Ragnaraok and Love & Thunder director Taika Waititi. Most of you won't have seen all of them, and that is okay, you should listen to this episode in its entirety anyway. The show will give you more details to look for when you get to watching them. 03m: Eagle vs. Shark (2007) 25m: Boy (2010) 41m: H...

[School of Movies 2022] This one hit us mere hours after the finale of Moon Knight. It has been six years since the first Doctor Strange hit in late 2016. To the point where the dangling threads of that film are ignored, because Stephen has made four more appearances since then, and been instrumental in deliberately instigating The Snap. But even that is mostly pushed to the side as this film beco...

[School of Movies 2022] Two films about dinosaurs as a metaphor for our own existential fear of extinction. We've held back on talking about the second film, released in 2018 because I was waiting on the onscreen consequences of the big decision at the end. While some folks considered Fallen Kingdom to be the worst in the franchise (I even saw a video declaring it the worst movie ever made - clear...

[School of Movies 2020] After the sexy teen rebels of The Lost Boys we delve into the cutthroat underworld of New York big business and the predatory nature of its ambitious executives, hollow inside and devoid of a soul, trying to fill that emptiness with delusions that their success excuses them from the people they hurt to achieve their power. Listen, when you bring in Nicholas Cage and tell hi...

[School of Movies 2022] The third in the Rage Cage trinity, released less than a month after Con Air, this movie saw our boy Nick set against John Travolta, who was at the time flying high on the success of Pulp Fiction a few years previously.  The premise of "Good guy wears bad guy's face" is completely nuts for a start, but what it allows us to see onscreen is two extremely intense actors perfor...

[School of Movies 2022] The Rage Cage Season continues, as Nicholas transforms himself into a statuesque Army Ranger from Alabama with a mullet (as We Hate Movies would say) to beat the band! It's had to imagine from every movie he was in before and since but here he's a combination of the peace-making soft  tones of Jesus and the spin-kicks of Chuck Norris.  Handed a severe sentence after defendi...

[School of Movies 2022] This is the start of our Rage Cage Season, celebrating the span of twelve months between Summer 1996 and Summer 1997 when Nicholas Cage was somehow the hottest action star of the age. He's quite appealingly low-key in this one, relative to the next two; Con Air and FACE/OFF. This is Michael Bay's best film. That's not hyperbole, it really is, in terms of how well-executed e...

[School of Everything Else 2022] A long-awaited visit to the first of Disney's new Star Wars TV shows. Weirdly we haven't had that many requests to talk Mando, but with Obi Wan launching this week and in the wake of the turbulent response to The Book of Boba we decided to journey back to the first and delve into what it did extremely well.  We divided the eight episodes into three movies, loosely...

[School of Everything Else 2022] A risky venture on Marvel's part. More than one might imagine. This is a character who is mostly known in the comics as a street-level supernatural vigilante (somewhere between Batman and Blade) and from a meme where that nerd Dracula owes him money. But more than that, in this TV miniseries, he's a Jewish superantihero played by a Guatemalan, directed by an Egypti...

[Digital Gonzo 2012] This was my first full-length audio drama. It was designed to be enjoyed by folks who saw the Nolan films the Arkham video games or the Animated Series. I wanted to write something significant, honest and authentic about the Batman legend and with a lot of help from long-time serious Bat-fan, David Hartrick, I was able to shape a bunch of ideas into a hopefully coherent story....

[School of Movies 2022] One of the biggest films of the year, celebrated for its dark beauty and mature themes. If you loved Matt Reeves' The Batman chances are the vast majority of moviegoers and critics are in the same boat. I'm not in that boat. I'm on a tiny little raft made of twigs and optimistic delusion, drifting off towards a whirlpool leading straight down to sea-Hell, surrounded by elec...

[School of Movies 2022] Daft bunny with amazing wife *may* have dropped a safe on a cartoon-arms dealer... An absolutely one-time deal, just like Lord of the Rings and Titanic, this perfect melding of live action and beautiful hand-drawn animation convincingly interacting in 3D space, coupled with a whip-quick hilarious script as well as the kind of combination of studio properties that just never...

[School of Movies 2022] I could just have told you folks not to see this one, but the whole world appears to have gotten the memo on that. I could also have just ignored it, but Harry Potter was important to a LOT of us in the past (and still many now) so a reappraisal of where the hell the Wizarding World sits today, and how we got to this place was in order. It turned into a lengthy investigatio...

[School of Movies 2022] Back at the turn of the century Dreamworks were going after Disney hard. The first lasting challenge to the mouse monopoly of animated cinema in the west involved a similar hand-drawn traditional style to match their 90s Renaissance. Notably that was a period of amazing achievement following mediocrity, thanks in no small part due to Dreamworks very own Lord Farquaad, Jeffr...

[School of Movies 2022] A cult British classic made in 1987, set in 1969 and an utter failure at the box office. With the advent of affordable videos in the 1990s this one later became very popular with students who warmed to its story of two out of work actors living in ridiculous squalor. It's insanely quotable and darkly funny if you have the corresponding frequency of humour (I think I'm going...

[School of Movies 2022] A trio of films that are considered by many to be the crowning glories of Don Bluth's oeuvre. He was one of the only serious competitors to Disney in the last two decades of the 20th Century that they had dominated, in terms of what constituted animated cinema in the west.  We take a documentarian approach to how he started, and cover the flourishing of the next few years,...

[School of Everything Else 2022] Lunatic eats strange fungus, throws reptile carcases and banana peel out of his car. Everyone cheers!  One of the most beloved of game series, the racing title that prides itself on accessibility (most of the time) and appeal to all ages, with a consistently high bar of quality (imagine if every Sonic game had that) and a lasting appeal that both piques nostalgia a...

[School of Movies 2022] We continue an unexpected year of diving into the back-catalogue of The Wachowskis. Speed Racer is on the way, and this right here is a dark little neo noir about stealing from murderous mobsters. It's all claustrophobic labyrinthine interiors, black and white, red and green with overtones of German expressionism. Bill Pope the same Director of Photography as the first thre...

[School of Movies 2022] This was unexpected... followed by yet more unexpectation. When I first saw the teaser trailer for the original film, all the way back in 2016 I thought the dancing pig picture would be inane and perpetually irritating, only to find out from trusted critics that there was way more below the surface. And they were right, I loved it immediately. Ever since then we've been pro...

[School of Movies 2022] Picture the scene; It's late 1994 and young teens who have thrown a thousand hadoukens in arcades and on home consoles throughout the early 90s finally get to go to the cinema and see their favourite characters battling in live action. The casting seems superficially solid. Jean-Claude Van Damme is at the peak of his career path, Raoul Julia was wildly entertaining in the A...

[School of Movies 2022] Your eyes do not deceive you, we are doing anime this week. Ironically the only other Main Event show we've done of this ilk is Kiki's Delivery Service, which emerged the year after this film and replaced it as the most expensive Japanese animated cinematically-released production of the era. You wouldn't think it, comparing that sweet tale about an enthusiastic girl who ge...

[School of Everything Else 2022] Bouncing back from What If? Marvel came out swinging with a street-level Christmas crime caper. This served the dual purposes of finally giving the least-loved Avenger some substantial spotlighting, and ghosts of his past to deal with, and introducing us to a brand new Hawkeye in the form of Kate Bishop. Hailee Steinfeld was offered the role the moment she walked i...

[School of Movies 2022] We come to it at last, maybe the final Matrix film directed by a Wachowski. Though this vein of property is worth too much money to the IP-owner to leave unmined. Representing a refinement and evolution of the philosophies laid down two decades ago. This film was launched a week after Spider-Man: No Way Home and just before Christmas Day, due to a prior arrangement with HBO...

[School of Movies 2022] The least-loved, most-hated, and in consequence least-explored of the Matrix saga finally gets the School of Movies treatment. The 1999 original is turned on its head here, resulting in a film that almost seems the inverse of everything that got us fired up in the first place. But it was a necessary refocusing in order to expand outwards from Morpheus' dogmatic vision of "U...

[School of Everything Else 2022] A very solid argument could be made for this being a movie, and thus being in the "Everything Else" category being erroneous. However, the focus of this episode is the trans-media endeavour that The Matrix series became.  It straddles four films, a PS2 game named Enter The Matrix, an MMORPG named The Matrix Online and this anthology of nine short animated films, an...