School of Movies

[School of Everything Else 2021] This one gets HEAVY. But what did you expect from a podcast which has examined every one of the MCU movies and found the hurt and pain at the core of the characters, being presented with a show that is absolutely about that principle? Now all the rampant speculation has passed, we can sweep aside our assumptions regarding what this *might* have been about and focus...

[School of Everything Else 2021] An absolutely phenomenal game which took 2020 by storm. We talk about, among other things, why being trapped inside for month after month just made a game where you're trying to escape the Underworld weirdly more resonant. There's an astonishing amount of story in there, astonishing art design and aesthetic, some of the most engrossing, multi-layered and sexy chara...

[School of Movies 2021] This is a commissioned show by Alex Vargas and Joe G. Stephen Chow's cartoonishly absurd, occasionally brutal, breathtakingly elegant and frequently side-splitting opera of kung fu.  Back in the 1940s Shanghai The Axe Gang rule the streets, massacring those who stand in their way (with axes). One day a pair of inept conmen come calling at Pigsty Alley and try to grift slim...

[School of Movies 2021] The Commissions Season continues with this classic, sponsored by Matthew A Seibert. It's a film made in 1978, set in 1958 meant for adults who were teens in that time period, now being watched more than 40 years later in 2021 by the children of those adults who grew up watching it and are now themselves adults. So this is going to be a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives....

[School of Movies 2021] This is our 700th Podcast. I began in April of 2007, and through four generations of my show, myself and then Sharon have covered a hell of a lot of media. Fittingly, this episode is the greatest.  On the twentieth anniversary of the 2001 Michael-Mann-directed biopic of maybe the greatest sportsman who ever lived, we finally go up against Ali in the ring. It's not just a fa...

[School of Movies 2021] This is a commissioned show by Kevin Veighy, who specifically wanted to make a kind gesture towards his friends and all of our listeners in the LGBTQ community. And what began as a desire to extend a sympathetic hand turned into something rather special, and a landmark episode. I haven't been entirely sure about this movie for several years. I know I loved it when I saw it...

[School of Movies 2021] The trilogy of Time, Space and The Afterlife culminates in the best one yet. And while we've had loads of folks express delight with the first two episodes as they grew in complexity, this one is really special. There's a sizzling energy to our discussions as things get very meta and concerned with generational responsibility, and the music that flows throughout is some of...

[School of Movies 2021] We got some real love for our Excellent Adventure show. It seems like you folks were responding to the pure joy threaded throughout, so let's see what we can do for the black sheep of the B&T Trilogy. This sequel turned up just two years after the first, having been hastily greenlit when executives got dollar signs in their eyes and saw franchise potential. The writers bega...

[School of Movies 2021] We begin a trilogy of shows taking us through time, space and the afterlife that begins here with this abidingly enjoyable romp through history, pilfering various key figures to make the deadline on a school report. We talk about how the time travel seems utterly nonsensical at first, but actually remains consistent and makes an internally logical sense within the adventure...

[School of Movies 2021] This follow-up to a fantastic debut in 2017 was long-awaited, much-anticipated and spent several years in production. At the end of a blockbuster-drought of a year, we were all looking forward to sinking back into the comfortable environs of an inspiring superhero story. Perhaps with some tactfully handled real-world symbolism in there, and a call to arms for women in parti...

[School of Movies 2021] We round off the year of Spielberg by going back to his roots as a filmmaker. And while this is a 2011 movie, directed by J.J. Abrams which Steve produced, I mean far more than  it simply evoking Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. There's more cinematic alchemy at play here than even we realised, when we took on this project, and we are very...

[School of Movies 2021] I've never known such a bad movie to be so loved, either secretly and shamefully, or boldly and unapologetically. If you're in either camp, lean into the second one. Firstly because why should you have guilty pleasures? Especially now. Unless you're eating mushrooms, growing to twice your size and jumping on the heads of those who call it garbage, you're not hurting anyone....

[School of Movies 2020] This show covers three movies: Enter the Ninja (1980) Revenge of the Ninja (1983) and Ninja III: The Domination (1984). They are hard to get hold of and almost entirely unconnected with each other, and they are violent, shoddy and absolutely hilarious. The connection is Cannon films and wildly talented actor and martial artist Sho Kosugi, who is the villain in the first, th...

[School of Movies 2020] Way back at the end of 2019 (Remember when we could get right up in each other's faces?) we recorded this show with Victoria Grieve, expecting it to be a riotous session of taking the book and film to task. Things got more complicated than that, as it turns out Victoria really liked certain elements of Spielberg's adaptation (as did many viewers). And then one of the worst...

[School of Movies 2020] Two Spielberg films that failed to capture the hearts and minds of the cinemagoing public. The Adventures of Tintin (2011) was his only animated foray, and the only one so far shot on digital rather than film. Made around the time Disney closed down Image Movers Digital because attempting wholly performance-captured films plunges the viewer into the uncanny valley. This one...

[School of Movies 2020] An obscure 2001 French period drama slash monster hunt, martial-arts mystery blockbuster, that only some of you will have seen. This is a show we've been looking forward to bringing you for many, many years. Also known as Le Pacte Des Loups in its homeland.  You can listen to half of this episode without having seen the movie. We keep the secrets to a spoiler section at the...

[School of Movies 2020] I recall when Crystal Skull came out it was around the time angry dudes on the internet were starting to really pick apart the prequels and why they had been betrayed on the promises made to them by George Lucas (to my shame that's how my movie podcast got started, but at least we'd moved on by week four). So the reception to this massively successful film was conversely ve...

[School of Movies 2020] It's safe to say that right now we all need something relaxing and engaging. Luckily Spielberg is right here for us with this 1960s period piece about a charming teenage confidence trickster, and the straight-laced government agent trying to bring him in. One of the greatest pleasures of this year-long exploration of Steve's work has been rediscovering just how fantastic th...

[School of Everything Else 2020] This is a special episode deliberately timed to around the American Election and not far off the official Brexit from Europe. It's a time of great anxiety, so we wanted to give ourselves and our listeners a dose of perspective. So I've collated ten different types of future seen in movies, and I've ranked them from the very worst to the very best. That way we can t...

[School of Movies 2020] Duelling Comets! In 1998, because of the way the movie industry works (or used to) we got not one but TWO films within months of each other, about the Earth facing an extinction-level event from the heavens. Both films largely concern themselves with the American response, both involve sending up a shuttle to blow the meteor apart, both feature lower-scale destruction as a...

[School of Movies 2020] To date Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise have worked together twice in their careers. And since they were two dark future-shock movies that were released close together in the early 2000s we figured we'd cover them both as a double-bill.  It's fairly extraordinary what a different world we are seeing here, than just a few years beforehand in the 90s. And in particular the ag...

[School of Movies 2020] What existed for years as an ongoing project for Stanley Kubrick became one of the only treehouses he let his friend Steven in on. Eventually Stan decided his approach alone could not ideally shape A.I. for the screen, and that this story needed Spielberg to direct. Stan offered to play producer. And then he died. So Steven picked up the pre-production art, concepts and dev...

[Digital Drift 2015] The second 2015 re-release from our dino season. You can go back to the separate School of Movies Archive podcast feed that a lot of people don't know about, but it has more than 200 of our pre-2017 shows. On there you'll find our episodes on Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World and at some point in the future we'll tackle Fallen Kingdom.  This one is a weird and tonally disso...

[School of Movies 2020] A long time ago, around late 2013, Sharon and I recorded a shortish piece on Hook. It was just before Robin Williams passed, and so the file sat in our archive, unreleased, along with the one on Mrs Doubtfire. We just didn't want to be scornful of something he had done during that period of shock and mourning. Eventually in 2015 we combined that section with a new one on th...

[Digital Drift 2015] Way back when Jurassic World was released (and we were all excited for what might have been the first really good Jurassic sequel) Digital Drift as this show was known at the time, put out one of our best episodes ever, on the 1993 original. So this is both a re-release and an essential, restored component of the Spielberg season.  Still as fresh and endlessly entertaining to...