School of Movies

[School of Movies 2019]  We cover the five movies each in turn. 0.00 First Blood (1982) 0.25 Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) 0.49 Rambo III (1988) 0.59 Rambo (2008) 1.12 Last Blood (2019) It's quite a wild and bumpy ride, going from a sobering critique of the military industrial machine and what it does to our soldiers, to a critique on political chicanery and lack of transparency in warfare to...

[School of Movies 2019] The follow-up to our extensive discussion on both the source novel and the 1990 miniseries, and then our lengthy discussion on the amazing 2017 movie. Few horror sequels are as eagerly anticipated as this one, and bettering or even matching the kids' story was always going to be an insane challenge. King didn't really manage it with his book, the TV version delivered a luke...

[School of Movies 2019]  This one is going to be a challenging listen. Arrival is a story about humanity utilising alien contact as a way of looking inward. It's an examination of our fears, our sacrifices, of language and of time. It's astonishingly powerful and perhaps the greatest performance of Amy Adams' career, requiring her to experience emotions that -as Mikey Neumann pointed out- we don't...

[School of Movies 2019] After a heavy couple of weeks, it's a welcome break to call in at a ridiculous, black comedy. This is a mockumentary investigating a house of vampires. They're a hapless collection of preening nincompoops, fragile egos and buckets of outdated neurosis (in other words very normal people). This film, directed by mad Kiwi Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok) takes many trappings of h...

[School of Movies 2019] A new direction for School of Movies. We've listened to our harshest critics and paid attention to what they seem to want from us and the overwhelming weakest aspect of our show is apparently our tendency to come at movies from a personal perspective, which in turn leads to heavy politicising of films where politics aren't present and don't need to be discussed. The result...

[School of Movies 2019] This was an unexpected one. We geared up for a Quick Review mere minutes after coming back from the cinema and then stuff just came flooding out. We send that recording to a few people to see if it was Main Event material and they pretty much demanded we get this out for everyone. So we added new sections and recorded a companion piece round-table session with two new guest...

[School of Movies 2019] The second commissioned show of our summer quickly grew from a film we liked a lot to one of our absolute favourites. This little-seen gem about teenage rebellion in Dublin, Ireland, 1985 is something we would love more people to know about. Directed by John Carney, the man behind Once and Begin Again, this is semi-autobiographical and features a measure of authenticity and...

[School of Movies 2019] It feels like a lifetime since 2015. Back then, during the tail end of the Obama administration we were enjoying the run-up to new Star Wars movies and Mad Max was about to blow everyone away with one of the greatest automobile stunt-fests of all time. But also Sharon and I were getting back into the Fast & Furious films very late after drifting away for a while. We were ab...

[School of Movies 2019] One of the worst, most disgusting animated movies of all time. This obscure yet notorious exercise in soulless corporate shilling dressed up as punky rebellion is a collaborative work of supreme incompetence. Begun in the early 2000s to surf in on the Pixar wave, but eventually released after Wreck-It Ralph in just a few cinemas, most people will thankfully never have heard...

[School of Everything Else 2019] This began as a short, thirty-minute Patreon-exclusive Quick Review just of Season 3. We didn't want to go all out since we hadn't actually covered Season 2 and the two-part Season 1 spectacular we recorded in 2017 was a Herculean feat of podcasting.  However, this is a strong TV show that never ceases to delight us and that Quick Review soon got deeper, before we...

[School of Movies 2019] The seventh live-action Spider-Man movie, but the eleventh big-screen outing for the wall-crawler. Following on from the creative magnificence of Spider-Verse was going to be a tough gig, but this movie seemed to please a lot of people.  This show is about how planet Earth is bouncing back from cataclysmic disaster, the key reasons Marvel villains differ from its heroes, ho...

[School of Movies 2019] The first of our Summer 2019 Commission Season is this beloved 1982 Rankin Bass animated cult classic. This episode acts kind of as a sister show to our early 2016 Flight of Dragons ep.  It's the story of a unicorn who ventures from the safety of her lilac forest out into a dangerous world to search for the rest of her kind. And it's the kind of story that while dismissed b...

[School of Movies 2019] One of the most difficult film productions of all time, the 1996 adaptation of the H.G. Wells book drove the cast and crew to the brink of madness. In many ways paralleling the infinitely-more-celebrated Apocalypse Now this was an ill-considered jungle shoot with a tyrannical director and Marlon Brando causing friction with his weird, selfish behaviour.  Few have seen this...

[School of Movies 2019] We haven't covered Pixar for an astonishing eight years, since the Toy Story trilogy of early 2011, so rather than starting from A Bug's Life and continuing through their entire library in the style of our Disney series we're going to cherry-pick our favourites when we have something to really say about them.  In this case we begin anew with our top choice, the 2015 story o...

[School of Movies 2019] Time to close the book on the Fox X-Men movies and the podcast series that Sharon and I started in 2014. If you haven't seen the film (and statistically this is the case) we will talk you through it. We can't spoil anything. There's no surprises TO spoil. It might sound like we're furious and that we hate this thing, but our response is something more like intense disappoin...

[School of Movies 2019] A film that immediately filled the majority of critics with derision, disdain and disgust. Now we don't want to say the majority of critics are wrong, but if they're saying there's no character to this and nothing below the surface then we don't have much choice, do we? Because what we have here is a joyful epic, a loopy sci-fi about the old Gods coming back to reclaim the...

[School of Movies 2019] With Godzilla II: King of the Monsters releasing this week, since we've already done a Godzilla show, we decided to cover his opponent in next year's long-awaited rumble of the Titans; Godzilla vs. King Kong.  That meant going back and examining essentially four versions of the same story. A boat-full of humans journeys to Skull Island for spurious reasons, encounter monstr...

[School of Movies 2019] With the release of Men in Black: International we went back to the original trilogy starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones and Mr Jones' younger model Josh Brolin. And what a wildly mixed bag we have here. The first is excellent, though almost too brief, the second is an atrocious unfunny mess and the third (which most people didn't see because they were so put off by the se...

[School of Movies 2019] The first ever live action Pokemon movie turned out to be one of our favourite films of 2019. A modest-yet-fleetingly-epic tale of a lonely young man searching for his father, uncomfortably partnered up with a coffee-addled, yet determined talking Pikachu. We go into why this choice of focus was ideal to introduce the wider audience to this world, the myriad tiny details th...

[School of Movies 2019] Since the third one is released this week and the series is not only continuing but branching out into TV and spin-offs we figured we'd journey back to the beginning and look at the 2014 original, examining what made it so powerful, relentless yet elegant. The YouTube channel which we reference several times is Film Joy, the musical act we showcase is Kaleida, the YouTube v...

[School of Movies 2019] How could we possibly sum up this immensely important, densely packed three-hour odyssey that closes out eleven years and 22 movies worth of continuity? The solution we came up with was a feat of organisation, collaboration and editing elegance that focuses on character arcs resolving and continuing with viewpoints from the biggest assembly of guests we have ever had in a s...

[School of Movies 2019] Back when the movie launched in late 2018 I put together a 50-minute Quick Review for Patreon. It was so entertaining and full of detail that I've been meaning for a while to expand on it and bring that show to the main feed. So this is that, with 45 minutes of new material added, including Sharon's take on Venom, recorded in early 2019 and my reassessment of what worked ab...

[School of Movies 2019] This is a rigorous dissection of the 1989 movie, the 2019 movie and the 1983 book. In many ways this is a sister show to our IT episodes. Stephen King done wrong three times, even by King himself.  This doesn't just come down to me not liking the nasty tone of all three, there is a fundamental breach in the overarching philosophy of the author which renders this an aberrati...

[School of Movies 2019] Not long after the 1999 original hit theatres Universal were on the phone to director Stephen Sommers with a basic request; "We need another one". And another one they got.  The creeping mystery and classical style of the first film was left in the sand and instead this is a rip-roaring race against time treasure hunt action spectacular.  This time around we discuss the bon...

[School of Movies 2019] The 1999 adventure has turned out to be one of our most eagerly-awaited podcasts. This time we delve into costume and actions to get a bead on subtle character-building that isn't in the script. It's a triumph of set-design and music and pacy, memorable and surprisingly progressive filmmaking.  We also go into its lengthy pre-production run and the string of very different...