School of Movies

[School of Movies 2018]   The mid-2000s saw Disney continuing to flail about in search of a new identity. They still didn't have a clear idea of who they wanted to be seen as now, they just knew it wasn't Aladdin and Jasmine singing on a magic carpet. So here was a duo of CG animated curios, with some genuine charm amidst some baffling choices, deliberately homogenised with the output of their riv...

[School of Movies 2018]  Now we have reached a truly dark time in Disney's history. These are two barnyard adventures featuring shrieking animals, wafer-thin plots and zero growth, either for the characters or creatively for the production teams.  As such there's little to talk about beyond ducks getting smacked in the head, so we devote most of this episode to discussing the painful transition fr...

[School of Movies 2018]  Treasure Planet: Maybe Disney's biggest mistake since The Black Cauldron. Actually, that comparison isn't a bad one at all. Both were epic-but-short adventures with the focus on a young boy that many audiences struggled to love, both were adaptations of difficult books, both were departures from the studio's accustomed style, both had awkward comedy moments that didn't qui...

[School of Movies 2018]  While there are still some good Disney films left before they hit their modern fourth renaissance this one is special. Either the swansong of the 90s era or the strongest example of how the studio COULD have been amazing during this muddled 2000s period, had they married creativity with heart and focus more often rather than wildly attempting six different things at once i...

[School of Movies 2018] This project began life when its creators mused over why nobody made Indiana Jones style adventures any more and Disney certainly hadn't attempted an animated film along those lines. And when you look at the chemistry at play here; a script begun by Joss Whedon (The Avengers), directed by Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise (Beauty and the Beast) starring Michael J. Fox (Back to the...

[School of Movies 2018] The Disney shows return. And this time we are entering their dark age. A period of creative freedom and box office flops, when the house of mouse was going through a serious identity crisis. Thanks to Pixar and the evolution of 3D graphics animation had changed in a big way over the previous few years and the world was about to be flooded in barnyard adventures as studios b...

[School of Movies 2018] Fantasia 2000: Probably not many people's favourite Disney movie unless there's some deeply personal story attached what this is represents an attempt to resurect Walt's idea for an ever-changing roster of musical sequences with Disney animation. If you figure it would have changed and evolved over the years, had the original proved successful, and gone with the original mo...

[School of Everything Else 2018] Do not adjust your phones, you are reading this one correctly. Despite barely ever mentioning wrestling in over eleven years of podcasting we are now doing an epic-length show on what for newcomers might be the most instantly satisfying event in WWE history. This isn't a show for wrestling fans (though you lot will get a kick out of it anyway) it's for people who a...

[School of Movies 2018] To close out our triumphant Guillermo del Toro season we give you our deep exploration of the 2007 ghost story he produced, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona; The Orphanage. Exquisitely, meticulously constructed as a mystery, this is one of the finest of its kind. Threaded through with intrigue, riven with suspense, punctuated with trauma with a heartbreaking yet uplifting co...

[School of Movies 2018] This turned out to be the surprise favourite del Toro of the season for one of our number. It's no mean feat to be able to produce work of the peerless quality of Pan's Labyrinth and still produce films that become the favourites of your audience.  The year is 1962, a creature has been found in a black lagoon and currently resides in a government facility where he will meet...

[School of Movies 2018] This one turned out to be my surprise favourite of the season. It's a Gothic romance which utilises the aesthetics of horror to tell a story of love, obsession and murder.  But it was released at a time when audiences were guzzling down clamorous ghost house jump scare fare and the general consensus was that it was a disappointment that refused to behave the way that people...

[Digital Gonzo 2013] This episode was previously published as the final instalment of Digital Gonzo #161, a month before we came back as Digital Drift with Sharon as the co-host.  Passed off as simply enjoyable dumb fun, and about nothing beyond enormous robots hitting big monsters, this movie proved to be absolutely perfect for our style of analysis, being in fact deeply textured, nuanced and det...

[School of Movies 2018] The second film is even better than the first. This time del Toro draws Hellboy deeper into his own world and away from the Mignola comics. And what we get is rich and nourishing, painted in beautiful red, black and gold. I begin with a hopefully compelling positioning of Hellboy II as being more like movies from Marvel's Phase 3 than the movies of Phase 1 were.  We go on t...

[School of Movies 2018] At the close of the Spanish civil war a girl beginning to comprehend the horrors going on around her encounters a fairy world that reflects that violence and grotesquery. Welcome to one of the best podcasts we've ever made. We go straight in with analysis of detail and breaking down this dense yet elegant dark fantasy into its meaningful parts.  Arguably del Toro's finest f...

[School of Movies 2018] Del Toro's fifth film was a passion project for him which he still managed to position as a studio picture supernatural superhero sci-fi that ended up with middling success.  The Hellboy comic by Mike Mignola blends Lovecraftian horror, mythology and folklore with a no-nonsense, gruff mechanic's approach to the paranormal. It's a deeply appealing combination hearkening to G...

[School of Movies 2018] This is about all three of the half-human, half-immortal vampire slayer's films to date. I don't even know how that works, since him being apparently half-immortal grants him all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses it's more like he's double-immortal, a little bit human (the bit that occasionally smiles). 1998 Blade: Maybe the best translation from comics to scr...

[School of Movies 2018] After many months of promising, and many weeks of recording sessions which you are going to love hearing, the Guillermo del Toro season is finally here. Our guest for the duration is Lorin Grieve and we go deep into the texture and detail of these movies together, drawing parallels, exploring symbolism and discussing the greater themes and the making of each. We begin with...

[School of Movies 2018] Our final commission for the first half of this year is a jungle adventure based (really loosely, it turns out) on a true story.  This one was very challenging for us. The film itself, as I state at the end, fails on almost every level for me, and has been bettered, countless times since its 1985 release, but there is still something of real merit inside. We pull no punches...

[School of Movies 2018] The second of the Star Wars anthology films emerges a mere five months after The Last Jedi. We are used to that in the era of the MCU but with the galaxy far, far away it feels strange, especially as Rian Johnson's film went out of its way to both evoke the formula of Empire Strikes Back and subvert it wickedly, challenging audiences everywhere, and what Ron Howard's effort...

[School of Movies 2018] I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is going to be the best thing you ever hear about Deadpool 2. I don't want to over-hype it, judge for yourself.  There's a lot of mixed feelings as we weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of this sequel.  If you've not heard them yet, we have done shows on all the previous X-Men movies, which can be found on the School of Mov...

[School of Movies 2018] We journey back to the small-scale fantasy boom of the 80s with this German-filmed adaptation of the book Die Unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende. This is a commissioned show by Joel Robinson. It's the simple tale of a newly motherless boy named Bastion who steals a magic book from a shop and reads it in his school attic. As the adventure he's engrossing himself in plays...

[School of Movies 2018] We were commissioned to cover the original 1985 version but decided to incorporate the 2011 remake as well.  A teenage boy named Charley Brewster is perturbed to find that the gentleman who just moved in next door is a vampire... named Jerry. But of course nobody will believe him. Charley's mother, his awkward friend Ed and his girlfriend Amy are all placed in danger, and h...

[School of Movies 2018] "We come to it at last, the great battle of our time." This show recording ran surprisingly long as we went off on wild tangents discussing where Marvel might go from here. Those are contained in a separate 80 minute podcast called Beyond Infinity which will be on the Patreon. What you have here is a super-focused 70 minute discussion about the film, with heavy reflections...

[School of Everything Else 2018] A currently ongoing comic series written by Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man) and Fiona Staples (North 40/Mystery Society). The remit of this commission was not to just talk about the first book and hold off of spoilers for the later instalments (since that's what a lot of people do) so we have to delve into the first eight volumes. This makes it kind of tricky to...

[School of Movies 2018] This is a trilogy of tellings of the same enormous tale.  First the 1954 black and white Japanese original, Gojira, which was a deliberate allegory for something deadly serious. Then (skipping over about 21 very silly Toho films which pitted the big lizard against an array of iconic kaiju) we have the 1998 Roland Emmerich attempt to bring Godzilla to America.  And finally o...