School of Movies

[School of Movies 2022] We've been planning Narnia shows for many years. This was a very special book series to me as a child, informing on my worldview and writing. It was also the first long-form live action fantasy series I watched on television, as the BBC production which ran from November 1988 to December 1991 adapted four books over three 6-episode seasons. I always wondered why they stoppe...

[School of Everything Else 2022] Following the tremendous critical and commercial success of the first ever dedicated  animated Batman show, the same creative team turned their eyes to his sunny counterpart, the original, archetypal superhero, the last son of Krypton. It's always more challenging creating a successful, beloved Clark Kent than it is a Bruce Wayne. People like the brooding and the d...

[School of Movies 2022] Nine years after his Chronicles, Richard B. Riddick is sat upon his iron throne, the crown hanging heavy, too many pie suppers since he was at his physical peak and too many wenches left in wordless ecstasy, sloughing around his greasy bedsheets.  This is the story of how he gets easily tricked, shot in the back, left for dead on a barren planet filled with beasties designe...

[School of Movies 2022] After knocking it out of the park on the first try with Pitch Black, David Twohy and Vin Diesel limbered back up four years later with a complete change of pace, scale and even sci-fi sub-genre. If you look at Pitch Black as The Hobbit, then where they took the series next was their Lord of the Rings. However, there is a world of difference between what went into the expans...

[School of Movies 2022] This one is really rather special and arguably the longest time coming of any of our shows. Pitch Black, released in February 2000 in the USA didn't make it to the UK until November of that year. There's even some confusion in this episode because I wasn't sure if Sharon and I were actually together as a couple when we saw it (turns out we were, just). But significantly, th...

[School of Everything Else 2022] This one has been many years in the making.  Around about the time the pandemic hit, followed by the global chip shortage there was a series of jumps in both quality and quantity of retro gaming machines being manufactured in China and shipped out to folks stuck in lockdown with a serious hankering to revisit a simpler less-apocalypsy past. At the same time the sec...

In case you didn't catch this at the end of the Company of Wolves show yet, Sharon, myself and even Willow have helped put together an anthology of Gothic tales written by members of the School of Movies community. It's available to buy right now on Amazon and if as many of you as possible buy it at once, talk about it on social media, (and if you want to be extra specially helpful leave us an hon...

[School of Movies 2022] This is an obscure coming-of age fable from the director of Interview With the Vampire and The Crying Game. It was made on a very low budget in 1984 in Shepperton Studios, England, but it has some of the best werewolf fiction within its toothy confines.  The framing device is a young girl who has gone to bed with tummy cramps. In her restless dreams she ties together variou...

[School of Movies 2022] It is a confusing time to be a lover of Ghostbusters. On the one hand you have the long-planned but never-realised Ghostbusters 3 reunion Dan Aykroyd always had plans for. On the other you have the 2016 oops-all-ladies remakeboot which plenty of people enjoyed yet made some guys so mad they burned down half the internet and scared Sony (as well as malignantly harassing seve...

[School of Movies 2022] WARNING: This episode contains lengthy discussions on depression, trauma and suicide.  You do not need to see this movie before listening to the episode. In fact, in a rare instance we actually suggest you *don't* see it, for reasons we will be elaborating on at length. It has reviewed well, and as with many horror movies based on a simple hook that shakes people up, it has...

[School of Movies 2022] It is hard to approach the Pixar of the 2020s with the same eye as the Pixar of the 2000s. For a long while this was a barely-interrupted chain of truly excellent and game-changing 3D animated films which signified to other studios that they didn't have to copy Disney in order to attain success, they could get their own Shrek. Their story structure was always reliably poten...

[School of Movies 2022] Our favourite mafia movie, even over the venerated classics, for reasons that will become immediately apparent. This 1999 comedy directed by Harold Ramis was made at almost exactly the same time as The Sopranos first season was developed. Both explore the very real anxiety that comes with a lifestyle that is inherently dangerous, as well as one that involves such a close-kn...

[School of Movies 2022] WARNING: This episode contains foul language and repeated references to very crude sexual situations, bodily fluids and some nasty-as-hell behaviour. Thou art warned! This began as a simple re-watch of the original 1999 film "American Pie", but it quickly spiralled into a look back on the gross, frat-house movie craze of the early 2000s. We go through each film in turn and...

[School of Movies 2022] Back when this was announced there was all kinds of excitement. Thor, much like his buddy Hulk was a character it seemed like Marvel took a while to get a handle on, relative to the duo of immediate home runs with Iron man and Captain America. The first film was a relative success, he contributed greatly to the chemistry of The Avengers, but then underwhelmed in The Dark Wo...

[School of Movies 2022] A truly magnificent film about pondering the nature of existence and being trapped between nihilistic despair and existential motivation. But also a touching and painful drama about a little, broken Asian family who no longer know what to say to each other any more. But also a spectacular running battle of martial arts and clownery, nestled inside a high-concept sci-fi abou...

[School of Movies 2022] Our unexpected year of the Wachowskis continues with a 2008 movie that fans feel passionately about, and a strong sense of it never really having a chance, being released the same summer as Iron man and The Dark Knight. A squeaky-clean blockbuster painted in a dizzying kaleidoscope of primary colours with intense greens, pinks and purples to deliver what was supposed to fee...

[School of Movies 2022] We venture back to John Carpenter for maybe his least marketable, most angry movies. You are probably aware of all those memes where a guy looks at a sign with sunglasses on and sees something direct and insidious usually masked with advertising. This is the film that's from. In fact what surprised me after we finished recording was checking out those memes and finding that...

[School of Movies 2022] The Summer Commissions Season continues with an unexpected highlight. Here we have a brace of films focusing on the same real life event: Man on Wire (2008) and The Walk (2015). The former is a documentary about Philippe Petit the man who walked on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The latter is the Robert Zemekis dramatization of that fairly astonis...

[School of Movies 2022] Our summer commissions season continues. It's surprising that this show has been going as long as it has only covering a handful of Pixar movies. So this one will be welcome to many listeners. Putting the original 2004 film in perspective, it was incredibly important as a touchstone for what became the age of superhero blockbusters. It has so many significant elements that...

[School of Movies 2022] Five years after our show on the 1982 original (which you will now find next to this on the podcast feed) and coincidentally falling on the 40th anniversary of that film, we look at the follow-up, directed by Denis Villeneuve. Astonishingly, considering its seminal position in film history the Ridley Scott original was treated dismissively by our parents and grandparents. I...

[School of Movies 2017] [Note: This is a re-release of the original Blade Runner to coincide with our show on 2049 this week.] Here's a short, and by no means exhaustive list of entertainment works influenced by this one movie...  RoboCop, Akira, Back to the Future Part II, Ghost in the Shell, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Futurama, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I, Robot, Minority Report, Sereni...

[School of Everything Else 2022] The initial trailers for this one had me groaning. We were still pre-Birds of Prey movie so it was easy to assume the touchstone for this one was the first Suicide Squad movie, plus extreme cartoon violence and crudity. Well I was right about the second two! Turns out this is one of the smartest, most psychologically explorative of DC's vast back catalogue of super...

[School of Everything Else 2022] This is our second show on Kamala Khan. The first was all the way back in 2017 when we talked about her first comic miniseries. I've re-released that show on the podcast feed so these two can be companion pieces.  The Disney+ miniseries delivered almost exactly what we had been hoping for all these years. A bright, funny, courageous Pakistani-American girl hero. In...

[School of Everything Else 2017] This is a reupload of our 2017 show discussing the first series of Ms. Marvel comics. It works as a great companion piece to our show on the 2022 MCU TV series.  In 2013 a brand new Marvel character was introduced to the world, one who is very reminiscent of classic Peter Parker, a goofy, hapless, sweet-natured teenager who just wants to help people. She's also the...

[School of Everything Else 2022] There are two things about Star Wars that seem endemic, inextricable from the process of engaging with the multitude of stories that have emerged over the many years since 1977. One is that we always seem to return to Tatooine. It ties in with the fact that Star Wars plays on nostalgia. Even as early as 1983's Return of the Jedi they were bringing us back to that s...