Special Topics in Media

Send us Fan Mail The time has come. In this "Recalibration Preview", Special Topics in Media examines the data sets that feed into the tabulation process defining the "Film Listology" methodology. Cohost Scott McMurry provides listeners with the clearest explanation yet for how the math works to determine placement in the Super Index ranking for culturally significant films.  T...

Send us Fan Mail The time has come. In this "Recalibration Preview",  Special Topics in Media examines the data sets that feed into the tabulation process defining the "Film Listology" methodology. Cohost Scott McMurry provides listeners with the clearest explanation yet for how the math works to determine placement in the Super Index ranking for culturally significant films. ...

Send us Fan Mail In the "Film Listology" entry to Special Topics in Media , hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry evaluate the legacy of Elia Kazan's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams literary stageplay of the same name, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Boasting a pair of explosive performances by Vivian Leigh ( Gone With the Wind ) and Marlon Brando ( The Godfather , On the...

Send us Fan Mail This week in our "Film Listology" season of  Special Topics in Media , Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry explore the innovation and influence of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction silent film  Metropolis . Can silent cinema maintain high cultural significance in an age of immersive media and high definition spectacle? The dialogic duo wrestle with the film to dete...

Send us Fan Mail Continuing the "Film Listology" seasons of Special Topics, the dialogic duo strategize the placement of the #78 film on the Super Index(TM), Christopher Nolan's 4-quadrant blockbuster released by Warner Bros. in 2008,  The Dark Knight . The middle act to Nolan's Batman trilogy,  The Dark Knight  won praise among audiences and critics, and became a zeitgeist tou...

Send us Fan Mail In this "Film Listology" episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry compose an argument both for and against reading the 1985 Academy Award winner for Best Picture as culturally significant to the history of film. Directed by Milos Forman and released in 1984,  Amadeus posits a lavish period biopic about the famed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the tension...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry assess the cultural significance of the 2008 Pixar Animated feature film WALL*E . Directed by Andrew Stanton and released to wide critical acclaim,  WALL*E centers on a labor robot fascinated by the haunting reveries of the now-vanished human civilization.  WALL*E imaginatively embodies qualities of the silent film in its...

Send us Fan Mail In our January RETURN to the Film Listology experiment, Scott McMurry reveals the next five films currently ranked by the analytics super index. What movies emerge as the Dialogic Duo debut the #80-76 entries? Should each of these be canonized in the Top 100, or is the data scheme exhibiting flaws in its matrix? Screen these film classic all month long and connect with the show on...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where science fiction breeds serious introspection... In this episode, host Garret Castleberry connects with science fiction film and media scholar Michael Harris to discuss his book Come With Me If You Want to Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films (Roman & Littlefield). Commemorating the book's one-year anniversary release, the author discusses...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where science fiction breeds serious discussion... In this episode, host Garret Castleberry connects with science fiction film and media scholar Keith M. Johnston to discuss his book Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury Press). Commemorating the book's ten-...to fifteen-year anniversary, the author discusses his research process, why science fi...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where free speech converges with film studies, one group of students fight the pandemic and enter the "forbidden zone" whereby their thoughts on Future Shock Cinema enter the public sphere. In "Part 2" of our student roundtable, we sit down with the second group of classmates to discuss their reaction to the future shock course, our film selections,...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where free speech converges with film studies, one group of students fight the pandemic and enter the "forbidden zone" whereby their thoughts on Future Shock Cinema enter the public sphere. We sit down with students from the class immediately following our final course screening to discuss their reaction to the future shock course, our film selections, and how...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where language gains new meaning, Special Topics looks back at a film that imagines forward to a point in which "first contact" with extraterrestrial life posits the unexpected arrival of the future. In this entrant to our "Future Shock" season, we examine 2016's Arrival . Twenty-first century sci-fi auteur Denis Villeneuve directs this adaptati...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where time marches forward...and backward, one protagonist stands between an open future and an open war on the past. John David Washington stars in the mind-bending blockbuster that never was, Tenet (2020). Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Tenet posits a world where the laws of physics both conceal and reveal ways in which the universe might finally unravel a...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where science fiction spectacle overwhelms science fiction narrative, one team emerges from deep space to confront the uncanny moviegoing valley. Amidst a career pivot from grounded dramas and espionage action films, global superstar Tom Cruise reinvented his career with a series of strategic choices increasingly oriented around the science fiction film genre. Following...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where society suffers the consequences of global biological contamination, one individual survives as the bridge between our recognizable past and an undetermined future. Box office superstar Will Smith stretches his action-comedy comfort zone to anchor I Am Legend , which was released in 2007 and directed by Francis Lawrence. Smith stars as Robert Neville, a U.S. veter...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where extinction events pose an imminent threat, one family enacts their survivalist instincts in a desperate ploy to stay alive. From director Ric Roman Waugh and starring his frequent leading man counterpart Gerard Butler, Greenland fell out of theatrical wide-release in 2020 when it ran up against the real-world threat in the COVID-19 global pandemic. Finding a secon...

Send us Fan Mail In this interlude "Future Shock Sound Bite", host Garret Castleberry briefly overviews key academic scholarship selected to accompany the educational approach to studying future shock science fiction film. Future Shock sound bites will function as complementary additions to the episodic Special Topics film analysis episodes. These supplemental minisodes provide "bit...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where future shock seemed certain to wind down, one professor will rise from the ashes to teach it again. And bring pizza! In this "Interlude" to the  Special Topics in Media season three focus on "Future Shock Film", host Garret Castleberry welcomes Scott McMurry to unveil the films selected for the latest iteration of the Future Shock Science Ficti...

Send us Fan Mail October is upon us! With scary movie season under way we continue our " Communicating Fears in Film " spotlight theme. Host Garret Castleberry is joined by Kyle Hammonds to analyze the spooky movie hall-of-fame fan-favorite, 1988's Beetlejuice , and its juggernaut legacy sequel in 2024's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . Each movie is directed by Tim Burton and feature...

Send us Fan Mail In this crossover episode, the Special Topics October spotlight series on "Communicating Fears in Film" continues with Part 2 of our conversation with horror scholar Simon Bacon, editor and contributor of the anthology  Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures (Lexington Books, 2023). Host Garret Castleberry explores movements within the horror gen...

Send us Fan Mail The Special Topics " Communicating Fears in Film " theme RETURNS with a 2-week limited engagement this October! First up, we transition from our Future Shock Film focus on Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem to an interview with the editor of the horror criticism anthology Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures , horror scholar Simon Bacon . In...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where the search for cataclysmic equations unlock universal truths, one dystopian data analyst faces apocalyptic existential crisis. Completing his unofficial dystopian tryptic, famed director Terry Gilliam ( Brazil , 12 Monkeys , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) posits a dystopian digital future in which corporate monoculture accelerates its convergence with societal d...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where free speech converges with film studies, one group of students fight the pandemic and enter the "forbidden zone" whereby their thoughts on Future Shock Cinema enter the public sphere.  Following the accelerated film class Special Topics in Media Studies , course designer and primary instructor Garret Castleberry is joined by a handful of students who suc...

Send us Fan Mail In a world where civil war long ago reshaped the Americas as we know them, the "Districts" of Panem grow restless in a fixed resource economy. Their only raison d'tre to be satiated by the annual games in which they embrace a lottery system that places their youth in mortal combat. Directed by Gary Ross and released in 2012, with a superstar performance by Jennifer...