Special Topics in Media

Send us Fan Mail Our Film Listology exploration of variability in the cultural significance of film history continues with consideration of director George Roy Hill's ragtime-sounding, depression era "big con" feature The Sting  (1973). A winner of seven Academy Awards and a top commercial earner in the year of its release, The Sting provided audiences of 70s cinema a populist escap...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode, the Film Listology voyage sails onward with the commercial zenith of Disney's 2D Animation Studios era, The Lion King . Released in 1994, The Lion King handed the Mouse House one of its biggest hits of the decade, and more importantly, provided the kind of four quadrant entertainment capable of sustaining an intellectual property engine that continues to infl...

Send us Fan Mail This week Special Topics continues its Film Listology  focus on the '80s. No, not that '80s but 'an' '80s nonetheless. Hosts Garret and Scott discuss Otto Preminger's 1959 courtroom crime drama Anatomy of a Murder . In some ways, the film functions as a precursor to the #TrueCrime movement that will dominate popular interest in the late twentieth and...

Send us Fan Mail This week the Special Topics in Media Film Listology season returns to a silent era heavyweight in Hollywood history, Charlie Chaplin. Cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry examine 1921's The Kid , a film written, produced, and directed by Chapline, who also wrote and conducted the film's score. The Kid ebbs and flows through film history, which resulted in numero...

Send us Fan Mail This year marks the critical peak in Christopher Nolan's quarter century of commercial filmmaking. In this episode, cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry wind up the countdown clock to consider the wide-reaching cultural significance of Nolan's 2010 blockbuster Inception . Written and directed by Nolan, co-produced by Nolan and career-life partner Emma Thomas, and...

Send us Fan Mail In this Special Topics in Media Film Listology reveal episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry unveil the films results quantified by the McMurry SuperIndex (MSI) at ranking #90-86. Accompanying each entry, Scott provides data points for contextualizing each film's placement in the running, just as Garret reacts to the film's poll position as a cultural artifa...

Send us Fan Mail Continuing our Graphic Design and Portfolio Management mini-series, host Garret Castleberry introduces listeners to  graphic designer Caleb Cole . An alumni of Oklahoma Baptist University, Caleb unpacks his formal educational journey and professional training in visual design, and thoughtfully individualizes his experience in ways that will allow listeners to learn about the inter...

Send us Fan Mail In this extension to our Graphic Design and Portfolio Management mini-series, host Garret Castleberry connects with fellow academic and chair for the division of art and design at Oklahoma Baptist University, Corey Lee Fuller . Corey discusses the intricacies of a life (and lifestyle) devoted to art and graphic design. He helps unpack the evolution of art into contemporary profess...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Special Topics in Media bridges two themes tied to our Season 9 emphasis. Seasons 9 emphasizes two distinct professional arenas of digital communication, podcasting and graphic design. This week we blend and blur those words. We sit down with emerging graphic design artist Allison Garner. Alli shares parts of her creative journey, a somewhat untraditional path of...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series welcomes Dr. Christine Becker, co-host and co-producer of the Aca-Media Podcast . As she explains, Aca-Media provides a cross-disciplinary series that serves as an mediated brand extension for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).  Dr. Becker then walks us through Aca-Media 's collaborative product...

Send us Fan Mail This week we return to our Media Methods and Content Creation mini-series. Host Garret Castleberry interviews Scott Hardy and Cam Smith, cohosts of SpyHards -- A Spy Movie Podcast . Scott and Cam reveal the origins of their multimedia partnership and explain how their participatory roles within fan culture helped birth their current mission to engage audiences with the history of...

Send us Fan Mail "What is real? How do you define, real ?" In this episode, cohosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry unpack the wide-reaching cultural significance of 1999's The Matrix . Written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, produced and distributed by Warner Bros., The Matrix redirected popular cinema for the 21st Century through its ingenious remixing of philosophy...

Send us Fan Mail This week the Film Listology season of Special Topics in Media  continues with an all-timer that has evolved from lowbrow crowd-pleasing mainstream B-movie from 20th Century Fox and relatively unknown director upon release, Sir Ridley Scott, to a "Top-Shelf Classic" that finds increasing cultural cache for its simplicity, elegance, ingenious conception, and nightmarish a...

Send us Fan Mail The Film Listology season continues with a welcome break from recent genre form.  Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry revisit Woody Allen's Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay from 1977, Annie Hall . The film captured the hearts of film critics and belongs in the pantheon of great "New York movies". Indee...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry introduce uninitiated listeners to the unique career highlights of artist-director David Lynch. For the uninitiated, the dialogic duo walk through a chronological explanation of the director's nontraditional route to fame, contextualizing his journey as a lead-in to this week's feature film focus, Mulholland Dri...

Send us Fan Mail This week  Special Topics in Media resumes its focus on "Film Listology" with a discussion of director Lewis Milestone's 1930 war film  All Quiet on the Western Front . Winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director,  All Quiet might better be understood as an  anti-war film for its grueling depictions of the human cost of war. Based on the novel of th...

Send us Fan Mail The Special Topics in Media Film Listology season reveals a number of contemporary classics just in time for the holiday season. No, these films don't necessarily rock around the Christmas tree. But they do rock, and in some cases, heads will roll.  Hosts Garret  and Scott  announce and respond to the latest output from the McMurry SuperIndex, the #95-91 entrants to the amalg...

Send us Fan Mail The Film Listology season of SpecialTopics in Media continues with an abbreviated assessment of the critically adorned foreign langugage film from renown French director Jean Renoir, 1939's The Rules of the Game . Highly valued for its groundbreaking use of deep focus and dolly camera movement, Renoir's coveted love lorn prewar social satire employs artistic expression a...

Send us Fan Mail This week Special Topics in Media   resumes production on our Film Listology journey with the bad boy grandchild born out of wedlock between Film Noir and Golden Age Hollywood, writer/director Curtis Hanson and co-screenwriter Brian Helgeland's detective potboiler L.A. Confidential . Adapted from the same name novel by James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential reaped considerable word-...

Send us Fan Mail With the holiday season in full swing, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry step away from the dinner table long enough to partake in an alternative pastime, cultivating our Film Listology season on Special Topics in Media . In this episode, the dialogic duo revisit the recently invoked "Dad Movie Hall of Fame" to inaugurate what many consider the apex entrant to t...

Send us Fan Mail As our Film Listology season drops into the nineties, Scott and Garret examine The Great Dictator from 1940.   Falling in familiarity to many, The Great Dictator  wisely uses comedy (and tragedy) to spotlight and critique rising fascism in early twentieth century Europe. Charlie Chaplin writes, produces, and directs this satirical story of mistaken identity, brandishing his patent...

Send us Fan Mail ... Hosts: Garret Castleberry, Scott McMurry Producers: Garret Castleberry, Will McMurry (Audio Engineer), Alli Garner (Cover Art), Austin Foster (Music) Recommended readings paired with our Film Listology season: Rick Altman. Film/Genre . British Film Institute, 1999. Jim Collins, Ada Preacher Collins, Hilary Radner (Eds.). Film Theory Goes to the Movies, 1st Edition . New York:...

Send us Fan Mail The Special Topics in Media Film Listology season is BACK! After our Communicating Fears in Film  Octoberfest, hosts Garret Castleberry and Scott McMurry return to the realm of classic cinema to count down the algorithmic rankings computated by the "McMurry Super Index" (MSI) to determine an alpha populous movie rating system to end all movie rating systems. Having previ...

Send us Fan Mail This week Special Topics in Media teams up with the Okie Bookcast for a podcasting event! We're crafting a two-part discussion surrounding the adaptation of author David Grann's 2017 New York Times bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI into a major motion picture now in theaters from director Martin Scorsese. Produced by Apple...

Send us Fan Mail Part 2 of our interview with Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Dr. Kendall Phillips.  In conversation with our Communicating Fears in Film topic theme, Kendall discusses his own "origins" and how his path first intersected with horror cinema at the crucial threshold of childhood adolescence. Garret and Kendall discuss several horror texts that marked  rh...