The Wages of Cinema

Look, or, no wait, LISTEN to the SKY! It's a BIRD! It's a PLANE! It's your neighbor with that thingamabob that he won't turn off and is ruining your weekend! No, it's THE WAGES OF CINEMA! We have been in the Fortress of Solitude being tended to by faithful robot companions (wait, that almost sounds a little unseemly, they are innocent robot creations, we promise! They're even voiced by Alan Tudyk)...

I mean... It's one thing to have a Merc with the Mouth, or a, uh, very well put-together Canadian professional drunkard who has some wicked cool claws (and/or Whiskey D*** of the Claws, ask your doctor if that is a problem, we digress), or, in this case, BOTH! It's another to have the Wages of Cinema re-assemble and talk with depth and enthusiasm (and with SPOILERS! ::Wolverine claws Snik-Snik 10...

So, another Marvel movie, by Marvel, called The Marvels! like a turkey we go Marvel-Marvel all over your eardrums! We went to the latest Ip collision of Captain Marvel, characters from Wandavision and Ms Marvel, and... other things. There are things to like about it... we think(?) Point is, you got to tap your bracelets together and transport yourself into Jack, Trash-Panda Korey and Guest Star Ma...

TITLE FIGHT! Wait, no, that's another weekend... Or, is it? To be fair and sure, the hype around this supposed "double" feature, which is kind of cracked given that one (albeit PG-13) Family comedy-fantasy is something that is for everyone, while the other is a... made for grown-ups, highly cerebral, politically provocative and visually and intellectually audacious spectacle... but isn't that also...

::WHOOSH THERE ARE SPOILERS 38 MINUTES IN (and a bit of Kevin Smith telling a Superman story) SO GOTTA GO NOW!! WHOOSH! Heard me go WHOOSH, that's my speeding-past sound! WHOOSH AGAIN!:: Jack, Andrew and Matt saw The Flash. Did we see it so you don't have to? Or, in this timeline, did we have fun? Are there now two Jacks, one who praises the film and one who criticizes it with a morose boredom? Or...

(SPIDERSPOILERS 12 MINS IN) How about those Canon Events, huh? Time to dig in to another chapter in the saga of that kid from Brooklyn who is the one and only Spider-Man, Miles Morales... in his Spider-Verse. But what about that Gwen Stacy, what's she been up to? I don't mean how some of you think of Gwen Stacy, I mean the Verse where she's Spider-Gwen.... Or, wait, what about the verse where ther...

Have we been gone a *long* time? Sometimes it feels that way. As long as the Guardians? They were in a.... couple of things last year, apparently! Were we? We'd.... have to double check our files for that. Point is, the Guardians of the Galaxy, those lovable rapscallions Star Lord, Gamora, Rocket, Drax, Mantis, that guy with the arrow, and the Partridge in the Pear Tree, they're all here! And Jame...

SUSPIRIAAA-AAAA-AAAAA.... And some of you are saying "wait, didn't you guys *do* a Suspiria episode?" And by some of you, yes, we mean you, Timmy. But really, that was so long ago (our "Cinema Immersion Tank" series, which we will link below in the description), some of you weren't born yet! Okay, some of you were, but did you know what it meant then to be under the spell of a coven of witches out...

What is this.... A CENTER FOR PODCASTS!?! Jack, Trash-Panda Korey, Andrew and Matt the Conqueror saw the thirty... third! Or is it thirty-first? Who keeps count? In another multiverse, there are 3 movies! Or 333! Anyway, we saw the latest movie from those worker ants at Marvel (The Queen is always Michelle Pfeiffer, sorry Kevin Feige), which finds Scott Lang, his daughter Cassie, the Van Dynes and...

And now for the.... well, you gotta listen to hear one of Jack's all time major blunders (which he kept in the final recording, for the record!) Here are the top 10 films of the year for Jack and Korey (featuring time-stamps if you'd like to jump to a particular part of the talk); there ARE SPOILERS FOR SALE! SPOILERS FOR SALE! Okay we'll stop now.... JACK: 10) FIRE OF LOVE (6 mins in) 9) THE NORT...

Whoa! This past year went by pretty fast, eh? Seems like it went the speed of a Lydia Tar musical concerto - or a Pete Mitchell flight (who's he? Look it up, it's easy to do)- or an Elvis wiggle - or an Evelyn dildo hot-dog finger fight! Or... okay, we didn't go with the obvious of women talking so fast (which they don't really don't do, that's not our problem with that movie, or do we have one......

There was a time, if you'll gather round our podcast fire, when you had movie studios looking for anything with Vampires, and as for comic books... well, I guess Men in Black was an exception (we forgot to mention that in the episode so I'm mentioning it here, correction huzzah), but that's actually a good example of what we mean when saying comic books were neither hated or a priority for studios...

I know what you're thinking: How do those Wages fellers put out so many of those podcast episodes? You must be looking at us like that thumbnail of M'Baku you see on here just puzzled as to how we can record and put out so many.... Okay okay we get it, you've missed us! Or... maybe you didn't realize we went away. We get that, too. Maybe more so. Where the hell was I... Oh yeah, podcasting, how do...

(spoilers 12 minutes in) (Korg): Gather around, kids. Once upon a time, there were four industrious, thoughtful, not unwell or poorly fragrant people who had thoughts on movies, and they shared them in forceful but polite conversation with one another on a strange, easy-to-use application called a (checks notes) Podcast! The four were Jack, a big, gentle man with a loud laugh, cinema knowledge and...

Is Elvis the King of Rock and Roll? He disputed that (maybe, probably, when he was sober) himself I suppose. He was also so many things to so many people - and in the case of the two movies we have to talk about here in this new VERSUS episode of the Wages of Cinema, where we watch the slightly obscure John Carpenter (!) directed ELVIS starring Kurt Russell and Season Hubley (as Priscilla) and the...

Because we at the esteemed Wages of Cinema podcast are all about having the most timely and topical of uh topics, we just watched the new FIRESTARTER (cue up Prodigy song maybe you remember if you're under 30- but not older than 54), the new movie that is burning up the box office charts! And by burning up, we mean that they burned up their entire budget worth of money because they're not making t...

Is it Animal, Mineral or Vegetable? Is it a Sam Raimi film or a Marvel production? As it is in this universe or another universe or the other one where the fingers typing this are actually sentient poodles, it's a combination of the two. The question of course comes as this: does Marvel Studios, the most successful company currently working within the Hollywood studio system, let a filmmaker who p...

You see a group of Podcasters, but I see a story.... of recording a podcast. But maybe in another universe we are playing Bridge or in another one we are all fighting on a hockey rink or our very own Guest Star Matt has become Emperor and makes decrees with his Cat Advisor, or maybe there's another where Jack and Korey are.... I don't even want to go there! Anyway, Everything, Everywhere All At On...

Riddle us this, listeners: What is a thing that flies around and never comes down? It's.... ah, screw it, we were never good at riddles anyway. But what we are pretty good at at the Wages of Cinema is breaking down a franchise that has been retrofitting and reformatting and re-suiting (and re-taping as it turns out) a story and characters and world that's been going since 1939! What does Bob Kane...

MAMBO! LISTO! GO! As Poe Dameron might say... *Somehow*, the Wages of Cinema ranking of the best of the year/Oscar nominations talk... has returned(!) Jack and Korey knew this would be one of the longer episodes, but certainly THIS long? Where's the eggplant emoji when you need it? But when you have such a wonderful crop of films, from all across the world and over so many genres, from Japanese co...

It's here! At last! Were you.... even asking for it? Well, it comes but once a year, at any rate (though in this case it's an Oscar/awards season that technically takes films from March 2021 to December of 2021, so no Judas and the Black Messiah even though that was 2021 February oh hell go listen to our last year podcast for that one, episode... you can figure it out pretty easy, we think). We, J...

Mr. Anderson..... (cough cough) ok we've done the impression long enough. So, what's it like to get plugged back in to a franchise? What kind of a series have the Wachowskis given us up to this point, and is this fourth time around (with sister Lana, minus Lily) the one that brings it back to the greatness of the original? What does going back to the well even mean? And why does Jack bring up Free...

Organic and/or Mechanical Web-shooter SPOILERS will be springing out this way and that from many parts of the body you don't even know you had at 23:30 minutes in. Good? Cool! Friendly Neighborhood Podcasting continues! So, how to make sense of a world where characters from the multi-verse(s) of Spider-Man films come into play in one big blow-out Reunion special like No Way Home? Is there any sens...

Who am I? Actually, that's the wrong personage? Who are WE?! No, sorry, that's too strong, what are we, Venom? No, who we are exactly should be no mystery - have we have secret disguises all this time... maybe we have, mwa-ha-ha... - but for real, we are Jack and Trash Panda Korey, and with the upcoming release of the third Spider-Man movie (and just a nostalgia for 2000's New York pizza prices an...

What's bigger than Why are we Here? Who created the Earth and Heavens and those weird Beast Wars characters we take for granted (here called uh looks at notes ah yes Deviants)? And what is up with the Bollywood career of that one actor who looks like his father-grandfather-great-grandfather? We saw Eternals! This being the full crew - Jack, Andrew, Trash-Panda Korey and "Guest-Star" (Uni-Mind) Mat...