Words and Movies

SorkinFest continues with the two films that Aaron Sorkin wrote after his series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was cancelled after only one season. (Interestingly, the same people who seemed kind of disappointed in Studio 60 as it aired are viewing it a little more generously in retrospect.) First we take a look at 2007's Charlie Wilson's War , the more-or-less true story of Congressman Charlie Wi...

It's time for SorkinFest! For the next few weeks, we're going to talk about the work of Aaron Sorkin, and in our usual fashion we're going to do it in a way that the films are paired up by common threads. This week we're looking at the films that were directed by Rob Reiner. First up is the 1992 film A Few Good Men , starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollak and Jack Nicholson. This one was ad...

Don't you hate it when ALL your software is just being so...jerkstore?  Just me then? Okay.  In this episode we take a look at a pair of films that were adapted from books. That, in and of itself, isn't unusual, however while the usual rap on this sort of thing is "The book was better," Sean makes an argument that in this case, it's the other way around. Subplots and overly-descriptive t...

In this episode we take a look at a pair of films that center themselves around a single piece of music. First we have 1992's The Mambo Kings , directed by Arne Glimcher. It's a bittersweet film that gives us a look at a pair of Cuban immigrants who briefly achieve success as musicians in the 1950s, due to a song that one of them has written about a lost love. There's a story to that lost love, ho...

Different eras of film can often be traced to specific "generations" of directors who came up together and had similar mindsets, and while that's true, sometimes they can be attached to  technological advances, some of them not initially part of the industry. For example, with the rise of teen culture and a general boom in consumerism, the drive-in movie exploded in popularity, which meant th...

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were contemporaneous civil rights icons of the 1960s, and they had very different images in the eyes of the general public. In this episode we look at Spike Lee's biopic Malcolm X (1992) and Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014), which, while not a biopic specifically, gives us a close look at Dr. King's motivations and methods. And we discover that philosophically, the...

We have to start at the beginning! Sean's beginning, that is. We go back to the year of his birth and check out a couple of science fiction movies that were both released in 1968, but which have very different outlooks on what the future is going to be like. Sit back and enjoy as we discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Planet of the Apes .  This being our first "real" episode, we do...

Welcome to our inaugural episode! Sean Gallagher and Claude Call introduce themselves to you and talk about what makes them so smart (hint: one of us is SMART, the other is S-M-R-T), plus what sort of stuff we'll be talking about, the overall approach we'll be taking to the films we discuss, and a preview of our first three episodes.