e193. Cheesy Christmas Movies 3

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! If you’ve been listening to this show for a while then you know that the winter holidays mean that we celebrate a certain tradition on our show. Welcome to our annual cheesy Christmas movies special! Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, chances are you’ve seen the emergent genre that is…

e191. Pop Culture Casserole

As we transition from the fall holidays through the winter ones we’ve noticed that there was a bunch of pop culture things have just fallen through the cracks. Like, really a WHOLE lot of them. And what do you do when you have a bunch of odds and ends left over from Thanksgiving that don’t…

e190. Pour Some Sexy On It!

Ever since the advent of movies enterprising humans have asked that age-old important question “how can we use this for sex?” That’s not hyperbole; the modern motion picture dates back to 1893, and erotic films like Le coucher de la mariée (aka The Bride’s Bedtime) were being produced in wide release as early as 1896.…

e189. Dune: How to Control the Spice & Influence People

Dune may be the greatest science fiction epic ever written. The way you can tell is that if you go up to any Dune fan, they will tell you that… at length! And if you don’t care for it, almost certainly a fan will happily explain to you that you secretly love it and just…

e184. Bram Stoker’s Dracula & the Draculi that Followed

It’s Halloween season and time to do some spooky theme shows! Of course, we’ve tackled monsters several times on the show before, but we’ve never devoted the whole show to just one monster. Until now! Dracula, is one of the most adapted novels of all time and with movies, TV shows, comics, video games and……

e183. How to Read All of the Marvels

If you’re a comic book fan, one of the things people often ask you is “I want to get into comics. Where do I start? What should I read?” This is especially true if you’re someone who reads comics for a living. It’s even more true this last decade or so of box office dominance…

e181. Entertainment and Other Unions — IATSE Solidarity

Over the past year, our viewing consumption habits have changed a lot. We spent months indoors streaming everything — including new release films — largely through new media platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus. These new production models have drastically changed box office results, profit models, and production budgets that reverberate across the industry —…

e180. So, You Say You Wanna Host a Pseudoacademic Pop Culture Analysis Podcast (with Drinking and Swearing)

Oddly enough, for a show that is devoted to talking about pop culture, one of the things we don’t talk about so much is podcasts. In a way, podcasting might very well be the epitome of pop culture in the current cultural moment… and also… we are one! So, on today’s very special meta episode,…

Call For Comments: Let’s Talk About Film Unions

From Monica: When a movie ends, do you stay for the credits?  Not the cutscene at the end, Marvel.  But do you actually read the scroll of names that represent the hundreds of people who worked to bring that project to theaters? Or, if you tuned in at home, the nature of television flow means…

e179. ImproveReality?

Several weeks ago, we did a show on how stand-up comedy works in the middle of a pandemic. We talked about the transition that comedians went through to move a traditionally “in-person” art form to an entirely virtual environment. But what about other art forms? Lots of performances that at least seem to “require” a…