e311. From Original to Ovation: Tracing the Threads of Musical Covers

Have you ever done that thing where you hear a song that’s a cover of another song you like, only to find out later that you have it backwards and the song you thought was the cover was the original and vice versa? That was actually one of the first arguments that Mav and his…

e310. The Biggest Oscar Upsets and Travesties

We did a couple of shows in the lead up to the Academy Awards last week. You’ve heard us talk about why the Oscars still exist and what function they serve as well as given our picks and reviews for this years nominees. But there’s one aspect of the Oscars that we haven’t really discussed,…

e309. The Human Kaiju: Translating the Unstoppable Monster To Human Scale

You know that movie where the hero loses someone he loves to an act of senseless violence and so he embarks on a path of carnage and destruction to gain revenge by killing his way through a never ended succession of henchmen and lackeys on a quest to kill the people responsible for the death…

e308. 2024 Oscars Predictions!

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been exactly a year since our last Oscar show. It’s kind of funny how that works out! Years being annual and all of that! In any case, the Academy Awards are next weekend and we’re a show celebrating popular culture so it seems like now would be a…

e307. Madame Web, Morbius, and Movies of Obligation

It seems silly to ask if you’ve seen Madame Web. We can see the box office returns and we know that you probably didn’t. BUT, if you’re listening to our show you almost certainly have heard of Madame Web. And we’re absolutely sure that you’ve heard of Morbius. And you probably didn’t watch that either.…

e306. Kaiju Kachoo: From Gojira to Godzilla Minus One

Last year, almost as if by accident, somehow the surprise hit of cinema was a relatively low budget Godzilla movie. The film, Godzilla Minus One, literally came out of nowhere. It dropped in November in Japan and the US in December, with a shoestring budget of about $10million(USD). And somehow it became a global sensation.…

e304. Barbie, the Oscars & Leavisism (What’s That Now?)

Last week the Oscar nominations came out and if you were hanging around the internet, you might have heard one story in particular… Barbie was snubbed. Everyone was talking about it… but was it? At the end of the day, it was nominated for eight awards and while Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie weren’t nominated…

e303. Our Lives in Pop Culture

It could be argued that the pop culture that you absorb makes you who you are. That’s certainly true of the hosts of this show. After all, it’s a show about pop culture hosted by pop culture nerds. So obviously we got this way… somehow! But how? On today’s show Mav takes Hannah and Wayne…

e302. So, A.I. George Carlin… WHY?!?!?

We’ve done shows on AI before and our feelings on how it is being used in art and creative endeavors. We’ve tried to not just be reactionary and alarmist about it the way the cultural zeitgeist can tend to be. In fact, we’ve made it clear that there are some really good positive uses for…

e301. Is Saltburn A Good Movie?

It’s no surprise that the US movie box office hit something of a slump last year. With few exceptions (ahem #Barbenheimer) most tried and true tentpole blockbusters underperformed (perhaps not as bad as most people claim, but that’s another issue). At the same time, in the last couple weeks we’ve had one of these weird…