A Degree Absolute! episode forty-one: "Brass Target" with Keith Phipps

Our guest Keith Phipps is not just a sterling critic and a dad — an essential component when we cover a movie as openly paternal as 1978’s post-WWII espionage thriller Brass Target . He is also the author of new book examining the career of a singularly idiosyncratic actor. A Degree Absolute! endorses Keith’s book Age of Cage absolutely.

And Brass Target? Well, minute-for-minute, it has the most undiluted Patty McG purity rating of any film we’ve covered save perhaps for Braveheart. It’s much harder to find but worth the hunt for those such as we. Invest in physical media, people.

Brass Target

Screenplay by Alvin Boretz, adapted from Frederick Nolan’s novel The Algonquin Project

Directed by John Hough

Released December 22, 1978

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Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Gray Man"

Ryan Gosling did a lot of hahaha training for the not-so-colorful thrillerThe Gray Man. (Paul Abell/Netflix)

Look, I cohost a podcast about The Prisoner. When a new international espionage-themed thriller appears with a lead character named Six, I have to pay attention. The Netflick The Gray Man is one of two new releases this month containing what I believe to be a deliberate Prisoner reference. The other one is Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.

I loved Captain America: Civil War and The Nice Guys and Blade Runner 2049 and Knives Out. I appreciated No Time to Die. I wanted to love, or at least appreciate, The Gray Man. I tried to.

A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-eight: "A Time to Kill" with Linda Holmes

Matty McC meets Patty McG, in the battle you didn’t know you wanted to McSee!

A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and probably too much studio pressure for him to get away with anything weird. (Braveheart, released 14 months earlier, was a long time ago.) Company-man director Joel Schumacher seems to have saved all his creative chits for putting nipples on Batsuits in this era, turning in a serviceable but unshowy piece of work the summer in between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He sure does like to spray his actors with baby oil, though.

The good news is that our friend Linda Holmes is back this episode, lending her quadruple-threat expertise as (in increasing order of significance) a Sandra Bullock expert, and Grisham expert, an actual-albeit-no-longer-practicing lawyer, and of course as a world-class critic to our examination of the picture. Join us, won’t you, on this jurisprudent journey back to nineteen-niner-six.

A Time to Kill

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from John Grisham’s novel

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Released July 24, 1996

Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail!

Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts!

Follow @NotaNumberPod!

Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-seven: "Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend" with Jordan Morris

Terrible fonts! Racist tropes! Puppetty brontos! A doomed marriage! A movie that was made for no one! Plus Paddy McG phoning it in with hardly a single trilled R! Listen, and catch the opposite of a fever!

Prolific podmedian & Eisner Award nominee Jordan Morris joins us to carbon-date a seminal document of his dino-loving youth, Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend! Starring Rachel the Replicant, The Greatest American Hero, For He’s a Julian Fellowes, & Patty McG as the heel.

Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend

Screenplay by Clifford and Ellen Green

Directed by B. W. L. Norton

Released March 22, 1985

A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-six: "All Night Long" with Casey Erin Clark

MOOR COWBELL! Slip into your cardigan, roll yourself a jazz cigarette, and prepare to savor one of Patty McG's most sinister heel turns as our lovely theme-song singer Casey Erin Clark joins us to deconstruct All Night Long, director Basil Dearden's 1962 adaptation of Othello set in the London jazz scene. PLUS! Casey draws upon her expertise as a voice coach and musician to examine several of McGoohan's most distinctive vocal performances, and presents her findings to the court.

All Night Long

Screenplay by Neil King and Paul Jarraco

Directed by Basil Dearden

Released February 6, 1962

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Going Back to "Titanic"

The great Aisha Harris hosted this conversation wherein I had the good fortune once again to join my old pal Linda Holmes and my new pal Roxana Hadadi. I had a whole digression when we recorded about The Abyss, James Cameron’s first seafaring disaster romance, released only eight years before Titanic, and from which Titanic derives a lot of its technique and one or two of its sinking-ship set pieces.

Titanic was not a film anyone other than Cameron was pushing to make when he pitched it to Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic in early 1995. (He wanted a movie studio to pay for his dives to the wreckage, which constitute the first footage he shot for this movie.) It’s not a film where Fox would have simply hired another director to make it had Cameron acceded to the prevailing wisdom and decided to focus his energies on anything else. Cameron is also the person who cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so the movie is a Cameron project from whatever the shipbuilding equivalent of “soup to nuts” would be. I think it makes sense to foreground Cameron in any discussion of it. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan making a movie now that adolescent girls embraced and returned to again and again. That’s what happened in in the last two weeks of 1997 and the first quarter of ‘98, when the gearhead writer/director of the first two Terminator films, and Aliens, and True Lies, and yes, The Abyss, turned in a romantic tragedy where in the big boat doesn’t hit the iceberg until an hour a forty minutes into the movie.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Northman"

Alexander Skarsgård wears all-natural fibers in Robert Eggers divisive new VIking epic.

I was glad to join my old pal Glen Weldon and my new pal Kristen Meinzer for a lively debate vis-a-vis the mertis and demerits of Robert Eggers’s new VIking movie The Northman, but my key takeaway listening back to this is that 30 years ago Conan O’Brien was trying to get us to say Cone-ehhn, not Cone-anne. Today the ghost of Robert E. Howard would like for us all to remember that his barbarian is called Cone-anne.

None of us remembered this.

A Degree Absolute! episode thirty-five: "Kings and Desperate Men"

A movie for McGoohan die-hards that creator Alexis Kanner the Once-Boxed sued the makers of Die Hard over! Paddy McG and Kanner! Squaring off, with a Montreal radio show as their Thunderdome. A film with all the makings of a taut thriller involving hostages, a building wired with explosives, and McG in fine form: Rolling them Rs! Slamming them consonants! Playing drunk! Almost evincing sexual-adjacent desire! Features more overlapping dialogue than if you played Nashville, A Wedding, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller all at once!