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Filtering by Category: podcasts
I haven't seen Alex Garland's Ex Machina yet, but I can't wait.
I was honored to be invited to join Tasha Robinson and Keith Phipps to discuss The State of Science Fiction in the movies on this week's episode of The Dissolve podcast. The also includes a discussion of documentaries and is thus named for a Werner Herzog phrase I love. A lot of ums from me, a lot of insight from Tasha and Keith. Listen here.
I was glad as always to join Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, and – for the first time – Barrie Hardymon on this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Here are my notes and ephemera from this exciting episode. Some of it is stuff I jotted down to say but forgot or didn't get the chance, and some of it is stuff I wish in hindsight that I'd been smart or quick enough to say on the fly. (I keep pounding so-called smart drinks hoping that I shall one day develop the ability to think at the speed of conversation.)
Anyway! I wanted to read this brief passage from Nick Hornby's new novel Funny Girl, our primary topic of discussion, because I think it encapsulates the spirit of the book succinctly. It's the first meeting between the book's heroine, Barbara (who adopts the stage name Sophie Straw), and her agent, Brian:
"I want to be a comedienne," said Barbara. "I want to be Lucille Ball."
The desire to act was the bane of Brian's life. All these beautiful, shapely girls, and half of them didn't want to appear in calendars, or turn up for openings. They wanted three lines in a BBC play about unwed mothers down coal mines. He didn't understand the impulse, but he cultivated contacts with producers and casting agents, and sent the girls out for auditions anyway. They were much more malleable once they'd been repeatedly turned down.Read More
Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis in Jupiter Ascending (Murray Close/Warner Bros.)
I was happy as always to join my buddies Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Glen Weldon on this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein we dissect Jupiter Ascending, the "original" sci-fi epic from auteur siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski from which audiences flocked away in droves last weekend. (I reviewed the film for The Dissolve.) We also try to figure out what people mean when they talk about "chemistry" among performers onscreen.
As always, I thought of more stuff I could've mentioned after we taped. I must disagree with my Pal-for-Life Glen we he praises Jupiter Ascending as being light on exposition, wherein stuff is "asserted, not explained," but I do believe in leaving some stuff on the table vis-a-vis world building.
One of the consequences of having sequels and prequels and reboots to almost everything now is that it's very difficult to sustain any sense of wonder or mystery. (We really didn't want to know about the Midichlorians, did we?) But the Matrix spinoff The Animatrix – shorts written and directed by animators handpicked by the Wachowskis – builds out the world of The Matrix much more satisfyingly than its own feature sequels do. These shorts are on DVD; they were released online for free in the run-up to the release of The Matrix Reloaded in May 2003, and you can still watch four of them gratis – including the best one, Mahiro Maeda's "The Second Renaissance."
For our chemistry experiment, I brought in a few more clips than we could use. This is an inexhaustible topic, but these are the ones I thought I might have something to say about on this particular day.
William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick & Nora Charles in 1934's The Thin Man and its five sequels. File under: Chemistry, romantic and spousal.
Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg as Steed & Mrs. Peel, from The Avengers, circa 1965-7. The show ran from '61 to '69, giving MacNee a succession of partners during that span, but the Rigg Era seems to be the most fondly remembered. It's certainly my favorite. File under Chemistry, Professional and Sexual.
And of course, the Riggs & Murtaugh of film criticism, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. File under Chemistry, Professional and Adversarial.
Finally, I can't believe I misidentified my own Justified viewing club, The Justified League of America, as the Justified Society of America. We're Silver Age, not Golden Age. Chalk it up to nerves.
I was happy as always to be the fourth crewmember on this week’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein regular panelists Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Glen Weldon discuss Christopher Nolan’s thrilling (to me, anyway) sci-fi opus Interstellar. We also talk about some of the other films that’ve angled for a plausible approach to sending our species beyond what the early rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky called “the cradle of humanity.”
Read MoreEven this movie was good this summer. 2014 has been a great year for popcorn flicks.
I was thrilled as always to fill the fourth chair on this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein we discuss the latest -- and funniest, and unlikeliest -- Marvel Studios blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy. Even I had no idea who any of these characters were when I sat down to watch this thing.
We also discussed the curious, evergreen phenomenon of Things So Bad They Are Good, a complex topic that did not in this case stray too far from the TV movie that inspired this latest iteration of it, Sharknado 2.
DISCLOSURE: I have not seen Sharknado 2. Nor, indeed, have I seen Sharknado. I have, however, seen the movie wherein Steven Seagal pledges to take the crooked U.S. Senator who killed his wife and put him in a coma for seven years... to the bank.
...to the U.S. Savings and Loan Bank.
Wait, I think I messed up the line. In any case, I'm sorry our discussion did not proceed in a direction that would've allowed me to play this clip from Seagal's 1990 hit Hard to Kill.
If we all sound unusually somber, it's because this episode was recorded on my birthday! Stream it or download it here.
FURTHER READING: My NPR review of Lucy from two weeks earlier. And my Dissolve review of Jinn and my Village Voice review of Brick Mansions, both from back in April.
Logan Hill's great story about the new expectation that male film stars sport gym-buffed bodies is here, but it was published in Men's Journal, not Men's Health as I fear I said on the show; my apologies.
Tickets to What's Making Me Happy This Week -- the smart stage sex comedy The Campsite Rule, by Alexandra Petri and starring my best gal Rachel Manteuffel -- are available here for a mere $20. If you're in or near Washington, DC or will be before the show closes on Aug. 16, you'll be doing yourself a big favor if you go.
And this episode of The FringeCasting Couch was recorded lst Tuesday afternoon, during a brief interval between a depressing visit to my doctor's office and the two fitness classes I had to teach that evening; one boxing and one boot camp. This were necessarily verbal-instruction-only editions of said classes for me; doctor's orders. Nothing feels worse.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of Live Action Theatre. Their show in the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, The Continuing Adventures of John Blade, Super Spy, was my favorite last year. I liked their new one, The Tournament, so much that I'm leaving to see it for a second time right now. Here's the original Fringeworthy post.
I had them on the podcast last year, too.
For the fifth consecutive year, I'm running the Washington City Paper's coverage of the Capital Fringe Festival here in DC, manifest mainly through a blog previously known as Fringe & Purge that we decided this year to rename Fringeworthy. In 2012, I started The Fringe & PurgeCast to accompany that blog; its rebranding this summer forced me to rethink the podcast's name, too. The Fringe & PurgeCast is dead; long live The FringeCasiting Couch.
I'm not cross-posting most of the stuff I'm doing for Fringeworthy, but I'm going to put up a couple of recent episodes of the podcast that I thought were particularly fun. This one, which I recorded last night with Twanna A. Hines, whose show is called I Füçkèð Your Country, is one of those. The original post is here.
Audie Cornish and Linda Holmes compete in the Wonder Woman quiz administered by Glen Weldon, June 24, 2014.
This was my enviable view for most of Pop Culture Happy Hour's special 200th episode live show at NPR headquarters last month. But I did have the honor of briefly ascending the stage to join All Things Considered film critic (and my Washington City Paper colleague) Bob Mondello in absolutely crushing NPR's Tanya Ballard Brown and Petra Mayer in the blockbuster movie IMDB plot keyword quiz conceived by PCHH host Linda Holmes. That's about halfway through the quiz segment of the show, posted today.
The highlight of the show is the Wonder Woman crucible designed by my Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon, against which both Audie Cornish and Linda were tested. Playing from the audience, I actually did relatively well, because I remembered a 13-year-old Hank Stuever story from the Washington Post about when the monthly Wonder Woman comic got its first openly gay writer & artist, Phil Jimenez. I can't find a link to its original WashPo version, but it's reprinted in Hank's book Off Ramp, which I recommend, for whatever that's worth.
Thanks as always to Linda, Glen, and Stephen Thompson for having me on the show.
