Apr 06 2015
This Week’s Underappreciated Movies
Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.
Melissa’s Pick of the Week: I Declare War
Armed with nothing but sticks and their imagination, a gaggle of 12-year-olds immerse themselves in a game of Capture the Flag as a summer afternoon passes. It starts innocently enough, but soon the film starts showing how they see themselves in the game: carrying real guns instead of sticks, and throwing real grenades instead of paint-filled balloons. Soon, their game becomes as serious as the real thing, as they emerge from childhood innocence by learning what their friends are truly capable of. I Declare War basically takes all the horrors of actual war, and then uses kids to start asking the hard questions. It’s like Lord of the Flies meets Platoon, and it is thankfully blessed with some decent child actors. It’s a fresh take on the war movie genre and a truly impressive low-budget indie film.
Windy’s Pick of the Week: The Long Kiss Goodnight
Writer Shane Black kicked off his career with Lethal Weapon. Then he wrote fan favorite Monster Squad. After Last Boyscout and Last Action Hero, what did he write before he knocked it out of the park with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3? This movie.
Geena Davis is the woman who lost her memory 8 years ago. Samuel L. Jackson is the low-rent private investigator still poking around for clues about her past. That past comes looking for her at the same time that a minor car accident causes flashbacks to the person she doesn’t remember being. And that person…was a violent, dark, cynical thing. When her old self fully snaps back, you’ll see why Geena Davis won so many acting awards back in the day. In an unexpected and satisfying twist, Sam the Man is not the ass-kicking savior of the piece – that role belongs solely to Geena, who saves Sam, her daughter, and the United States all on the same night.
Apr 02 2015
Episode 60: All Up in My Limbic System
, with special guest: Barb Lind, David Justin, Gordon Smuder, Kelvin Hatle, Meghan Murphy, Noel Thingvall, Pat Harrigan, Sharon Stiteler
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This week, dear listeners, we bring you our fourth Off Topic extravaganza!
If you are a new listener, here’s what’s going on: our episodes are heavily edited, mostly because we drink while we record. Most of the things we cut out are things nobody will miss, but sometimes we simply go off on an odd tangent. So, we save all the fun clips until we can just make a whole episode out of them. It’s like Voltron with less planning.
The audio bits you are about to here were recorded between November 2014 and February 2015. The audio quality will vary, the subject matter will wander, and our drunkenness… well, you know the drill. You will also hear the sonorous voices of:
Pat Harrigan
Kelvin Hatle
David Justin
Barb Lind
Meghan Murphy
Gordon Smuder
Sharon Stiteler
Noel Thingvall
Please enjoy our fourth Off Topic celebration. More show notes behind the cut!
Mar 30 2015
This Week’s Underappreciated Movies
Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.
Windy’s Pick of the Week: The Court Jester
I’m conflicted recommending this as “underappreciated” since any fan of classic films will already know and love this movie. But – maybe you somehow missed it? Maybe you don’t think you like classic films? Maybe you’ve seen all the Big Dramas, and missed one of the best of the classic comedies? It’s medieval England and the throne has been usurped from it’s rightful ruler (a baby with a special birthmark) by evil King Roderick… I could try to summarize the plot but it’s slapstick, and farce, and word play, and spies. Glynis Johns is gorgeous, Danny Kaye is majestically adorable, and your eyes will pop out of your head at the young Angela Lansbury. Plus Basil Rathbone even! And he and Danny have one of the best sword fights ever put on film! It’s The Adventures of Robin Hood as a farce. With musical numbers.
Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Jodorowsky’s Dune
Back in the early 1970s, somehow the license for Frank Herbert’s space opera Dune fell into the hands of gonzo avant garde film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (the same man who started the midnight cult film phenomenon with El Topo). For the following two years, Jodorowsky gathered an army of “spiritual warriors” to design the artistic look and feel of the film. The project eventually fell apart, leaving behind an immense library of elaborate production art that has, until now, never really been seen by the public. Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary about the failed film production, and it is a fascinating oral history of a dizzying, bizarre project that had a profound influence on sci-fi films of the 1970s and 1980s. The documentary is fantastic: it is as entertaining and funny as it is profound and visually stunning.
