sportsalcohol.com podcast

The SportsAlcohol dot com conclave assembled to discuss the Oscars for the movie year of 2024: What we'd vote for, what we predict will win, and who we considered SNUBBED, in the big eight categories and beyond. Hear Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse talk about Conclave, Emilia Perez, A Complete Unknown, Anora, The Brutalist, and more!

In our annual virtual get-together, the heaviest moviegoers of SportsAlcohol.com's roster discussed the movies on our collective Top 15 list for 2024, including but not limited to: Filming about architecture! Horrible bodies! Frawd marriages! Expressions of horniness! And many more. It's a long one but a good one; the episode also includes our outlier picks that only one person apiece voted for!

Belatedly venturing into a new decade for our summer flashback series, the SportsAlcohol.com crew looks back at the top 10 highest-grossing movies released in the summer of 1984! Recorded way back in the vintage summer of 2024, lost to time, and then recovered just in time for the tail-end of the year, this episode goes deep on mid-80s blockbusters featuring gremlins, ghosts, sports, spaceships, cops, breakdancers, and nerds (of course, there are always nerds on SportsAlcohol.com podcasts). So grab your proton packs, hold off on your electric boogaloos, and get ready to remember the summer movies of 1984!

Ten years ago, we did our first 20-years-ago flashback podcast about summer movies. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of these 20th anniversaries, we decided to circle back to 1994 and talk about ten movies that were very much not the ten highest grossers of that summer, including nascent superheroes, mad bombers, beloved and obscure indies, and a couple of natural born killers. Join us for another and even more eclectic trip down memory lane!

It's that time of year again: Time for the good people of SportsAlcohol.com to jump in their exclusively movie-related time machines and travel back 20 years for a look at the summer movies that were on top of the box office in 2004. Tom Cruise breaks bad! Hugh Jackman breaks worse! Michael Moore breaks records! Fox Searchlight puts out not one but two generational indie movies with their own individual backlashes! And who cares about Shrek when a new Riddick adventure is in the offing? These are the cultural events that Nathaniel, Jeremy, Jesse, and Marisa will be covering in great detail for our annual summer nostalgiafest!

Some months ago, Nathaniel, Jesse, and Marisa got together to talk about the then-new movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Since then, everyone's lives got real busy and Jesse didn't carve out any time to edit it. But now that Godzilla and Kong have made their way to HBO Max and will presumably remain there in heavy rotation for months, we've decided to belatedly unleash our episode on what still remains one of the biggest movies of the year. As a special bonus, we have a segment featuring an eight-year-old talking about how much she loved the movie. So enjoy this long-delayed episode as you rewatch Godzilla x Kong on Max!

In a follow-up to our recent Oscar special, the SportsAlcohol.com continues their discussion of the 96th Academy Award nominations, covering categories outside the big eight, which means nerdy discussion of music, animation, international features, cinematography, editing, and more!

The 2023-24 Oscar season has finally heading for the end, and the SportsAlcohol.com team has assembled to talk about our PREFERENCES, our PREDICTIONS, and our most treasured SNUBS in the top eight major categories! Place your bets, protect your faves, and listen up as we get our last build-ups and teardowns in on the films of 2023!

We may be arriving a little late with our discussion of the 15 best movies of 2023, but we still beat the Oscars to air! In a long and enthusiastic discussion of our collective favorites, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com take turns waxing rhapsodic over an eclectic group of 2023 movies that we loved, including major auteurs, exciting debuts, special-effects blockbusters, and small-scale indies. It's one of our biggest episodes ever and full of great streaming suggestions!

After a three-year hiatus to get our heads right, the SportsAlcohol.com pop-music contingent is back to talk about new discoveries, legacy acts, favorite albums, and more as we go through 2023 in music, featuring Boygenius, Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, The National, Belle & Sebastian, and... Joe Jackson?! Join Rob, Sara, Marisa, Jesse, and Jeremy as we try to make sense of our fractured and internet-addled music landscape!

Leapin' lizards! Everyone knows Godzilla is the King of All Monsters, but what this episode pre-supposes is... maybe he's also the King of All Media? With a new Toho Godzilla film in theaters, an American Godzilla movie coming in a few months, a Godzilla-related TV series streaming on Apple, and the big guy fighting the Justice League in the pages of DC Comics, Godzilla fans are, as they say, eating. After seeing Godzilla Minus One twice each, Jesse and lifelong Godzilla fan/expert Nathaniel sat down to talk about the overall state of the monster. 

Happy Labor day from your pals at SportsAlcohol.com! We got you a podcast episode! Earlier this summer, Ben convened a small panel of labor experts (by which we mean Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) to talk about the bumper crop of movies about companies making products. Air, Blackberry, Flamin' Hot, and Tetris all came out within months of each other -- what gives? In this episode, led by a bona fide MBA, we talk about each movie, which ones (if any) appealed to us and why, and the greater meaning of this trend. (We recorded this episode before The Beanie Bubble dropped but you know what? It's barely worth discussing anyway!) Please, spend your hard-earned Labor Day (or months after Labor Day) with us!

Our annual summer nostalgiafest and re-evaluation continues further into the 2000s, as Marisa, Jesse, Becca, Jeremy, and Ben go through the eye-popping 17-title list of movies that made over $100 million domestic back in the summer of 2003. Superheroes! Pirates! Car chases! Multiple cops on the edge! And... fish?! Take a stroll through the early-to-mid '00s with us and revisit the best and the dregs!

It's that time of year again, where the SportsAlcohol.com crew gets together and has a wide-ranging, semi-nostalgic, semi-modern discussion of the biggest summer movies of decades ago. This year, we're kicking off our pair of anniversary episodes with the 30-years-ago version, throwing it all the way back to the summer of 1993, where dinosaurs (of the special-effects variety) and dinosaurs (of the dad-movie variety) ruled the box office! Join Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Ben as we talk Ford, Stallone, Arnold, Goldblum, Dave, Hanks, Ryan, and Dennis (the Menace, that is).

With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny now in theaters and wrapping up Indy's story for good, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel decided to take a look at the whole Indiana Jones saga, starting with the new movie and working our way back through the other entries -- and some ancillary materials courtesy of Indy expert Nathaniel! Last Crusade is impugned and defended! Crystal Skull isn't hated! Temple of Doom is revered! Has the world gone topsy-turvy?! Listen and find out!

It's Oscar season! Well, for another few days, anyway! In the run-up to the 95th annual Academy Awards, honoring achievements in cinema for the film year 2022, our OSCAR EXPERTS (hint: actually just Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) gathered to talk about who WILL win, who SHOULD win, and, of course, the SNUBS! We're really just talking about our general thoughts on the silliness of the awards competition in eight major categories, plus some bonus rounds that go beyond. We've got Oscar fever and we invite you to catch it!

2022 is over, but have you caught up on all of the great movies it had to offer? Maybe not! Five SportsAlcohol.com regulars voted on their 20 collective favorites from 2022, and in this podcast we run through the upper reaches of the list to discuss what movies got to us last year, and why -- including both consensus favorites and outliers that only made one contributor's list! From Irish infighting to Spielbergian family dynamics to multiversal variants, there are streaming (and, in a few cases, still movie theater!) recommendations galore on this episode, from your pals Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse. 

Taking a break from endless movie-watching, the good people at SportsAlcohol.com celebrate another overwhelming year of Peak TV with a Ben-led discussion of their favorite shows in various categories, including workplace, romance, sci-fi, animation, and more! If you're looking for an absolute slew of TV recommendations, and a handful of vicious takedowns, look no further!

Watch out for the cultural impact! Avatar: The Way of Water is finally in theaters -- in fact, it's topped the box office for seven weekends in a row, garnered a Best Picture nomination, and has made over $2 billion worldwide. In light of this stunning failure to attract any audiences or acclaim, your SportsAlcohol.com crew hopped in their submersible and did a deep dive on the films of James Cameron, in all their water-y, tech-y, earnest glory. The Avatars, the Terminators, the Aliens, the various boats and choppers... they're all here in this two-hour-plus extravaganza that is still shorter than the runtime of Avatar: The Way of Water. Jesse, Marisa, Jeremy, Nathaniel, and Jeff are your guides through the floating mountains of Pandora and beyond!

We got a little bit behind editing this one, we admit: Our annual round-up of a dozen-plus indie movies from the summer blockbuster season is dropping closer to the end of the year. But you know what? That works, because this marathon episode includes tons of recommendations that might get lost in the end-of-year awards-movie shuffle. Enjoy our enthusiasm over indie horror, indie whimsy, indie young-adults-figuring-stuff-out, and all the rest! Featuring Aubrey Plaza, Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Maika Monroe, Marcel the Shell, Jessie Buckley, and more!

You thought the summer movie season was over?! Well, it is for 2022, but for 1992 it's beginning again! Join Nathaniel, Ben, Marisa, Jesse, Becca, and Jeremy as we revisit the top ten biggest summer hits from 30 years ago, featuring movies from Tom Cruise, Steve Martin, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Geena Davis, and Batman!

It's that time again! Your pals at SportsAlcohol.com are back to comb through the biggest but not necessarily best movies of 20 summers ago. We've worked our way up to 2002, a real mixed bag featuring masterpieces and junk piles alike. Cruise, Sandler, Bourne, Stitch, Lillard, and some kind of Ya Ya Sisterhood... the gang's all here! Join Marisa, Ben, Jeremy, Becca, Nathaniel, and Jesse as we relive the highs and lows of Summer 2002!

All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up: Sam Raimi put out his first new movie in nine years this summer, returning to the world of Marvel superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. We thought it would be a good time to revisit all of his older films and, in the process, analyze just how much of his voice can be heard in the MCU machine. And though Jesse did not edit this episode in a timely manner, Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange 2 is now on Disney+, so you can do a full Sam Raimi marathon, from Evil Dead trilogy to the normal-movie trilogy to the Spider-Man trilogy and beyond, from the comfort of home! Join Nathaniel, Jeremy, Marisa, and Jesse as we discuss every single Sam Raimi feature film, including his latest. Who defends Oz the Great and Powerful? Who was not feeling Darkman? Who loves The Quick and the Dead more now than as a callow teenager? Now dig on this and find out!

Every year, the SportsAlcohol.com crew of loyal Saturday Night Live viewers checks in to discuss a recent episode of the show and the season as a whole. For Season 47, we chose a late-season episode with host and musical guest Lizzo to assess the swollen 24-person cast and other changes as the show nears its 50th birthday.

It's that time of year again, finally: the 94th Annual Academy Awards are here, and so are Marisa, Sara, Jesse, and Jeremy, to discuss their predictions and preferences in the top eight big categories. We make movies better.

Better late than never, and still earlier than the Oscars! The SportsAlcohol.com crew convenes to discuss our collective list of the 15 best movies of 2021, including streaming suggestions galore! How many musicals, superheroes, kaiju, cartoons, morose motorists, and Bronco Henries made the list? Listen and find out!

We here at SportsAlcohol dot com were pretty excited about the recent release of The Matrix Resurrections, the 18-years-later legacy sequel to the Wachowskis' Matrix trilogy, written and directed by Lana Wachowski sans her sister Lily. After watching the movie in IMAX theaters and/or HBO Max, Jesse, Marisa, Ben, Jeremy, and Nathaniel got together to talk about how the new movie fits in with the legendary original, the controversial trilogy, and the garden of delights that is the full Wachowski filmography. So we start with The Matrix and then get into our full collective ranking of the Wachowski movies. Join us, won't you, after all these years... to go back to where it all started. Back to The Matrix!

In an episode we feely admit we should have recorded years ago, the SportsAlcohol.com pals talk about the full filmography of Wes Anderson, starting with his new movie The French Dispatch (now available on streaming/rental/disc/etc.!) and then working our way through a full ranking of his ten features films so far! Who put Life Aquatic much higher than anyone else? Who likes the stop-motion animation less than the others? What is our collective favorite? Listen and find out!

Our double-feature summer flashback continues with another thirty-years-ago sorta-nostalgia fest, as a whopping seven SportsAlcohol regulars get together and talk about a dozen-plus movies from the bygone days of summer 1991. The gang's all here: Michael J. Fox, Kevin Costner, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Leslie Nielsen, Ice Cube, and more! So think back to the days of Robin Hood trading cards and listen to us chat about 1991 summer movies!

Once again, the longest-running and most popular SportsAlcohol.com episode format returns to look at the biggest summer movies of 20 years ago. What the hell was going on in 2001? Sequels, dinosaurs, Diesels, and ogres, among others! Join Marisa, Jesse, Ben, Nathaniel, and Jeremy as we talk about the nine highest-grossing movies of that summer, because most of us refused to watch Dr. Dolittle 2. But we also include another half-dozen non-blockbusters that we genuinely love! It's another nostalgic yet skeptical trip down memory lane to summers past!

As a corollary to our recent discussion about BLACK WIDOW and CRUELLA, we went off on a little bonus tangent about box office reporting, streaming numbers, the ongoing release-plan evolution, and a bunch of stuff about modern entertainment journalism!

Disney put out two big-budget, franchise-driven, backstory-heavy summer movies starring two popular, multi-Oscar-nominated superstar actresses, so we decided to pair a discussion of Scarlett Johansson in BLACK WIDOW with a discussion of Emma Stone in CRUELLA and see what happened! We talk Marvel, Disney, villains, origin stories, directors in the franchise machine, star power and... SNL sketches?!

Ben and Jesse resume their podcast-within-the-podcast miniseries where each selects a movie and they watch them both together and talk about it. This time, we've set aside our usual business and sci-fi in favor of two movies about rock and roll, sort of: Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl and Walter Hill's Streets of Fire.

Is that show still on?!?!? YEP, IT IS, and some more members of the SportsAlcohol.com editorial orbit still keep up with Saturday Night Live on a weekly basis. So as part of our annual drop-in progress report, we checked in with the show between episodes 19 and 20 of its 46th season, reviewing the Keegan-Michael Key-hosted episode and looking back to other ups and downs of Season 46, ahead of the season finale airing on Saturday!

After a long, long, long awards season, the Oscars are finally almost over. But before we can all move on with our lives, the SportsAlcohol.com awards pundits are here to talk about, well, actually mostly which performances and movies in the big eight categories that we think should win, along with some predictions and, more often, complaints about movies that were unfairly overlooked. Do we all hope Carey and Chadwick win the big prizes? Are we united in favor of Mank? Who the hell still wants Aaron Sorkin to win one? Listen and find out!

To mark the momentous occasion of Godzilla fighting King Kong again, we convened another SportsAlcohol.com roundtable, featuring a lifelong fan of Godzilla *and* Kong and multiple viewings of the new movie, to talk about this latest installment in the Warner Bros. MonsterVerse.

Well, it's finally and improbably here: the four-hour Zack Snyder-approved version of his superhero opus JUSTICE LEAGUE has hit HBO Max, so Rob, Ben, Jesse, and Marisa watched all four hours and tried to process our experience with this rambling, shapeless, weirdly impressive superhero epic. We talk about everything from Jack Kirby and Joss Whedon to toxic workplaces and Watchmen. And at two hours, it's much less time-consuming than the movie itself!

Uncertain over how the rest of the year would go, we made a podcast episode in August of 2020 about the best movies of the year. But hey, it turned out there were plenty more great movies to come! So here's our supplementary podcast covering our collective favorites (and oddball outliers) from the rest of 2020, including talk about Nomadland, Soul, Tenet, Sound of Metal, and more!

Silence of the Lambs turned 30 on Valentine's Day this year, so a bunch of us decided to celebrate by watching this romantic movie (distanced, of course), plus various other Hannibal and/or Jonathan Demme movies, and then got together (distanced, of course) to talk about them. It's a pivotal movie for both Demme's career as a director and Hannibal Lecter's career as a major villain. Something something eat some fava beans and listen!

It was a weird year for everything, including music. But that didn't stop the SportsAlcohol.com crew from getting together (virtually) to discuss some of the artists and albums we listened to a lot this year, including Phoebe Bridgers, Waxahatchee, HAIM, Fiona Apple, and Run the Jewels -- plus thoughts on Taylor Swift, a bunch of random reissues, how our listening habits changed, and more!

Continuing our look back at the career of David Fincher in the shadow of his new movie MANK, this episode includes deep-dive explorations of FIGHT CLUB, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, PANIC ROOM, THE GAME, and more!

The recent movie Mank marks David Fincher's 10th movie as director -- or 11th, if you count the big-budget sequel that started his career and that he's since disowned. We figured his new movie, something of an outlier in his career, would be a good time to look back on his all of his features so far, in another two-part episode. In part 1, we take a look at Mank, plus other outliers like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Alien 3; and his triptych of serial killer films: Seven, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Our career-long deep dive into Martin Scorsese's storied career continues with conversations about the genre ones (Shutter Island; Cape Fear), the Leo ones (The Departed; Wolf of Wall Street; Gangs of New York; The Aviator); the religious ones (Silence; Kundun; Last Temptation of Christ); and more!

Over a year in the making, the SportsAlcohol.com crew finally dedicates a full episode to the films of Martin Scorsese... make that TWO whole episodes! In part one of our comprehensive career retrospective, we discuss the recent anniversaries of Goodfellas and Casino, then go from there to tackle The Irishman, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and Bringing Out the Dead.

The biggest superhero movie of the year hit HBO Max (and... movie theaters?!) on Christmas, and took the internet's biggest complainers by storm! But the nerds at SportsAlcohol.com have some bones to pick with the bone-picking, and also their own fresh and wonderful thoughts on this ambitious mixed bag of a sequel. Listen up as Rob, Jon, Jesse, and Marisa talk everything WW84!

Robert Zemeckis put out one of the more disappointing sorta-big movies of 2020 with The Witches, so we convened a special career-spanning episode of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast to talk about his career in greater depth--both how the new movie falls short, and why we had high expectations for it to begin with. Join Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Jeremy as we talk about EVERY Zemeckis movie so far!

With the recent release of Sofia Coppola's latest movie On the Rocks, the SportsAlcohol.com crew decided it was time for a comprehensive career review, discussing all seven of her films (including her new one), plus various ephemera. Bill Murray! Kirsten Dunst! ScarJo! Andy Garcia?! They're all here for this lively discussion and appreciation.

Look, it's been a long sort-of quarantine for everyone, including your friends at SportsAlcohol.com, and we haven't all completed the projects we thought would be our silver linings for this extended period of inactivity. For example: Thinking we could all use some laughs during a pretty dark time, a bunch of us recorded a comedy-centric podcast about what makes us laugh, back in the spring, when it seemed like maybe we'd be dealing with a pandemic through the summer. Jesse's neglect in editing this long but fun-filled episode turned out to be prescient, as it's now almost six months later, and here we still are, dealing with the pandemic, and maybe still in need of laughs? So here's Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sara, Jeremy, and Jon talking about, and analyzing, the kind of comedy (well, mostly comedy) that makes us laugh now, has made us laugh in the past, and we hope will make us laugh again in the future.

In the long-awaited, long-delayed conclusion of our 1999 Albums saga, Marisa, Jesse, and Magnetic Fields expert Ben take a look at the band's most acclaimed and best-known work. But is it actually their best album? Ben's complex answer may surprise you!

To celebrate the recent release of long-awaited trilogy-creator Bill & Ted Face the Music, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com got together to talk about the new Bill & Ted movie, discuss our wide range of opinions of how well it works, and then have a broader discussion about the state and mechanics of movie trilogies these days.

Well, after two and a half years of blown release dates and rumored (but not actual) reshoots, the final installment in the original X-Men movie series is here, as THE NEW MUTANTS debuts in movie theaters mid-pandemic. Four core members of the SportsAlcohol.com crew saw the movie--safely and not in traditional public screenings!--and decided to send off this series by doing what we always do: talking extensively about the X-Men.