Podcasts about Glass onion

Humans are enthralled by stories about murder. And the mysteries we tell these days – like in the Glass Onion films or TV shows like The Residence – often follow a blueprint set by the iconic Agatha Christie. It turns out, Christie knew a whole lot about science. In this episode, we speak to Dr Kathryn Harkup, a chemist who writes about the science behind famous works of literature. Her newest book, V is for Venom: Agatha Christie's Chemicals of Death, is her sequel to A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, exploring Christie's expert use of dark chemistry. She tells us about some of the poisons Christie used in her books – the brutal, the medicinal and the obscure – revealing Christie's extensive chemical knowledge. But be warned: this conversation gets quite dark. Listener discretion is advised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the final episode of the Big Screen Bracket Challenge! In this episode, we pit Harry Potter's Butterbeer, The Big Lebowski's White Russian, Glass Onion's Cuban Breeze, and Casino Royale's Vesper Martini against each other to determine the ultimate movie cocktail for pairing with a cigar. Grab your favorite cinematic cocktail and join the show! Pairings Randy: Butterbeer Old Fashioned & Alma Fuerte Colorado Claro

TV writer turned novelist Jordan Roter joins Zibby to discuss MOMS LIKE US, a sharp, funny murder mystery set in the cutthroat (and neck-lifted) world of elite Los Angeles private school moms. Jordan shares how a frustrating back-to-school night and real-life glamping trip inspired this story; why she wrote it as a novel instead of a TV show; and the complicated, messy truths behind modern motherhood, competition, and community. She and Zibby dive into the book's Big Little Lies-meets-Glass Onion vibes, the challenges of writing multiple points of view, and what it's like to fictionalize familiar spaces without offending the carpool line…Purchase on Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3Z5dNcRShare, rate, & review the podcast, and follow Zibby on Instagram @zibbyowens! Now there's more! Subscribe to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books on Acast+ and get ad-free episodes. https://plus.acast.com/s/moms-dont-have-time-to-read-books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're turning our attention to Peter Sellers'penultimate film (if we disregard those pesky ‘flogging a dead Panther' posthumous farragoes), and the film for which he came closest in his career to carrying off a Best Actor Oscar: Being There from 1979.  Very much a passion project for Sellers, the film, directed by Hal Ashby (Harold & Maude) and based on the novel by Jerzy Kosiński, centres around the character of Chance, a gardener and late middle-aged ward of an elderly man whose death throws Chance's entire world into disarray, if he didbut know it. Chance has the mental age of a child and is cut off from the outside world; his limited understanding of anything outside his immediate surroundings is entirely informed by what he glimpses on TV.  Through a series of incidents, Chance (now rechristened Chauncey Gardiner after a misunderstanding) is thrust into the world of the American political establishment when he is invited to stay at the home of dying billionaire Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) and his wife Eve (Shirley Maclaine). He meets the President (Jack Warden) and somehow he is assumed to be some sort of oracle, with people believing his every banal utterance to be invested with great truth and meaning.  Podcaster Antony Rotunno (host of Glass Onion podcast) joins Tyler to talk about the film and tries to work out quite why it gets under his skin.

Send us a textWelcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:10 points: Get the year dead on!7 points: 1-2 years off4 points: 3-5 years off1 point: 6-10 years offGuesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: Funky Donkey by Beastie Boys (2011)Song 1: Glass Onion by The Beatles (1968)Song 2: Baby, I Love Your Way by Big Mountain (1994)Song 3: Because I Got High by Afroman (2000)Song 4: Scientist Studies by Death Cab for Cutie (2000)Song 5: Kisses on Fire by ABBA (1979)Song 6: Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (1984)Song 7: Sigma Oasis by Phish (2020)Song 8: Sweater Weather by The Neighborhood (2012)Song 9: Footsteps in the Dark by The Isley Brothers (1977)Song 10: Mrs. Train by They Might Be Giants (1994)

Brick. The Brothers Bloom. Looper. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. Knives Out. Glass Onion. Oh, and maybe the most well-regarded episode of television in modern history. Join Devin Diazoni and Paola Zavala as they journey through the first 20 years of two-time Academy Award-nominee Rian Johnson's career!Support Film Literate on Patreon!Guest: Paola Zavala (Instagram|Letterboxd)

Now boy, I say boy, we got ourselves a bondian conundrum...Where to find us:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Two episodes a month now.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠On The Path Socials⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Lucy's Socials⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Our shop is here!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Show us a pic of your merch/order and we will do a review of ANY* movie/show of your choosing.

The Blottos hit the double ochos by playing a voicemail from the fictional world of Knives Out, hitting a very early Magical Mystery Word, questioning when the last time was that people saw Ringo's eyes, complimenting Becker's Joe Walsh impression, suggesting that Scotty add a cowboy hat to the ensemble, mixing cocktails live on air, apologizing to the Larrys of the world, and diving deep into the many layers of the critically underrated Glass Onion.  Mix up a Gibson and join us for the ride.As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter / X (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com).  We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop!  Grab some merch.  You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: http://www.blottobeatles.com & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyExecutive Producer: Scotty C.Musical Supervisor: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)ArtistinIn-Residence: Colin Driscoll (@theroyal.we)

Seen the movie? We challenge the way you see this movie, pointing out things you may have missed—even if you've seen it many times.Haven't seen it? We give you a quick, simple, spoiler-free breakdown to help you decide if it's worth your time.In this episode of Movies In A Nutshell:✅ The Nutshell: A clear, spoiler-free summary for new viewers.✅ Ratings & Reviews: How do critics and audiences compare—and what does that say about the film's legacy?✅ What Did We Miss?: Hidden layers are uncovered, challenging how you see the movie.✅ Paul's Facts of the Day: Fascinating trivia and behind-the-scenes insights.✅ Takeaways: The first time in the episode Marc, Darren, and Paul share their personal thoughts after holding back opinions until now.

Kate Hudson's comedic turn in How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days made that movie one of the greatest romantic comedies of the noughties, and her performances in everything from Bride Wars to Glass Onion have each been totally scene-stealing. This month, she stars in Running Point, a new Netflix comedy from Mindy Kaling, and she has just released her first album, Glorious. Her failures are open, honest and so very wise. Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Lawrence-Tickell Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Part 2 of the episode is here and it's all homework.  We talk about In, Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection Vol 17: Kraven's Last Hunt, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Space-Mullet Vol 1: One Gamble At A Time, We Called Them Giants, Punk Rock Jesus, Usagi Yojimbo Vol 1-2 (Fantagraphics), Love Hurts, Nightbitch, Glass Onion, Austin Powers, Blues Brothers, Kill Bill, The Jerk, Severance, Silo, Skeleton Crew, Turtles All The Way Down, Spiderhead, When You're Done Saving The World, After Everything, Say You Will, Teacher, I Used To Go Here, Dear Zoe, Arcadian, Free Samples, Creature Commandos, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and The 4:30 Movie. The featured song is "Money" by Empired.  You can find them at: Website | Instagram Check us out at our website and on social media.  Don't forget to rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

Benoit Blanc please listen to this episode

Thanks a ton for checking out our podcast!! Video versions can be found on youtube  https://www.youtube.com/@blackandwhitereviews1866 & Please Consider Supporting us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/BlackandWhiteReviews

Greg takes Richard into classic Agatha Christie territory with a French director's Hollywood take on a British novel.  After examining the British class system, they finish with a largely forgotten whodunnit film written by Psycho actor Anthony Perkins and West Side Story composer Stephen Sondheim.  And if that doesn't get you in, nothing will.  What is Richard's problem with filmic murder?  And is it OK for Death to be funny? And Then There None (1945)  http://tinyurl.com/fmfw-05-08-none  Gosford Park (2001)  http://tinyurl.com/fmfw-05-08-gosford  The Last of Sheila (1973)  http://tinyurl.com/fmfw-05-08-sheila  OTHER RESOURCES Watch “The Ninth Guest” (1934)  https://tinyurl.com/9thguest  Watch “Charlie Chan in London” (1934)  https://tinyurl.com/london-chan  Read the 2021 article about “The Last of Sheila”  https://tinyurl.com/sheilabyjulia  Glass Onion (2022)  http://tinyurl.com/fmfw-05-08-onion 

Sam and Todd explore the fascinating world of watches in film, uncovering the stories behind the timepieces that define characters, set moods, and become part of cinematic history Watch Obsessions CW Dune: https://tinyurl.com/24m2k7tv Tag Chronograph: https://tinyurl.com/jxsw6cx2 YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDMV7-YPaH3UkKrnpZmh9bQ Movie Watches Jurassic World Oris: https://tinyurl.com/mvmpjszt Mission Impossible 2 G-Shock: https://amzn.to/3WuMEyQ Uncharted Fossil Watch: https://amzn.to/4gcASA8 Chronosport Rambo III: https://tinyurl.com/5ysfhs2d Omega 1948 Glass Onion: https://tinyurl.com/4bkrksu9 Casio A201 48 Hours: https://tinyurl.com/yu5u8xkf Breguet Batman vs Superman: https://tinyurl.com/942yfyzy Carl F. Bucherer John Wick 4: https://tinyurl.com/5826ymxd Luminox Fast and Furious: https://amzn.to/4gc37iu Bremont Venom: https://tinyurl.com/mw7x5824 Bremont Kingsman: https://tinyurl.com/yc8357c5 Become a YouTube member and get some great perks! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCphARVVB4rSikpd_86Vwgiw/join Instagram: https://bit.ly/3OKK4za ⌚️ Amazon Watch Store: https://amzn.to/2Ld4Bzs

We're at the mid-way mark of the NBA season and before putting in their unofficial NBA award ballots, Marco and Sean link up to share their silly mid-season award picks like 'the most Chirs Evans in Glass Onion player' or 'the most unwatchable player in the league'. The Deep Two NBA Podcast is part of The Deep Two Podcast Network, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. We've got basketball covered from every angle: breaking news, in-depth analysis, and of course, some hijinks. If you enjoyed this episode, jump onto your favourite app and give one of our podcasts a listen. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDeepTwoNBA X: https://www.twitter.com/TheDeepTwoNBA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedeeptwo YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thedeeptwo

For one last time in 2024, we're closing out DePalmber: Part De by opening the vault door and welcoming another of our beloved classics into the podcast canon, this time a bleak noir thriller about a foley artist in the film industry who winds up recording proof of a political murder conspiracy while out grabbing sounds for a new low-end horror picture, and gets swept up into a dark world of intrigue where no one is safe. It's 1981's Blow Out, written and directed by Brian De Palma and starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Jon Lithgow, Dennis Franz, Peter Boyden, John Aquino and Deborah Everton. Like Michael Mann's Thief (released just four months earlier), it feels like a visionary director establishing countless trademark flourishes in an early outing before really hitting their stride as the decade continued. And just like Thief, that early outing may prove to be a high-water mark neither man ever cleared again. Plus: without any theatrical outing to report on to end the year, we're vibing out with hoarfrost and the music of Waxahatchee. If you'd like to watch the movie before listening along to this conversation, and we loved this movie so we strongly recommend you do, Blow Out is currently streaming for free on Tubi (at least in Canada) at the time of publication. Other works discussed in this episode include Sonic The Hedgehog 3, Nosferatu, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Abigail, The Brutalist, The Order, Blue Chips, Air, Hustle, Hoosiers, Moneyball, Glory Road, Miracle, The Way Back, The Holdovers, Knives Out, Glass Onion, Law Abiding Citizen, I Saw the TV Glow, Monkey Man, Biggest Heist Ever, Joker: Folie à Deux, A Christmas Story, Black Christmas, Baby Geniuses, The Karate Dog, A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, To Grandmother's House We Go, New York Minute, Scarface, Body Double, Pulp Fiction, Gotti, The Fanatic, Dexter, Conclave, Cliffhanger, Nightcrawler, and Nope among many more. We'll be back next week to kick off 2025 with the Bernie Mac baseball comedy Mr. 3000, to celebrate J Mo crossing the 3000 films watched lifetime milestone at some point in the year that was 2024. That's as good a reason to watch it as any I suppose, and you can find Mr. 3000 streaming for free on Hoopla at the moment. Until then, we'll see you at the movies!!

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies and TV shows I watched in Autumn 2024, and rate them from my least favorite to my favorite. TRANSCRIPT Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 230 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the Sixth, 2024, and today we are looking at my movie/TV show roundup for Fall 2024. Before we get to that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will do Question of the Week.   First up, I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Orc Hoard is done at 78,000 words, so it'll probably end up being about exactly the same length as Half-Orc Paladin, the previous book in the series. I've also written a short story called Commander's Wrath that newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of when Orc Hoard comes out and hopefully we're on track to have that out before Christmas. I'm also 7,000 words into Shield of Deception, which will be the fourth book in The Shield War series and if all goes well, I'm hoping to have that out in January or February. In audiobook news, recording is currently underway for Cloak of Masks and that will probably be out towards the end of January or perhaps February, depending on how long processing takes.   00:01:02 Question of the Week   Question of the Week is designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what do you listen to while working: genre of music, audiobooks, podcast, nothing else so you can concentrate, et cetera. No wrong answers obviously, and we had quite a few answers.   David says: I listen to audiobooks and music. Music ranges from classical to country to pop, bands and soul artists to instrumental. No rap or heavy metal or dance music or I listen to music from YouTube channels. If I have to really focus on what I'm doing, I'll turn it low so it doesn't distract.   Justin says: video game music is my first choice. It can help you grind in real life just like it does in the game. If that isn't working for me, then rock or classical music with movie soundtracks at third.   Brooks says: I tend to gravitate towards hard rock/punk rock. I have to stay adrenalized. Outside work, I'll listen to almost anything.   Michael says: I find I can't listen to words or lyrics without getting distracted by them, so instrumental music is the way to go. Usually video game music too (the Stelara soundtrack is particularly epic), movie scores (Kingdom of Heaven is one of my favorites), or Dungeon Synth, an amazing music genre I only discovered recently.   Barbara says: sometimes I play music while writing, but most of the time I prefer the silence so I can better hear the voices in my head. Of course, I prefer very specific types of music that always end up coming back no matter how much I try to stray.   Jenny says: lots of EDM and techno if words would distract me or my solid nineties pop punk angsty mix. I also have a giant one I called “I heard it in a video game” for background music. John says: When I did/could work, I enjoyed outlaw country music, particularly that from Texas. Put me in a kick butt and take names kind of mood. When you're a plumber who gets paid by the work done, not the hour, that's where one wants to be.   (A different) John says: I only listen to music when I'm working in the kitchen. I'm eclectic. Sometimes classical music, sometimes ‘80s prog rock with Hawaiian music and occasionally jazz tossed in.   Juana says: I like rock and roll from many eras. I put my eclectic music on shuffle. I also listen to movie soundtracks: Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Animal House, et al.   Brandy says: If I'm cooking, I listen to Pandora. There's a pop ‘90s - ‘20s station. I do have a few that are specifically listed, angry or sad, one more angry German metal or Mongolian throat metal, the other more goth and industrial. I read books instead of listening. If I'm proofing, I usually have something on in the background. Today it's Sanctuary Season One.   Morgan says: ADHD means I jump around a lot on what I'm listening to depending on the day, but audiobooks- usually fantasy or horror. Podcasts- Pathfinder actual play podcasts, horror podcasts, and wrestling/gaming news podcasts. Music, whatever artist/album I'm obsessing over at the time, but usually prog rock, metal, or rap.   Matthew says: I always have my iPad for background noise. If I'm particularly invested in getting chapters done, I'll put on something largely audible.   Gary says: audiobooks, podcasts, worship music, Christian hard rock.   Bob says: Retired now, but when I was working I didn't listen to anything-needed to concentrate on what I was doing. When paying bills, I sometimes have some Morse Code on in the background (one of my previous means of paying the bills). On long car trips, it's nice to have some distraction -whatever radio station I can find, preferably one with a story. In truck stops, we used to find some stories on disc that had the actors doing the voice of the characters and some of them were pretty good.   For myself, I almost always listen to music while I'm working and that genre is usually soundtracks and video games, movies, and TV shows (in that order) that I liked, which makes it difficult to discuss music with people, I have to admit. I do listen to podcasts when I'm working outside, so long as I'm not using a power tool that requires earplugs for safe operation (which sadly seems to be most of the time).   00:04:42 Main Topic: Autumn 2024 Movie/TV Review Roundup   Now on to our main topic, the review roundup of the movies and streaming shows I watched in Autumn 2024. I was going to do a combined Autumn/Winter 2024 one, but it was getting a bit too long, so Winter 2024/2025 will be its own post in a few months. I seemed to watch a lot of time travel movies this time around and quite a few with Space Magic. As ever, the grades are totally subjective and based on nothing more than my own thoughts and opinions. Now let's take a look at the movies and streaming shows from least favorite to most favorite.   First up is Escanaba in Da Moonlight, which came out in 2001 and it is a surrealist comedy about hunting traditions set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 42-year-old Reuben Sodi is the only man in his family who has never shot a buck, so when he complains about this to his Native American wife, she casts a spell to help Ruben bag his first buck, which results in a very bizarre nighttime journey/vision quest. This includes UFOs, visitations by nighttime spirits, and a Department of Natural Resources officer having a mental breakdown. This was a funny movie, but it was definitely very weird and even more specific. If you're at all familiar with the hunting culture of Upper American Midwest, you'll get the humor. If you're not familiar with it, this will be like watching a movie from another planet. Overall grade: C.   Next up is Looper, which came out in 2012. I didn't actually like this movie very much, but I respect how well done it was. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Joe and is a type of assassin called a looper living in the US in 2044. About 30 years after 2044, time travel is invented but immediately outlawed. Since it's difficult to get away with murder in 2074 due to advanced technology, crime syndicates have taken to sending people they want eliminated back in time to 2044 where the loopers immediately execute the target in exchange for a big fat payout. Loopers can live like kings, but there's a price. Eventually the loop is closed and the looper's future self is sent back to be killed by his past self. Failure to comply results in an extremely grisly fate at the hands of the syndicate. Joe, being a hardened killer and drug addict, is fine with all this and even helps turn in a fellow looper who failed to close his own loop. Then Joe's future self arrives. Joe is about to kill Future Joe (played by Bruce Willis), but Future Joe escapes and Present Joe has to hunt down and kill Future Joe if he wants to survive.   In the process, Present Joe stumbles across the farm of a woman named Sarah (played by Emily Blunt) and her young son Sid. Present Joe realizes that future Joe has traveled back to kill the child, Sid, who will be responsible for the death of Future Joe's wife in the future. Despite everything he's done, Present Joe is not okay with this and gears up to help Sarah defend Sid from Future Joe. This movie was on the very dark side of noir filmmaking: no good characters, essentially only various degrees of bad people trying to navigate their way through the maze of time crimes. I did strongly dislike how fundamentally nihilistic the movie was and the addition of telekinesis did seem like kind of a plot crutch. There is also some unnecessary nudity. Rian Johnson is actually an excellent filmmaker. Knives Out and Glass Onion were both very good, but I cannot imagine how someone will watch Looper and think, hey, this guy is a good choice for a Star Wars movie. Overall Grade: B-   Next up is Agatha All Along, which came out in 2024. It was extremely well written and well-acted. You almost have to watch it twice just to admire how well put together the plot was. I wasn't expecting to like Agatha All Along, but it is an excellent example of writing a show with a villain protagonist and actually pulling it off. The show is also a good example of something I've talked about before on the podcast and the blog: characters can be likable, emotionally sympathetic, or both. It's sometimes tricky to write a character who's both, unlikable but emotionally sympathetic. By contrast, Agatha Harkness is an excellent example of a character who's both likable and highly, highly unsympathetic. Agatha All Along is indeed a show with a villain protagonist, but Agatha is charismatic enough to remain likable even though she's unquestionably an absolute monster who deserves every bit of suffering she endures.   Actress Kathryn Hahn deserves major credit for making someone as evil as Agatha so charismatic. Agatha retains just enough of a sliver of sympathy to keep the audience from turning on her, but even when she shows flashes of humanity, beneath that there are even more layers of monster. She also does a very sort of a modern Doctor Who/ Sherlock thing where she talks very fast and puts up a flippant and silly facade, but she's actually calculating things several steps in advance and manipulating everyone around her to her final goal. Anyway, the plot of Agatha All Along is that Agatha finally breaks free from the spell of the Scarlet Witch placed on here at the end of Wandavision. However, Agatha doesn't have any magic left, which is a major problem for her because she has very many enemies who very much want to see her dead as soon as possible, but then a mysterious teenager turns up and asks for Agatha's help. He wants to walk the legendary Witches' Road and it has said that someone who walks the road and survives to the end will receive their heart's desire. Since Agatha doesn't have any other options and she has some major enemies, she agrees. Agatha, the teenager, and the Witches' Road itself all have very dark secrets and their reveal makes for some major drama. As I mentioned, the show was very well written and acted. I suspect that may be the secret for movie or TV success in the 2020s economic climate: good actors, an excellent script, and keep your costs down. Overall grade: B   Our next movie is Field of Dreams, which came out in 1989. An Iowa farmer discovers he's a very specific kind of necromancer, like how sports medicine is a specific field of study. Maybe sports necromancy is a specific subclass for evil wizards or something. All joking aside, the main character is Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) and he's walking his cornfield one day and he hears a mysterious voice tell him “If you build it, he will come.” Ray builds a baseball field in one of his cornfields and began speaking to the ghost of Shoeless Joe, a popular baseball player who died in 1951. Soon a lot of other ghosts arrive and start playing baseball as well. The mysterious voice starts urging Ray to “ease his pain” and Ray concludes this must means Terrance Mann (played by James Earl Jones), an activist writer from the sixties who dropped out of the public eye and is living in seclusion. So Ray starts on a cross country trip to persuade Mann to come to his baseball field. This movie is really perhaps the ur-example of the Feel-Good Eighties Movies and maybe a Baby Boomer movie. The characters speak with near religious reverence for the ‘60s, baseball is the Great American Pastime, and Ray really wants to heal his relationship with the father he rebelled against back in the ‘60s. The best part of the movie was unquestionably James Earl Jones' character and his performance as he resigns himself to Ray's craziness and then starts to believe in it was pretty great. Overall grade: B Next up is Holiday, which came out in 1938. Holiday is a romantic comedy from the 1930s. Cary Grant plays Johnny Case, who has fallen in love with Julia Seton, the daughter of a wealthy New York banking family. However, his more individualistic outlook soon puts him at odds with Julia's more traditionalist family, though this draws the attention of Julia's elder sister Linda (played by Katharine Hepburn). It felt a bit like watching a play and a little research revealed that it was indeed based on a play from 1928, which may be why the film didn't do so well when it originally came out, though it is regarded as a classic today.   Viewers in the Great Depression era would probably find it difficult to sympathize with a man who wanted to turn down a well-paying job at a bank, not out of moral objections to the bank's business practices, but because he would feel constrained. The Seton family is played as eccentric and somewhat troubled, but not as buffoons or villains as rich people were often portrayed in other 1930s movies. Good performances and worth watching as a classic, though sound technology has improved quite a bit in the last 90 years, so you probably will want to watch it with the captions on. Overall grade: B   Next movie is Twisters, which came out in 2024. This is basically the same movie as Twister from back in 1995, but with some of the plot of Pride and Prejudice bolted on. Kate Carter (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) is an Oklahoma storm chaser with her boyfriend and best friends. One day, one of their storm chases goes horribly wrong, killing Kate's boyfriend and most of their friends. Five years later, Kate is working for the National Weather Service in New York when her old friend Javi, the other survivor of that storm, asks for her help testing a new radar tracking system. Kate reluctantly agrees and they return to Oklahoma and crosses horns with storm YouTuber Tyler Owens (played by Glenn Powell) who makes videos of his truck shooting fireworks into tornadoes. Naturally, Kate and Tyler immediately misunderstand each other in the same way as in Pride and Prejudice but are forced to work together when it turns out that Javi's company might have ulterior motives. I thought this was a thoroughly enjoyable summer popcorn flick. Given how both Covid and the 2023 writers' strike hit this movie's production like two successive freight trains, it's astonishing it turned out so well. Overall grade: A-   Next up is The Rings of Power Season 2, which came out in 2024. I have the same attitude towards this as I do with Starfield. I really like it. In fact, my Xbox told me I played Starfield for 270 hours in 2024, but I get why some people do not. This show is essentially very elaborate fan fiction. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, despite the changes from the book, was still recognizably The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power is almost entirely its own thing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this for a couple of reasons and hope it continues. First, it's nice to have an epic fantasy TV series that's not a nihilistic pornographic torture fest like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon and is more competently executed than Disney's ill-fated Willow Series.   Second, all things must be taken in their context. What do I mean by this? Perhaps a food comparison will illustrate the point. The book the Lord of the Rings is like Kobe beef prepared by the finest chefs in the world, the sort of experience you get maybe once or twice in your life if fortune smiles upon you. The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is like a high-quality supermarket steak grilled in the backyard by someone who's pretty good at it. The Rings of Power is like McDonald's, but there are times when you really want some McDonald's. In fact, I kind of want a Big Mac after saying all of that, but The Rings of Power is really good McDonald's, the kind of McDonald's you have after driving the car for 250 miles without stopping across one of America's flatter and less populous states. The only place to eat for like a hundred miles in any direction is this McDonald's in the same building as a gas station, so you stop and don't expect very much, but it turns out the fries are crispy and salty and the nuggets are just right.   I don't think it's surprising that The Rings of Power has had such a mixed reception. The Venn diagram of “enjoys Lord of the Rings” has some wildly divergent circles to it and that is a testament to the fact that the Lord of the Rings is such a great work of literature that so many people from so many very different ideological identity groups enjoy and identify with the book. Even ideological identity groups that are mortal foes agree on their approval of the Lord the Rings. So naturally each different group has its own strong opinion of what an adaptation should look like.   With that very long-winded introduction out of the way, I liked season two and I thought it was an improvement over Season One, a lot more narrative tension. Season One perhaps spent too much time setting the table and building context, but Season Two works well in making Season One better in hindsight. The Rings of Power version of Galadriel is improved in Season Two because she was one of the few characters in Season One able to throw off Sauron's mental domination and seduction. The highlight of the season was the toxic dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor.  Actors Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards did an amazing job portraying the slow-moving disaster that Sauron and Celebrimbor's collaboration would create, two intellectual equals working together to create something great, but nonetheless, Sauron twists everything to his own ends. Their final scene together was just astonishingly good. The portrayal of Sauron is both very modern and true to Tolkien, a destructive narcissist who actually believes whatever lies he's speaking at any given moment. He really, truly believes he's going to heal Middle Earth, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. The scenes with Prince Durin, his father, and one of the dwarven rings of power were great as well. It had the same sort of feel to it as an adult child watching with horror as a beloved parent succumbs to a drug addiction. The best new character the show created (in my opinion) is Adar, one of the progenitors of the orcs. Tolkien himself could never really decide on the origin of the orcs and came up with different thoughts throughout his lifetime. When editing The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien settled on the corrupted former elves version, which seems to be what his father had been leaning towards anyway. Rings of Power takes that to its logical conclusion. Adar wants his orcish progeny to live free of the dark lords Morgoth and Sauron, which makes sense because in the books, the orcs hated Morgoth and Sauron and only served them out of fear. Indeed, in The Lord of the Rings, Sauron seems to have secret police and informers among the orcs to keep track of their loyalties. Since the show displays how twisted and cruel Sauron really is, it makes sense that Adar is willing to go to any lengths to stop Sauron, no matter how extreme. The orcs are still monsters, including Adar himself, but they're monsters who want to be free of an even greater monster than themselves. If you've read The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings, you'll know all the characters' efforts are doomed to failure, especially Adar and Celebrimbor's, which lends an air of inevitable tragedy to everything that happens. I know some people were mad that Tom Bombadil was basically Wizard Yoda, but I thought it worked. Tom Bombadil is so inscrutable of a character that he can really do whatever he wants so long as he's inscrutable. It was also great how composer Bear McCreary wove a variation of Sauron's theme throughout the show. The soundtrack was A+ work in my opinion. Overall, I enjoyed the show and would like it to continue. If you know the difference between Fëanor, Finwë, Finrod, Felagund, Finarfin, Findulias, Fingon, and Fingolfin (without having to look it up), and in fact have everything about them from The Silmarillion memorized, you'll hate this show. But I think it's worth watching. Overall Grade: A-   Next up is Casa Bonita Mi Amor, which came out in 2024. Way back in the 1990s I saw an episode of Frasier where Frasier and his brother Niles decide to buy a restaurant. A series of hilarious cascading disasters result. At the time I decided I never wanted to own a restaurant and every piece of both factual information and fictional media I have consumed since has not changed this decision. Casa Bonita Mi Amor definitely will not challenge that decision. Apparently, Casa Bonita was a beloved theme restaurant in Colorado that went out of business during Covid. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, decided to buy the restaurant themselves and reopen it. They budgeted $3.6 million for the restoration of the building. Costs soon swelled to $40 million and the problems were still only just beginning. This is an excellent and entertaining example of the “rich man buys restaurant, soon finds himself over his head” genre of documentary filmmaking. Overall grade: A   Finally, my two favorite things I saw in Autumn 2024 and the first of them is the movie Frequency, which came out in 2000. It's another variant on a time travel story, but I like this one considerably better than Looper. Frank Sullivan is a firefighter and devoted family man living in New York circa 1969. His son John is a police detective living in the house 30 years later in 1999 with emotional problems because he never got over his father's tragic death in a dangerous fire 30 years earlier in 1969.   When the son of a friend stumbles across his father's old ham radio, John lets the kid goof around with it. Later that night, John starts talking to someone on that radio and to his astonishment realizes he's talking to his father from 30 years ago on the same ham radio. Desperate, John tries to warn Frank about the fire that kills him and it works. Frank survives the fire and instead of dying 1969, instead dies in 1989 from lung cancer due to a pack a day habit. The scene where history changes and John suddenly realizes what has happened was pretty great, but this isn't the ending. We're only 40% of the way through the movie. John successfully managed to put right what once went wrong.   However, in doing so, he accidentally also put wrong what once went right. His mother is a nurse and in the original timeline was on bereavement leave the day after Frank's death. In the new timeline, Frank is okay, so she goes to work and saves a patient who otherwise would've died in medical error and the patient happens to be the deadly serial killer known as the Nightingale. To his horror, John realizes that The Nightingale is now free to continue his murder spree and his new target is John's mother and Frank's wife.   As I've mentioned numerous times before, I'm not really a fan of time travel stories, but this one was quite well done. Interestingly, the plot structure was similar to Avengers Endgame. The Avengers go back in time to steal the Infinity Stones to undo Thanos' Snap, but Past Thanos figures out what's going on and follows the Avengers back to the present and attempts to make things even worse than they already are. John manages to save Frank from the fire, but this means the Nightingale serial killer survives and might create a worse present than the one John already has, so that really adds an altogether excellent element of dramatic tension to the entire movie. As one amusing side note, this movie shared Field of Dream's reverence for baseball as the Great American Pastime and John manages to convince Frank he's telling the truth about their time travel radio by accurately predicting the outcome of baseball games. Overall grade: A Now the second favorite thing I watched in Autumn 2024, The Grand Tour: One for the Road, which came out in 2024. I admit that when I started self-publishing in 2011, I knew absolutely nothing about the contemporary United Kingdom, like I couldn't even told you whether the UK used the Pound or the Euro. When I started getting book royalties from Amazon UK, let's just say I learned about currency conversion rates really fast, but as UK book royalties fluctuated as they do, I started reading the UK news since when there's an election or major news event in the UK, book royalties tend to drop for a few days after the same way they do when something similar happens in the US. Because of that, I saw the news article when Jeremy Clarkson was fired from Top Gear in 2015 for punching out a producer. At the time, there were some seasons of Top Gear on Netflix, so I was curious and started watching and was thoroughly entertained.   When Grand Tour started on Amazon, I started watching that as well and I was also thoroughly entertained, but all good things must come to an end. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May go on one last road trip adventure across Zimbabwe. The usual hijinks ensue for one last time, and it was a fitting end to Top Gear/The Grand Tour. I'll miss the show, but I am grateful for over a decade of entertainment from Top Gear/The Grand Tour and from the various spinoffs like Clarkson's Farm and James May's travel show. Overall grade: A   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this episode, we're joined by rising star trailer producer Taymar Cox from Mocean. We explore the making of iconic trailers like SPIDERMAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE, EXTRACTION 2, RENFIELD, THE GRAY MAN and so many more; mentorship in the industry; and the evolution of how agencies work on campaigns. We also get into Taymar's journey in her career so far, the challenges faced by women and underrepresented groups in the industry, and how Taymar's unique past, including some really cool internships, shapes her approach to her work.   02:11 Taymar's Industry Background 03:13 Internships at Ignition and Marvel 09:38 Choosing the Producer Path 15:13 Mentorship and Diversity in Internships 21:21 Early Career at Heartsleeve 28:23 Impact of COVID on the Industry 39:16 The Challenges of Remote Work 41:49 Generational Differences in the Workplace 44:37 The Importance of Community in the Industry 50:00 Navigating Industry Exclusion and Inclusion 51:39 Advice for Aspiring Trailer Editors 55:25 The Evolution of Industry Networking 01:02:19 The Art of Crafting Trailers 01:20:53 Working with the Russo Brothers 01:23:22 Unexpected Podcast Guest: Mom 01:26:27 Murder Mystery and Career Growth 01:30:29 Renfield and the Perfect Music Choice 01:34:05 Favorite Campaigns and Trailers 01:51:58 Final Thoughts and Acknowledgements   Be sure to check out our wonderful sponsors:  Brent Allen Hagel - www.brentallenhagel.com/   The Golden Trailer Awards - goldentrailer.com/     Please leave us a rating and review: https://apple.co/3QYy80e   You can find Corey on all the socials @coreysnathan such as www.linkedin.com/in/coreysnathan.   https://www.moceanla.com/   

In episode forty-one, Caveman and Maggi take a trip to Greece to visit the Glass Onion. Murder mystery abounds in this delightful follow-up to Knives Out. A gorgeous cast, a shocking murder, and Benoit Blanc. Who could want more? Enjoy today!Follow our Instagram, Threads, & Letterboxd accounts @movieminglepod Check out our YouTube channel, MovieMinglePodcastQuestions? Comments? Write us at movieminglepod@gmail.com

Corinne and Sabrina team up with Amanda Montell from Sounds Like a Cult Podcast to unpack the eerily familiar connections between cults, community, and the paranormal. From Amanda's lifelong quest to conjure a ghost to her wild adventures uncovering cultish behaviors in everything from Trader Joe's fandoms to evangelical hell houses, there's no shortage of spooky, intriguing tales. Plus, Amanda reveals her dream of encountering a ghostly admirer at twilight—an oddly romantic twist that has us wondering: what kind of haunting would you want to manifest?

Welcome to ohmTown. The Non Sequitur News Show is held live via Twitch and Youtube every day. We, Mayor Watt and the AI that runs ohmTown, cover a selection of aggregated news articles and discuss them briefly with a perspective merging business, technology, and society. You can visit https://www.youtube.com/ohmtown for the complete history since 2022.Articles Discussed:A License All Alonghttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/nonsequiturnews/f/d/steam-now-says-the-game-youre-buying-is-really-just-a-license/Your Toothbrush as Bioreactorhttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/nonsequiturnews/f/d/your-toothbrush-is-home-to-hundreds-of-new-viruses-they-could-be-the-future-of-biotech/Inhaling Deodoarant Particleshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/nonsequiturnews/f/d/scientists-discover-deodorants-deposit-particles-into-our-lungs/Accused and Disconnectedhttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/thewordinlaw/f/d/5th-circuit-rules-isp-should-have-terminated-internet-users-accused-of-piracy/A Bag Labeled not drugs was drugs.https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/bag-labeled-not-a-bag-full-of-drugs-definitely-was-full-of-drugs-cops-say/The Glass Onion is a Documentaryhttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/four-wheel-tech/f/d/teslas-beer-serving-optimus-robot-was-controlled-by-a-human-the-whole-time/Ticketed during test drive.https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/four-wheel-tech/f/d/cops-ticket-man-on-test-drive-because-the-dealer-truck-had-no-plates/Robot Vacuums with a dirty mouth.https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/robot-vacuums-hacked-to-shout-slurs-at-their-owners/Multichannel Franchise Podcastshttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/why-vox-media-is-selling-its-podcasts-as-multichannel-franchises/Biometrics to Replace Microchippinghttps://www.ohmtown.com/groups/technologytoday/f/d/this-ai-tool-uses-biometrics-to-replace-pet-microchipping/

Alan's Eyes & Ears #019 - Movie Countdown III In this new episode 19 of this podcast, Alan begins by covering a bit of feedback from prior episodes, and then counts down the most recent 20 movies that he has watched. Among the films that are discussed in this episode are: all 5 original Planet of the Apes films, The Flash, Lucy, Madame Web, Glass Onion, and the most recent entries in 2 separate action film franchises. Listen to this episode ... and find out! Click on the player below to listen to the episode: Right-click to download episode directly Promo: Is It Jaws? Send e-mail feedback to relativelygeeky@gmail.com  You can follow the network on Twitter @Relatively_Geek and Professor Alan @ProfessorAlan You may also subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or the RSS Feed.

This week's theme is Art. Bob & Robb choose six movies about paintings and stuff. Bob:  Great Expectations (18:58), The Art of the Steal (2009) (35:55), The Good Thief (56:48) Robb:  My Kid Could Paint That (5:39), Glass Onion (28:02), Blow-Up (48:17) Follow —> Rewind Video: https://rewindvideopod.substack.com/p/follow-rewind-video Bob: https://letterboxd.com/rgdjr Robb: http://robbwitmer.info

In "The Glass Onion," Benoit Blanc discovers Miles Bron's deception by realizing his conversation is "A minefield of malapropisms." From Shakespeare to Sheridan to today, malapropisms are humorous and revealing. Show NotesCarol Ann Lloydwww.carolannlloyd.com@shakeuphistorypatreon.com/carolannlloydThe Tudors by NumbersCourting the Virgin QueenRichard Sheridan, The Rival (Mrs. Malaprop)William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Dogberry)Rian Johnson, Glass OnionHistory shows us what's possible.@shakeuphistory

Kathryn Hahn (Agatha All Along, Bad Moms, Glass Onion) is an Emmy-nominated actor. Kathryn returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss the Swedish art of death cleaning, whether limousines are embarrassing or not, and the line between hoarder and collector. Kathryn and Dax talk about losing their fathers, the relationship of their story once they had kids, and why fecal transplants have become so popular. Kathryn explains why menopause should be talked about more, what being married for 30 years is like, and how she has handled having anxiety later in life. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AND DON'T CALL ME SHIRLEY!! Airplaine! Full Movie Reaction Watch Along: https://www.patreon.com/thereelrejects Follow Us On Socials: https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/  https://www.tiktok.com/@thereelrejects?lang=en This Comedy Saturday, it's time for a BONAFIDE Classic & one of the top-rated Comedies of ALL TIME as Coy Jandreau & Aaron Alexander give their FIRST TIME Reaction, Commentary, Analysis, Breakdown, & Full Movie Spoiler Review for the hilarious Parody from the comedy team Zucker / Abrams / Zucker (Kentucky Fried Movie, The Naked Gun Series) about a transnational flight struck with an outbreak food poisoning, causing a neurotic ex-fighter pilot to overcome his past & safely land the commercial airplane full of passengers... Airplane! features Robert Hays (Homeward Bound, Superhero Movie), Julie Hagerty (Marriage Story, Freddy Got Fingered), Leslie Nielsen (The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, Wrongfully Accused, Scary Movie 3), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (The Los Angeles Lakers, Fletch, Glass Onion), Lloyd Bridges (Hot Shots!), Peter Graves (Mission: Impossible), Lorna Patterson (Private Benjamin), Robert Stack (Unsolved Mysteries), Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad, Gremlins), & MORE!! Coy & Aaron REACT to all the Best Scenes & Most Hilarious Moments including Don't Call Me Shirley, I Speak Jive, Roger Roger, Get a Hold of Yourself!, Girl Scout Tussle, Have You Ever Seen a Grown Man N***d?, Automatic Pilot, Red Zone vs. White Zone, & Beyond!! Follow Coy Jandreau:  Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coyjandreau?l... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coyjandreau/?hl=en Twitter:  https://twitter.com/CoyJandreau YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYH2szDTuU9ImFZ9gBRH8w Follow Aaron On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealaaronalexander/?hl=en Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! https://www.rejectnationshop.com/ Music Used In Manscaped Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor: https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO: https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thereelrejects Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thegregalba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barry and Abigail discuss Cloud Eleven by Cloud Eleven and sample Margarita Sour, Mai Tai - Tiki Easy Collab, and Hi-Pitch Mosaic IPA from Hi-Wire Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina. Barry discovered this album while looking for music to use in a family video and discovering the song Tokyo Aquarium. You can check out the video Tokyo Aquarium on our YouTube channel.  Abigail compared the opening of Look of Sky to the opening of Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls. Barry played a bit of Blackbird by The Beatles for the comparison of the bird sounds and guitar (we have officially gone zero episodes without mentioning the White Album!). Barry compared Didn't Wanna Have to Do It to Twin Peaks Theme - Instrumental by Angelo Badalamenti. Lyrically, he compared the song to See You In September by The Happenings. Abigail compared Hole to Glass Onion by The Beatles and Wish I to Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Up next… GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo Jingles are by our friend Pete Coe. Visit Anosmia Awareness for more information on Barry's condition. Follow Barry or Abigail on Untappd to see what we're drinking when we're not on mic! Leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Facebook | Instagram | X | YouTube | Website | Email us | Virtual Jukebox

Well, good evein' to you all, ladies and gents, a very good, Ah say, Ah say, a very good evening to all of you. ‘cept, mebbe it ain't such a good evenin' for one individual in particular, hear in our “Give Me One More Chance” series. Yes, one individual ain't gonna get no more chances, … Continue reading "Episode 305 – Glass Onion (2022)"

In this week's mini-episode of Matt on Matt podcasting action, your Certified Forgotten co-hosts share their thoughts on Zoë Kravitz's rageful debut, Blink Twice. How did she sneak a rape-revenge movie into theaters with mainstream appeal? By wrapping it in a Glass Onion meets Get Out meets The Hunt vision — and casting Channing Tatum helps. But this isn't a movie about him. Blink Twice is an indictment of cancel culture's failings from a female perspective, which Kravitz delivers with haymakers from Naomi Ackie and the women around her. It's a battle of the sexes while trapped in paradise and one hell of a coming out for the actress-turned-filmmaker.

In today's video, we're diving deep into the surprising news about "Knives Out 3"! Reports suggest that the latest installment in the Rian Johnson-directed Netflix series has a staggering budget of over $210 million! Why is "Knives Out 3" so expensive to make? We'll break down all the details, including speculation about the "Knives Out 3" plot, the reasons behind the massive budget increase, and what we can expect from the film. We'll also be discussing everything from the "Knives Out 3" trailer, sneak peeks, and updates to exciting news about the "Knives Out 3" cast, including Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc. With the success of the first two films, "Knives Out" and "Glass Onion," fans are eagerly awaiting more from this thrilling series. But does a bigger budget mean a better movie, or is this a sign of Hollywood's budgeting issues? Plus, we've got new details on Ridley Scott's "Gladiator 2" as he discusses working with Russell Crowe, and updates on the upcoming Nova series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Don't miss out on all this and more on today's live episode of The Kristian Harloff Show! Make sure to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell for more updates on "Knives Out 3," Marvel news, and all things movies! #KnivesOut3 #DanielCraig #RianJohnson #Netflix #GlassOnion #BenoitBlanc #Marvel #MCU #Nova #KristianHarloffShow #Budget #Films #Hollywood #MovieNews  OUR SPONSORS: AG1: Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase at http://www.drinkAG1.com/BIGTHING TUSHY: Stay shower-fresh all summer long and join the 2 million butts who already switched to TUSHY! For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first bidet order when you use code BIGTHING at checkout. https://hellotushy.com/BIGTHING HIMS: ● Start your free online visit today at http://www.Hims.com/BIGTHING MANDO: Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that's over 40% off) with promo code [BIGTHING} at http://www.shopmando.com #mandopod http://www.shopmando.com  

On today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we're going to talk about the Whore of Babylon and Scarlet Woman! We'll unpack the meaning and symbolism of these terms as it pertains to the Christian Bible and the modern day occultists! We'll talk Crowley, BABALON, Spirit Cooking, Annunaki, John Dee, Jack Parsons and a slew of modern day pop culture refernces to all these things- from the Super Bowl to Twin Peaks to the Exorcist and Metropolis' False Maria!Links:The Ninth Gate Film Analysis! Luciferian Enlightenment Whore of Babylon Illuminati and Occult Symbolism! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/the-ninth-gate-film-analysis-luciferian-enlightenment-whore-of-babylon-illuminati-and-occult-symbolismMarjorie Cameron Pt 1: Wormwood Star Origins, Babalon Working of the Scarlet Woman & Jack Parsons!https://illuminatiwatcher.com/marjorie-cameron-pt-1-wormwood-star-origins-babalon-working-of-the-scarlet-woman-jack-parsons/NOPE Film Symbolism Analysis of the Occult: Hollywood Apocalypse 2001 Scarlet Woman & Crowley! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/nope-film-symbolism-analysis-of-the-occult-hollywood-apocalypse-2001-scarlet-woman-crowleyHocus Pocus Film Analysis! Disneys Sex Magick Satanic Adrenochrome Witchcraft Ritual! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/hocus-pocus-film-analysis-disneys-sex-magick-satanic-adrenochrome-witchcraft-ritualHocus Pocus 2 Film Analysis: Sacrifice Rituals Witchcraft Crowley Cakes of Light & the Scarlet Woman! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/hocus-pocus-2-film-analysis-sacrifice-rituals-witchcraft-crowley-cakes-of-light-the-scarlet-womanBONUS: Hocus Pocus Spell Book REVEALED! Crowley Vows of Silence & More! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/preview-hocus-pocus-spell-book-revealed-crowley-vows-of-silence-moreBONUS: TMZ- Symbolism in Glass Onion, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jay-Z, Beyonce and UFO Drama! https://illuminatiwatcher.com/preview-tmz-symbolism-in-glass-onion-jamie-lee-curtis-jay-z-beyonce-and-ufo-drama/Show sponsors- Get discounts while you support the show and do a little self improvement!*CopyMyCrypto.com/Isaac is where you can copy James McMahon's crypto holdings- listeners get access for just $1WANT MORE?...Check out my UNCENSORED show with my wife, Breaking Social Norms: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/GRIFTER ALLEY- get bonus content AND go commercial free + other perks: *PATREON.com/IlluminatiWatcher : ad free, HUNDREDS of bonus shows, early access AND TWO OF MY BOOKS! (The Dark Path and Kubrick's Code); you can join the conversations with hundreds of other show supporters here: Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/hcq13)*VIP SECTION: Due to the threat of censorship, I set up a Patreon-type system through MY OWN website! IIt's even setup the same: FREE ebooks, Kubrick's Code video! Sign up at: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/members-section/*APPLE PREMIUM: If you're on the Apple Podcasts app- just click the Premium button and you're in! NO more ads, Early Access, EVERY BONUS EPISODE More from Isaac- links and special offers:*BREAKING SOCIAL NORMS podcast, Index of EVERY episode (back to 2014), Signed paperbacks, shirts, & other merch, Substack, YouTube links & more: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw *STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos. 

Kieran Scott brings her distinctive “sharp and stylish” (BookPage, starred review) prose to this breathlessly suspenseful novel that combines Glass Onion with Big Little Lies as three women are implicated in a murder after a wedding goes horribly wrong. “Today, we dive into Kieran Scott's latest suspenseful novel, where three women are implicated in a murder after a wedding goes horribly wrong. At the Frank family's annual clambake, Peter Frank's charm leads to chaos when his surprise wedding ends in tragedy. Now, Maya, Catherine, and Leanne must uncover the truth behind the bride's death to clear their names. Stay tuned for a thrilling discussion!” @Simonandschuster @Kieran_Scott @Pam Stack @Book Review Crew #FlorenzaLee #Florenza.Denise.Lee #FlorenzaasPlace #FlorenzaSays #AuthorInterview #Authorschat #OnTheAirWithFlorenza #NYT_Bestseller #NYT_Bestselling_Author

Description Returning guest Nik English joins Joe to discuss Glass Onion, the second film starring Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc. This film sees Benoit Blanc solving a murder mystery on a billionaire’s private island. Support Patreon Show Notes Glass Onion … Continue reading →

Welcome to the final movie of Rian Johnson month! Listen as we peel back the layers of the acclaimed sequel and Netflix exclusive to Knives Out! With more large ensemble casts,exotic locations,and southern Daniel Craig to keep you satisfied. Follow Billy and Raul on Twitter @MasterOfPuns196 and @raulvaderrdz as well as the main show @SYNSPod

We're back and it's just a thrown together at the last minute episode.  Jay completed Tom King's Batman run, so we discuss the run as a whole and how it compares overall to recent runs.  Matt discusses a little bit of the Justice League arcs he's been reading before hitting on some news topics.  We finished with homework, including The Final: Attack on Wembley, The Bear S3, Eric, Peanut Butter Falcon, Schitt's Creek, The Rookie, Descender, We Promised You A Great Main Event: An Unauthorized WWE History, Scarlet Witch, Star Man, Fade From Grace, Monkeyman, Godzilla Minus One, Glass Onion, and Lisa Frankenstein. This week's beer was Juicy Bits from Weldworks Brewing. The featured song is " Pascal And Sabine" by Lost in Society.  You can find them at: Facebook | Twitter/X | Instagram Check us out at our website and on social media.

It was so cool to get to hang out with Chris Daniel, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at LionsGate. Prior to LionsGate, Chris led 360 marketing campaigns on some of Netflix's biggest films such as Red Notice, Glass Onion, Dayshift, To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, Dolemite Is My Name, and Over The Moon. Previously, he edited and produced trailers, digital-social, and brand campaigns at AV Squad where he was a part of a ton of award-winning work. Chris came up through the ranks at highly creative shops Mocean, Ignition and Seismic. Over his years on the agency side, he's been recognized with Clio Entertainment and Golden Trailer Awards (and even a CUTTER AWARD - y'all remember that?) for his campaigns for Red Notice, Dayshift, Bright, The 13th, Spy, Top 5, The Drop and many more.   Be sure to check out our wonderful sponsors:  Carrma - www.carrma.com/   Brent Allen Hagel - www.brentallenhagel.com/   The Golden Trailer Awards - goldentrailer.com/   ALIBI Music - alibimusic.com/     Please leave us a rating and review: https://apple.co/3QYy80e    You can find Corey on all the socials @coreysnathan such as www.linkedin.com/in/coreysnathan. 

This week on the Talk Without Rhythm Podcast I'm fulfilling a Patreon Pick from TWoRP Legionnaire Tom B. by discussing The Cheap Detective (1978) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). [00:00] INTRO [01:48] CromCast Promo [02:33] RANDOM CONVERSATION [07:13] The Cheap Detective (1978) [33:49] Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) [01:06:32] FEEDBACK [01:10:12] ENDING MUSIC: Glass Onion by The Beatles Buy The Cheap Detective (1978) Support TWoRP Contact Us talkwithoutrhythm@gmail.com

“Are you all comfortable? Even the murderer?” We watched “Evil Under the Sun” (1982) with our friend and murder mystery expert Hiko Mitsuzuka, and you can find us all turban shopping for the foreseeable future. Now we know there are a ton of Hercule Poirot mysteries to choose from - from Albert Finney to Kenneth Branagh - all of them filled with the most glamorous leading ladies in Hollywood history. But there is something about this version, starring Peter Ustinov that is giving us high camp, high glamour, and we're loving every minute of it. Dames Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg are serving up their finest jewels, turbans and (maybe most importantly) their wittiest barbs as old frenemies with unfinished business. French ingénue Jane Birkin (of the famed Birkin Hermès bag) is not all she appears to be and Roddy McDowell is camping it up - as usual. Oh and if you're not yet familiar with hunky Nicholas Clay in those butt hugging swim briefs - you're welcome. We talk about how much Rian Johnson ripped off… we mean was inspired by this film when making “Glass Onion” and we muse over the various fits and fashions throughout this oh-so-very early ‘80s mystery.  Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! www.patreon.com/moviesthatmadeusgay Facebook/Instagram: @moviesthatmadeusgay Twitter: @MTMUGPod Scott Youngbauer: Twitter @oscarscott / Instagram @scottyoungballer Peter Lozano: Twitter/Instagram @peterlasagna

En "El trastero" de Carlos del Amor conversamos con Antonio Sánchez Luengo, subdirector de la Galería de las Colecciones Reales, que cumple ahora un año. Después, en "¿Quién es quién?", junto a Aitor Caminero, recibimos a la experta en el sector audiovisual Elena Neira, profesora de los Estudios de la Comunicación y la Información de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Y acabamos con "Lo bitel" de Marta G. Navarro. Hoy escuchamos: Soily (Paul McCartney & Wings), Let It Be y Glass Onion (The Beatles), If Not For You Rehearsal (George Harrison & Bob Dylan) e Instant Karma (John Lennon).Escuchar audio

Kieran and Matty D just watched "Enola Holmes 2" and "Glass Onion" and review their original predictions to see who was closer to the mark.   WARNING: This podcast WILL contain actual spoilers for the movies discussed!

Heute erwartet euch der große Filmstar-Talk! Gibt es noch das Starsystem in Hollywood? Wie hat sich die Filmbranche in den letzten Jahrzehnten verändert? Kann man mittlerweile überhaupt noch von Filmstars sprechen? Außerdem sprechen die drei über ihre Erwartungen zu KNIVES OUT 3. Damit ein herzliches Willkommen zu einem neuen Podcast hier auf Cinema Strikes Back!

Deadpool & Wolverine Breaking Box Office Records?! After rumors of her potential cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, Taylor Swift is rumored to have been in talks with Kevin Feige - some have speculated to play Alison Blaire / Dazzler, but the newest rumors indicate she could be joining Scarlett Johansson's Blonde Phantom project. Elsewhere in Marvel news, the MCU's first official live-action X-MEN movie is set to begin production in 2025 & is in talks with potential writers including The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Sankes scribe Michael Lesslie; while James Gunn took to Threads to announce that Ozark writer Chris Mundy will be involved along with prolific Comic Book writer Tom King & None other than Lost & The Leftovers' Damon Lindelof! Meanwhile, Director Adam Wingard has parted ways with Godzilla x Kong 3 in favor of directing "Onslaught" at A24 (while indicating he'd be thrilled to return to other aspects of the MonsterVerse), Rian Johnson's 3rd Benoit Blanc Mystery (sequel to Knives Out & Glass Onion) was announced titled Wake Up Dead Man, and Deadpool & Wolverine (Deadpool 3 with Ryan Reynold & Hugh Jackman) just smashed some pre-sale ticket records! WILL IT SAVE THE CINEMA SINCE EVERY MOVIE HAS APPARENTLY BEEN FAILING LATELY?! Marvel Jesus... can you hear me?

Paul Costello and Emma Kathryn from The Yearbook Committee Podcast return to Flixwatcher to review Paul's choice Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Glass Onion (2022) is a standalone sequel to Knives Out written and directed by Rian (Brick) Johnson. Daniel Craig reprises his role as detective Benoit Blanc. This mystery sees Blanc joining a group of “Disruptors” on a private Greek island for a murder mystery weekend hosted by Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a Elon Musk type tech bro and founder of Alpha. His guests include model-turned-fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), the governor of Connecticut Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn) and her assistant, video game streamer Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend and co-founder of Alpha and Miles's ex-business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe). As with Knives Out, Glass Onion takes the classic murder mystery genre, throws in several red herrings and is full of fun and enjoyable performances from the ensemble cast. While not quite as intriguing and original as Knives Out, but still fun, Glass Onion still scores high on recommendability and engagement to score 4.23 overall [supsystic-tables id=357]     Episode #343 Crew Links Thanks to the Episode # 343 Crew of Paul Costello (@)PaulCinephile) and Emma Kathryn from The Yearbook Committee Podcast   Please make sure you give them some love   More about Glass Onion For more info on Glass Onion can visit Glass Onion IMDB page here or Glass Onion Rotten Tomatoes page here. Final Plug! Subscribe, Share and Review us on iTunes If you enjoyed this episode of Flixwatcher Podcast you probably know other people who will like it too! Please share it with your friends and family, review us, and join us across ALL of the Social Media links below. [supsystic-tables id=355]     Episode #342 Crew Links Thanks to the Episode # 342 Crew of Verbal Diorama and Easy Riders Raging Podcast   Please make sure you give them some love   More about Parasite For more info on Dune: Part One can visitParasite IMDB page here orParasite Rotten Tomatoes page here. Final Plug! Subscribe, Share and Review us on iTunes If you enjoyed this episode of Flixwatcher Podcast you probably know other people who will like it too! Please share it with your friends and family, review us, and join us across ALL of the Social Media links below. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we discuss class, opulence, and the optics of wealth. Why do we love Schitt's creek and why does The Menu miss the mark? Respectfully Disagree is The Swaddle Team's very own podcast series, in which we get together to discuss and dissect the issues we passionately differ on. Credits: Featuring: Shrishti Malhotra Co-Producers: Neha Shetty, Rohitha Naraharisetty Cover Art: Neha Tewari Art Director: Neha Shekhawat Executive Producer: Karla Bookman Credits: Featuring: Shrishti Malhotra Co-Producers: Neha Shetty, Rohitha Naraharisetty Cover Art: Neha Tewari Art Director: Neha Shekhawat Executive Producer: Karla Bookman

Now this is the epitome of a left-brained story. THE LAST OF SHEILA has puzzles within puzzles, an intricate plot that has been expertly set up, and a cast of characters who aren't who they seem to me. There are so many amazing things about it, I hardly know which of them to highlight for you here so I'll give you a bit of trivia: this movie was Rian Johnson's inspiration for THE GLASS ONION. Oh, and if you solved the mystery before the murderer was revealed, tag me on IG/Threads and let me know. I didn't get anywhere close to solving it.-V"If you can work a secret that is juicy and high stakes into your story, you're well on your way to creating really great narrative drive." - Valerie FrancisRELATED STORY NERD EPISODESGosford Park (Season 9, Episode 8)See How They Run (Season 9, Episode 5)Knives Out (Season 1, Episode 7) REGISTER FOR THE 2024 SPRING WEBINAR SERIESFor access to writing templates and worksheets, and more than 70 hours of training (all for free), subscribe to Valerie's Inner Circle.To learn to read like a writer, visit Melanie's website.Follow Valerie on X, Instagram and Threads @valerie_francisFollow Melanie on X, Instagram and Facebook @MelanieHillAuthor

An envoy and his entourage have been massacred! Butthole (Ryan LaPlante, @theryanlaplante) debated resurrecting the envoy before discovering the body didn't have a soul, Quinny (Tyler Hewitt, @tyler_hewitt) is taking a quick rest before seducing Vinten Charlemagne, and Juniper (Laura Hamstra, @elhamstring) is on her way to a crime scene while dreaming of paint night. Can our heroes determine who carried out these massacres? Also featuring our awesome DM Tom McGee (@mcgeetd). Enjoying Dumb-Dumbs & Dragons? - Consider becoming a Patron of Dumb-Dumbs & Dice for as little as $1 a month and gain access to a ton of extra BTS fun (https://www.patreon.com/dumbdumbdice) - Buy merch on our website (https://dumbdumbdice.com/) - Watch us on YouTube (https://youtube.com/@dumbdumbdice) - Follow us on Instagram (https://instagram.com/dumbdumbdice) - Follow us on Facebook (https://facebook.com/dumbdumbdice) Can't remember a discount code you wanted to use from one of our ads? Find it at https://fableandfolly.com/partners/ Artwork by the brilliant Del Borovic - Website & Portfolio (https://delborovic.com/) - Twitter (https://twitter.com/deltastic) The Combat Wheelchair was created by Mark Thompson (@mustangsart) on twitter and can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_ Their ko-fi is: https://ko-fi.com/mustangsart Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

You're invited to a mysterious dinner party while the hosts are ready to solve the greatest mystery by reviewing the comedy classic, Clue, starring Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Brennan, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Michael McKean and directed by Jonathan Lynn.  Based on the popular board game, the film has become a cult classic since it's release and now has become an iconic film in the mystery-comedy genre. The hosts pair the film with the No Clue cocktail. So sit back and relax as the hosts explore secret passageways from the lounge and reveal the plot twists in this classic film.  Come listen and follow us on Instagram @the.gentlemenpodcast and our website thegentlemenpodcast.com

SPOILER ALERT: We're about to talk about Tony spoiling Glass Onion on Mystery Crate. Mike Schur joins us to share his Stat of the Day, Top 5 Miami Athletes More Annoying Than Josh Allen, and, after sharing his true disdain for Jimmy Butler, his Top 5 Most Annoying Human Beings On Earth. He also opens up some more 90s baseball cards. Then, a full breakdown of Stephen A. Smith's Rihanna apology and the drip at the end of his voice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices