Podcasts about movie roundup

Mike & his good friend Alex Hart talk about Alex's move to Canada, what he likes there and the importance of his current job! In more detail, Alex talks about why he loves the nature of Canada, before explaining his decade-long journey from England to Wales to Canada, with several trips to Asia & America in-between and why he's staying in Canada for the time being. Alex open up about his directionless in his youth, how he found ways to work in nature and how that's culminated into his current role as Camp Director at Easter Seals' Camp Tidnish in Nova Scotia; “the only fully accessible camp in the province” – this is the perfect conversation for any travellers, lovers of nature or people who may need help in finding a new path in life. Alex's IG: @underthepiness (www.instagram.com/underthepiness) Easter Seals' Camp Tidnish Site: https://easterseals.ns.ca/camp-tidnish Alex's previous GCC appearances: 226 (Top 2023/4 Movies), 77 (2019 Movie Roundup), 37 (Nature), 10 (2017 Movies) 3 (Underrated Movies). If you want to support the show, get bonus content every week and get early access to episodes, support on Patreon: www.patreon.com/GenuineChitChat   The last episode of GCC was part of the Clone Wars Legacy Project and prior to that, Mike spoke with Tony Holt about Invisible Man and it's relevancy to Black America today, including code-switching and they also make Black Panther comparisons! The week before, Douglas Vincent was on, speaking about his Star Wars journey from 1977 to the Disney era and prior to that was the return of Gough of Beernuts Productions! Mike appeared on Spider-Dan & The Secret Bores for their top 5 small cast movies, listen here: https://pod.fo/e/289237   Mike also appeared on Spider-Dan's pod with Megan, talking Princess Diana in Spencer: https://pod.fo/e/2916c6   Find all of Mike's social media & other links at https://linktr.ee/GenuineChitChat Please review/rate, subscribe and share – it helps the show out an incredible amount!

Brendan shares his thoughts on several films he watched in November and December of 2024. Join us, won't you?Penguin Pool Murder 1932Awkward Guests: The Walton Case (2016)Hot Frosty 2024Santa's Workshop (2017)Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up 2023Holly Jolly (2021)In a Violent Nature 2024Last Friday (2016)The Bourne Supremacy 2004Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” (2021)The Bourne Ultimatum 2007Specter Ops (2015)National Treasure 2004Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game (2011)Watched but not discussed:That Thing You Do! 1996Smile 2022Elf 2003Mixed Nuts 1994What films did you watch in November and December of 2024? Share your films over on Boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

Brendan shares his thoughts on several films he watched in November and December of 2024. Join us, won't you?Penguin Pool Murder 1932Awkward Guests: The Walton Case (2016)Hot Frosty 2024Santa's Workshop (2017)Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up 2023Holly Jolly (2021)In a Violent Nature 2024Last Friday (2016)The Bourne Supremacy 2004Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.” (2021)The Bourne Ultimatum 2007Specter Ops (2015)National Treasure 2004Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game (2011)Watched but not discussed:That Thing You Do! 1996Smile 2022Elf 2003Mixed Nuts 1994What films did you watch in November and December of 2024? Share your films over on Boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in winter 2024/2025, and share my opinions on them. I also take a look at my ebook advertising results from January 2025. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Orc Paladin, Book #3 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: PALADIN50 The coupon code is valid through February 28, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for the bad February weather, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 238 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 7, 2025 and today we are discussing the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter 2024 and 2025. Before that, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing projects, Question of the Week, and my ad results from January 2025.   First, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Orc Paladin, Book Three in the Half-Elven Thief Series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is PALADIN50. This coupon code will be valid through February the 28th, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook to get you through the bad February weather, we have got you covered.   Now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. As I mentioned last week, Shield of Deception is now out and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords and my Payhip store. It is doing quite well. Thank you all for that. I hope you enjoy the book and I've been hearing good things about it from people who read it.   Now that Shield of Deception is done, my main project is now Ghost in the Assembly and I am 36,000 words into it as of this recording, which puts me almost on Chapter 8 of 21. So I'm about one third of the way through the rough draft, give or take. If all goes well. I'm hoping that book will be out in March. My secondary project is Shield of Battle, which is the sequel to Shield of Deception and I am about 2,000 words into that. I'm also 50,000 words into what will be the third and final Stealth and Spells book, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. It was originally named Reactant, but I decided to change the name to Final Quest because that sounds better and if all goes well, that will probably be out in the middle of the year, give or take.   In audiobook news, Cloak of Masks (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now out at all audio stores, including Audible, so you can listen to that there. Work is almost done on Cloak of Dragonfire. It's being proof-listened to as I record this and hopefully that should be out before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects.   00:02:19 Question of the Week   Next up is Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's topic, which ties into our main topic: what was the favorite movie you saw in 2024? No wrong answers, obviously (including “I hate everything I saw in 2024”). We have a few responses for this.   JD says: It was either Transformers One or Deadpool and Wolverine.   Mary says: I didn't see any movies in 2024.   Doug says: Dune was one of the books I read in the ‘70s. Like your books, I never got enough back then. I was buying Hardcovers. I still have six of them. I have seen the two versions of the books. Can't wait to see this version of the books. I have seen the first movies. Hope to see more.   David says: Godzilla versus Kong was pretty much the only one from last year I saw. I just bought Gladiator 2 but haven't watched it yet.   Davette says: I enjoyed both Dune 2 and The Fall Guy and Inside Out 2 and Deadpool and Wolverine. My favorite was Wicked, mainly because I've been waiting on that movie for years.   Bonnie says: I haven't seen any movies or watched TV in years.   For myself, I think it would be a tie for my favorite movie of 2024 for between Dune 2 and The Fall Guy. The two Dune movies, for all the stuff they changed from the book, are probably the most faithful adaptation it was possible to make with that very dense and very weird book. I thought The Fall Guy was just hilarious and I had no idea it was based on TV series from the ‘80s until I read up about it on the Internet after I saw the movie. It was interesting that we didn't have very many responses to this question the week and of those responses, one third of them was “I didn't see any movies in 2024.” So if the movie industry is wondering why it's in so much trouble, I think we might have just found the answer here in that nobody wants to go to see movies in the theater anymore.   00:04:09 Ad Results for January 2025 Now onto our next topic, how my ads performed in January 2025. Now as usual for my books in January, I used Facebook ads, Amazon ads, and BookBub ads, so let's break them down by category- first, by Facebook ads. As usual, I advertised The Ghosts and Cloak Games/Cloak Mage.   GHOSTS: $4.08 for every dollar, with 22% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.   CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $3.38 for every dollar, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. So that went pretty well. I'm hoping that percentage will go up once Cloak of Dragonfire is done and we can put together Cloak Mage Omnibus Three.   I also did some Amazon ads – specifically for HALF-ELVEN THIEF, STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION, and THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNERS GUIDE.   Remember, for an Amazon ad to be effective, it usually needs to be generating at least one sale for every eight clicks on the ads.   HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $4.65 for every dollar spent, 1.85 sales for every click. It's just an amazing ratio-thank you for that.   STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION: Lost $0.15 for every dollar spent, 1 sale for every 4.76 clicks.   THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER'S GUIDE: $3.16 for every dollar spent, 33% of the profit from audio, 1.34 sales for every click.   The standout was HALF-ELVEN THIEF, which actually had more sales than clicks on the ads. That hardly ever happens!   You can see there's a reason I'm going to conclude STEALTH & SPELLS with the third book, because it just doesn't sell well. All of the advertising experiments I have tried to make it sell well have not responded to date. That said, we did improve from December, where I only got a sale for every 14 clicks.   Additionally, Amazon ads work really well with nonfiction books, since they respond a lot better to keyword ads.   Finally, I used Bookbub ads for THE GHOSTS on Apple. That went pretty well.   THE GHOSTS: $4 for every $1 spent.   So, all in all, a pretty good month for ads, though STEALTH & SPELLS remains the weak point. As always everyone, thank you for buying the books and listening to the audiobooks.   00:06:50 Main Topic: Movie/TV Show Reviews of Winter 2024/Early Winter 2025 Now onto our main topic, the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter 2024 and early winter 2025. As always, my ratings are totally subjective and based on nothing more concrete than my own opinions.   Our first one is Red One, which came out in 2024. This was a strange mashup of genres, a holiday movie, urban fantasy, a thriller, and just a little bit of existential horror. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Callum Drift, who is the head of Santa Claus's security. Meanwhile, Chris Evans plays an unscrupulous hacker and thief named Jack O'Malley. Jack unwittingly helps unknown malefactors kidnap Santa Claus and so Callum and Jack have to team up to rescue Santa from his kidnappers. This sounds like a lighthearted holiday movie, but it really isn't. The movie is rather dour and takes itself very seriously. Callum acts like he's in a Jason Bourne movie and deals with various supernatural creatures like a special forces operator assessing targets. Additionally, there are some urban fantasy elements with the vast government agency dedicated to hiding the supernatural world from normal people. I don't think the dissonance really worked at all. It had pieces of a light holiday movie and pieces of a thriller and they really didn't mesh. It's not hard to see why this one didn't do well in the theaters, on top of its enormous budget. Overall Grade: D (In the spirit of Christmas generosity)   Next up is Argylle, which came out in 2024. This was a dumb movie, but I enjoyed it, kind of like Murder Mystery with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston on Netflix. I mean that wasn't exactly Shakespeare or Milton, but I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself while watching it. Same thing applies to Argylle. The plot is that the protagonist Ellie Conway is a bestselling spy novelist. Ellie is a bit of an eccentric personality and travels everywhere with her cat in a backpack that has a window in it so the cat can see what's going on. However, it turns out that Ellie's novels are accurately predicting events in real life espionage, so several sinister spy agencies are hunting her down to learn her secret. A spy named Aidan saves Ellie, claiming that he's the only one she can trust. Of course, this is the kind of movie that has a shocking betrayal and plot twist every eight minutes or so, and the revelation of the central twist made me face palm a bit. There is a fight scene at the end involving colored smoke that's absolutely bonkers. It was on Apple Plus or Apple TV or whatever it's called, but that means all the characters did all their computing on shiny new Apple devices, which is always amusing. Overall Grade: D+ (but barely)   Next up is Venom: The Last Dance, which came out in 2024. It wasn't as good as the first two since so many of the characters did not return, but it brought the Venom Trilogy to a mostly satisfying conclusion. Eddie Brock and Venom are on the run after the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Unbeknownst to either of them, the US government has a secret facility holding captured symbiant aliens and the agency that runs the facility is hunting for them. Unbeknownst to the US government, the creator of the symbiotes, an evil entity named Knull is preparing to escape his prison and to do that, he needs Eddie/Venom delivered to him alive, so he dispatches his creatures to Earth hunt down Eddie and Venom, with disastrous results. The best part of the movie was the comedic duo of Eddie and Venom since the movie takes the absurdity of their situation and leans into it. Overall Grade: B- Next up is the Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which came out in 2024. I read an interview with Brandon Sanderson where he said that a big part of the problem with movie adaptations of books is that the filmmakers often want to tell their own story, not the books'. So they basically used the book as a framework for telling their own story, which inevitably annoys the readers of the book. I suspect that was what happened with The War of the Rohirrim. This movie was a mixture of strong points and weaknesses. Apparently it only exists because New Line needed to put out something or they'd lose film rights to Tolkien's stuff, and so The War of the Rohirrim was fast-tracked.   The strong points: the animation looked pretty, the battle scenes were fun to watch, the voice performances were good, and the music was also good.   The weak points: it felt too long and slow-paced. I think a good half-hour could have been cut of the characters looking pensive and thoughtful (and saved the animators a lot of work in the process). Additionally, I don't think the changes to the plot quite worked. It's based out of the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the history of Rohan. In the book, the plot is touched off when the corrupt Lord Freca demands that King Helm's daughter Hera marry Freca's son Wulf. Helm takes exception to this and ends up killing Freca. His son Wulf swears vengeance, gathers an army from Rohan's enemies, and sets out to seize the crown for himself. In the book, Helm's sons are killed, and Helm himself dies in the defense of the Hornburg (which later becomes known as Helm's Deep), but his nephew Frealof gathers an army, kills Wulf, and becomes the new king of Rohan.   That would have been perfectly good for the plot, but as we mentioned above, I think the screenwriters decided they wanted to write about a Strong Female Character, so they massively expanded Hera's part and made her the protagonist. The problem with this as an adaptation is that Hera is only mentioned once in the book, so the script has to make up a lot of extra stuff to justify Hera's presence, which always weakens an adaptation of a book. This version of Hera would have been in danger of becoming a stereotypical #girlboss character, but she acts more like a Japanese anime protagonist, which does work better in this sort of movie than an Americanized Strong Female Character.   So, in the end, not a bad movie, but I think it would have worked better if they had stuck closer to the original plot in the book. Overall Grade: B-   Next up is Golden Era, which came out in 2022. This is a documentary about the making of the classic Nintendo 64 game Goldeneye and the company behind it. Until I watched this, I never knew that Rare, the company that made Goldeneye, was based in the UK.   I admit I really didn't play Goldeneye back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. I did a few times at various social events, but I never really got into it since I didn't own a game console from 1998 to 2019. Nonetheless, Goldeneye was a very influential game that left its mark on all first-person shooter games since. The documentary interviews most of the people who were involved in the making of Goldeneye, and it was fascinating to see how they more or less accidentally created a genre-defining game.   If you enjoyed Goldeneye or are interested in video game history at all, the documentary is worth watching. After many years of official unavailability, Goldeneye is now available on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, so I may have to give it a try. Overall grade: B     Next up is Wonka, which came out in 2023. I didn't really intend to watch this, but it was on in the background while I was playing Starfield…and Starfield has a lot of loading screens. This movie wasn't made for me, not even remotely, but I thought it was a competently executed example of a movie musical.   Anyway, the plot revolves around a young Willy Wonka coming to a city that seems like a weird hybrid between Paris and New York. Wonka sets out to start selling his innovative chocolates, but soon runs into stiff opposition from the corrupt local candy industry, the corrupt local police chief, and his equally corrupt landlady, who has somehow transitioned from hospitality to luring people into debt slavery. Wonka makes allies from his fellow indentured workers, and soon he is conducting local chocolate manufacturing like a heist.   Like I said, this really wasn't made for me, and I'm sure people who actually like musicals would have many more detailed opinions. But this had some genuinely funny bits. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa was hilarious, and so was Rowan Atkinson as a corrupt bishop. The best line: “Judgment has come…in a most unexpected form!” Overall grade: B     Next up is Man on the Inside, which came out in 2024, and this is a Netflix comedy series from Mike Schur, who created Parks and Recreation, The Good Place and Brooklyn 99. To describe this show, think of a meditation about accepting the inevitability of aging and death through Schur's comedic style, and you'll be there.   Anyway, Ted Danson stars as a recently widowed retired professor of engineering named Charles. His daughter is worried that he's not handling things well and becoming too isolated, so suggests that he find a hobby. Charles answers a classified ad for an “older man who can use technology” and finds himself recruited by a private investigator named Julie. Julie's company has been hired to find a thief within a retirement home, and Julie is about 35 years too young to convincingly infiltrate a retirement home. Hence, Charles pretends to be a new resident, and finds himself befriending the residents he is supposed to investigate. All the while, he tries to deal with the remaining grief from his wife's death, which he never got around to processing in the moment.   In my opinion, The Good Place and Brooklyn 99 both kind of fell apart in their final seasons, but Man on the Inside avoids that in its final episodes, providing good resolution to both the conflict and the emotional stakes. I thought it was both bittersweet and quite funny, and I approve that there's going to be a 2nd season. Overall grade: B   Next up is Minted, which came out in 2023, and this was an interesting documentary about the rise in the fall of the NFT, which in the early 2020s we were assured was going to be the next big thing, but it just turned out to be yet another scam.   The documentary follows an interesting course, first explaining what an NFT is, and then interviewing artists who made life-changing money from minting their early NFTS. But then the speculators arrived, and followed swiftly by the scammers. As of 2025, of course, NFTs are quite worthless, like so many much-vaunted Web 3.0 style technologies.   I think the documentary's biggest weakness was assuming that NFT technology was around to stay and would find a use that would help artists. I agree that it's around to stay, but I don't think it adds value to anything at all. Nevertheless, an interesting look into the NFT fad and the impact it had on artists. Overall grade: B     Next up is Gladiator 2, which came out in 2024. This is basically the same movie as the original Gladiator, just reshuffled a bit and with twenty years of improved technology. The main character Hanno is a soldier in an African city that rebels against Rome. After the rebellion is inevitably crushed, he is taken as a slave and ends up as a gladiator in Rome, determined to take his vengeance on the Roman general who ordered the death of his wife. However, the general was only carrying out the orders of the insane twin emperors Geta and Caracalla. For that matter, Hanno's owner, the charming and affable Macrinus, has his own agenda. As Hanno seeks revenge, he finds himself drawn into the deadly game of imperial politics and must confront the secrets of his own past.   The movie is only very vaguely accurate in terms of history, but it does a good job of capturing the corruption and decadence of the Roman Empire at that time. The empire was in very bad shape, and in fact was only a few years from what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century, a fifty year period of continual civil war, assassination, usurpation, and economic meltdown that resulted in the empire breaking into three separate states for about fifteen years. Everyone knows that the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, but it very nearly didn't make it even to 300 AD. So the ending of Gladiator 2 is a total fantasy, like one of those alt-history books where the Roman Empire ends up conquering the Americas or expanding into outer space.   That said, I enjoyed the movie. Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, and Connie Nielsen in particular gave very good performances, with Denzel Washington's Macrinus as the standout. Overall grade: B Next up is High Sierra, which came out in 1941, and this is 1940s true crime grimdark. A common misconception is that black and white films are generally more sanitized and saccharine than modern fare. This definitely isn't true – there wasn't any gratuitous violence and nudity in ‘40s movies, but some of them were very cynical and dark. High Sierra definitely falls into that category. Humphrey Bogart plays Roy Earle, a bank robber currently in Indiana state prison. His former boss Big Mac arranges a pardon for him, and brings him out to California for one last big job.   Unfortunately, the other people on Earle's crew are idiots, and he has a growing sense of impending disaster. Additionally, Earle gets emotionally entangled with two women – Velma, a sick woman from his hometown, and Marie, a woman inured to the lifestyle of criminals. As Earle prepares for the job and attempts to deal with the two women, things get more and more complicated. Definitely on the darker side as I mentioned, but well worth watching, both as a historical artifact and a crime story in its own right. Overall grade: B+   Next is Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5, which came out in 2024. Lower Decks is an example of a parody of a thing that is so good that it sort of loops around the horseshoe and becomes a good example of the thing it is parodying. Season 5 is the undeserved end to the very funny Lower Decks series. Paramount really, really wants to get purchased by Skydance, and that's probably going to happen in 2025, so there's a lot of clearing the decks at Paramount, and I expect Lower Decks was one of the casualties.   Then again, our protagonists are no longer lower deckers but junior officers, so perhaps it was a natural place to end the show. So Lower Decks went out pretty strong with a collection of funny and good episodes. All the characters experienced plot arcs and development. The lower deckers matured from the callow ensigns they were in Season 1, and the senior officers likewise experienced character growth and development. (I liked Commander Ransom's triumphant battle cry of “high intensity interval training!”)   I'd say the only weakness is that the show ended with multiverse stuff, and I don't like multiverse stuff in general. Still, the show made a compelling argument for the multiverse as a concept, and the multiverse plot did give an excuse to bring back various Trek actors for speaking parts. And, to be fair, Star Trek has been doing multiverse stuff long, long before the Marvel movies ran the concept into the ground – Captain Kirk was dealing with alternate universe stuff back in the 1960s.   The last episode was a satisfactory conclusion to the series. Lower Decks might be over, but once the Skydance acquisition settles down, maybe the character will return in a new show called Junior Officers? One can hope! Overall grade: B+   Next up is the Frasier reboot Season 2, which also came out in 2024. I liked this about as much as I liked Season 1, which is to say I enjoyed it and found it funny. Frasier's and his son Frederick's relationship seems to have reached equilibrium, so the season spent more time on more 1940s style screwball comedy, which is not a bad thing. Some of the best comedy remains the conflicts between Frasier and Frederick, which is of course an echo of Frasier's own conflicts with his father back in the original show in the 1990s.   I think the best episode was the return of Frasier's scheming, Machiavellian agent Bebe and her daughter Phoebe, who did not exactly fall far from the maternal apple tree. The 10-episode format for the season does seem rather cramped compared to the 20-ish episodes per season of the original show, but that was a different era.   Frasier remains, as one of the characters said in the previous season, the same well-meaning buffoon who goes “that extra, ill-advised mile.” I hope we get a Season 3, but with the shakeups we mentioned at Paramount, that seems unlikely. Overall grade: A-     Finally, let's close with the three best things I saw in Winter 2024/2025.   The first of my favorite three is Saturday Night, which came out in 2024. This is a biopic about the chaotic first night of Saturday Night Live back in the 1970s. Quite hilarious in a vicious sort of way, and (from what I understand) it accurately captures the sheer chaos of live TV. Of course, the chaos surrounding SNL is probably a bit higher than usual for standard live television.   After I watched it, I looked it up, and it seems the movie compresses about three months' worth of events into the hour and a half before the launch of the very first episode. What's amusing is that the more outlandish an event in the movie was, the more likely it was to have actually happened in the leadup to the show's launch. It was the mundane stuff that was made up, not the crazy stuff.   JK Simmons was hilarious as Milton Berle. Nowadays, SNL is an Institution, so it was amusing to see it back when everyone thought it was a bad idea that would fail catastrophically. The movie convincingly captured the “look” of the 1970s – all the characters looked like they were made of nicotine, cholesterol, and cocaine, and in some instances, a lot of cocaine. That stuff is bad for you, as several SNL stars later found out to their sorrow.   It really shows the randomness of history – watching the creation of SNL, you wouldn't expect it to have lasting cultural impact, but it did. Overall grade: A The second of my three favorite things I saw was The Thin Man, which came out in 1934. This is based on a novel by Dashiel Hammett (most famous for writing The Maltese Falcon), and was made pre-Hays Code, so the female lead tended to wear outfits that show off a bit more skin than you would otherwise expect in a 1930s movie. Interestingly, The Thin Man is a fusion of a noir detective movie and a screwball comedy, not two genres that are usually connected, and somehow it all works.   Anyway, the movie centers around detective Nick and his wife Nora, who have returned to New York after a four-year sojourn to California. Nick used to be a private detective, but then he married the wealthy Nora, and wanted to retire to a life of ease and parties with a lot of alcohol. Except everyone in New York assumes that Nick isn't retired and is back on the case, and so he gets dragged into the disappearance of an eccentric factory owner and a string of murders that pop up around it. Of course, Nick isn't as reluctant to come out of retirement as he pretends.   As is often the case in many movies made in the 1930s, many of the rich characters are shown as malicious buffoons, especially the factory owner's ex-wife. Nick and Nora, as the protagonists, are of course exempt from this.   This is considered a classic, and deservedly so – the characters are sharply drawn, the dialogue is good, the performances are excellent, the movie manages to portray a fairly complex plot in 90 minutes. You'll want to watch it with the captions on, of course, because while human nature may not have changed in the ninety years since this movie came out, audio technology has sure improved.   Fun fact: Nick and Nora's dog is named Asta, which is apparently a frequent answer in crossword puzzles due to the double vowels. Overall grade: A   Now, for the third of my three favorite things I saw in Winter 2024/2025, that would be Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, which came out in 2024. This is Star Wars meets The Goonies meets Pirates of the Caribbean, and despite that very odd combination of influences, the show was really quite good. The show opens on the idyllic planet of At Attin, which looks like an idealized version of 1980s suburbia filtered through Star Wars. Everyone on the planet has the same job – contributing to the Great Work (whatever that is). Since our four protagonists are kids, they don't pay much attention to that or the concerns of the adults. When one of the children discovers a derelict spaceship in the woods, they accidentally activate it and fly off-planet.   This is a problem because At Attin is protected by a Barrier that doesn't allow travel, and the galaxy is a dangerous place with a lot of pirate gangs roaming around looking for prey. However, the children fall in with Jod, who claims to be a Jedi who will help the kids get back to their home. Everyone they meet warns them that Jod is a con artist and not to be trusted, but he demonstrates Force powers again and again (which would seem to support his claim that he's a Jedi). And the kids' home of At Attin has a mysterious secret, one that Jod desperately wants to claim for himself.   This is very entertaining all the way through. Star Wars really works best as a kids' adventure show (in my opinion), though I'm still looking forward to the second season of Andor, which is Star Wars crossed with a John le Carre spy thriller. 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.

Danielle & Brett are back with another pre-season grab-bag of pop-culture topics. Danielle raves about the Sebastian Stan awards dramedyA Different Man& Brett discusses his first watch of the Cher-Nicolas Cage rom-comMoonstruck.Also, they talk at length about the new HBO MAX streaming dramaThe Pitt, starringER's Noah Wylie and how medical dramas are BACK BABY.Later, Brett shares some Survivor 48 cast thoughts, Danielle answers a listener question aboutTraitors and we touch on a few other random movies from 15 years ago.Follow Hey Julie on Bluesky and submit your questions ⁠⁠@HeyJulieBB⁠⁠.bsky.social, our ⁠⁠Discord server⁠⁠, or email us ⁠heyjuliebigbrother@gmail.com⁠!Watch Hey Julie on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠Follow Brett ⁠⁠@BrettRader⁠⁠.bsky.socialFollow Danielle ⁠⁠@DingDongDani.bsky.social

Recorded - 12/29/2024 On Episode 302 of the Almost Sideways Movie Podcast, the team sends 2024 off in style. We recap 6 different new releases we have seen over the last 2 weeks (and there were disagreements on almost every one of them). Then, our power rankings puts us in the director and editor chair by asking what scene that was skipped in a movie we wished we could have seen. Our trivia segment focuses on the Metacritic score of Best Picture nominees. Here are the highlights: What We've Been Watching (11:30) Todd Indie Screener Review: "September 5" (15:15) Zach Review: "The Old Oak" (20:00) Terry Oscar Anniversary Review: "Maria Full of Grace" (24:15) Terry Oscar Anniversary Review: "Kinsey" 2024 HOLIDAY MOVIE ROUND-UP (28:30) "Nosferatu" Review - Todd, Terry, Zach (43:50) "A Complete Unknown" Review - Zach, Todd (54:15) "Nightbitch" Review - Terry, Todd (1:04:20) "The Fire Inside" Review - Todd (1:10:00) "Babygirl" Review - Zach, Terry (1:20:55) "Lee" Review - Terry, Todd (1:29:45) Power Rankings: Skipped Scenes in Movies/TV We Want to See (2:08:50) Honorable Mentions & Guessing Adam's List TRIVIA (2:22:45) Todd Trivia Review: "You're Sleeping, Nicole" (2:27:00) Trivia: Metacritic Score of Best Picture Nominees (2:35:50) Quote of the Day Find AlmostSideways everywhere! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠almostsideways.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/AlmostSidewayscom-130953353614569/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AlmostSideways Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @almostsideways ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Terry's Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @almostsideterry ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zach's Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @pro_zach36 Todd: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Too Cool for Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Adam's Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: @adamsideways ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/almostsideways-podcast/id1270959022⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7oVcx7Y9U2Bj2dhTECzZ4m⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Stitcher⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/almost-sideways-movie-podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfEoLqGyjn9M5Mr8umWiktA/featured?view_as=subscriber⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

2024 was a banner year for horror movies and Bryan and Dave are going to run you down the list of the best, worst, and most-okayest horror movies of the year. Where do your favorite titles drop? What did we think of Maxxxine? How about Terrifier 3? Longlegs? It's all in here and then some, a giant-sized episode to address 25+ titles. Our opinions are sure to make you mad. Support Bring Me The Axe on Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/bringmetheaxepod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Buy Bring Me The Axe merch here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/bring-me-the-axe-podcast/⁠

Brendan talks about the movies he watched in September and November of 2024, Join us, won't you?Back to the FutureBack to the Future 2Back to the Future 3Back to the Future: Back in Time (2020)Back to the Future: An Adventure Through Time (2016)Jimmy Savile: A British Horror StorySherlock, “The Lying Detective”K2: The Killer SummitK2 (2010)Summit: The Board Game (2017)That Thing You Do!On Tour (2019)Rock Hard: 1977 (2024)What movies did you watch in September and November?

Brendan talks about the movies he watched in September and November of 2024, Join us, won't you?Back to the FutureBack to the Future 2Back to the Future 3Back to the Future: Back in Time (2020)Back to the Future: An Adventure Through Time (2016)Jimmy Savile: A British Horror StorySherlock, “The Lying Detective”K2: The Killer SummitK2 (2010)Summit: The Board Game (2017)That Thing You Do!On Tour (2019)Rock Hard: 1977 (2024)What movies did you watch in September and November?

We love to see Hugh Grant being a little bastard! Listen along to Casey & Eddie's thoughts on three of the most recent big screen releases. Thanks for listening! Original Theme by Eddie Trizzino

It's October, that special time of the movie year where quality awards-bait shares space with horror flicks and other genre fare. We have space to write about it all on BFG, but barely have enough time to talk about it. So this week chief film critic Stephen Garrett joins Neal Pollack for a kind of speed-round to catch each other and all of you up on what's in theaters and also on the way out of theaters.First up is 'Conclave,' a pulpy not-quite-murder mystery set in the Vatican. Apparently there's more intrigue surrounding the election of a new Pope than there is surrounding the selection of the new head of a Mafia crime family. Maybe they're actually the same thing, Conclave posits. Stephen calls Conclave director Edward Berger the king of "empty prestige" pictures. Neal sort of agrees with him but still enjoyed Ralph Fiennes's campy lead performance as a Cardinal-detective who's undergoing a crisis of faith.On a less serious note, we have 'Venom: The Last Dance,' which Stephen points out has the same creator as the previous two Venom movies, both of which he also reviewed for us. While he absolutely hated the first Venom, Stephen has warmed to each subsequent installment, and he's almost a fan. At this point, we have to wonder if a Venom symbiote isn't inhabiting his body, or at least his reviews.Parker Finn, the creator of Smile 2, is almost like a horror auteur at this point. The sequel is flashier than the first installment, and it's also a huge hit. Stephen found it a bit too long and maybe a bit too full of itself, but it's also genuinely creepy and also has some deliciously nasty ideas about how deep-seated psychological trauma can haunt people, and even kill them. But even if it doesn't, the franchise is a hit and it's here to stay.With the election approaching, The Apprentice should be required viewing. Neal calls the Donald Trump origin story, set in the 1970s and 80s, "one of the best movies I've seen all year." Stephen won't go that far, but he has nothing but praise for Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stand as Donald Trump. This movie is more popular overseas than in the U.S. Neal thinks it's not pro-Trump enough for MAGA types and not anti-Trump for people who are anti-Trump. But for people who love good movies, it's perfect.We can't say the same about 'We Live In Time,' a completely dopey romantic drama about cancer and chefs and who knows what else. Stephen calls this Florence Pugh/Andrew Garfield movie "so dumb," and Neal and Stephen both marvel at the millennial uber-beta-male who is Garfield's character. Then there's the non-linear narrative, a curse on the world that hopefully this movie will end. But we wouldn't count on thatEnjoy the show!

Paul and Amy are back and discuss all the big horror movies of 2024! They're talking The Substance, Smile 2, Longlegs, Speak No Evil and What's Inside. Plus Alison Foreman tries to sell Paul and Amy on Art the clown of the Terrifier franchise!  You can join the Unspooled conversation on Paul's Discord at https://discord.gg/ZwtygZGTa6Follow Paul and Amy on Letterboxd for more of their movie hot takes! https://letterboxd.com/paulscheer/  https://letterboxd.com/theamynicholson/Paul's book Joyful Recollections of Trauma is out now! Find it at https://www.harpercollins.com/products/joyful-recollections-of-trauma-paul-scheerCheck out more of Paul's writing on his Substack https://substack.com/@paulscheerEpisodic Art by Kim Troxall: https://www.unspooledart.com/ Learn more about the show at Unspooledpod.com, follow us on Twitter @unspooled and on Instagram @unspooledpod, and don't forget to rate, review & subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or where you listen to podcasts. Get access to all the podcasts you love, music channels and radio shows with the SiriusXM App! Get 3 months free using this show link: https://siriusxm.com/unspooled.

it's a spooky and fright-tastic bonus episode for you on Scary Wednesday ooooh!Ben went to some film festivals with CHERUB and it was spooooky ahhhh! and he talks about how scary it is to be a famous Hollywood celebrity OooOooOOOOoooo!and then Ben and Alex talk (from beyond the grave) about some of the absolutely bone-chilling horror films they've been watching this October oh ah oh no I'm afraid I will die and no one will remember me fondly oh noooo! I'm afraid I wasted my life watching mooooovies ohhhh noooo!enjoy or die + rot in piss!

Brendan chats about the films he watched in July and August of 2024. Join us, won't you?SplitGlassHeroes Wanted (2014)Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)Wicked Little LettersMarrying Mr. Darcy (2014)Death on the TyneMurder on the Blackpool ExpressMystery! Motive for Murder (2015)Riverside (2021)SlingshotPanic Station (2011)Win, Lose, or Banana (2009)What movies did you watch in July and August? Share your viewing list over on boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

Brendan chats about the films he watched in July and August of 2024. Join us, won't you?SplitGlassHeroes Wanted (2014)Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)Wicked Little LettersMarrying Mr. Darcy (2014)Death on the TyneMurder on the Blackpool ExpressMystery! Motive for Murder (2015)Riverside (2021)SlingshotPanic Station (2011)Win, Lose, or Banana (2009)What movies did you watch in July and August? Share your viewing list over on boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

Shanon And Jami throw bombs at Kate Blanchett but then are instantly best friends for no reason, they go to a fun island with Channing Tatum but some of the night time activities really suck. Their 1000 year old step mother in law stays with them and has an "accident" like 10 times, and our older selves come back in time to tell us just to kinda go with it.  We do a slingshot thing to Titan, but get the math and science all wrong and find out we're the same person and the first rule is you don't talk about space fight club. 

Our summer round up includes reviews of 'Alien Romulus', 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice', 'The Trap', 'Borderlands' and more....plus we tunnel back in time for our classic oldie 'The Great Escape', starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Richard Attenborough. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've been busy over here at The Spook House so today we're squeezing 3 movies into one gross episode! First up we review the 36 years in the making sequel to Beetlejuice! Did Tim Burton snap his losing streak with this one? Tune in to hear what we thought! We also discuss our first ever theater viewing together for The Front Room, the unintentional comedy of the year. Finally, after having our minds blown by The Substance, we review this disgusting body horror masterpiece in all it's bloody glory. Let's pump it up!

In this special episode the HFCS members Greg, Barry and Aron discuss how summer movie season 2024 panned out and how fall movies are shaping up.

In this week's episode, I review the movies and streaming shows I saw in the second half of summer 2024. The episode concludes with a preview of the audiobook of HALF-ORC PALADIN, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 218 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 13th, 2024 and today we are discussing my Summer Movie Review Roundup, Part 2. Just to note to say that you may hear some odd background noises in this episode. My neighbor across the street is getting his roof replaced. I can't begrudge them that because no one likes a leaky roof, but it is slightly inconvenient because this is the only time today I have to record the podcast. So if you hear the occasional pop in the background, that is the sound of a nail gun driving shingles into a roof. Before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects and then we will do Question of the Week. First up, Shield of Conquest is very nearly done. I am about 2/3 of the way through the final round of editing and if all goes well, it should come out shortly after this episode is available, so be sure to check your favorite ebook retailer and see if it is out. Once that is done, I will be going full speed ahead on Ghost in the Tombs and I'm currently 48,000 words into that, so about halfway through the rough draft, give or take, depends on how long the rest of the book takes and how certain scenes in the final half of the book out. In audiobook news, Half-Orc Paladin is done, and it's now available on all the major audio stores: Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Payhip, Spotify, and a couple others, and you can get it there. We will close out this episode with a preview of Half-Orc Paladin (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward). 00:01:30 Question of the Week Now let's have a Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite superhero movie? No wrong answers, of course (including “I don't like superhero movies”, but it turns out no one said that, so I guess superhero movies are quite popular). The inspiration for this question was that I was thinking about how superhero movies are such a major part of pop culture. Nowadays when people think of superhero movies, they usually think of Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there were major superhero movies before the whole Marvel Cinematic approach really got going in the 2000s/2010s and they've been obviously part of pop culture for a very long time, and as you could expect, we had a wide range of responses from this. Our first response was from JD, who says: If I had to pick just one, it would probably be Guardians of the Galaxy. The first film had a near perfect mix of action, drama, and comedy. For me, the best Batman film was the 1966 one starring Adam West. Joaquim says: In the last millennium, when I was a child, we had DC Comics and Marvel Comics. I did like Batman in DC, Spider-man and The Avengers in Marvel. In the movies, I did not particularly like Batman, but I like the early Marvel movies, Avengers 1 and Captain America 2 the most. Mary says: X-Men. Todd says: 1978 Superman. Visually at 15, I believed a man could fly. Juana says: My superhero is actually a couple - The Vision and Scarlet Witch (before they turned Vision into an emotionless thing a while back). What's interesting is that the guy who was in charge of Picard Season 3, which I quite liked, is apparently going to be running a Vision show for Marvel sometime in 2026 (assuming Disney doesn't run out of money first), so it should be interesting to see how it turns out. Stephen says: I know this is random- Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings. I know it was not completely an original storyline, but I liked it a lot. I agree with Stephen. I thought Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings was one of the stronger Marvel movies and it's too bad it hasn't had a sequel. Becca says: The Dark Knight trilogy. Those are the real Batman films for me. Ledger was certainly the best Joker. I do love the happier Batmans, too. I grew up on West's version of Batman. For me, V for Vendetta is my favorite superhero movie and one of my favorite movies ever. I usually watch it at least once a year. Michael says: Captain America: The First Avenger. Juliana says: Second Captain America. The spy aspect really married well with the superhero genre in this one. I agree with Juliana. I think Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of the better Marvel movies. Roger says: only because we're entering the season, The Christmas Chronicles with Kurt Russell. Andrew says: Deadpool and Wolverine, followed by The Dark Knight trilogy. James says: I know Fox's X-Men get a bad rap generally, but Days of Future Past was amazing. I'd have to go with that, with The Dark Knight, Thor: Ragnarok, and Wonder Woman as runner-ups. Cheryl says: don't really have favorites, but for eye candy, Thor. Catriona says: The original Christopher Reeve Superman. Jenny says: Mystery Men. Jeanne says: Megamind. Randy says: Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight movies are definitely in the top three but Iron Man has always been my favorite. Good story, good pacing, and Robert Downey Junior just nailed playing Tony Stark, in my opinion. Not to mention it kicked off the longest, largest, story movie arc to this day. BV says: Superman 1978. Terry says: Fifth Element. Gary says: Hancock. For myself, I think my favorite superhero movies would be the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Dark Knight trilogy. Strong performances, great action, and they managed to do something very difficult, namely bring a satisfying end to a superhero story arc. It almost feels like The Dark Knight movies are the “real” events of Batman and all the other comics and cartoons and movies are legends and exaggerations after the fact, like how the whole glittering mythos of King Arthur and the Round Table developed around an obscure Roman British warlord in the 500s AD. Also, Heath Ledger's version of the Joker was amazing. That said, for Marvel movies, which have been kind of the dominant form of superhero movies for the last decade, I think the best one of those would be Captain America: Winter Soldier (in my opinion). 00:05:45 Main Topic: Summer 2024 Movie/TV Roundup, Part 2 And now on to our main topic of this episode, my Summer 2024 Movie Roundup, Part 2. And if this movie roundup has a theme, it's miscellaneous. The reason for that is I did not actually watch all that many movies in the second half of the summer. There was no nefarious reason for that. I was just busy with travel and busy with multiple instances of home repair and busy finishing Half-Orc Paladin and Shield of Conquest. So I mostly watched some older stuff that I found on streaming, especially on Tubi, which has the delightful attribute of being free with ads. As usual, the movies are listed from my least favorite to my most favorite and the grades are totally subjective and based upon my own thoughts and opinions and nothing more substantial than that. So with that in mind, let's start out. First up is The Burbs, which came out in 1989. It's a dark comedy/horror movie satire starring Tom Hanks as Ray, a suburban homeowner with a wife and a son. On vacation for the week, Ray becomes obsessed with the Klopeks, a new family that has moved on to his street. The Klopeks have no interest in maintaining their property and show signs of other odd activities: going out only at night, constant digging in the backyard, and strange noises and lights coming from their basement. Soon, Ray and his two neighbors become determined to find out just what the Klopeks are up to. It was darkly funny, though you could tell that the ending had been rewritten a few times. The movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be a satire of clannish homeowners or to totally validate their concerns, or both. I think it tried for both and couldn't quite get there. Though it does kind of show how much the United States has changed or possibly declined in the last 35 years. Ray and his friends are shown as kind of losers, but they live in enormous, well-maintained houses. It's like how Homer Simpson in the first couple seasons of The Simpsons was shown as a bumbling loser, but yet he could afford to live in a four bedroom house, his wife didn't work most of the time, they had two cars and three children, and all without Homer having a college degree. By the standards of 2024, Homer Simpson lived like a king. Amusing anecdote-one scene in The Burbs was clearly inspired by A Fistful of Dollars, which I talk about more below. Overall grade: C Next up is The Batman vs. Dracula, an animated movie which came out in 2005. In this movie, Batman goes up against Count Dracula. This was probably as dark and gory as something can be while still technically remaining targeted at children. When a robbery goes bad, the Penguin accidentally releases Count Dracula from his tomb and becomes the Vampire Lord's new chief servant. Dracula is fascinated by the modern world, but he's especially fascinated by Batman since for obvious reasons he admires Batman's bat-themed motif. Dracula offers Batman the chance to become his chief lieutenant, which Batman refuses and Dracula takes that personally. He'll get his revenge by turning Gotham City into a city of the undead and taking Bruce Wayne's girlfriend, Vicki Vale, as his new vampire bride. Unless, of course, Batman stops him. It was interesting how neatly Dracula slots into becoming a good enemy for Batman. After all, in the original Dracula novel, Dracula's nemesis Van Helsing was definitely a man of science who brought logic, reason, and scientific method to his fight against Dracula. Batman is also a man of science in the sense that he's a detective, so he does some detective work to unravel Dracula's weaknesses and to build weapons to use against him. Overall Grade: B Next up is Set It Up, which came out in 2018. This is a romantic comedy that reminded me a bit of the more cynical 1940s-era romcoms like The Shop Around the Corner. The female lead Harper works as a personal assistant for a workaholic female sports writer who terrorizes her employees. The male lead Charlie works for workaholic male venture capitalist who also terrorizes his employees. Both their bosses are miserable, demanding people who make everyone around them unhappy. One day, both Charlie and Harper are dispatched to get dinner for their bosses and end up fighting over the last available delivery man. However, in the wake of the encounter, Harper hatches a plan. Both she and Charlie know everything about their respective bosses, so why not manipulate their calendars and schedules so they fall in love? They might be more cheerful, or at the very least they'll be in the office less frequently. Charlie has his misgivings about this plan, but after one more unfortunate encounter with his boss, decides to embark upon Harper's plan. Of course, Charlie has a high maintenance girlfriend who wants him to make a lot more money, and Harper is trying to find a boyfriend, but as per the rules of romcoms, perhaps Charlie and Harper will have more in common than they might think. This had a bit more crude humor than I might prefer but was still enjoyable. It did remind me quite a bit of the more cynical ‘30s and ‘40s movies like My Man Godfrey or the Shop around the Corner. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Bank of Dave, which came out in 2023. This is basically the cynical British version of a Hallmark movie, but with better production values. It is very, very loosely based on the activities of Dave Fishwick, a successful van dealer in the north of England who decides to start a local bank for local people, feeling that the Big London banks have lost sight of that. To do that, he recruits a London lawyer named Hugh to help him navigate a labyrinth of regulation around financial institutions. Of course the big banks dislike this idea and come after Dave hard. Dave is definitely the local Big Man, and it's interesting that humanity's default mode of government seems to be Local Big Man. However, if one must have a Big Man, one could only hope he is as benevolent as Dave. The movie was pretty funny, though a lot of the humor comes from the UK's class and regional divides, which are rather more pronounced than in the United States. Here in the United States, you can drive for 300 miles and be in the same state the entire time, and the local culture won't change all that much. The cliche is that the US East Coast and the US West Coast look down upon flyover country, but you can drive something like 1,000 miles from New York before you even get to Flyover Country. If you drive 300 miles in the UK, you've probably gone through six or seven regional accents and local traditions. The Bank of Dave does kind of turn into a Hallmark movie since Hugh falls for David's doctor niece. So basically a romance with the backdrop of British class/regional struggle as comedy. Overall grade: B Next up is Cool Runnings, which came out in 1993. A sports comedy film very (and I mean very loosely) based on the debut of the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team in the 1988 Winter Olympics. When sprinter Derice Bannock is unable to qualify for the Jamaican Olympic team due to an accident, he decides to instead to start a bobsled team to represent Jamaica in the Games. To do this, he recruits washed up former bobsledder Blitzer (played by John Candy) to act as the team's coach. What follows is a pretty good example of a sports movie. The team must come together and perform while overcoming their own personal challenges and inner conflicts, especially Coach Blitzer, who has to dig deep and overcome his past to effectively coach the team. It's interesting that sports movies tend to follow one of two trajectories. Either the team rallies and wins the championship, or they don't win the championship and nonetheless achieve moral victory by overcoming their internal difficulties in learning to work together. I won't spoil which path Cool Runnings follows. Overall Grade: B Next up is Uncle Buck, which came out in 1989. This is a coming-of-age comedy film about a 40 year old man, oddly enough. I did think this was pretty funny. Bob and Cindy are a married couple with three children living in the suburbs of Chicago, and when Cindy's father has a heart attack, they need to rush to his side. Due to the unexpected nature of the news, they have to find someone to watch the kids while they're gone. In desperation, they turned to Bob's brother Buck, who alternates between working for his girlfriend at her tire company and making money on rigged horse races. While Buck is kind of a loser, he's basically a decent guy, just averse to responsibility and settling down. He quickly steps up to take care of the children, though he conflicts with the oldest daughter Tia, who is in the grips of a full-blown adolescent rebellion. Buck soon realizes that he's come to a crossroads in his life, which is reinforced when Tia runs away to a party for the weekend. Slightly dark in places, but definitely more family friendly than many ‘80s comedies. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is the Adjustment Bureau, which came out in 2011. It is a science fiction romantic thriller based on the Philip K. Dick story, which is a very odd sentence to say, but it's true. Matt Damon plays David Norris, a congressman from New York who just lost the Senate race. Preparing for his concession speech. He meets Elise (played by Emily Blunt) and is immediately smitten with her. A month later, he runs into her by accident on a bus and receives her phone number. However, soon mysterious suited men with unusual powers arrive and burn the paper with the phone number. The men explain to David that they are The Adjustment Bureau, charged with making sure history unfolds according to the mysterious Plan. The Plan says that David can never see Elise again. David of course is not the sort of guy to take that lying down, so he soon finds himself trying to outwit the Time Cops and find Elise. It was interesting that The Adjustment Bureau was very similar to the Time Variance Authority from the Marvel Loki show, so I wonder if they drew on some of the same sources of inspiration. An interesting movie and worth watching. It actually wrestled with the oldest philosophical question in Western civilization: are all things predestined or do we have free will? Or is it somehow both? I have to admit that the scene where Elise dunked David's BlackBerry in coffee was very satisfying to me personally, since I had a lot of support headaches with Blackberries back in the 2000s. Overall Grade: B+ Now, finally the favorite thing I saw in the second half of the summer 2024: A Fistful of Dollars, which came out in 1964. This was the first Spaghetti Western I've seen, which means it's Italian director Sergio Leone's sort of stylized version of what the Old West was like. Of course, the movie actually ripped off the Akira Kurosawa samurai movie Yojimbo. In fact, it was so heavily ripped off Yojimbo that Kurosawa sued, settled out of court, and received 15% of A Fistful of Dollars' revenue. Apparently Kurosawa made more from the settlement than he did from Yojimbo. Legal troubles aside, it was quite good and I could see how it heavily influenced many subsequent movies. For example, the Star Wars character of Boba Fett was inspired by A Fistful of Dollars and Boba Fett in turn inspired the Mandalorian. Stephen King's rather disappointing Dark Tower series was inspired by Dollars as well. And there are many other examples, such as the scene in The Burbs I had mentioned above earlier. Anyway, Clint Eastwood plays The Stranger, a mercenary gunslinger who seems to be drifting from town to town without a purpose. He arrives at San Miguel, a US-Mexican border town that is dominated by two crime families at each other's throats, the Rojos and the Baxters. Both clans seek to hire The Stranger for their organizations and the gunslinger begins playing them off each other for personal profit. As mercenary and as ruthless as he is, The Stranger seems to have a core of honor to him. A couple of times he goes out of his way to help people because he can, which sometimes gets him into trouble. Definitely worth watching as a classic film. Overall Grade: A So that's it for this week. Thanks 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are available from Episodes 140 onward). If you enjoy the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In the newest episode of InsideFlix, brothers Mike, Richard, and Raymond gather to share their insights on a few recent films they've watched. They dive into their impressions of the latest entry in the "Alien" franchise, "Alien: Romulus," and discuss M. Night Shyamalan's newest thriller "Trap," starring Josh Hartnett. To wrap things up, Raymond weighs in on the highly talked-about horror thriller "Strange Darling." Could it be his favorite horror film of the year?

Send us a textIn this energetic episode of Love on the Pod, Sherri, Danielle and Jessica dive into the world of made-for-TV sports movies! Each host brings two of their picks to the table, offering a diverse lineup of films that celebrate the triumphs, challenges and heartwarming moments in the world of sports.From underdog stories to tales of perseverance and teamwork, our hosts cover a wide range of sports genres and themes. Listen in as they share their thoughts on the characters, plotlines and the emotional highs and lows that make these movies so compelling.Expect plenty of lively discussions, fun anecdotes, and perhaps a few surprising opinions as Sherri, Danielle and Jessica analyze what makes each movie a touchdown, home run or a slam dunk in the realm of TV sports films.Whether you're a sports enthusiast or just love a good story, this episode is packed with excitement and heartfelt moments. Don't miss the ultimate sports movie roundup on Love on the Pod! Thank you for listening to this episode of Love on the Pod! Subscribe, Rate, and Review: Don't miss an episode—subscribe to Love on the Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review us! Connect with Us: Email: loveonthepod@gmail.com Instagram: @LoveOnThePod Visit Our Website: For show notes, episodes and more, visit https://www.loveonthepod.com. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll discuss another holiday favorite. See you next time!

In the latest episode of InsideFlix, brothers Mike, Richard, and Raymond come together to discuss some of the recent films they've been watching. Raymond shares his opinions on the heavily criticized video game-based action movie "Borderlands," which just hit theaters this past weekend. The conversation then shifts to the trio's thoughts on Ti West's final installment of his horror "X" trilogy, "MaXXXine." Finally, Mike and Richard give their take on the new Apple original movie, the heist film "The Instigators," starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. To wrap things up, Mike and Richard recommend two digital releases: "Thelma" and "Ghostlight."

Brendan talks about the films he watched in June and what games would go well when paired with those films. Join us, won't you?Boys in the BoatAll the President's MenWatergate (2019)1960: The Making of the President (2007)Hit ManFiascoThe KillerMarloweP.I. (2012)Detective: City of Angels (2019)Dune (Part Two)Dune: Imperium – Uprising (2023)What films have you seen lately? Share with us over on Boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

In this week's episode, I rank the movies and streaming shows I saw in the first half of summer 2024. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 210 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 19th, 2024, and today we are discussing the movies and streaming shows I watched for the first half of summer 2024. Before that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will go into Question of the Week. So, my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Half Orc Paladin is finished at about 81,500 words. Next up, I'm writing a short story called Paladin's Hunt that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Half Orc Paladin is out, hopefully in early August. I'm also 23,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs. I'm not 100% decided what I'm going to write next once Half Orc Paladin is out. I have to make a decision soon obviously, but it's probably going to be either Shield of Conquest or Cloak of Illusion. In audiobook news, the audiobook Wizard-Thief, as narrated by Leanne Woodward, is almost done. It's just got to get through the various approvals at the audiobook sites, so hopefully that should be out in early August. Recording is going to start very soon on Shield of Darkness. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. We have a question about the Shield War series from reader EM, who writes in to ask: I was rereading Shield of Darkness and occurred to me that Connmar Pendragon would have had a much easier time finding his way to Owyllain if he had a Corsair Lord or whatever they called themselves back then, who had the Hidden Eye navigating for him. Am I right and this will be revealed in the Shield Wars series? No, Connmar did not have a Corsair or anyone with the Hidden Eye ability navigating for him, and he basically found his way to Owyllain by accident. At that time, there were people living on the Isle of Kordain, but they hadn't really coalesced around the Corsairs of the Isle of Kordain as their national identity yet. I mean the process was underway but hadn't reached the form it would by the time of the Frostborn series. And while some of them had the Hidden Eye ability, they hadn't quite fully understood what it meant yet, and they hadn't lived on the isle long enough for the mutilations from the dwarven engines to fully take hold. We'll reveal more details about that in Shield of Conquest when I write that as my next book or the book after my next book. 00:02:26 Question of the Week Now on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week's question: subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited, Spotify, Netflix, Thrive Market and Xbox Game Pass are an inevitable part of modern life. If you have a subscription service, which one is your favorite? No wrong answers and bear in mind that “subscription services all cost too much and I hit them all with the fiery consuming heat of 1,000 cores of 1,000 suns” is a perfectly acceptable answer as well. Surabhi said: Disney Plus, because Marvel movies are my therapy. Ray says: I only use Bookbub and Google Play. Justin says: I do not use subscription services. I prefer to purchase the books, games, and programs I buy outright rather than rent them. Connectivity can be a problem where I am so being able to read, work, or play without being tethered to the Internet is a good thing. That is something to keep in mind when considering a subscription service. If you have questionable Internet connectivity in your area, that may not be the best choice to sign up for a subscription service that relies on the Internet. Our next comment is from Venus, who says: I can't afford any subscriptions services, although if Barnes and Noble did one for ebooks, I'd consider working something out. I refuse to support Amazon and don't like the fact that apparently books on Kindle Unlimited can't be anywhere else. That is indeed one of the annoying features of the Kindle Unlimited program, which is why only four of my 153 novels are currently on Kindle Unlimited. Barbara says: my husband and daughter subscribe to some streaming services, but I'm not sure which ones. I don't subscribe to any. I don't watch television. I already own the games I play and I purchased my digital books so I don't have to give them back. John says: I think I get by far the most bang for the buck from Amazon Prime, but my favorite subscription service is probably my local weekly seafood delivery service, Sea Forager. Bonnie says: I gave up the ones I had because I don't watch TV anymore and can't afford it. I have Prime, but only really use it for ebooks. If I need background noise, I use local radio. Local radio remains free, so I suppose that is the most cost effective of all the subscription services. Juana says: Kindle seems to have the most content and good price. I looked at the other platforms, too. Becca says: I have Prime and agree it has a ton of benefits. I canceled Netflix because it doesn't work on my TV. Hulu has some great shows (I recommend Crazy Fun Park, an Australian teen show about ghosts and friendships and changes. Surprisingly mature and well-acted). William says: given the sheer quantity of great Star Wars series that Disney produces, theirs is hard to beat. Gary says: Spotify. David says: for value, you can't beat Prime: movies, free shipping, and music. Netflix is very good for original content and Hulu for old stuff. And Joseph says: I also have Prime mostly for the free shipping. Everything else there is just a bonus. I also have Kindle Unlimited. Totally worth it for me as I read daily and read two or three hundred books a year. That is down from 400 to 500 the first couple years of retirement. It is diverse enough that I can always find a good read. For myself, the one I enjoy most is Nintendo Switch Online. I'll pay for a month of Netflix when they have something I want to see and then we'll cancel again after I've seen it.  I used to have Xbox Game Pass, but all I ever actually play on the Xbox is Skyrim, Starfield, and the first three Halo games, so there is no point in keeping it. But Nintendo Switch Online lets you get the classic Mario and Zelda games from the NES and Super Nintendo era. Given that Nintendo's attitude towards the legacy properties tends to veer between complete indifference and wrathful litigation depending upon the month, it's good that Nintendo offers a relatively affordable way to get them legally because at my age, sometimes the best way to relax at the end of the night is to just play a few levels of the original Super Mario Brothers. So that's it for Question of the Week this week. 00:06:26 Main Topic: Summer 2024 Movie/TV Show Review And now let's move on to our main topic: 2024 Summer Movie Roundup, Part 1. Summer always has a lot of movies, so I usually split the Summer Movie Roundup post in two halves and this would be Part 1. I was surprised at the number of sports movies I watched this time, since, as I've mentioned before, I don't usually follow professional sports all that closely. That said, while the NFL and the NBA might not have quite the cultural hegemony they had at their peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, they're still hugely central to American culture. I don't think you can really understand the United States without grasping the central role of professional sports in mainstream culture. I expect there's a similar phenomenon with association football clubs in the UK and many European countries. Besides, one of the abilities of good storytelling is to make you interested in a story about a topic you might not otherwise care about, like athletic shoes. So here are the movies and shows I watched in the first half of summer 2024, ranked from worst to best. As always, the rankings are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own opinions and observations. So first up is Madam Webb, which came out in 2024. Oofffff. This wasn't quite the crime against cinema that the Internet thought it was, but it still wasn't great. Sony has the rights to a bunch of Spider-man adjacent characters, and the company is holding those in a death grip and has been trying to make a Spider-man Cinematic Universe happen for some time, with mixed results. The Tom Hardy Venom movies had been pretty good, the others, not so much. The plot of Madam Webb: cynical and jaded EMT Cassandra Webb works with her partner Ben Parker (later in the Uncle Ben of Spider-man fame) and is almost drowned in an accident. While drowned, Cassandra starts developing precognition and clairvoyant powers. She starts seeing visions of three young women who will be murdered by a powerful real estate developer named Ezekiel. Turns out that Ezekiel has Spider-man powers that also include precognition, and he wants to kill the girls before they someday kill him. The scenes where Cassandra wonders if she is going mad, but gradually starts to realize that she can see the future were actually quite good and cleverly laid out since they did in sort of a time loop where she experiences the event before it happens. That said, this movie could have been an interesting concept, but it didn't really work. For one thing, the dialogue was just clunky. Dialogue is a hard, hard art to master, both in movies and writing novels (as I know first-hand). But Madame Webb didn't get there. Many of the dialogue scenes were just wooden. Additionally, the movie felt padded and drawn out, which is interesting because the runtime was under two hours. Ultimately, I think Madam Webb succumbed to the illness of a shared cinematic universe. It felt like the incomplete prologue to a more interesting movie, and not every side character in the Spider-man mythos needs an origin story. The trick to making a shared cinematic universe is that each movie must stand alone on its own, especially in the beginning, and the stories have to be interesting. Madam Webb, alas, couldn't quite manage either. Overall grade: D- Next up is The Acolyte, a streaming series which came out in 2024. There is quite a furor about this show on social media, but you can't believe most of what you see on social media. To be blunt about it, I've come to believe that social media is designed to induce mental illness in as many of its users as possible in order to increase their time spent on the site, which in turn raises ad revenue. Very cynical. But I suspect that's the basic business model of Facebook and YouTube, which is why you see so much rage-filled clickbait on both sites, since that's what drives engagement and increases revenue, but that's a problem beyond the scope of a movie review podcast episode. Back to The Acolyte. I would say that The Acolyte wasn't the crime against cinema that YouTube thought it was but instead an uneven mixture of some strong points and some weaknesses. The plot: former Jedi Osha has left the Order and is working as a mechanic on a trade federation starship. Meanwhile, a woman who looks exactly like her has started murdering Jedi Masters. Osha is arrested for the murders, but her former teacher, Jedi master Sol, quickly figures out that the murderer is in fact Osha's twin sister Mae, who has been presumed dead for the last sixteen years. Osha reluctantly tagged along with Sol to help track down Mae, which means she needs to delve into the dark secrets of her past and discover who trained Mae to be a Jedi killing assassin. The Jedi assume a renegade member of the Order must have trained Mae because the Sith had been extinct for a long, long time. Or have they? This show did have its strong points. The lightsaber fights looked good and were fun to watch. Lee Junge-jae as Sol, Manny Jacinto as Qimir, Charlie Bennett as Yord, and Dafne Keen as Jecki all gave good performances. In particular, they stole episode 5, which was overall the strongest episode of the series. The design of the Sith Lord's helmet (dubbed Darth Teeth or Smilo Ren by the Internet) was good. The nods to the old Expanded Universe, like cortosis ore, were nice. There was enough of a compelling mystery -who is the Sith Lord and what actually happened in the twin's past- that can hook the viewer through to the end of the series. The show also did a good job of showing how complacent and political the Jedi had become, to the point where 100 years later the Jedi High Council would meet with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine every day for thirteen years and completely failed to realize that he was in fact the Sith Master who had been pulling the strings all along. That said, I think the show did have four significant problems. 1: the whole good twin/evil twin thing was kind of lame. Playing identical twins is hard for any actor, and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of whether Osha or Mae was in a particular scene. I kind of wish the characters had been brother and sister, or at least not identical twins so they had been easier to tell apart. 2: As much as I appreciated the nods to the Expanded Universe, I think it relied too heavily on them and assumed the audience had a high level of Star Wars knowledge, like the weird Force cult where Osha and Mae grew up. In the Expanded Universe, there are all kinds of weird half-baked cults with an incomplete knowledge of the Force that run into serious problems when they encounter an actual Jedi or an actual Sith. One advantage of visual media over novels is that it's much easier to show instead of tell, but I don't think Acolyte explained its premises well. The Mandalorian explained its premises better, gradually exposing the viewer to the Mandalorian's culture as he dealt with the Monster of the Week. Mando gradually learned about the Force and the Jedi, a race of enemy sorcerers, as he tried to save The Child from the Imperial Remnant. By contrast, The Acolyte kind of dropped viewers into the middle of things, didn't bother to explain any ambiguities, and simply assumed they would all understand the references. 3: The problem with the Jedi Order is that its philosophy is essentially stupid. The reason for that is that Jedi philosophy is basically a highly watered-down version of 1970s style Hollywood Buddhism, which is itself a tremendously watered down version of actual Buddhism. The Jedi are basically left with “don't feel fear or anger” and “don't get attached to people” but lack the religious and philosophical underpinnings which would allow those concepts to make sense in actual Buddhism. In real life, eventually we learn that both suppressing anger and fear or allowing it to dominate us is unhealthy. Both anger and fear serve useful functions. Fear warns of danger and anger is a good response when one is forced into circumstances where you have no choice but to fight. Anger and fear make for good servants, but awful masters, but Jedi philosophy completely misses that point. 4th and finally: the show was the wrong genre for the kind of moral relativism it had. Moral relativism worked well in Andor, which was a spy thriller about criminals gradually realizing that they had to fight the Empire and do terrible things while doing it. That worked because Andor was a spy thriller. By contrast, The Acolyte was about Kung Fu space wizards using space magic that literally comes in good and evil flavors. Moral relativism works less well in that kind of setting where there is literally good or evil space magic. So I would say Acolyte was a mixed bag. I admit, if there's a second season, I'll watch it just because I want to see what happens, but given Disney's significant financial woes, that seems unlikely. Overall grade: C- Next up is Unfrosted, which came out in 2024. It is an absurdist comedic retelling of the creation of the Pop Tart breakfast food, told as sort of a parody of corporate biopics like Ford versus Ferrari and Air (which we will talk about later this episode). This movie was silly and kind of dumb, but it knew it was silly and kind of dumb and so leaned into it and therefore worked. Jerry Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, a high-ranking employee of the Kellogg cereal company, which is locked in a bitter rivalry with the Post cereal company for the breakfast market. One day Cabana uncovers everyone at Post is working on something that will upend the breakfast market, a fruit filled breakfast pastry that can be toasted. Alarmed with this information, the CEO of Kellogg, Edsel Kellogg III (played by Jim Gaffigan as a sort of parody of ‘60s era U.S. business executives), launches a crash effort to match Post's effort. Cabana must recruit a heist style team to build Kellogg's breakfast pastry, including numerous obscure figures from 1960s pop culture. The race is on to build the Pop Tart. Anyway, this was an entertaining movie, but it has no connection to factual accuracy. Also, Bill Burr was hilarious as President Kennedy. Overall grade: B- Next up is The Hit Man, which came out in 2023. It is an amusing cross between a dark comedy and a sort of Hitchcockian thriller. Glenn Powell plays Gary Johnson, a mild mannered and somewhat ineffective philosophy professor. Due to his skill with electronics and microphones, he frequently helps out the police with sting operations. One day, the officer who usually goes in for sting operations gets suspended for beating up some teenagers and having it go viral on viral on YouTube. Gary is drafted at the last minute to go undercover as a hit man and get a suspect to contract his services. Gary does it so well that the Police Department uses him more and more and Gary starts disappearing into his roles as various hit men in a sequence which is quite funny. This works well until Gary meets Madison, a woman who wants him to kill her abusive husband. Gary talks her out of it and starts seeing her, a situation which quickly escalates out of control. It was interesting that the movie went through a sudden genre shift about 1/3 of the way through, from dark comedy to love story, a bit darker than I usually prefer, to be honest, but enjoyable nonetheless if you don't mind the strong language. That said, I watched this right after Madam Webb and the contrast between Webb's clunky and wooden dialogue and the much better written Hitman was night and day. What was interesting was that the movie only cost $8.8 million to make. Given the economic climate, I expect we will see more of this: movies that have to be disciplined about keeping the cost down, as opposed to the enormous 295 million budgets of something like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Overall grade: B- Next up is Boss Level, which came out in 2021. This movie is best described as Groundhog's Day but as an action movie. Former Special Forces soldier Roy Pulver, played by Frank Grillo, is caught in a time loop that repeats the same day over and over again, which always ends with him getting killed by assassins that have been hired to hunt him down. This happened after he tried to reconnect with his former girlfriend, a scientist working on a secret project overseen by the sinister Colonel Ventor, played by Mel Gibson. For a variety of reasons, let's just say at this point in his career, Gibson is very believable in a villain role. At first, Roy succumbs to despair in the time loop, but then decides to spend the endless day trying to reconnect with his estranged son. Eventually, this causes him to rally and fight back against the loop and he realizes that his ex-girlfriend deliberately put him into the time loop because he was the only person she knew who could stop Colonel Ventor's evil plans for his project, which turns out to be a time machine. I'd say the biggest weakness of the movie is the opening, which is a sort of record scratch “you're probably wondering how I got here” opening I complained about in Episode 203 of this podcast. Also, I think it maybe should have been five to 10 minutes longer. The ending is sort of implied but it would have been far more satisfying to have actually been shown what would happen. But overall, I like this movie. Solid B-level thriller/science fiction stuff. It's interesting to compare this to Groundhog's Day because Groundhog Day had to spend so much time establishing the premise because the plot idea of a time loop wasn't as widely known back then as it is now, whereas nowadays you just say “Groundhog Day loop” and most people will immediately know what you're talking about. Overall Grade: B Next up is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which came out in 2024. This wasn't quite as good as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but I still enjoyed it. In this one, Ian Spengler's daughter, her good-natured boyfriend, and her teenage children have returned to New York City to restart the Ghostbusters business. They were bankrolled by original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddmore, who is now a wealthy businessman funding a variety of ghostbusting projects. When one of Zeddmore's employees stumbles across a dangerous artifact holding a powerful ice ghost, both the new and original Ghostbusters must team up to save the day. I really like how the new Ghostbusters films handle the original characters. The original characters are no longer the main focus but they're now mentoring the new characters and providing advice and support. I like this a lot better than the Disney/Lucasfilm approach of the original character as being sad old losers that the new characters must rebel against and then surpass. It was also great that actor William Atherton returned as government apparatchik Walter Peck. Back in the first movie, Peck was an officious EPA inspector who accidentally released a ghost horde upon New York. In the grand American political tradition of tradition of failing upward, he is now the mayor of New York City and still hopes to disband the Ghostbusters. I think the movie's biggest weakness was that it was too complicated and there were a lot of different characters and moving parts to keep track of. Overall grade: B Next up is Inside Out 2, which came out in 2024. It is a terrifying descent into the nightmarish hellscape that has the mind of the average teenage girl. I am, of course joking (though, if you have teenagers, you know that I'm only mostly joking) but Inside Out 2 is a strong follow up to the first movie. In the first movie, the anthropomorphized representations of emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust) tried to control themselves inside the mind of young girl Riley. At the start of the second movie, Riley is now 13 and doing pretty well, but then puberty kicks in. Suddenly new emotions arrive in her head: Ennui, Envy, Embarrassment, and Anxiety. Anxiety in particular runs amuck and seizes control of Riley's mind. As Anxiety starts to send Riley spiraling out of control, the other emotions have to rally behind Joy and find a way to save Riley's mind and sense of self. It is both quite funny and poignant. I can see why this movie cleared a billion dollars. As of early July 2024, is the biggest box office movie of the year so far. Overall grade: A Next up is Ford versus Ferrari, which came out in 2019. This is a biopic of the rivalry between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari in the 1960s, which is an interesting bit of history. In the ‘60s, Ford Motor Company, under the leadership of Henry Ford II (founder Henry Ford's grandson), decided it needed a cooler image, much like how Microsoft bought a bunch of indie gaming studios in the 2010s so Xbox would seem cooler. So Ford Motor Company spent years negotiating with Enzo Ferrari to buy Ferrari's company. At the last minute, negotiations collapsed and Ferrari famously went on a rant insulting Ford as an ugly company that made ugly cars and also called Ford II a lesser man compared to his famous grandfather. This was a major public failure and humiliation for Ford Motor Company, and needless to say Ford II took this very, very personally. He threw a ton of resources behind Ford's racing car project with one goal: beat Ferrari at the famous Le Mans 24 hour race. To pull this off, Ford recruited Carroll Shelby (played by Matt Damon), a former racing driver who turned to race car designing because a heart condition no longer let him race. Shelby needed a driver, so he recruited Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale), a talented driver and mechanic with a combative streak and knack for making enemies. Shelby, Miles, and their team set out to build the GT40, Ford's first proper racing car. Since this is all in the historical record, it's not a spoiler to say that they succeeded in the 1966 Le Mans race. Ford Cars finished in first, second, and third positions, locking out Ferrari entirely from the podium. This was a very enjoyable biopic. All the actors disappear into their roles and give strong performances. The racing scenes all look cool. It is also interesting from a historical perspective to see how the Ford executives had a very bad habit of acting like feudal lords who would dictate their will to the consumer rather than what they actually were, which is merchants who needed to give the customer what they wanted. This attitude was one of several reasons the US auto industry hit very hard times in the 1970s. I'd say the only thing wrong with the movie is that it feels too long, though for the life of me I'm not sure what they could have cut. Overall grade: A Next up is The Last Dance, which originally came out in 2020. I originally watched this back during peak COVID, but after watching Air (which I will discuss shortly), I decided to watch this again to refresh my memory. The Last Dance is a documentary about the Chicago Bulls NBA team and the renowned three-peat champion streak back in the 1990s. I have to admit it is an amusing feeling to have lived long enough that things I lived through are now considered history and have prestige Netflix documentaries made about them. The documentary mostly revolves around the career of Michael Jordan, though it includes interviews with many other people involved in the experience of the Bulls championship run, including brief interviews with two ex U.S. Presidents. The documentary got a lot of criticism for focusing too heavily on Jordan and portraying him in a positive light, especially from the other members of the 1990s Bulls team. Interestingly, I thought Jordan did not really come across all that great on the show. He seemed somewhat vindictive and petty and prone to holding on to grudges for decades. He was presented as the sort of man who is afflicted with an all-consuming competitive streak, who is irresistibly compelled to win at everything he does, even if it's a casual golf game between friendly acquaintances. For that matter, professional basketball players in general all tend to be highly competitive type A personalities who like to win and hate to lose. Getting them all to agree on an account of events beyond the objectively observable facts is probably impossible. Despite that, I suspect the simple fact is that the Bulls would not have won their championships without Jordan. There's no denying that Jordan was probably one of the most famous people on Earth in the 1990s. Honestly, no one can stand up to that kind of scrutiny well, especially after a personal tragedy like when Jordan's father was murdered in the mid-1990s. When Jordan talks about how winning requires complete focus and absolute dedication, I'm afraid that he's right. Winning in the competition at a level like the NBA does require 110% focus, even to the detriment of every other aspect of one's life. I've heard athletes say that champions have no balance and Jordan himself seems to be a living example of both the benefits and the extremely high personal costs of that. Amusing anecdote: when I originally watched this documentary in late 2020, I texted my brother that he should check it out because I thought he would enjoy it. His response was something along the line said he had seen when it first came out on ESPN and I really ought to engage with the culture more. Overall grade: A Now for the best movie I saw in the first half of summer 2024 and that would be Air, which came out in 2023 and is related to our sports documentary topics. This is a movie about Michael Jordan and his family negotiating deal with Nike about the Air Jordan shoe. I didn't expect to like this movie very much, but it turns out it is quite excellent. As I mentioned earlier, in full disclosure, I have minimal interest in the NBA and while I could tell you the NBA team of the US state in which I currently reside, I think if pressed, off the top of my head, I could probably tell you the name of maybe five other NBA teams. Additionally, I lived through the 1990s and had no money for all of it, and so at the time I really resented the peer pressure around Air Jordan shoes and other sports apparel, because that stuff was always so expensive. As I mentioned, I had no money. All that aside, that shows Air was a good movie because it made me care about a story involving a topic in which I have no interest and perhaps mildly dislike. Anyway, the movie's plot is set in 1984. Matt Damon (back again) plays Sonny Vaccaro, who was working with Nike's struggling basketball shoe division. At the time, Nike was the biggest maker of running shoes in the US that had only a minimal presence in the basketball shoe market. Vaccaro has the idea of building a shoe brand entirely around an upcoming young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan. At the time, this was an enormous gamble and had never been done before, but needless to say, it paid off for the company in a big, big way. All the actors gave good performances and the dialogue was sharply written, simultaneously conveying the character of the speaker and moving the plot forward. If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, you could do much worse than to watch Air. I recommend this movie, even if like me, you have zero interest in sports apparel. Perhaps that is one of the functions of art, to give you glimpses of worlds into which you would otherwise never visit. Overall grade: A+ So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show enjoyable and 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.

This week Paul & Amy are kicking off the summer movie season by rounding up all the releases you're dying to hear about. We're talking about the good, the bad, and the indie. Paul proclaims Bad Boys: Ride or Die should have been called something else while wondering if Challengers was sexy enough, and Amy is not on board with this year's Garfield movie. Then, the two dive into a few indie movies like The People's Joker, Late Night with the Devil, and Hundreds of Beavers. Plus, we announce this is now a Glen Powell Stan podcast.  You can join the Unspooled conversation on Paul's Discord at https://discord.gg/ZwtygZGTa6Follow Paul and Amy on Letterboxd for more of their movie hot takes! https://letterboxd.com/paulscheer/  https://letterboxd.com/theamynicholson/Paul's book Joyful Recollections of Trauma is out now! Find it at https://www.harpercollins.com/products/joyful-recollections-of-trauma-paul-scheerCheck out more of Paul's writing on his Substack https://substack.com/@paulscheerEpisodic Art by Kim Troxall: https://www.unspooledart.com/Learn more about the show at Unspooledpod.com, follow us on Twitter @unspooled and on Instagram @unspooledpod, and don't forget to rate, review & subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or where you listen to podcasts.

Brendan shares what movies he watched in April and May of 2024, what he thought of them, and what games would go well with a viewing. Join us, won't you?DamselThe PrincessLegacy of DragonholtDead Poets SocietyMiskatonic School for GirlsPoetry for NeanderthalsWrath of ManEscape PlanGhostwatchLate Night with the DevilMysteriumHako OnnaThe BlackeningLast FridayFinal GirlI.S.S.StationfallWhat films have you seen lately? Share over on boardgamegeek in guild #3269.

Brendan talks about six movies he watched in March of this year, and games to go with them. Join us, won't you?Saw XUnlockThe Wedding SingerFog of LoveDuneDuneDune ImperiumThe Cheap DetectiveAwkward GuestsThe Mystery of the 13th GuestMysteriumThe HoldoversMiskatonic School for GirlsDumb MoneyPonzi SchemeWhat games would you watch with these movies? What movies did you watch in March? Join the conversation on boardgamegeek in guild 3269.

We are playing catch up once again when it comes to the most rcent new releases, so we go thru and talk about Arcadian (1:19), The Ministry of Ungentlemenly Warfare (5:28), Hundreds of Beavers (11:28), Abigail (18:07), Boy Kills World (24:05), Tarot (30:23), Challengers (36:01), The Fall Guy (44:29), and finally Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (53:25)

In this week's episode, I look back at the movies I saw in Spring 2024 and rate them from least to most favorite. To celebrate the arrival of CLOAK OF TITANS, this coupon code will get you 25% off any of the CLOAK MAGE ebooks at my Payhip store: MAYTITANS The code is valid through June 3rd, 2024. So if you're looking for a new book to start the summer, we've got you covered! PODCAST 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 201 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 17th, 2024, and today we are looking at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Spring 2024. Before we get to anything else, let's do Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the arrival of Cloak of Titans, naturally, this coupon code will give you 25% off any of the Cloak Mage ebooks at my Payhip store. That coupon code is MAYTITANS spelled MAYTITANS and of course, as always, the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. This code is valid through June 3rd, 2024, so if you're looking for a new book to start the summer, we've got you covered. Now for an update on current writing and publishing projects. I am pleased to report that Cloak of Titans is done and it is now out. It should at all the ebook stores and get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. It looks like it's off to a good start, so thank you everyone for that. In audio news, Ghost in the Veils is out, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. As of right now, it should be available at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and my Payhip store. It should be showing up on Google Play, Spotify, and Chirp shortly. Now that Cloak of Titans is done, my next big main project will be Shield of Darkness, the second book in the Shield War series, picking up from Shields of Storms earlier in the year. I spent the last couple days writing the outline for that, and if all goes well, I should start on it on Monday the 20th or Tuesday the 21st. It depends on what the weather is, since there are some things I'd like to do outside if the weather is good, but anyway, that will be my new main project. Hopefully that will be out before the end of June. My secondary project right now is Half-Orc Paladin, the third book in the Rivah series, and I am currently about 14,000 words into that. That should come out fairly quickly after Shield of Darkness is done, so probably mid to late July for that book. 00:02:10 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question is inspired by the various comments whenever I post the picture related to grilling: specifically, what is your favorite thing to grill? And we had a variety of responses this week. Our first response is from Justin, who says: my favorite thing to grill is a well marinated sirloin. Garlic, pineapple juice, soy sauce, and herbs in a Ziploc bag for two to four hours, then on a hot grill for a couple minutes per side. Yum! Alas, nowadays it's mostly chicken legs and pork loin sliced up for chops. Even the cheapest hamburger meat is getting to be too expensive to buy on a regular basis. Sadly, this is definitely true, and I've seen that myself. Our next response is from ABM, who says: is it even camping in the Midwest if you're not grilling a pudgie pie over a fire? For those unfamiliar with this regional delicacy, either sandwich or pie fillings are put between bread in the special sandwich shaped iron before it goes over the fire. It really puts the grilled in grilled cheese sandwich. Jenny says: steak, but only because I have a charcoal grill now. I used to use gas. I think it is better because I find it to be slower and tastier. Bonnie says brats and burgers were my favorite when Hubby was around to grill. Gary says: a pork loin is one of my favorite things to grill. I prefer smoking stuff over grilling. Grilling and barbecue are definitely two different things. There is nothing better than a dry rub pork shoulder smoked for about 10 hours and then shredded. Mark says: we love good old-fashioned burgers and lately have been adding teriyaki grilled chicken thighs to the cooking plan. John says: Chinese style plum sauce ribs. Family recipe. Country style ribs, which is just pork butt cut onto thick strips, marinated 3 days. Catriona says: Lamb chops and sausages. A different Mark says: ribs are my favorite, followed by barbecued chicken. Jesse says: spicy Italian sausages for the most part. Michael says: I find the grilling post interesting because over here in the UK, we tend to call it barbecuing and the term itself is a barbecue. Grilling is what you do under grill in your oven indoors. But regardless, I would say hamburgers! Joseph says: Porterhouse and lobster tails on charcoal grill. Second would be shrimp, scallops, and fish fillets of any kind on charcoal. Breakfast on the griddle, pork and chicken on the smoker all year round. Jonathan says: steak and nothing but steak. A third Mark says: prisoners. I hope he meant that tongue in cheek. For myself, I think it's a good old-fashioned burger. I find half the battle in terms of flavor is to spend ninety seconds melting cheese onto the burger in the final phase of grilling. Toasting the bun separately also helps a great deal. It is remarkable how proper cooking can improve the flavor of many foods. Like, I had eggs for lunch. Eggs by themselves are kind of bland, but if you add some ham and cheese and some pepper to the eggs, it really tastes quite a bit better. I suppose the realization that food tastes better when you prepare it properly is the foundation of five and a half thousand years of cooking and civilization. 00:05:15 Main Topic: Spring Movie Roundup And it's now titled for my Spring Movie Roundup for 2024, our main topic of the week. As usual, everything is sorted from least liked to most liked, and just a reminder that my opinions are in no objective or qualified and are based solely on my own taste and whether or not I like something. The least favorite thing I saw this spring would be Hot Tub Time Machine, which came out in 2010. This is one of the very rare movies I didn't finish. It was just too stupid. Like sometimes if I don't like movie, I'll start playing Starfield or Skyrim or something with the movie still playing in the background, but Hot Tub Time Machine was too stupid even to merit that treatment. I don't object to crude humor on its face. Indeed, much of the absurdity of the human condition comes from the various indignities to which human bodies are inherently subjected. There is something both hilarious and egalitarian in the fact that an emperor and a peasant have to relieve themselves in the same way, and many jokes have made use of that truth. You can get away with a lot of crudity if you're actually funny. But the Hot Tub Time Machine movie, just threw crudeness on the screen in lieu of attempting actual humor. Besides, crude humor ultimately is to storytelling as garlic salt is to cooking: best used sparingly. Anyway, the protagonists were all unlikable. I simply got annoyed enough with movie that I gave up around 40 or 50 minutes into it. Overall grade: F Next up is Wish, which came out in 2023. I did not see that in the theater. I saw it when I turned up on Disney Plus a few months ago. I liked the animation and the voice acting was good, but the movie just did not make a lot of sense. Like there's this wizard-king and people give him their wishes, but then they forget what they wish for, and he does this to prevent civil unrest, or so he says. The protagonist gets mad that the wizard-king isn't handing out free stuff in the way that she likes, so she wishes really hard and then a magic star falls from the sky to help her. This upsets the wizard king, so he switches from using good magic, which is apparently blue and sparkly to evil magic, which is green and sparkly. I guess that that color makes all the difference. Then everyone in the Kingdom sings at the wizard-king until he turns into a mirror. I have to admit that made even less sense as I spoke it aloud. There are movies that don't make a lot of sense but work because it's like a dream or a magic trick since the movie suspends the viewer's disbelief during the tale, and it's only afterward that you realize it didn't make much sense, but that by then it doesn't matter because you're entertained. Unfortunately, Wish doesn't even make sense while you're watching it, and a benevolent wizard king who hoards wishes sounds a lot like the Disney Corporation. It would be hilarious if Disney made Wish as a parody of themselves, but I think their interpretation happened by accident. Overall grade: C-, maybe D+ if I'm in a really bad mood. Next up is Green Lantern, which came out in 2011. This turned up free on Tubi, so I gave it a watch. It was interesting because all the pieces were there to make it a great movie, strong cast with good performances, reasonable CG computer graphics for 2011, and a potentially compelling plot. However, it didn't really gel. I suspect Ryan Reynolds works better as a comic actor than a dramatic one. Additionally, the movie relied way too heavily on a lot of ponderous infodumping to explain the elaborate mythology of the Green Lantern Corps. The classic axiom of fiction writing is to show don't tell, and since movies are a visual medium, it's especially true in movies. The problem was that Green Lantern spent a lot of its runtime telling instead of showing, but I suspect the studio didn't want to take a lot of risks with a movie that cost $200 million to make in 2011 money (before a lot of inflation). Additionally, the movie leaned a little too heavily into its CG. So overall, I would give it a grade of C-. Next up is Avatar: The way of Water, which came out in 2022. The Avatar films are visually beautiful, but they're also profoundly misanthropic, which is sort of a “it would be better if humans were all dead” strain of environmentalism running through it. It's also unfortunate how the movies portraying “living in harmony with nature” as morally upright, because in real life, living with nature means dying before the age of 30 of sepsis, dysentery, various contagious diseases, endemic local warfare, and starvation, often all at the same time. Basically, the history of civilization is five and a half thousand years of humanity trying to find ways to get screwed less by nature. Of course, then we're getting into profound philosophical questions. Do you believe that humanity is made in the image of God with a soul, or is humanity particularly simply a particularly clever breed of destructive chimpanzee? Obviously one's worldview will diverge profoundly based on how you answer that question, which, let's be honest, is a rather deep philosophical/religious discussion for a movie about blue space elves made by the director of Terminator. On the other hand, maybe I'm just overthinking it and in the world of Avatar, the Na'vi are blue space elves and the humans are just space orcs. Anyway, incoherent philosophical questions aside, the movie is visually stunning, the apex of computer graphics. It's what you get with a $400 million budget overseen by a perfectionist director who directed three of the four top-grossing movies of all time. The plot is a straight continuation of the previous movie. The humans have returned to reconquer Pandora, including a clone of the charismatic Colonel Quaritch from the first movie. It's up to Jake Sully and his family to unite the squabbling Na'vi forest and water clans to fight off the invaders. Unlike the first movie, Way of Water is not a self-contained story, but helps tee up the third movie, which is definitely happening since this one made like two and half billion dollars. I also admire James Cameron's unswerving devotion to the Papyrus font, even after two Saturday Night Live sketches about it. Overall grade: B Next up is The Cutting Edge, which came out in 1992. I watched this because I was told it is considered a classic in some corners. Since it was also free on Tubi, I decided to give it a watch. It's basically the ideal form of the very popular enemies to lovers romance story trope. Olympic hockey player Doug suffers a head injury that damages his peripheral vision, which means he can't play hockey anymore. Meanwhile, Kate is a spoiled and demanding figure skater who alienates every single potential partner, thereby ruining her chances of winning Olympic gold. Kate's coach Anton seeking out a partner willing to put up with Kate's difficult personality, tracks down the desperate Doug and convinces him to give figure skating a try instead of hockey. As you might expect, sparks and conflicts immediately fly when Doug and Kate meet, and they must learn to overcome their initial mutual dislike (and their obvious mutual attraction) to win the Olympics. Enemies to lovers romance tends to follow a very specific story structure, and this movie nails it perfectly. The actors all did a good job with their parts. Fun fact, Anton was played by Roy Dotrice, who narrated the A Song of Ice and Fire audiobooks. Even more fun fact, the movie was written by Tony Gilroy, who also wrote several of the Jason Bourne movies and created Star Wars: Andor, which are about as totally different from The Cutting Edge as you can get. This man has some range. Overall grade: B. Next up is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which originally came out in 2021. After the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot didn't work for a variety of reasons, it seemed that Sony they settled on a different tactic, instead decided to continue the original continuity of with the new movies, which in my opinion was a smarter choice. Single mom Callie is having a rough time with her teenage children, Trevor and Phoebe. Callie is out of options when her estranged father dies and leaves her a farm on the outskirts of Summerville, Oklahoma. With no better options at the moment, Callie and the kids pack up and move to Summerville and the bored Trevor and Phoebe began poking into their relics of their grandfather's life. However, it turns out that their grandfather was Egon Spengler, one of the original Ghostbusters, and he had moved to Summerville to keep an eye on a dangerous supernatural threat. With Egon dead, the threat is waking up once more, and it's up to Phoebe and Trevor to finish their grandfather's work and save the world. This was a very well-constructed comedy/horror action thriller. Admittedly, it starts a bit slow in the same style as the original Ghostbusters movie from 1984, but overall, it works. There's a gradual sense that something is increasingly wrong in Summerville. Unlike Green Lantern, this movie doesn't do a lot of infodumping, but instead uses the much better storytelling technique of gradually revealing the worldbuilding as the kids start to investigate the mysteries around their family and their new town. Phoebe and Trevor had the right combination of teenage brattiness and curiosity and Callie was believable as a single mom who had made some questionable life choices and was trying to hang on as best she could. Paul Rudd was also good as an incompetent summer school teacher/seismologist who has nonetheless figured out that something strange is happening in Summerville. The movie leaned a little too hard into to nostalgia, but I liked it. Overall, grade: B+. Next up is The Sign of Four, which came out originally in 1987. I finally had a chance to watch the Jeremy Brett version of the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four. Brett was, in my opinion, the best Sherlock Holmes actor of all the actors who have played versions of the character. Amusingly, I think Mr. Brett would have made a good Grand Admiral Thrawn, which is funny because one of the inspirations for Thrawn was of course, Sherlock Holmes. But unfortunately, Brett died two or three years before Heir to the Empire was even written. Anyway, back to the main point. In The Sign of Four, Miss Mary Morstan calls upon Holmes and Watson asking for Holmes's help in unraveling a strange mystery. Her father disappeared soon after returning to England from India, and once a year since then, she has received an extremely valuable pearl in the mail. Her mysterious benefactor wishes to meet her at last and Morstan wants Holmes' advice as to what she should do. Naturally, there's quite a bit more going on beneath the surface, and Holmes soon finds himself investigating a case involving a pair of eccentric brothers, a one-legged man, a deadly assassin, and treasure that seems cursed to bring misfortune to whoever obtains it. All of the performances were excellent, though given the state of 1980s sound technology, I definitely recommend watching the movie with the captions on. The only thing that I didn't like was that the adaptation removed the fact that Morstan and Watson get engaged at the end but given that the actors wanted to deemphasize Sherlock's cocaine use (the original story has the famous line “for me there still remains the cocaine bottle”), that's probably why it was cut. Overall grade: A-. And now for the favorite things I saw in spring 2023 and for the first time, it came out to a three-way tie. The first of my three favorite things was Fall Guy, which came out this year, in 2024. I didn't intend to go see this initially, but then I saw the hilarious Saturday Night Live opening Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling did about Barbie and Oppenheimer, and I decided to give it a shot. This is a romantic comedy action thriller and it nails all those genres excellently. The protagonist is a highly regarded film stuntman named Colt, in love with an assistant director named Jody, but Colt is seriously injured in an accident. In the aftermath of the accident, Colt abandons his career and breaks up with Jody. Eighteen months later, the producer of a big budget science fiction epic contacts Colt. It turns out that his ex, Jody, is directing the movie and her career is riding on its success. So he goes to do the stunts for the movie to help her out. However, things soon take a turn for the worse when the movie's egotistical lead actor disappears, and if Cole can't find him within 48 hours, the studio will shut down the movie and destroy Jody's career. What follows is a romantic comedy that remains funny and turns into a pretty good thriller movie. The running joke about seeing the unicorn was great and there's a bit with Colt crying in his truck that becomes absolutely hilarious. Definitely recommended. It's really regrettable that this movie apparently didn't do well in theaters, but I predict it will have a long and healthy life on streaming. Overall grade: A. The second of my three favorite things is Clarkson's Farm: Season Three, which also came out in 2024. This show has stumbled into a genius formula: display the extreme difficulties of the modern farmer through the lens of an unsympathetic comedy protagonist in the person of Jeremy Clarkson. Like, Jeremy Clarkson is not a terribly sympathetic figure because he's very rich and unquestionably prone to quarrelling because he got fired from one of his old jobs for punching a dude. But by having him run his own farm and deal with all the many, many headaches and heartaches of farming, he becomes a sympathetic figure because he suffers through the same things as every other farmer: failed crops, bad weather, badger-spread diseases, animals dying, government red tape, and so on. And it also demonstrates how hard farming is. If Clarkson's farm loses a lot of money, it doesn't really matter to him because he can rely on his media career. But that isn't true for most farmers, obviously, and Clarkson himself and the show go out of their way to point out that fact again and again. Anyway, if you're not familiar with the concept of the show, in 2019 Clarkson decided to run his farm himself rather than hiring a professional manager and since he was under contract to produce a show for Amazon, he figured he could make a documentary and get paid for working on his farm. In the first season, Clarkson was shocked when a year's work on his farm brought in a profit of about $150. In the second season, he battled local government to open a restaurant on his farm. In the third season, the team continues. Clarkson attempts to raise pigs and find new ways of making revenue from the farm. The show manages to be both entertaining and educational about the difficulties of farming at the same time. Definitely worth the watch. Overall grade: A. And now for the third of my three favorites: Dune Part 2, which came out in 2024. As a writer of novels, I really, really hate to admit it, but I think Dune Part 2 improved somewhat on the original book. This is rare in film adaptations, but it does happen. Goldfinger the movie is better than Goldfinger the book in my opinion, since Auric Goldfinger's plan makes much more sense in the movie than it does in the book and the movie also has James Bond's climatic showdown with the deadly Oddjob. The Godfather movie is pretty close to the Godfather novel, but it's tighter because it does omit some needless subplots that honestly I thought the author threw into the book to pad out the length. So as a writer, it really does pay me to admit this, but I think some of the changes to Dune Part 2 are an improvement over the book. It's a bit tighter, a little less deus ex machina. The novel Dune, beyond all doubt, is a very weird book. It's also very dense, with multiple interlocking themes. You can honestly say that Dune is about ecology, religion, politics, declining empires, the cyclical nature of history, oil-based politics, social dynamics, and of course, truly enormous quantities of mind altering drugs. Any movie adaptation would probably have to take just one of those themes and lean hard into them since there won't be enough time to address all of them. The director, Denis Villeneuve, chose to go with the mostly political themes. Anyway, I think Dune Parts One and Two combined are probably the best possible adaptation that could be made of the seminal (but still very weird) science fiction book. Various parts from the novel have been omitted, altered, or emphasized, but that's necessary in adaptation. The trick is to do it in a way that preserves the spirit of the original work, and I think Dune Parts One and Two have done it well. Part of the problem with the 1984 version of Dune was that the ending totally subverted the message of the book, which Frank Herbert himself said several times was “beware of charismatic leaders.”  Dune Part 2 most definitely does not subvert the message of the book. Indeed, Paula Atreides's final line in the movie is downright chilling. Part 2 picks up in the second half of the story when Paul joins the Fremen and embarks on his gradual transformation (or perhaps descent) from the son of a destroyed noble house to the blood drenched warrior prophet Muad'Dib. All the performances are good, the effects are excellent, the desert shots are sweeping, and you could tell Hans Zimmer and his team enjoyed cutting loose with the soundtrack. Overall, I think Dune Parts One and Two are probably the best possible adaptation of the Dune book in movie form, which is probably was the other problem with the Dune 1984, since there was just one movie and Dune Parts One and Two required over five hours of very expensive big budget movie to tell even a condensed adaptation of the complicated original book. Overall grade: A. So that's it for this week. On my writing podcasts this week, we talked about grilling and movies, so next week we will try to have a more writing themed topic. Thanks 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. 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, Sanjeet and Amartya welcome Devi (@film.trance) back to talk about two new Malayalam movies recently released on OTT: Jithu Madhavan's high-voltage action-comedy "Aavesham" (on Amazon Prime Video) and Girish AD's tender rom-com-drama "Premalu" (on Hotstar). Both films serve up narratives that are largely popular in the Indian cinematic landscape but feel unique because their screenplays are shaped by rich characterizations, not elaborate plots. In "Aavesham," Fahadh Faasil's electric performance lights up the screen; "Premalu" is a carefree, almost experiential story of burgeoning youthful love. Interestingly, both films are produced by Faasil. We discuss how his productions' stamp on contemporary Malayalam cinema makes them feel refreshingly unique. Listen to the full, spoiler-filled episode to know what we thought about each of these movies and how pale Bollywood films look & feel compared to these films. TIMECODES Random baat-cheet - [00:00 - 04:13] Intro - [04:13 - 05:33] "Aavesham" - [05:33 - 01:12:00] "Premalu" - [01:12:00 - 02:14:05] Do hit 'Follow' on Spotify if you haven't already to help the podcast reach more people! You can also follow our Instagram page: https://instagram.com/queenisdead.filmpodcast Amartya: https://www.instagram.com/amartya25/Devi: https://www.instagram.com/film.tranceSanjeet: https://www.instagram.com/pixel_baba/ Follow us on Letterboxd at: Devi: https://letterboxd.com/cinemamadhuram/ Amartya: https://letterboxd.com/amartya/Sanjeet: https://letterboxd.com/Sanjeet_Singh/

​In Episode 119, the guys talk about Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's diva behavior and his nasty habits on the set of RED ONE. The two then close out the news with Taratino scrapping THE FILM CRITIC as his final movie.Jeff watches the second part of Zack Snyder's sci-fi epic REBEL MOON subtitled THE SCARGIVER, BABY REINDEER, and the animated GOOD TIMES show.Brandon discusses the SHOGUN miniseries on Hulu, the Ryan Gosling hosted episode of Saturday Night Live, and discusses a wide range of fil [...]

Brendan talks about six movies he watched in February of this year, and games to go with them. Join us, won't you?OppenheimerManhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project: Energy EmpireThe Vast of NightVisitor in Blackwood GroveBeyond the Infinite Two MinutesThat Time You Killed MeThe Lost KingTobagoThe Lost CityThe Adventurers: The Temple of ChacBlackBerrySmartphone IncWhat movies did you watch in February? What games would you pair with them? Share your thoughts over on Boardgamgegeek #3269.

Anney lays down her feminist thoughts of some recent horror movies: Late Night with the Devil, You'll Never Find Me and The Royal Hotel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This ain't no April Fool's joke. MARK HAS RETURNED TO THE POD. The boys are back in classic, two-hour OG episode form with this New Movie Round-Up special! On the docket: all the new movies making the rounds right now, on streaming and in theaters. We cover the product placement of Madame Web, the snooty Letterboxd reactions to Road House 2024, the PG-ness of the violence in Dune Part Two, the WTF silliness of Argylle, the quality of Kung Fu Panda 4, and more. Of course, along the way, we also somehow manage to talk about chatty moviegoers abroad, the AI-created Coke flavor, German beer, and Renny Harlin's oddly sexy Instagram. Tune in. Kick back. LIVE MAS. Support our show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheMattandMarkMovieShow . You can get access to fun podcast extras for as little as $1 a month. Wanna be on the show? Call us and leave a voicemail at (707) 948-6707. Visit our Linktree for more ways you can connect with us and connect with our show! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themattandmarkmovieshow/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@themattandmarkmovieshow Merch: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/the-matt-and-mark-movie-show-merch?ref_id=26325 Support our show through Blubrry: https://blubrry.com/services/professional-podcast-hosting/?code=GetRecd Buy Us A Coffee: http://buymeacoffee.com/Mattandmark YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzDsxUs9JzL70A1Sh5GbRdw

In this episode, Dhruv and Amartya welcome Devi (@film.trance) back to talk about two Malayalam movies recently released on OTT: Anand Ekarshi's morally complex drama/thriller "Aattam" (on Amazon Prime Video) and Rahul Sadasivan's folk horror film "Bramayugam" (on Sony Liv). Both films serve up narratives and, especially, aesthetic styles largely underexplored by contemporary Indian cinema. Reference points range from international—Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi and A24's elevated horror films—to local—legendary Malayalam filmmaker K.C. George and Rahi Anil Barve's "Tumbbad." But these films feel wholly original, either wanting to tackle thorny subject matters in contemporary society in thorny ways ("Aattam") or creating a new Old world whose order -- even in the wilderness -- eerily resembles that of our reality ("Bramayugam"). Listen to the full, spoiler-filled episode to know what we thought about each of these movies and how their superior quality makes Dhruv and Amartya want to tear their hearts out when they see contemporary B'wood movies. TIMECODES INTRODUCTION - [00:00 - 03:40] "AATTAM" - [03:40 - 01:11:10] "BRAMAYUGAM" - [01:11:10 - 02:21:00] Do hit 'Follow' on Spotify if you haven't already to help the podcast reach more people! You can also follow our Instagram page: https://instagram.com/queenisdead.filmpodcast Amartya: https://www.instagram.com/amartya25/ Devi: https://www.instagram.com/film.trance Dhruv: https://www.instagram.com/terminalcinema/ Follow us on Letterboxd at: Devi: https://letterboxd.com/cinemamadhuram/ Amartya: https://letterboxd.com/amartya/ Dhruv - https://letterboxd.com/aterminalcinema/

In this week's episode, I rate the movies and TV shows I shaw in Winter 2024. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE PACT as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE PACT for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: MARCHEXILE The coupon code is valid through April 5th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we've got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 192 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 15th, 2024, The Ides of March, which we're traditionally told to beware, and today we are looking at my Movie and TV Review Roundup for Winter 2024. Before we do that, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing projects, and our Question of the Week. So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Pact, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook for Ghost in the Pact for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon: MARCHEXILE and that is spelled MARCHEXILE. As always, the coupon code will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April the 5th 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook on this Ides of March, we've got one ready for you. So an update on my current writing projects. I am about 56% of the way through the first edit of Ghost in the Veils. That means the book should be on track to come out before Easter (which is at the end of March this year), if all goes well. I'm also 40,000 words into Wizard Thief, so hopefully that will come out before too much longer after Ghost in the Veils. I'm 11,000 words into Cloak of Titans. So that is where we're at with my current writing projects. 00:01:19 Question of the Week Now on to our new feature: Question of the Week. This week's question is inspired by the fact that I've spent a lot of the last few weeks setting up my new computer and getting it configured properly. So the question is: what is the first computer you ever used? No wrong answers, obviously. Joachim says his first personal computer was an Atari 1040 ST with 1 MB of RAM. I participated in the “religious war” with the Amiga 500 users, which was better and looked down at the MS-DOS PCs, which only has 640 kilobytes of RAM. Justin says: my first computer was a Timex Sinclair. It had two kilobytes of RAM and I forked out $50 for the 16 KB RAM extender module. The manual that comes with it says you will never need this much memory. I use a cassette tape recorder/player to record more programs and it ran a 300 baud. Todd says his first computer was in 1994. I purchased a 486 DX 2 8 megabytes of RAM for use in school. I believe the hard drive was about 250 MB. The monitor weighed a ton. I wrote a bunch of machine code and played Wolfenstein 3D like crazy. Tarun says in 1993 it was a 386 with four megawatts of RAM with Windows 3.1. I played a lot of Prince of Persia and got bad grades in school. Then the computer was locked up. In my educational defense, I did do some Pascal programming. AM says: my first computer was an Apple IIe at school. Getting to play Number Munchers or Oregon Trail on it was some kind of behavioral reward (and a very effective one at that). William says his first computer was a Macintosh SE in my parent's home office, though “using” is an overstatement since all I did was play a few simple preinstalled games. I also have fond memories of playing the original King's Quest with said parents and something like a Compaq Portable. Rich says Commodore 64 with cassette drive. Didn't have cassette the first day. Spent the whole day punching in code for a blackjack game. My sister walks into the room to turn the computer off, erasing everything. That is a bummer. Juana says: a Gateway. My whole family came to gawk at it, and me setting it up! It had 120 megabytes of RAM. Twice what was the ones that used in the college computer lab! I thought I was set for life. Venus says Commodore Vic20. We played Radar Rat Race and Mom gave us a stack of computer magazines and tape recorder, so we played every game that was in the magazines at the time after we typed in the programs and saved them to the tapes. You are the first person outside my family that ever heard also had one. More on that later. Cheryl says: we got our first computer in the early ‘90s: an Amstrad with an AWA printer. I was doing courses for work, so I needed something to print the assignments, but we also played games on it: Wolfenstein, Lemmings, and Stock Markets. They're the only ones I can remember. Craig says: Apple IIe. I'm oldish. With dot matrix printer and handheld modem, dial-up Internet access, the one you had the dial phone into the holding cradle after you called it in. Tracy says: at college we used the TRS80s. I think she may win the award for oldest computer mentioned in this topic. And Perry says: IBM PC clone at school, a friend's family had a Commodore 64. Our first family computer was a Commodore 128. For myself, I had the same first computer as Venus earlier in the thread. That would be a Commodore Vic20. It had 20 kilobytes of RAM and the Word file for the rough draft of Ghosts in the Veils, which I'm editing right now, is 355 kilobytes in size. So to load the Microsoft Word document of Ghosts in the Veils in Microsoft Word format, I would need about 18 different Commodore Vic 20 computers. That's like 1 computer per chapter and a half. So it is amusing to see how computer technology has changed quite a bit over time. 00:04:56 Winter 2024 Movie/TV Review Roundup Now to our main topic. We are inching closer to spring, so I think it's time for my Winter 2024 Movie Review Roundup. I got a Paramount Plus subscription to watch the Frasier reboot and since Paramount owns Star Trek and the Frasier reboot was only 10 episodes long, I ended up watching a chunk of modern Star Trek this winter. This was a new-ish experience because the last new Star Trek I watched was Star Trek Beyond way back in 2016. That was only eight years ago, but it's been a very eventful eight years, you know? I did watch a lot of Star Trek back in the 1990s. If you had held a gun to my head and demanded, you know, if I consider myself a Trekkie, I would say no, because I think Gene Roddenberry's socialist/utopian vision for the Federation that he put into Star Trek is fundamentally kind of goofy. The shows and movies were at their best when they stayed away from it or subverted it, like how the Federation can only be a utopia because Starfleet seems to have a Black Ops section that does all the unsanctioned dirty work and regularly runs amuck. Or like how Starfleet seems to have an actual mad science division that cooks up all kinds of nasty stuff. So anyway, these are the movies and shows I watched in Winter 2024, and as always, my ratings are wholly subjective and based on nothing more rigorous than my own opinions. We will go through these in order from least favorite to most favorite. So the first movie I watched was Now You See Me, which came out in 2013. Last year, I compared Adam Sandler's Murder Mystery movie to a C- student, but a fun C- student who everyone likes for his great parties and goes on to have a successful career as a regional sales manager. By contrast, Now You See Me is the sort of moody art student who always wears a black porkpie hat and thinks of himself or herself as deep and complicated, but in fact, they're just confusing. This is an apt comparison for this movie. Anyway, the plot centers around four sketchy magicians who are recruited by a mysterious organization called The Eye to carry out a series of high-profile heists using stage magic. I have to admit, that concept sounds even more ridiculous as I said the previous sentence. Anyway, after the first heist, the magicians become fugitives from the FBI but keep carrying on shows, sometimes staying ahead of law enforcement. The trouble is that nothing they do makes very much sense, and it all falls apart if you think about it for more than two seconds. Additionally, the movie overall feels very choppy since they rushed from scene to scene very quickly. The actors all gave very good performances that were entertaining to watch, but honestly, that was about the only thing the movie had going for it. Overall grade: D- Next up is The Marvels, which came out in 2023. This movie was logically incoherent, but actually rather charming and funny. It kind of reminds me of those ‘70s or ‘80s style science fiction movies that don't make much sense, though The Marvels was much lighter in tone than anything that came out in the science fiction space in the ‘60s or ‘70s. The movie got a bad rap because it didn't make back its budget, and apparently Disney rather shamefully threw the director under the bus. But to be fair, the budget for The Marvels was an enormous $274,000,000. To put this into context, the top three movies of 2023 (Barbie, Super Mario Brothers, and Oppenheimer) combined had a total budget across these three movies of $350 million, and together they grossed something like 15 times more than The Marvels did. Anyway, the plot picks up from the end of Ms. Marvel when Kamala Khan, Captain Marvel, and Monica Rambeau discover that their superpowers have become entangled. This means that if two of them use their powers at the same time, all three of them switch places randomly. This makes for a rather excellent fight scene earlier in the movie when the three characters don't know what's going on and are randomly teleporting between three different battles, much to the frequently amusing confusion of all participants. Once things settle down, Captain Marvel and her new friends realize that an old enemy of Captain Marvel is harvesting resources from worlds she cares about. So it's up to them to save Earth from this old enemy's vengeance. I have to admit, the plot of the movie didn't actually make much sense, but it was overall much funnier than Ant-Man 3 and Secret Invasion. The best thing about the movie was Kamala Khan and her family. Kamala, Monica, and Captain Marvel also had an entertaining dynamic together and the planet of space musicals was also pretty funny. I think the movie's biggest, unconquerable weakness was that it was the 33rd Marvel movie. There are all sorts of theories of why the movie didn't perform at the box office: superhero genre fatigue, everyone knew it would be on Disney Plus eventually, the lasting effects of COVID on movie theaters and the movie business, Disney throwing the director under the bus, Disney inserting itself into the US Cultural Wars, etcetera. All those reasons are subjective and subject to personal interpretation. What I think is objectively quantifiable is that The Marvels is the sequel to a lot of different Marvel stuff: The Avengers movie, Wandavision, Captain Marvel, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Secret Invasion, and Thor: Love and Thunder. That's like 50 to 60 plus hours of stuff to watch to fully understand the emotional significance of all the various characters in The Marvels. 50 to 60 hours of watching sounds like almost an entire entire semester's worth of homework assignments at this point. As someone who has written a lot of long series, I know that you lose some of the audience from book to book. I think that's ultimately why The Marvels didn't make back its budget. The Marvel movies as a series have just gone on too long and are just too interconnected. Ultimately, I am grateful to The Marvels. Realizing and understanding the concept of Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome helped me decide to write something new that wasn't a sequel or even connected to anything else I had written, which eventually led to Rivah Half-Elven and Half-Elven Thief. Overall grade: B- Our next movie is My Man Godfrey, which came out all the way back in 1936. This movie is considered the progenitor or one of the progenitors of the screwball comedy genre. A homeless man named Godfrey is living in a trash dump in New York, though despite his circumstances, Godfrey remained sharp and quick on his feet. One night, a wealthy woman named Cornelia approaches him and offers $5 if he'll come with her. Godfrey is naturally suspicious, but Cornelia assures him that she only needs to take him to a hotel to win a scavenger hunt by finding a forgotten man, which was a term President Roosevelt used to describe people who have been ruined by the Great Depression and then forgotten by the government. I have to admit, Cornelia immediately reminded me of the way the more obnoxious YouTubers and TikTokers will sometimes pay homeless people to participate in dance challenges and suchlike. King Solomon was indeed right when he said that there is nothing new under the sun and what has been done before will be done again. Anyway, Godfrey is offended by Cornell's imperious manner but after he sees Cornelia bullying her kindly but none too bright younger sister Irene, Godfrey decides he'll go with Irene so she can win. A grateful Irene offers him a job as the family's butler. At his first day at work, Godfrey very soon realizes the reason the family has gone through so many butlers: they are all certified certifiably and comedically insane. In addition to these other problems, Cornelia is harboring a massive grudge against Godfrey for losing the scavenger hunt and wants payback. Wacky hijinks ensue. Fortunately, Godfrey has some hidden depths that he will need, which include being much smarter than his employers. Admittedly, this is not hard. 1936 was towards the second half of the Great Depression in the United States, so obviously the movie has more than a bit of social commentary. The characters joked that prosperity is just around the corner and wonder where they can find that corner. The rich characters are uniformly portrayed as some combination of frivolous, clueless, or malicious. I think the movie was pretty funny, if sharply so, but the big weakness was that the male and female leads were so clearly unsuited for each other but got together at the end of the movie simply because it was the end of the movie. Still, it was definitely worth watching because you can see how this movie influenced many other movies after it. I definitely recommend watching it with captions if possible, because while human nature has not changed in the last 90 years, sound technology has in fact improved quite a bit. Overall grade: B. Next up is Charade, which came out in 1963. This is a sort of romantic comedy, sort of thriller that has Audrey Hepburn playing Regina, an American living in Paris who is in the process of getting divorced from her husband. When she returns to Paris, she learns that her husband was murdered in her absence and it turns out that he was in possession of $250,000 he stole from the US government during World War II. Regina had no idea about any of this, but the US government thinks that she has the money stashed away somewhere. It turns out that her late husband also betrayed the men he worked with to steal the money and they're convinced that she has the money as well, and they're going to get it from Regina regardless of what they have to do. Regina's only ally in this mess is a mysterious man calling himself Peter Joshua (played by Cary Grant), who may or may not be one of the other thieves operating under an assumed identity. I liked this movie, but I think it had two structural problems. First, Regina wasn't all that bright, though she did get smarter as the movie went on, probably out of sheer necessity. Second, it had some severe mood whiplash. The movie couldn't decide if he was a lighthearted romantic comedy or gritty thriller, though finally snapped into focus as a pretty good thriller in the last third of the movie. Amusing tidbit: Cary Grant only agreed to do the movie if Audrey Hepburn's character would be the one chasing his character in their romance, since he thought their age gap would be inappropriate otherwise, because he was so much older than Hepburn at the time of filming. Overall grade: B+ Next up is the new Frasier series from 2023. I admit I had very, very low expectations for this, but it was considerably better than I thought it would be. My low expectations came partly because the original show was so good. Some seasons were stronger than others, of course, but the show had some absolute masterpieces of sitcom comedy throughout its entire run. Some of this was because I think the 2020s are a much more humorless and dour age than the 1990s, so I had my doubts whether the new show could be funny at all. Fortunately, my doubts were misplaced. The new Frasier is actually pretty good. It's interesting that the show's generational dynamic has been flipped on its head. In the original show, the pretentious Frasier lived with his working-class father. 20 years later, it's now Frasier who lives with his son Freddie, who dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter and consciously rejected his father's love of intellectualism and cultural elitism. The inversion of the original dynamic works quite well. It has some moments of genuine comedy because, like his father before him, Freddie is more like his father than he realizes. The show also avoided the pitfall of bringing back legacy characters that Disney and Lucasfilm stumbled into with Star Wars and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Disney brought back legacy characters like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones but made them into sad, old losers. Frasier, by contrast, while frequently an unsympathetic comedy protagonist who brings his own misfortunes onto his own head, is most definitely not a sad old loser. He's famous, respected, and wealthy enough that he can afford to buy an apartment building in Boston at the drop of a hat. If you know anything about the United States, you know that the East Coast is the most expensive area of the of the country. Despite that, he remains the same well-meaning buffoon that he always was, the sort of man who, as a colleague aptly says, always goes that extra, ill-advised mile. There's a story that when Ricky Gervais was advising the creators of the American version of The Office, one of his chief pieces of advice was that Michael Scott could not be as incompetent as David Brent was in the original UK version of the show. American culture, Mr. Gervais said, was generally much less forgiving of incompetence than British culture. I thought of this as I watched Frasier because all the characters were in fact extremely competent at their jobs. Even Frasier himself, when he finally gets out of his own way, is a very good psychiatrist and teacher. Anyway, the show was funny and I think it deserves a second season. We'll see if that happens or not. Overall grade: A- Next up is Star Trek: Lower Decks Seasons One through Four, which came out from between 2020 and 2023. As I mentioned earlier, I ended up subscribing to Paramount Plus for a month after I watched Frasier, so I decided to watch Star Trek Lower Decks, since I'm forever seeing clips of that show turning up on social media. Lower Decks is a pitch perfect, affectionate parody of Star Trek from the point of view of four relatively hapless ensigns on the Cerritos, one of Starfleet's somewhat less prestigious ships. We have the self-sabotaging rebel Mariner, the insecure and ambitious Boimler, the enthusiastic science girl Tendi, and cheerful engineer Rutherford, who nonetheless has a dark and mysterious past that he can't remember. Season Four also adds T'Lyn, a Vulcan whose mild expressions of carefully measured annoyance make her a dangerous loose cannon by Vulcan standards. The show is hilarious because it makes fun of Star Trek tropes while wholeheartedly embracing them. The ensigns run into a lot of insane computers, random space anomalies, rubber forehead aliens, and other Star Trek tropes, including the grand and venerable Star Trek tradition of the Insane Admiral. Starfleet officers always seem to go off the deep end when they get promoted to Starfleet Command. The senior officers are also varying degrees of insane and drama generators. Starfleet, from the point of view of the Cerritos crew, is a vast bureaucratic organization that veers between ineffective idealism, blatant careerism, and whatever crazy project the Insane Admiral of the Week is pursuing. Yet since American sitcom characters have to be competent (like we just talked about above with Frasier), when the crisis really kicks into high gear, the Cerritos crew can pull itself together and save the galaxy with the best of them. I did like how the show grows from an affectionate parody to its own thing, with all the characters experiencing struggles and personal growth in their arcs. I liked it enough that when the 5th season of Lower Decks comes out, I'll subscribe to another month of Paramount Plus (assuming Paramount Plus still exists and hasn't been brought up by Warner Brothers or Skydance or something). Overall grade: A- Next up is Predator, which came out in 1987. When Carl Weathers died in early February of 2024, I realized I had never actually got around to seeing Predator. So I did and I'm glad that I watched it. Predator was an excellent blending of thriller, science fiction, and horror. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, who commands a team of operators who do Black Ops work for the CIA. Since it's 1987, the CIA is up to its traditional shenanigans in Central America and Dutch is dispatched to help out his old friend Dillon (played by Carl Weathers), who has been ostensibly assigned to rescue a Pro-American cabinet minister from rebel guerrillas in the jungle. Since this is the CIA, naturally there is more than the mission than is apparent on the surface. However, the mission quickly becomes irrelevant when Dutch and his team realize they are being hunted by an unknown creature with capabilities unlike anything they have ever seen before. It turns out the creature is the Predator, an alien hunter who comes to Earth and takes human skulls as trophies. Soon the movie turns into a death match duel between Dutch and the Predator. The movie did a very good job of showing the Predator's capabilities such as stealth, heat vision, and his shoulder laser without explicitly spelling them out for the audience. It was a very well put together piece of storytelling and it is of course the source of the famous Internet meme of a muscular white arm gripping a muscular black arm and also Schwarzenegger's famous line of “Get to the choppa!” Also to quote a famous Internet meme, if you had a nickel for every future governor of a US state who is in this movie, you would have two nickels, which is not a lot, but even two is pretty weird, right? Overall grade: A. Now for the favorite thing I saw in winter 2024. That honor goes to Star Trek: Picard Season Three, which came out in 2023. Honestly, this was so much better than I thought it was going to be. I thought I would watch one or two episodes and then give up. Instead I watched the whole thing in like two days over the New Year's holiday. I watched the first episode of Picard Season One way back in 2020 was free on YouTube, but I didn't like it enough to subscribe to CBS All Access (or whatever the heck it was back then). The first episode also seemed more ponderous and dour in the sort of 21st century realistic prestige television snooze fest than I really wanted to watch. But Season Three of the show got high reviews from people whose opinions I generally respect when it came out in early 2023. Since I had Paramount Plus for a month because of Frasier, I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did. How to describe the plot? You may remember that back in summer 2023, I watched the Battleship movie. Battleship is objectively a bad movie, but it does have one interesting subplot that would make a good movie all on its own. When space aliens imprison most of the US Navy, a bunch of retired veterans take a decommissioned battleship out to war to save the day. This basically is the plot of Picard Season 3. The plot kicks off when Doctor Crusher contacts Admiral Picard after they have not spoken for twenty years. Apparently, Picard had a son named Jack with Crusher that she never told him about and mysterious assailants are trying to kidnap Jack. On the original show, Picard and Crusher definitely gave off the vibe that they probably got romantic whenever they were alone in the elevator together. The fact that Doctor Crusher got pregnant with Picard's son is not all that surprising. Picard had always been adamant about his desire not to start a family and given that any son of the legendary Captain Picard would be a target for his equally legendary enemies, Crusher decided to keep the boy a secret. Picard, understandably, is shocked by the news, but teams up with his former first officer, Captain Riker, to rescue his son. Jack has an extensive Robin Hood-esque criminal history, so it seems that his misdeeds might have caught up to him. It turns out that deadly weapon is locked in Jack's DNA and the people pursuing him aren't merely criminals but powerful enemies intent on destroying Starfleet and the Federation. Jack Crusher's DNA will give them a weapon to do it, which means it's up to the crew of The Enterprise to save the galaxy one last time. This was ten episodes, but it was very, very tightly plotted, with not many wasted moments. Sometimes you see movies that seem like they should have been streaming shows, and sometimes streaming shows seem like they really should have been cut down to movie length. But Picard's Season Three does a good job of telling a tense story that we've been impossible either in a movie or the old days of network television. The show very quickly plunges into the crisis and keeps moving from new tension to new tension. The gradual reveal where Picard at first feels guilty that he has to ask his friends to help rescue his estranged son and ex-girlfriend like he's living his own personal version of some trashy daytime TV show, only to slowly realize that something much more dangerous and much, much bigger than his personal problems is happening, was put together well. The show was also another good example of how to bring back legacy characters right. All the characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation are older and have been knocked around by life or suffered personal tragedies, but none of them are sad old losers like in a Disney or Lucasfilm project. The new and supporting characters were also great. Seven of Nine returns as the first officer to Captain Shaw, a by the book officer who thinks Picard and Riker are dangerous mavericks. He has a point. Shaw turns out to be extremely competent in a crisis. Amanda Plummer was great as Vadic, a scenery chewing villain who has very good reasons to hate Starfleet and the Federation. Vadic's love of spinning directly in her command chair was a great homage to Amanda Plummer's late father, Christopher Plummer, who played a villain with a similar tic way back in Star Trek VI in the ‘90s. It is also great how the show wrapped up some of the dangling plot threads from the ‘90s, like Picard's strained relationship with his former mentee Commander Ro Laren or the brief return of Elizabeth Shelby, Riker's former First Officer. A few people have complained that Worf is now a pacifist, but he's a Klingon pacifist, which basically means he'll attempt negotiation before cutting off your head, but he is still probably going to cut off your head. Less Conan the Barbarian, more serene Warrior Monk. I think Data had an excellent ending to his character arc, which started with his character's very first appearance way back in the ‘80s and Brent Spiner did a good job of portraying Data's fractured personalities and then how they achieved unity. I'd say the weakest point of the show was how consistently dumb Starfleet command is. The plot hinged around Starfleet gathering its entire fleet together for a celebration and then putting all those ships under a remote control system, which seems both exceptionally stupid and very convenient for the bad guys. But to be fair, this is Starfleet, an organization whose high command regularly spits out insane Admirals and also has an unsanctioned Black Ops/Mad Science division that it can't control, so it definitely fits within the overall context of Star Trek. I mean, that's like half the premise of Lower Decks. And if you've ever worked for a large governmental, military, healthcare, or educational institution, you understand. We all know that working in a large institution under leaders who are either insane or dumb isn't exactly an anomaly in the human experience. I mean, the Roman Empire circa 190 A.D. was the most powerful institution on the planet and the Empire's maximum leader liked to spend his time LARPing as a gladiator in the Coliseum. Anyway, the emotional payoff at the end of Picard Season Three was very satisfying, and how the show wrapped up a lot of threads from Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager was pretty great. It's like the people who were in charge of Season Three of Picard watched the Star Wars sequel trilogy and thought, you know, we can do better and then they did. Overall grade: A So those are the movies and TV shows I watched in Winter 2024. If you're looking for something to watch, hopefully one of them sounds like it will catch your interest. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform or choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Brendan shares his film viewing in December and January of 2023 and 2024. Join us, won't you?SpotlightShe SaidThe ReportOfficial SecretsShattered GlassMargin CallBank of DaveGenieThe Hunt for Red OctoberBlood QuantumWhat did you watch in December and January? Share your viewing over in our guild on Boardgamegeek, #3269.

Hey everybody! Got a different format today I'm ranking all the horror movies from 2023 that I saw this year! Here are the rankings Exorcist: Believer (5/10)When Evil Lurks (5/10)Dark Harvest (5.5/10)It Lives Inside (6/10)Cobweb (6/10) Renfield (6/10)The Boogeyman (6.5/10)Infinity Pool (6.5/10)Nun II (6.5/10)A Haunting in Venice (7/10)Last Voyage of the Demeter (7/10)Five Nights at Freddy's (7/10)Totally Killer (7/10)Knock at the Cabin (7/10)Mallum (7.5/10)Saw X (7.5/10)Scream VI (8/10)TOP FIVE 5. The Pope's Exorcist (7.5/10)4. Evil Dead Rise (8/10)3. No One Can Save You (8/10)2. Thanksgiving (8.5/10)1. Talk To Me (8.5/10)

Join our dynamic duo as they dive into their top 5 rankings in film and TV of 2023. We're exploring the depths of what makes these shows and movies stand out in 2023. Tune in for our rants, stay for our reviews, and join the discussion with Scene N' Nerd. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe for more deep dives into the world of film and TV! Timestamps: 0:00 Welcome/Overall thoughts on 2023. 3:52  New "The One Piece" anime adaptation is coming to Netflix. 6:45  Where does Marvel Studios go now that Jonathan Major's is no longer Kang? Our thoughts on the case, Marvel's decision, how this is different from Ezra Miller and more. 12:55 Marvel Studios and DC's rough 2023. 15:45 Reflecting on the 2023 writers and screen actors guild strikes. 19:00  Ryan Coogler is developing an X-Files remake for Disney Plus. 22:00 Start of our 2023 Lists! 22:55 Sarah's Top 5 K-Dramas of 2023. 48:12 Will's Top 5 Films of 2023. 1:04:50 Sarah and Will share their Top 5 TV/Streaming shows of 2023. 1:47:15 Outro. We will see you in 2024! Follow our crew on Twitter @SceneNNerd, friend us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram and Threads @scene_n_nerd, and our website at www.scenennerdpodcast.com.  But most importantly rate, follow, and comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts!        

Brendan talks a bit about the films he watched in October and November of 2023. Join us, won't you?DuneDuneDune ImperiumDune: A Game of Conquest and DiplomacyDune Imperium – UprisingThe Pelican BriefHunt A Killer: Death at the Dive BarDeep Blue SeaShark IslandAsteroid CityMoongha Invaders: Mad Scientists and Atomic Monsters Attack the Earth!The HolidayFog of LoveThe KillerSniper Elite: The Board GameWhat movies did you watch in October and November? Share over on boardgamegeek guild #3269.

This week Bryan and Dave take a look back at Bring Me The Axe! year one and all the horror movies released in 2023. They run down the losers, the winners, and the just okay. Find out where all your favorite horror movies of this year landed and prepare to be outraged by hot takes and surprising reviews. Where did Scream 6 land? How do we feel about Skinamarink? Are we just too old to properly appreciate Five Nights At Freddy's? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bring-me-the-axe/message

On Episode 263 of the Always the Critic Podcast, we're back from our Thanksgiving break to review all the in-theater releases we watched recently, including Saltburn, starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, and Rosamund Pike.  Rico and Jess discuss Emerald Fennell's wild dabaucherous romp Saltburn, the latest from Hayao Miyazaki The Boy and the Heron, Dream Scenario with Nic Cage, and the triumph that is Godzilla Minus One. For episodes with similar movies, click belowAnimatedAction AdventureDramaThriller Become a Subscriber! Monthly Subscription Listen To Us! Spotify Apple Podcasts Anchor Follow us! Patreon Instagram Twitter Facebook Rico's Youtube Rico's Letterboxd Jessica's Letterboxd --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alwaysthecritic/message

Screw Russia Hard; Musk and Santos F The World; Movie Roundup Karel Cast #285 Well, I start a little angry. Why? Well first, it's paying bills day. And if you're like me, you are grateful you can pay them, but then, you wonder where the hell is all the money going? And if the economy is so great as we are being told, then why is it so hard? That moves right in to anger at Russia over their new anti—lgbtq laws, laws that are becoming more popular around the world. Then it's Musk and Santos. Two men that are literally giving Americans the finger, telling us to go F our selves, and what do we do? Comply mostly. Why? Why do we let people get away with screwing us all the time? Are we a nation of big bottoms? And then it's movie time, from SaltBurn to Priscilla, ending with Dicks The Musical because why not. See which ones I recommend. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe at YouTube.com/reallykarel @ReallyKarel is all social media and website reallykarel.com The Karel Cast is heard three times a week on all your favorite streaming services and the video can be seen on Youtube. Karel is a history-making #LGBTQ talk show host currently living in Las Vegas with his pup Ember.

Screw Russia Hard; Musk and Santos F The World; Movie Roundup Karel Cast #285 Well, I start a little angry. Why? Well first, it's paying bills day. And if you're like me, you are grateful you can pay them, but then, you wonder where the hell is all the money going? And if the economy is so great as we are being told, then why is it so hard? That moves right in to anger at Russia over their new anti—lgbtq laws, laws that are becoming more popular around the world. Then it's Musk and Santos. Two men that are literally giving Americans the finger, telling us to go F our selves, and what do we do? Comply mostly. Why? Why do we let people get away with screwing us all the time? Are we a nation of big bottoms? And then it's movie time, from SaltBurn to Priscilla, ending with Dicks The Musical because why not. See which ones I recommend. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe at YouTube.com/reallykarel @ReallyKarel is all social media and website reallykarel.com The Karel Cast is heard three times a week on all your favorite streaming services and the video can be seen on Youtube. Karel is a history-making #LGBTQ talk show host currently living in Las Vegas with his pup Ember. https://youtu.be/z2atasSJ1_A

We depart from our regular format to bring you our takes on the new family movies premiering on streamers and in theaters during the holiday season. What deserves our screen time as 2023 comes to a close? We have plenty of options, from the newest Disney animated musical to a family body swap comedy to Adam Sandler's latest silly voice. In Screen Time in the News, we discuss an article that asks why none of the newer holiday films feel like they'll truly become classics like Elf and Love Actually.

Halloween came last this year! Jon and Howie line up a murderer's row of horror recommendations as November rears its ugly head. Why were Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe movies "A" list movies? When did "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" get an identity crisis? And, is "Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama" just a good title? [Ep356]

In this episode, Jess and Jenni catch up on the spooky season TV shows and movies that they've been watching recently, including the 'Scream' movies, the 'Chucky' TV reboot, and many more. *There are NO SPOILERS in this episode* If you have any questions or thoughts to share with the Double Take team, you can reach us at doubletakenewsletter@gmail.com. Subscribe to the Double Take ⁠Newsletter⁠ for weekly TV recommendations. Find and follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠Twitter⁠ for even more Double Take. Hosts: Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen This episode produced and edited by: Jess Spoll --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dbltakepod/support

Mike and Kelsey return for another round of Best and Worst of the Month.  They each share the best and worst movies they watched this month. New and old movies you may have missed and the ones you should avoid at all costs.  In the Movie Review, Mike shares his spoiler-free thoughts on John Wick 4 and why it's the best one yet. He talks about the gritty action, Keanu Reeves Performance (or lack thereof?), and if it was worthy of the almost 3 hour runtime. In the Trailer Park, Mike talks about the new Wes Anderson movie Asteroid City starring Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johannson, Margot Robbie and so many more A-list actors! New Episodes Every Monday! Watch on YouTube: @MikeDeestro Follow Mike on TikTok: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Instagram: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikedeestro   Email: MovieMikeD@gmail.com    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mike and Kelsey share the best and worst movies they saw in February. A collection of movie reviews with the best recommendations for movies you may have missed and what movies to avoid because they are so bad. In the movie review, Mike gives his review of the highly anticipated Cocaine Bear. It's based on a true story, and follows the actions of a 500-pound black bear who consumes a significant amount of cocaine and embarks on a drug-fueled rampage in a Georgia forest. Mike shares what of the story is actually true, how ridiculous the action was and how it stayed surprisingly grounded with such a bizarre plot. In the Trailer Park, Mike shares his thoughts on Bert Kreischer's new meta comedy “The Machine”.  New Episodes Every Monday! Watch on YouTube: @MikeDeestro Follow Mike on TikTok: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Instagram: @mikedeestro Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikedeestro   Email: MovieMikeD@gmail.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.