Drive-In Saturdays

Join us this week for a discussion of two superhero movies that together epitomise the 'Elderly Superhero Comes Out Of Retirement In A Grimdark Dystopian Future' subgenre. Patron request Logan is probably the most critically acclaimed superhero film ever made. DKR is an adaptation of Frank Miller's iconic Batman story, indisputably one of the most influential modern superhero comics.

Buckle up, folks, because boy howdy are we gonna get Inside Baseball tonight.

In this episode, originally recorded approx. three months ago, we discuss two big-budget Disney animated features about Indigenous youth recovering their cultural history, 2017's Coco and 2016's Moana. Join us for our usual digressions about Diana Wynne Jones; thoughts on Moana as it relates to the Disney Princess canon; the importance of non-violent conflict resolution in kids' media; an Una O'Connor Award candidate seemingly designed purely for Saoirse's benefit; and a WHOLE LOT of capital-F Feelings.

Our brief podcasting break is over and here we are with patron request Billy Elliot, paired with a personal favourite of ours, Pride, set during the same events!

This one has a lot of Very Serious Talk About Queerness, Labour, Identity Politics, and Leftist Organising, but also our regular amount of nonsense, including a peek at the rural vegetarian struggle, my refusal to accept that there's a real actual human dance choreographer named Peter Darling, and the all-important question, 'What if Toni Collette were here?'

Menu:

• Welsh rarebit
• Potato leek soup
• Bara brith
• Heinz beans
• Yorkshire tea

Music:

• David Bowie, Drive In Saturday and Let's Dance 
• Tom Robinson Band, Glad To Be Gay
• Joan Baez and Mimi Farina, Bread and Roses
• T. Rex, Children of the Revolution
• Johnny Cash, Dark As A Dungeon

This week we watched the greatest film of the 20th century, and also Citizen Kane.

Unreliable narrators! Fictionalised biopics that made their subjects really mad! Flashbacks! Non-murder mysteries! The passage of time! The price of wealth and fame! Pieces so personal to their directors that even Saoirse has to acknowledge auteurist readings!

This week we chose to pair patron selection and weird mess Stigmata with Kevin Smith's Dogma, made in the same year and handling similar themes and subject matter in a completely different tone and genre.

Join us as we expolore the intersection between Catholic and Goth; find the correct past tense of the verb 'to glide'; ramble on about Neil Gaiman some more; pitch an academic paper on homosociality in the works of Kevin Smith; threaten ourselves with the idea of watching the Constantine movie; learn what Saoirse still remembers from kids' books about unexplained phenomena; and conclude once and for all that film... is bad.

Menu:

- Communion wine

- Italian bread with olive oil and vinegar

- Ritz crackers

- Tequila shots

- Burgers

 

Concluding Wonder Woman month with two woman-directed films from 2017, Patty Jenkins' superhero/war epic Wonder Woman and Angela Robinson's period romance Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.

Join us as we enter Deep Comics Nerd Territory, discussing such topics as the inappropriate Christian framing of Wonder Woman; the prevalence of wood alcohol poisoning; how and why the comics industry is fucked; the queer female gaze; some books we read once; whether men should be banned from making superheroine movies; films linking subtextual queer desire with tragedy; and the oft-forgotten and unfortunately-named Wonder Woman artist Harry Peter.

Music:

- David Bowie, Drive In Saturday

- Tina Guo, Wonder Woman Theme

- Green Day, She's A Rebel

- Olivia Newton-John, Culture Shock

- Etta James, It's A Man's Man's Man's World

Menu:

- Pierogies

- Cabbage Rolls

- English Breakfast Tea

- German Beer

- Whiskey from an Erlenmeyer flask

Most of you are probably familiar with Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman, at least by reputation. But did you know that there was a completely different Wonder Woman movie/TV show pilot that aired just one year earlier?

Join us as we compare these two Wonders Woman; meet our new favourite character, Angela; consider the possibility that Diana hooked up with the wrong Steve; shop for jackets; and discuss the problems some writers have with Diana''s supporting cast.

This week we compare two accounts of the same historical event told from very different points of view, 1983's astronaut-focused The Right Stuff and Hidden Figures, the story of the Black female mathematicians working behind the scenes.

We discuss why we aren't going to space; pitch a sequel to Snakes On A Plane starring Jeff Goldblum; discover our favourite special effects mechanism ever; trap ourselves in an unfortunate digression about urine; and complain about our least-favourite bumper sticker.

This week we watched our second patron-requested film and first non-English-language release, Train to Busan, which we paired with Snowpiercer, the other internationally-successful South Korean genre film about a train!

This one was loads of fun to record but I edited it in a bit of a daze so I don't have notes to make a proper teaser post like I usually do.

Music:

- Drive In Saturday, David Bowie

- This Train, Big Bill Broonzy

- To Morrow, The Muppet Country Trio

- This Train, Joni Mitchell

- Big Steel Rain, Gordon Lightfoot

Menu:

- Boiled eggs

- Sushi

- Neither insects nor babies

Thanks to our wonderful supporters on Patreon we're able to bring you this bonus episode where we talk about what's most likely to win Academy Awards, which winners would make us personally happiest, and most importantly, what we're wearing to the Fantasy Oscars!