Hate Expectations

It's that special time of year again -- spring! We at Hate Expectations like to to put out an episode like this in early April to celebrate the joys of the season. This time we take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, along with some of the myriad adaptations the literary giant appears in. But how to make sense of it all? For a case this large and confusing we felt like we needed a little help. So we called on our friends Humphrey and Bogart for assistance. Much as we all tried to us sift through the evidence and piece together a cohesive narrative, it's not clear that, even collectively, we really solved anything. Perhaps the answer we were looking for was more elementary, and what we really needed was the help of you, dear listener. Can you eliminate the impossible to find the truth? *Note: Great Britain is actually about the same size as Idaho, as it turns out. No apologies needed.

We're not high, we promise, though it may sound like it at times in this episode (maybe we should have been). That just the effect of Thomas Pynchon on a person's brain. And while Inherent Vice (2009) is possibly his most accessible novel, with the Paul Thomas Anderson movie (2014) being a streamlined version of that, there's still just a lot to absorb in both. A lot of, you know, stuff. Where was I? Anyway, a listener might best be advised to treat this episode like one of his novels and just go along for the ride. Who knows, man? Maybe you'll get a contact high just hearing about it.

At long last, we are delivering on our promise to rip into Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and the two film adaptations molded by it (1971, dir Mel Stuart & 2005, dir Tim Burton). But there's just too much confectionary conversation not to share it with friends, so we invited Megan Steen and returning guest Dug Steen* to join us! This episode represents our first repeated author, as well as our first two time Snuffy Walden winner! Listen in as we confer about cgi chocolate, weigh in on Wonka wackiness, and parley about which parts would be present in the perfect motion picture version. *Dug didn't realize he was invited and didn't read the book. Thankfully, he was a good sport and joined us anyway.

Sweet swimmin' unicorns, what did Lizzy do? It was her birthday a few months ago, and for it she selected Elizabeth Goudge's book, The Little White Horse, for us to cover. Seemed like a good idea, doing a cute story of a plucky little girl who discovers she's a moon princess in the valley of her OH MY GOD! What is wrong with the movie?! Where is the eyebleach! Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhhhhhhhh...

It's April as I type this (rabbit, rabbit), and that can mean only one thing -- it's time for our Easter episode of Hate Expectations! Now we know there have been a few adaptations of the Bible over the years, so we had a lot of options. For this special episode we decided to concentrate on the stellar 1999 direct-to-video filmed staging of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I assume we go into great depths about our feelings for both the book and the movie/musical, so I'll let it stand it without any further commentary. Enjoy!

While the pandemic has left a lot of us feeling a bit unstuck in time, the effects of that don't seem to be as strong for us as they are for Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969). Join us as we meander through our discussion, popping back and forth between the book and the movie adaptation (1972, dir George Roy Hill), relishing in the good moments and pointing out the those that never really came to life. So it goes.

Finally! Hate Expectations, along with multiple time returning guest/friend Jane Hutchins, takes a journey deep into the human mind. Join us as we dig into all the minutiae of the 1966 movie, Fantastic Voyage (dir. Richard Fleischer) and the novelization of it by noted sci-fi author, Isaac Asimov. No plot hole is too large and no performance is too small to escape our microscope. This is an episode that is guaranteed to get under your skin!

Halloween is our favorite time of year, here at Spielenwald, Hate Expectations's headquarters. There's no better time to dim the lights and curl into the fetal position with a scary book or the movie it spawned. In this episode we breathe life into Rosemary's Baby, the 1967 novel by Ira Levin and the 1968 film directed by Roman Polanski. It's a classic, but does it still live up to its reputation? It's atmospheric, but is it horror? Will it scare the bejesus out of you? There's only one good way to find out, and that's to join us...if you dare!

We're back! It's a special birthday / rebirth episode, as Lizzy* and Nate track down Richard Stark's 1962 novel, The Hunter. Join us as we not only beat this crime classic to a pulp, but we talk the two(!) movie adaptations to death: Point Blank (1967, dir John Boorman) and Payback (1999, dir Brian Helgeland). There's a whole lot of seething putrid evil to rip into, but somehow we get beyond just the pandemic to discuss the thrice told tale of a thief, a betrayal, and bloody vengeance. *Lizzy wants to correct the record and say that Keenan is Ed's son, not grandson.

We're back with a special quarantine episode! From the time we published The Princess Bride until today (11/19/19 to 04/01/20 -- over a third of a year!) we at Hate Expecations have had a good long Christmas vacation, planned and delivered the culmination of a four year Leap Day party, read some non-adapted books, and mostly enjoyed taking some time off. However, now that home isolating is a reality, we have had time to re-read something we expect a lot of people are also re-experiencing, the first book of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954). We also watched the seminal film adaptation (dir. Ralph Bakshi, 1978) and some other lesser conversions of the work. We don't have any special guests this time, in part because of the quarantine, but mostly because this episode wasn't planned. Like Gandalf the Grey, sometimes a podcast arrives precisely when it means to.