Movies We Dig | Film, Antiquity and Everything in Between

We're here with a very special bonus episode on Superbowl commercials past and present. We dig into three classically themed features from 2022's Superbowl LVI as well as a special throwback to the distant year of 2004. Listen us argue for a Marxist interpretation of a Pepsi add, pitch a quirky comedy featuring a retired Zeus and discuss why classical antiquity seems to be having a moment in our current pop-culture landscape.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

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We're back to look at the more action adventures following the success of Gladiator and writer David Franzoni's next project: King Arthur (2004). Here, Antoine Fuqua directs a gritty re-imagining of Arthurian legend in the final years of the Roman Empire. We get into the mid-00's obsession for gritty realism, the NEW archaeological 'discoveries' and esoteric Celtic spiritualism which inspired this movie, along with riveting discussion of the Roman fort of Vindolanda, our favorite Knights of the Round Table, whether or not Til Schweiger has hair and our favorite (male, non-queer-coded) sexy villains pre-2010. Enjoy, or don't. I'm a podcast, not Roman authority.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back for the big one (because it sold us queer giraffes!). A critical and commercial hit, Gladiator spawned a revival for a genre that had been presumed dead for at least 40 years. It also inspired, for better or worse, no small amount in interest in ancient Rome over the last two decades. We get into all the details of this movie, its legacy and the impact its vision of Rome had on 21st audiences. Plus, we share our hopes and dreams for upcoming, albeit unnecessary, Gladiator 2.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Get ready for a real trip back to ancient Egypt, where Caesar is green, triumphs feature sports cars and gladiators bring handguns to the arena. Joined by animation expert Chiara Sulprizio, we dig into this animated adult fantasy/sci-fi/historical epic by Osamu Tezuka and Eiichi Yamamoto. This is really one of the wilder takes on ancient history we've ever seen and even if it's not your bag - which for many it probably won't be - it is definitely worth a viewing, if only to take in its sheer wildness.

You can read more from Chiara about animation and the ancient world at Animated Antiquity

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is simultaneously an excavation of both Imperial Rome and late 60's Italian cinema. Joined by the amazing Sarah E. Bond and Gregory Hays, we dig into Frederico Fellini's dreamlike, even frenetic, adaptation of the Satyricon by Petronius. This is a film which has a lot of offer when it comes to classical reception. In lieu of 'historically accuracy' (if we care about such things), Fellini presents us with a fantastical and at times unnerving vision of ancient Rome. In some ways, Fellini Satyricon is the true embodiment of how we receive both Petronius' work and the ancient world at large: fragmentary, perplexing and often unknowable. Final Verdict (courtesy of SEB): Watch more movies! Care less about accuracy!

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a very special episode, Colin, Eli, Christie and special guest Zoé Thomas sit down with Charley and Vlas Parlapanides, the creators and head writers of Blood of Zeus (2020). We dig into the brothers' inspirations for the show, their strong ties to Greece and Greek culture and their approach to a forward-thinking adaption of ancient myth. Other discussion topics include the underappreciated tradition of Helen in Egypt, fully funded dream projects and "monster tiddies".

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes we review movies we're very passionate about and sometimes we review The Last Legion. Fortunately we have special guests Ayelet Haimson Lushkov and Pramit Chaudhuri, hosts of Calcutta Arthouse Podcast, to save Rome(?) with us. Where to even begin with this one. It's a movie where every scene and line of dialogue competes to be the most absurd, confusing or just ridiculously hammy thing every put to screen. There's something to be unpacked about the way this movie wholeheartedly embraces a lot of misconceptions about the "decline and fall" of the Roman Empire, including: Rome was an inherently good and freedom-loving absolute monarchy, it came to an end in a single violent invasion of *waves hand* barbarians, the Caesars were a bunch of conqueror-kings with magic blood, Tiberius was a nice guy. The list goes on. Perhaps the best way to watch this movie is on an Aeroflot from 1980.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joined by super extra awesome guest Donna Zuckerberg, we dig not down but up and out of hell with the 2020 rogue-like (or rogue-lite) dungeon crawler Hades by Supergiant Games. Yes we've switched gears to video games, which are like movies, but ones you play. Pretty early on we reveal we're all BIG fans of this game and we really relish getting to dive into the all the many creative, engaging and inclusive ways it merges mythology, storytelling and game-play into one fantastic package.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back at Troy, where shirts are optional, digging up an artifact from a bygone era: late 90's television. Joined by the wonderful Dr. Deborah Beck, expert Homerist from UT Austin, we we break down the 1997 Hallmark miniseries, The Odyssey. This movie, by its director's own omission hones in on the action-adventure aspects of Homer's Odyssey. But, we scholars ruminate, are those really the best parts of the story? We mediate again on the pitfalls of sticking to the plot of a story while missing its larger themes. We also tackle two of the great questions of our time: Iliad or Odyssey and who had the best mullet?

You can find podcasts on the Iliad and Sophocles' Antigone by Deborah Beck with her students at UT here and here

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you even Argo bro?!? Christie Vogler is back with us again but we've decided to leave her name out of the title tos ave money on digital ink. We're back with Ray Harryhausen's most celebrated film, Jason and the Argonauts, in which Colin's cat does battle with a Zoom background of Talos, the Bronze Giant. Should this movie actually be a heist film? Is Jason really such a hero? Why do we expect historic/mythic settings to feature British accents? How do special effects affect storytelling, especially myths? Can skeletons swim? We get into these and many more topics this is love child between prestige sword and sandal and B-theater creature features.

As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show! Stay up-to-date on all the Movies We Dig news by visiting movieswedig.com or checking out our socials.

Movies We Dig is also part of Mnemosyne: The Memory Collective, a podcast network and creator collective for historians, archaeologists, artists, and other creators and educators dedicated to sharing content about and featuring the ancient world that is accurate, accessible, and inclusive. To learn more about the collective and its contributors, check out collectivemem.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.