Reel Deep Dive

Zardoz lingers in the public imagination as an unintentionally hilarious creative misfire. It was written, directed, and produced by a supremely confident John Boorman, fresh off a succession of creative and commercial triumphs. It features Sean Connery skulking about in both a red diaper and a wedding dress. This first ten minutes of the film showcases a floating stone head that lectures people about how the penis is evil before it vomits rifles at them. For some, Zardoz is a cautionary tale about artistic hubris. For others, it ranks alongside Troll 2, The Room, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Birdemic as a perennial for their bad movie night.

This is the second of three Reel Deep Dive episodes covering WandaVision. Feel free to scroll down and click on the preceding installment if you'd like to listen to us cover episodes 1-3.

Plenty of fun things on the internet lose their appeal once their creators begin tracing trends. A sense of joy is lost when one stops writing about what they care about and focus instead upon what they think will drive clicks.

This episode kicks off a series of features centering on The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling's classic anthology show of sci-fi, twist endings, and socio-political allegories. We're going to be dividing them up based on writers. Ryan had too much trepidation about tackling Serling or Richard Matheson for the initial outing, so we're talking about the three episodes that Jerry Sohl ghostwrote on behalf of Charles Beaumont. They include "Queen of the Nile", "The New Exhibit", and the iconic "Living Doll" episodes.

It's fairly common knowledge that the first Godzilla film was a thinly-veiled allegory for nuclear devastation. However, while parables about ecological ruin and government fallibility never quite left the series, Godzilla's growing appeal among small children meant that his sequels would get progressively more colorful and silly as the years went on. Terror of Mechagodzilla, the subject for this episode, came out when its star was depicted as an unambiguous superhero; it wound up being the final installment in the franchise's Shōwa Period (iterations of Godzilla are named after whoever happened to be emperor of Japan at the time).

A common complaint about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that its films often come off as the homogenous product of an anonymous assembly line. The superhero comics that they're derived from are often the formulaic result of journeymen frantically scrambling to meet deadlines for an audience of undiscerning eight year olds, but the longevity of certain characters have meant that creative teams have interpreted them through many different perspectives. Superheroes are a mash-up of a number of 1930's pulp adventure tropes and many other aspects of genre fiction have been applied to them over the decades. For instance, over the course of a month's worth of stories, Batman can solve a locked room mystery, fight a vampire, search for lost treasure in the Amazon, and topple an alien dictator with his buddy Superman. The superhero story can often be run-of-the-mill, but it can also be this weird sponge that absorbs and adapts to a striking variety of narrative formats.

The Fast And The Furious was a successful movie, but it's unlikely that anyone in 2001 could predict that it would be the starting point for a massively-successful and influential franchise that's beloved the world over, has begrudgingly won critical accolades, and is still going strong after two decades. A teenaged Ryan certainly didn't think so when a high school friend dragged him in to see the first movie in theaters; he was unimpressed and skipped all the sequels despite the fact that all the cool kids started getting on board when the fifth one came out.

Ryan definitely wouldn't have picked this topic if left to his own devices; he's not a big Selena listener and he's not usually fond of biopics for iconic musicians (he later had to cut a lot of ranting on the latter subject out of the episode because it veered too far away from relevancy). Sylvan, on the other hand, had an adolescent obsession with the charismatic Tejano vocalist profiled in this film.

Stagecoach is a film that revived the Western as a film genre, solidified John Ford as one of the iconic Western directors, and made John Wayne into a star. It's also a strong ensemble feature that boasts gripping action scenes, gorgeous shots of Monument Valley, tight editing, layered characterization, and defining performances from Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, and Thomas Mitchell.

This adaptation of Dante Alighieri's narrative poem, one of the earliest feature-length films, finds the poet braving the terrors of hell with Virgil as a guide. Drawing from Gustave Doré's famed engravings and employing many of the trick photography techniques pioneered by Georges Méliès, The Inferno caused an instant sensation upon its 1911 debut and has yet to lose its ability to strike audiences. Only about a third of the film's three hours have survived to the present day, but The Inferno remains a bold, unique, and captivating example of cinema's formative era.