School of Movies

[School of Movies 2024]

Nolan-Vember evolves to a whole new stage of the man's career, as following the billion-dollar success of The Dark Knight in 2008 he became a household name. This 2010 film, after The Prestige, just four years earlier garnered a mere $109m at the box office totally flipped the landscape of possibility in cerebral blockbuster cinema.

It netted an astonishing $839m, signalling to Hollywood that here was an auteur who could open a summer movie that wasn't based on comics or toys, wasn't a remake or a sequel, a reboot or a prequel or even an adaptation of a book, a play, a fable a video game or a TV show. This was a standalone tale written by the director himself, and that a huge audience now wanted to be taken to the places they recognised him as capable of taking them, mentally, emotionally, and in terms of how intense Hans Zimmer's BWAAAAAAAAAAAAA got; physically.

But that doesn't mean that this evolution of Christopher Nolan works for Sharon and I. In fact, from this point on he royally cheeses our onions!

[Digital Gonzo 2012]

NOTE: This is a reissued episode from over 12 years ago. Please forgive the lower production values and boneheaded things I say.

Part two of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. Following the powerful set-up of Batman Begins, the production team pulled out all the stops to deliver an epic crime thriller in the style of Michael Mann’s Heat. This is a story of a city in turmoil and a police force struggling to keep order, up against the ruthless mob. At the center are Batman and The Joker, forces of nature representing order and chaos. The only hope for Gotham may in fact be the White Knight, district attorney Harvey Dent.

But you all know this, because everybody and his dog saw this movie back in 2008. I just wanted to set the scene a little. Much is discussed, especially Heath Ledger’s extraordinary performance, but not forgetting the brilliant turns from Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal and the possible career-high score from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard.

Guests:

Sharon Shaw of School of Movies

Neil Taylor of TheKiddDogg

Joshua Garrity of Cane and Rinse

Jerome McIntosh of GameBurst

Aquila Edwards of Eyrie City

Paul Gibson of Gonzo Planet

[School of Movies 2024]

Nolan-Vember continues with Christopher's fifth film. Now, you would think, following the momentous success of Batman Begins, his period piece about feuding magicians that remains one of his best tricks to date would have been a stellar success... Wolverine's Hugh Jackman versus Dark Knight Christian Bale, and for the low, low price of $40 million; this is a recipe for insane box office gross from the man who would eventually go toe to toe with the plastic pink lady and save cinema in 2023. However, it garnered a paltry $109m from a general audience who in 2006 would far rather go see The Da Vinci Code, Night at the the Museum and the dancing penguins of Happy Feet (also Borat was popular; my wife).

This means the odds are a high percentage of our listeners have not seen this film. We would urge you all to do so at once. Spend a proper evening with a big TV in a darkened living rom with the volume high and intense. This is not a film to catch in ten minute chunks on your phone, nor to pass by at Blockbuster on your way to grab Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector.

An atmosphere thicker than a whale-omelette, twin obsessions to be the best conjurer the Victorian era had going, spies, stolen encoded journals, Gothic secrets and tragedy, David Bowie doing a Serbian accent as Nikola Tesla, the wizard on the mountain, murder after murder... this film will stick to you like your shadow.

[Digital Gonzo 2012]

NOTE: This is a reissued episode from over 12 years ago. Please forgive the lower production values and boneheaded things I say.

Finally we get to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. After eight years away from cinema screens, and multiple stalled attempts at relaunching the franchise, Warner Bros knocked the Bat out of the park with the best film so far and arguably the most compelling and mature adaptation of Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego.

Many aspects are discussed and deconstructed including Christian Bale’s intense portrayal, ace cinematographer Wally Pfister’s erotic endeavours and why Hollywood on paper is a senile, avaricious old psychopath.

Guests:

Sharon Shaw of School of Movies

Taylor Nova of TheKiddDogg

Joshua Garrity of Cane and Rinse

Jerome McIntosh of GameBurst

Aquila Edwards of Eyrie City

Paul Gibson of Gonzo Planet

[School of Movies 2024]

Kicking off Nolan-Vember with a tale of obsession, revenge and the untrustworthy, ephemeral nature of memory. Things play out in nonlinear fashion as Nolan executes his second film with the deft surety of a man who can see the final arrangement within all the misaligned frames.

Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man afflicted with a rare brain disorder that resets his short-term memory every five to ten minutes or so, with his mid and long-term memories almost completely blank, following a terrible tragedy.

For those of you feeling alone and scared right now, we will do our very best to keep on making utterly engrossing podcasts over the next few hard years. Whatever helps listeners get through the goddamn day is a job well done.

Guest:

Greg Downing of Through the Wind Door

[School of Movies 2024]

A perennial Halloween favourite for our family, this was Tim Burton's Sophomore effort, after his debut with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure but before he became a Hollywood Titan with Batman (starring Beetlejuice). And I know we give him a hard time a lot, as a purveyor of populist Goth chic to the masses, but when he hits right you get this movie.

And it really does hold up after three and a half decades. Possibly because it's so much fun and so child-friendly that new generations can embrace this ghostly monster party every few years, giving it an evergreen quality. Certainly Willow has loved it since they were tiny, and goes into why on this episode with us. Each member of the cast and crew are firing on all cylinders. It's visually stunning, wickedly gruesome, wildly quotable and utterly hilarious.

And this weekend we get to visit the messy but enjoyable 2024 sequel for the Patreon bonus podcast feed.

[School of Everything Else 2024]

This is a special episode I've been planning for many years, ever since the notion that 'Horror' as we know it is largely a marketing construct, and that stories that deliberately jab at our Fear-response can be found pretty much everywhere.

This is why I decided to go with my favourite metaphor; food) and hone in on the precept that Horror is not a story type, but a spice (or indeed a series of differently flavoured spices with differing properties) that can be sprinkled in lightly or ladled in heavily to produce wildly varying results.

This would be why de facto Horror film series' like Friday the 13th don't frighten me in the slightest, but Shallow Grave, which would be classified as a Thriller in cinematic terms, chilled me to my core, and why the most frightening film I ever saw isn't in the Horror genre at all!

We and our guests work our way up the scary Scoville Scale (the Screamville scale) to establish some genuinely thought-provoking new, fresh and flavourful perspectives, accompanied by some of the greatest and most spine-tingling movie music of all time!

The window for our Winter Commissions season is now open.

Coming up this October we have shows on the first two Psycho films, (as well as touching on the ill-advised Gus Van Sant 1998 remake of the Hitchcock original.) Then a long-planned episode discussing the Horror genre in a new light. And finally on Halloween, we got us a hot, steaming bowl of Beetlejuice.

Following that we have Nolan-Vember, from the makers of Cloon-June. Sharon and I will be talking about four of his films on the Main Event feed: Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, and on the Patreon bonus feed we will have After School Clubs on Tenet, Insomnia, Following and Dunkirk.

Then in December we are going back to the animated X-Men with shows about ‘97 and maybe more.

So that leaves January open for four episodes chosen by four of you. Again, the standard fee is $150 for a movie, more for TV, comics or video games because of the increased time and energy investment. And as always, it’s not first come, first served, it’s the four we think will make for the best shows.

These places tend to fill up very fast, usually within a few days, so get in touch via email, Patreon messaging, Discord, or even twitter, if anybody still uses that hellsite. And we can negotiate these shows into reality.  

[School of Movies 2024]

This was a commissioned episode for Dean R who was very keen for us to examine this 1983 follow-up to the 1960 classic. This film brings back Anthony Perkins after Norman has served his time and behaved well in crazy-jail, with the 'Mother' persona seemingly dormant.

But now we, as the audience may find ourselves strangely onside with the mild-mannered, respectful man, seemingly genuinely trying to go straight, and surrounded by people who want to give this multiple-murderer a piece of their mind (knock it off, idiots, it's crowded enough in there!).

Meg Tilly (sister of Chucky's bride, Jennifer) plays Mary, a down-on-her-luck waitress whom Norman really seems to want to help back onto her feet, as this torrid story circles into an operatic and tragic conclusion. We close out with a synopsis of the entirely unrelated book "Psycho 2" by Robert Bloch; a novel so hated by the studio that they made their own sequel here.

[School of Movies 2024]

For this rather special episode, we firstly welcome to the show for the first time, director Alfred Hitchcock, as we examine his most famous and most revisited film, Psycho (1960). This became the wellspring from which modern-day detective thrillers emerged. But it also has tangled roots in Horror and the grubby stepchild of its sub-genres, the slasher. While other films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) and John Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962) -both weirdly starring Robert Mitchum- were also hugely important, Psycho was less about the stalking killer as it was a torrid dive into the swampy waters of their mind.

Deriving from a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, who lived down the road from Ed Gein as he was being arrested for trying to make a woman-suit, this story, along with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs (1988) assisted greatly in the lurid, pulp sensationalism of the twisted deviant killer-man-in-a-dress mythology. Despite quiet, clear, firm, researched and experienced protestations from trans folk and their allies who keep having to remind the world at large that they aren't toilet-lurking monsters.

We also look at the stunningly ill-advised shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock film, directed in 1998 by Gus Van Sant. Superficially, these are exactly the same film, but the devil is in the details. Next week we will be returning to Bates Motel with the far less well-known, but actually pretty good Psycho II, which more pronouncedly paints Norman as a victim.