Screeners Podcast

...does humanity still get enslaved?

What better way to celebrate American independence than by trying to milk some more money out of a 20-year-old hit movie? That’s what Fox thought, anyway—unfortunately, though, Josh isn’t much of a patriot, and Melody had other things to do, so only Chad, Chris, and Daniel saw Independence Day: Resurgence. Based on box office numbers, though, that’s a higher percentage of Screeners making it to the theater than of the general moviegoing public, so Fox should be happy. The Screeners who picked Resurgence to do well in their box office wager list...well, they’re a little less happy.

Surely Hollywood can do better than a movie about aliens that doesn’t even have Will Smith in it, though. If they have, the Screeners (or what’s left of them) will dig it up for their top 3 list. In keeping with the July 4 theme, this episode’s topic is “best alien invasion movies” (or, we assume, TV shows, but if anyone says Falling Skies, Josh will find out, and he will quit the podcast for real this time).

If you’re not too busy stealing paranoid glances into the sky in anticipation of impending doom, join us over on Facebook to tell us about all the overlord races we forgot to welcome. Next episode, we’ll switch from aliens to ghosts. Good times!

News flash:  People liked Finding Nemo. Judging by the box office numbers for Finding Dory, a lot of people liked Finding Nemo. Either that, or people just really like animated movies about fish. We’re guessing it’s the former, though. The Screeners are no exception, whether their kids love it, or they were kids when it came out (OK, so that’s only one Screener). They all have something good to say about the little clownfish—even Josh probably does, though we doubt he’ll say it out loud. Did the sequel measure up to the original, though?

Well, that’s what everyone’s here to talk about. This episode happened to fall on a relatively slow news week, so the hosts jump right into their main event review. All five of them managed to make it to the theater (along with the rest of the country, apparently), so there should be at least a little room for debate. C’mon, Chris; everyone’s counting on you to remain objective in the face of everyone else’s excitement. Don’t disappoint us!

OK, so there wasn’t much news, but we can still put together a top 3 list, right? Sure; why not? In the spirit of the main event’s title, the Screeners decided to make a top 3 “lost and found” list. As usual, it can be movies or TV, and as Chris is so fond of saying, there are no rules...for this one especially, it would seem. If you can make any sense at all out of Daniel’s picks here, please do let us know. We’re still working on figuring out a couple of them.

And that’s it! Like we always say, do join us over on Facebook to add your top 3 picks to the list, send us topic ideas, or just tell us how amazing Chad’s sound quality was this episode. We want to hear what you have to say, and we obviously love to hear ourselves talk too, so let’s, um, talk...together.

This episode’s a bit different than most:  No entertainment news roundtable, no movie review, just sheer listmania from start to finish. Here’s the deal:  The Screeners have decided to try their hands at picking the top summer movies of 2016, as determined by their box office haul. The “official” rules are here, but Chad didn’t read them, so why should you?

It’s pretty simple, actually:  Rank the gross domestic (US + Canada) profit of movies released between May 6 and September 5 from 1 to 10 in descending order, and pick 3 more “dark horses” that you’re not as confident about but think might make a good showing. We won’t summarise the gory scoring details here, but rest assured:  There will be a winner, and that winner will inflict some form of horrific cinematic torture on the rest of our beloved Screeners. Some of them might not make it, but they knew that when they signed up for this.

Just so no one can back out of their terrible, terrible picks after the fact, we’re going to post them all right here, right now; don’t read on if you want to play along unbiased by your favorite Screener’s opinions. OK—we’ll list Josh’s first so you can have just a taste of how this goes; we’re pretty sure he’s not your favorite Screener anyway.

Josh:

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Suicide Squad
3. Independence Day Resurgence
4. X-Men Apocalypse
5. Star Trek Beyond
6. Jason Bourne
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
8. Mechanic: Resurrection
9. Central Intelligence
10. Finding Dory

Dark Horses:

1. The Secret Life of Pets
2. Ice Age: Collision Course
3. Ghostbusters

Daniel:

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Finding Dory
3. X-Men: Apocalypse
4. Suicide Squad
5. Independence Day: Resurgence
6. Star Trek Beyond
7. The Secret Life of Pets
8. Ghostbusters
9. Jason Bourne
10. Central Intelligence

Dark Horses:

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
2. Alice Through the Looking Glass
3. Ice Age: Collision Course

Melody:

1. Captain America Civil War
2. Finding Dory
3. Suicide Squad
4. The Secret Life of Pets
5. X-men Apocalypse
6. Independence Day: Resurgence
7. Ghostbusters
8. Star Trek Beyond
9. Angry Birds
10. Jason Bourne

Dark Horses:

1. Central Intelligence
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
3. Neighbors 2

Chris:

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Independence Day: Resurgence
3. X-Men Apocalypse
4. Finding Dory
5. Ghostbusters
6. The Secret Life of Pets
7. Suicide Squad
8. Star Trek Beyond
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
10. Jason Bourne

Dark Horses:

1. Neighbors 2
2. Bad Moms
3. Central Intelligence

Chad:

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Finding Dory
3. Suicide Squad
4. The Secret Life of Pets
5. X-Men Apocalypse
6. Star Trek Beyond
7. Angry Birds
8. Jason Bourne
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
10. Ghostbusters

Dark Horses:

1. Central Intelligence
2. BFG
3. Alice Through the Looking Glass

The Screeners are down a host for this episode—Josh mentioned something about packing all his earthly belongings, but we’re honestly a bit worried that’s just a euphemism. Please do come back someday, Josh; we miss the lack of substance you bring to the show.

Anyway, in honor of this episode’s main event, the remaining Screeners start out the show by talking about their top three third installments in a trilogy.. See, Apocalypse is either the third movie since the last X-Men reboot, or the third third X-Men movie (yes, that’s nine in all for those of you playing along at home...how many more can they make?). Either way, Chad promised us this would make sense, and we’re just going to take him at his word. That usually works out.

OK, main event time. Like we said, there have been a lot of X-Men movies, but you know what there are even more of? X-Men characters. X-Men: Apocalypse alone must introduce 20 of them...we lost count somewhere after the guy with the tail. We can’t say any more than that, because once we start making jokes about how the cast has all the makings of a fantastic Blue Man Group tribute band, we’re liable to spoil something. You’ll just have to listen to find out whether Melody and Daniel loved this movie as much as you’d expect them to.

And that’s one more superhero movie episode in the books! As always, join us over on Facebook to let us know what you thought and what you’d like to hear more about next time.

Another month, another Marvel movie. They’re a machine at this point—the kind of machine they keep at the US Mint. They say money doesn’t grow on trees, but they clearly haven’t seen the trees on the Marvel Studios lot.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we go all Confederateless Civil War on you, we have a single Jump Cut to kick off this episode. Your Facebook feed may or may not have recently been bombarded with ads for a new twist on video streaming lately—if not, the Screeners here to fill you in. VidAngel is a service that claims to rent SD movies (those are still a thing?) for $1 and the HD version for $2, with the added bonus that you can edit them to your heart’s content to remove anything you find objectionable.

Is this a good idea? Is it legal? Would anyone consider using something like this? All these questions and more will be...well, they’ll at least be mentioned in our longest Jump Cut ever.

OK, main event time. They thought about waiting until it came out on VidAngel so we could edit out all its gratuitous violence and at least 3 potty words, but the Screeners just couldn’t wait to see Captain America: Civil War. So, first question: is this a Captain America movie or an Avengers movie? Does anyone really know? We sure don’t.

It’s definitely a spectacle, though, and we’re sure Chris hated every minute of it. Let’s talk about why, and what Marvel can do to keep his attention the next time around. And once we’re done with that, let’s find something relatively inconsequential to argue about, just to keep things interesting. Sound like a plan? Good.

Once the infighting dies down, brother stop killing brothers, and all that, the Screeners decide to go back to talking about when the good guys decide to fight the bad guys for a change. This episode’s Top 3 is about our hosts’ favorite superhero fight scenes of all time. As usual, there are no criteria that qualifies something as being a “superhero fight scene”, or even a “superhero”; those are just words anyway, right; what good are they?

Maybe you’re thinking, “Wow; that Top 3 was a little too specific for me.” Well, it’s time to channel your inner Gandhi and be the change you wish to see in the world. Click over to our Facebook page and tell us what we should talk about next time.

Come to think of it, maybe you should suggest something for two episodes down the road—for the next episode, the Screeners are going to play a ranking game even more specific than an Oscar ballot. They’re going to attempt to rank the year’s top 10 box office earners released before that episode. The loser has to...listen to the winner gloat until they can think of a better punishment. See you then!

The Screeners are missing their only mommy host for this episode, but that won’t stop them from doing a kid-friendly episode...right after Jump Cuts, that is.

OK, so “Jump Cuts” might be a bit of a misnomer for this episode’s first act, but Chris really likes the audio bump he recorded for it, and everyone else is too lazy to come up with a replacement, so we’ll let the pretense continue for at least one more show.

The four Screeners who did show up this time tend to have TV viewing habits that are...let’s say “distinct”. Since they don’t all watch the same things, they’ve decided to do a round of mini-reviews of shows that have caught their eye recently. With Josh digging up a CNBC show and Daniel implying that there’s a Hulu original that might be worth watching, this segment might just be the most eccentric thing the Screeners have done since Chad named a foreign language movie his top pick of 2015. Of course, no one else has watched Phoenix to see if he had a point, so we’re just going to keep mocking him for it.

Unsatisfied to ruminate about just the small screen, the Screeners looked around for a movie to review as a group this week and landed on Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book. After all, how wrong can you go with casting Bill Murray and Christopher Walken as talking animals?

The group is down one more voice for this segment, as Josh wasn’t able to make it out to the theater, but we’re pretty sure the other 3 can successfully fill the 45 seconds of content he usually adds to main events. We won’t spoil the review here, except to say that we had no idea how little Chad likes kids. Tsk, tsk, Chad.

Looks like the Screeners might actually be sticking with this “top 3” thing. In honor of The Jungle Book, they’ve decided to recap their favorite movies that feature (though don’t necessarily “star”) talking animals. Josh is back to participate, but does he have enough of an inner child to even give this topic a fair chance?

That’s enough cuteness for one episode. As always, find us on Facebook to join the conversation—and come back next time when we’ll be talking about Captain America: Civil War and our favorite superhero fight scenes of all time.

It’s been at least three episodes since we talked about murder, so the Screeners decided to kick this one off by pretending they like Chris as much as Daniel and watching—you guessed it—Hannibal. The hype train has been building speed for awhile now, so we’re not even sure if whatever got the show canceled can stop it. Even Josh played along and watched a couple episodes, though, so we’ll see if he can be the immovable object the world needs in times like these.

OK, enough cannibalism and telepathy. To cleanse everyone’s palate before the main event, it’s time to introduce a brand-new segment: Top 3. After all, Buzzfeed built a media empire around the concept of numbered lists, so why can’t the Screeners? The world needs more favorite things, so we’re going to list ours more often, and we’re going to start with, um . . . movies and TV shows about serial killers. Funny how that worked out.

We’re done now; we promise. For the main event this time, the Screeners revisit a segment that’s been on the shelf for awhile:  Made You Look. For any new listeners out there (and the forgetful among us), this means that each Screener picked a movie and forced one other Screener to watch it. There’s usually at least a little sadism involved in the choices, though, so it still fits with the episode’s theme. Here’s a list of each Screeners, their victim—er, beneficiary—and the movie they picked. All the movies are available on Netflix, except Chris and Melody's picks. You can thank them for that on Facebook.

Daniel -> Chris: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Chris -> Chad: The Final Girls

Chad -> Josh: Tangerine

Josh -> Melody: In Bruges

Melody -> Daniel: The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, it’s time to send you over there to tell us which serial killer you’d like to see more of (shout-out if you’ve already done that part!). Feel free to suggest future topics for main events or Top 3, lest we end up talking about our top 3 movies about loneliness. You laugh, but that’s totally on the list, and you can send your hate mail to Josh.

That’s right; the Screeners are actually doing an episode 51. We’re as surprised as you are; we were expecting the kind of twist where we never hear from them again. Oh well; there’s always episode 100 for that…

Anyway, in case you missed it, one of the Screeners quietly posted a link on the podcast's Facebook page a little while ago about a proposed new service called The Screening Room. The gist is that a subscriber would pay an initial fee for some equipment that would give them the privilege of watching new movies as they’re being released in theaters—at $50 a pop. Though it may bear an eerie similarity to the name of our beloved podcast, the service might not strike the right chord with all of its hosts. Let us guess: Chad loves this idea. Just loves it.

Next, in anticipation of the general tone of tonight’s main event, the Screeners pause for a rare moment to ask themselves what purpose film criticism itself serves and how we should react when people disagree with us. It’s a stirring call to tolerance and unity—or at least it could be if Josh weren’t such a misanthrope.

Tonight’s main event is...let’s say “divisive”. We don’t know how a comic book movie can be divisive, but everything else seems to be these days, so comic book movies might as well jump on the bandwagon. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice* has gotten terrible reviews that seem have been entirely ignored by the moviegoing public. It made Warner Brothers roughly $166 million in its opening weekend, and given the rancor it’s stirring, some more money will probably be rolling in, even if it’s just the stragglers seeing it out of spite only so they can argue with their friends. (Josh might’ve been in that last category if the others hadn’t made him see it for this episode.)

Since we’ve firmly established the value of anonymous talking heads publishing their opinions for the public to consume, let’s ask the big question:  Did the Screeners like it? Are they willing to hold the line against the “professional” critics, or will they give in to peer pressure and their ambitions of being the next big movie podcast? Their integrity hangs in the balance—can they avert disaster?

And when Justice League Part 1 comes out, tune in again: same bat time, same bat RSS feed!

* We'll only write out the full title once, and we’re mad about doing it even that time.

...or at least Chad does. The rest of the Screeners are holding out for the 20th anniversary of The Wedding Singer to let go of the innocence of youth. EIther way, we’ve made it to the big five-oh. Fifty episodes in just over 3 years is still a better production pace than most non-reality TV shows (read: shows that require creativity to produce), so maybe our mothers are right to be so proud of us.

How, then, should we celebrate? Let’s make a list! Everyone loves a good anniversary list. We’re afraid the Screeners may have missed the boat topic-wise, though. Instead of “Melody’s top 5 unnecessary apologies”, “Chris’s 3 favorite explosions that don’t involve helicopters”, or “The 10 foreign films Chad claims are amazing, but that no one will ever watch to validate his enthusiasm”, they went with “Top 5 movies we’ve reviewed on the podcast”. They’re sorry. They’ll do better for episode 100. If they live that long.

Now that we’ve rehashed all the other main events, it’s time to make a new one. 10 Cloverfield Lane is Dan Trachtenberg’s feature-length debut after years of suffering on The Totally Rad Show under the crushing weight of Chad, Chris, and Melody’s zealous fandom. Has he proven worthy of their endless devotion? Also, what’s this movie about, anyway? It has the word Cloverfield in it, and there was that alien movie awhile back—is this that? JJ Abrams is involved, so it has to be that, right? But the trailer...the trailer was, like, not that. We’re confused. You’re probably confused too, and we understand. Listen, and all will be revealed—unless, of course, you don’t want it to be, in which case you probably shouldn’t listen to the spoilers section.

Oh, and one more thing for the kiddos. Zootopia’s out too. Most of the Screeners with offspring (and one without) have seen it and have some feedback for Disney. Is it worth schlepping the kids to the theater? Does it live up to Disney movie standards? And just how much are we allowed to mock the DMV before something bad happens? The answers to all these questions and more, in a segment that’s totally not an afterthought to a review of a very different movie.

After you’ve seen 10 Cloverfield Lane, why not head over to Facebook and question Chris’s sanity, or maybe Josh’s solipsism? The rest of the Screeners don’t know how much longer they can keep it up without some help. It’s beginning to feel like a losing battle.

The day after the Oscars marks Josh’s favorite time of the Hollywood calendar; it marks the day furthest from the next time he’ll have to sit in front of a television watching famous people celebrate each other’s fame for over three hours. Sadly (for him), the rest of the Screeners feel at least a little differently about the whole ordeal. As creators of a podcast that purported to be about all media and slowly collapsed into the black hole of Hollywood, they feel duty-bound to discuss their reactions to the show, its host, and its big winners. Josh will live.

There are certain vital moments in all our lives, events that we come to recognize as turning points, decisions that shape our future. The Screeners experienced such a moment 6 months ago when they invited Daniel into the sacred circle of co-hosts. They did it because they knew he loved movies, but they could never have predicted just how many movies he would love.

You see, a scant 2 months before Daniel’s debut on the Screeners, a run-of-the-mill disaster movie debuted in theaters to...something less than you might call “critical acclaim”. The movie was, of course, San Andreas, and it immediately stole Daniel’s heart. He shrewdly hid this from the rest of the Screeners during the rigorous interview process, and it slid under the radar for awhile, but one day he could contain his enthusiasm no longer.

The hosts’ fate was sealed. Daniel was the only Screener who’d bothered to see San Andreas, and that included Chad, who’s been known to watch movies that aren’t even made in this country. At some point, the rest of them were going to have to sit through this thing just to teach Daniel a lesson (since masochism is the path to true enlightenment and all).

And what better time to engage in self-torture than the week after the Oscars? The sense of having squandered time that can never be reclaimed is familiar; despair for the world we’re leaving our children holds sway. So who cares that the movie’s 8 months old? Without further ado, we present to you our full review of San Andreas, starring Dwayne Johnson as a tall man with large muscles and Paul Giamatti as an actor who lost a bet and had to accept the next script that came his way no matter what it was.

With all of the intellectually draining parts of the episode behind them, the Screeners decide to round out the show by returning to Flickchart to work on their list of all-time favorites. As any longtime listener of the show knows, this is a hopeless Sisyphean task, yet they persist. Join them in their suffering.

OK, that’s enough torture for one day. Join the Screeners next time, when they’ll be watching 10 Cloverfield Lane, which at least Josh is destined to love. And, as always, feel free—encouraged, even—to add your two cents on Facebook. See you next time!