sportsalcohol.com podcast

It's the end of the year, and you know what that means: music publications published their year-end coverage approximately one to three months ago. We here at SportsAlcohol.com do not have a list of our 200 Favorite Albums That Came Out Between January and Mid-October. For our best music of 2017 wrap-up, we decided instead to take a different tactic and take a roughly chronological trip through the various live shows we all attended, together and apart, throughout the year, and let the discussion spring from there. You'll find out who we went to see because we're afraid of death, whose live show exceeded their disappointing album(s), and which show got Rob feeling real emotional in a rough year.

We'll have a proper podcast about Star Wars: The Last Jedi soon enough, but in the meantime, here: we made you a mixtape.

Here are the instructions:

1. Figure out when you will be arriving at your theater of choice to see The Last Jedi. 2. Approximately 35 minutes before that time, hit "play" on the mp3 of our mixtape on your music-playing device of choice. 3. Get psyched.

There is also a trivia component:

The songs and samples on this mix (EXCEPT those that are from a Star Wars movie or constitute some kind of reference to Star Wars or a Star Wars cast members) have one thing in common. What is it?

Superhero movies are still dominating the blockbuster landscape these days, and plenty of your pals at SportsAlcohol.com see most or all of these things. So after a bunch of us saw Justice League, we sat down to talk about the state of DC-based cinema, plus where Thor: Ragnarok leaves us with the MCU, and how they both fit into the year of superhero cinema.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have collaborated on three movies, and this fall they're both back with their own solo movies: Gerwig's Lady Bird and Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse watched both movies (as well as plenty of past work from both filmmakers) and then got together to discuss how they function together, how they function apart, and what we think of their new projects.

Following a movie swap where Pretty Woman was exchanged for Starship Troopers, Ben and Jesse leap forward one year in time and make another business/sci-fi trade: The 1991 Danny DeVito dramedy Other People's Money swapped for the 1998 cult classic Dark City. We watched 'em both and then talked it out, touching upon Penelope Ann Miller, The Matrix, subverting expectations, and possible reasons that both of these movies flopped in their original releases.

Jesse had never seen Pretty Woman.

Ben had never seen Starship Troopers.

So they sat each other down and watched two beloved Films of the '90s, then had a little chat about it.

This is that little chat.

While what makes us laugh, cry, or scared can vary greatly, what we want out of a romantic comedy is often even more nebulous, especially as romantic comedies appear to be in something of a mainstream slump at the movies. In a state-of-the-genre conversation, Marisa, Nathaniel, Jesse, and two different Saras chat about what makes a romantic comedy, what our favorites are, and how they (maybe) work or (sometimes) don't. This is a must-listen for rom-com fans and also for people who want to find out which one of us holds a torch for the Hugh Jackman/Ashley Judd rom-com Someone Like You.

Summer may be winding down, but there are probably still some cool non-blockbuster movies you need to catch up with. For the third year in a row, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together to discuss over a dozen of the summer's most notable indie movie releases, which in 2017 includes The Big Sick, The Beguiled, Detroit, Ingrid Goes West, It Comes At Night, A Ghost Story, Atomic Blonde (it's an indie!), Columbus, and a whole lot more recommendations for your local arthouse -- or to keep you busy on Netflix all fall. Bonus recorded-outdoors ambiance abounds!

While the Steven Soderbergh oeuvre isn't universally beloved by The SportsAlcohol crew, it is well studied. We talk about his return to filmmaking in Logan Lucky as well as his whole career. If you're worried we only cover his films, don't worry: we talk more about K Street than anyone has since K Street aired. Other topics include:

• Legacies
• George Clooney (like, a lot about Clooney)
• Blonde women
• Movies that aren't as good as Do The Right Thing
  
• Why exactly one of us thinks the universally reviled Ocean's Twelve is the best one of the series
• non-actor actors
• professionalism
• contempt
• K Street
• The very nature of reality

As we did for 1994, 1995, and 1996, we look 20 years back at the top films of the summer of 1997. Things were much different 20 years ago and we tackle some of the bug changes including: 

Watching trailers without a broadband connection
Bookstores, existence of
Nicolas Cage was respected, dammit
John Travolta too, for that matter.
Girls wanted to hang out with us