The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

For decades now, outlets and scholars have been predicting who the next Spielberg might be, including names like J. J. Abrams or M. Night Shyamalan. But what does it mean to be the next Spielberg? To answer that, we'd have to know what it means to be Spielberg in general. So, to get to the bottom of this, Ian Nathan, author of Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work, chimes in. What accounts for the wild popularity of the filmmaker behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a career that spans many genres and decades? Why is it that his inward turn in 2022’s autobiographic The Fabelmans failed to resonate with audiences like his bigger works? We’re digging into it all, along with which Spielberg films may deserve a second look.

Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Today we’re looking at a movie that is about exploring more than just meaning in culture but meaning in general. What is meaning? How do we know? What do we believe and why? This may sound more like the territory of an art-house move or prestige drama, but perhaps surprisingly it’s the focus of the new horror film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods called Heretic, which is playing now in theaters. It follows a pair of Mormon missionaries who meet with a man claiming to be searching for information about their religion but seems to be up to something substantially more sinister. Further complicating matters, he’s played by Hugh Grant.

You might know Beck and Woods as the writers of A Quiet Place, which relied on its characters remaining as silent as possible to avoid the hyper-sensitive ears of a brutal alien race. Heretic, instead, is all about dialogue, a single location journey into the murky questions of faith, fear, and the meaning of life. How do you make a talky horror movie stay tense? How do you balance fears of the visceral with the existential? Can Hugh Grant’s charms be overridden by his possibly sinister intentions? How do perhaps unlikely influences, from M. Night Shyamalan to William F. Buckley, Jr. manifest on the screen? That’s the focus of today’s spoiler-free episode.

Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Often, when we look at our screens, we’re looking for distractions, But just as often, we want to be informed. This election weekend, maybe a frantic mixture of both. If we can be informed and be entertained? Even better. Almost all of our coverage on The Entertainment so far has been focused on narrative spaces, telling fictional stories or adapting reality into something broadly fictional. But, of course, much of what has been on screens since 1922’s Nanook of the North has existed in a hazy space known as the documentary. What is a documentary? It seems like a deceptively simple question until you start to unpack it. Is a documentary news? Should its standards be that of journalism? Of the essay? Of authenticity? How authentic can a documentary or, for that fact, the news ever really be?

These questions are, of course, evergreen while the key players change. Just this past month, Am I Racist?—directed by Justin Folk, and starring The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh—became the highest grossing documentary of the decade and had the highest opening weekend for a documentary in 20 years since Michael Moore’s unprecedented and unparalleled blockbuster documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Walsh is, of course, very far from Michael Moore’s politics, and yet may be a kind of successor of the Moore revolution in documentary filmmaking centered on a scrappy outsider trolling the establishment. I wondered: is this a political realignment of the popular documentary? Will there ever be another blockbuster documentary? To dive into these questions, I asked Joshua LaBure, critic, host of KIOS at the Movies, and documentarian himself, director of The Women Who Ran and The Instrument in Six Movements, among others, to come on the show and talk through the wild ride of the genre over the past several decades.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Last week, we started a two part series exploring the way horror films in 2024 seem to feature significant overlap, often manifesting through a woman losing control in a malicious world full of corrupt institutions and family structures imposing their will on her in uniquely horrific ways, from Immaculate to The First Omen to Longlegs, and more. The critic Vern calls this a strand of "post-Roe" horror. He means Roe v. Wade, but we saw another meaning in there in the fact that nearly every film exploring these ideas is doing so under the long shadow of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. The convergence of feminocentric body horror, folk horror, and Satan as a manifestation of the corrupt institutions preying on women, is, of course, nothing new in the genre. But our relationship with these ideas as viewers may be shifting in the Post-Roe world.

To get into all of this on today’s show, we have two guests, Faith Horror: Cinematic Visions of Satanism, Paganism, and Witchcraft author LMK Sheppard describing the trends from Rosemary, The Omen, and The Wicker Man leading up to today's shifts, and, later in the show, Film Streams programmer Taylor Eagan describes what she sees as a subgenre within both pre- and -post Roe horror that she calls "postpartum horror," as seen in recent films like Baby Ruby, Birth/Rebirth, and the upcoming Nightbitch.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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The 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby works as psychological thriller, satanic horror, and social satire all at once. Closely adapted from Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, Roman Polanski’s film tells the story of Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who becomes increasingly convinced that her aspiring actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has made a horrible deal with maybe the literal devil to advance his career in exchange for their unborn child. Its plot, its supernatural implications, and its imagery are all horrific enough, but what has been the subject of much of the enduring decades of discourse around Rosemary’s Baby is the horror that can be found simply in motherhood, in family you can’t trust, in a community that is lying to you, and in the institutions that will do nothing to protect you.

These ideas are, of course, all over the horror since Rosemary and in ways that are especially prevalent in the films 2024. It’s difficult to look at The First Omen, Apartment 7A, Immaculate, or even Longlegs without seeing the long shadow of Rosemary’s Baby, but also as manifestations of particularly palpable fears of a world where women’s bodily autonomy is under more governmental scrutiny following the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022. In Dobbs v. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court ended nearly 50 years of federally protected abortion rights in the United States, establishing what critic Vern calls the post-Roe world. 

He meant Roe v. Wade, but we saw another meaning in there, “Roe” being what Guy often calls Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. And we’re in a post-Rosemary world, too. One shaped, in some sense, by it. So, we’re going to do a two part series looking at the world Roe/Roe built and the way post-Roe horror might take us into the future. In this episode, we hear from Eleanor Johnson, professor at Columbia University, author of the forthcoming book Scream With Me on 1970s horror films, and writer of the Public Books article “Guy Horror: Rosemary’s Baby and Coercive Control.” Then, later in the show, Vern describes his conception of the trends in post-Roe horror, which he noticed in writing about the sometimes-bizarre overlaps between Immaculate and The First Omen.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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One of the most popular genres of the past several years, one you’ve probably seen on the screen, on the page, in music, and just by living through various stages of life is the bildungsroman or the coming of age story: the journey from youth into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood–the messy formation of identity and the conflict between an innocent conception of the world and the often ugly realities that wait around the corner. In her debut feature film Good One, writer/director India Donaldson taps into both this genre as well as a universal sensation that comes along with growing up: disappointment. Today's show is a conversation about the personal influences that led to Good One, the post-COVID landscape of independent film, and the reality that, when you shoot a movie on a low budget outside, it always rains. Check your local art-house to see if Good One is playing near you.

Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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For a lot of people over the past decade, the nonstop campaigning and chaos of our political system has instilled a kind of constant dread about the future, compounded by looming environmental disaster and geopolitically uncertainty. And sometimes it feels like all we can do is accept that the train is slowly crashing. But what if we could do something about it? In 2023, Kurt Andersen teamed up with Larry Doyle and Steven Soderbergh to create Command Z, a sci-fi comedy web series about a group of time-travelers from the ruined world of the future who are given the opportunity to send their minds back to 2023 to right the ship. Their perhaps impossible mission? Convince the movers and shakers currently ruining everything to become better people. The show features a cast of very funny people including Michael Cera, Roy Wood Jr, Chloe Radcliffe, JJ Maley, and Liev Schrieber and, beyond its humor, is full of insights about what exactly is going wrong with a society that seemingly can fix itself but first has to want to do so.

This conversation originally aired last year on Riverside Chats. We’ve repurposed it for today’s episode because all of the show’s anxieties are just as relevant today as they were a year ago. You can find all of Command Z’s episodes here. Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Over the past few months, we’ve done several episodes that return again and again to the word genius. What is a genius? Is it something objective we can all agree on? Is it a lofty way to say favorite? Is it a way of saying a person was a mess but they were talented? Moon Zappa has strong feelings about the concept as the daughter of a man who got a lot of leeway by being known as a genius. Frank Zappa became known for guitar solos, unconventional compositions that never quite fit into the genres of his time, and lyrics that range from poetic to profane to goofy. Blending rock, jazz, classical, and even avant-garde influences, it’s hard to classify him as anything other than himself. But who was the man behind the body of work?

In her new memoir, Earth to Moon, she tries to grapple with her father’s legacy as a countercultural icon of the music industry and also a complicated human being, trying to find an answer to the question of whether genius is worth its collateral damage. Along the way, she explains, she even found herself. On today’s episode, she tells her story—her way. You can buy her memoir wherever you get books.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Few people have made an impact on our screens as profound and lasting as Rod Serling, creator and host of The Twilight Zone, in which he and his team would interpret anxieties about human nature, nuclear war, the problems of power, and many more universal themes through genre exercises that exaggerate, allegorize, and depoliticized its subjects just enough to get by network censorship across the 1950s and 60s. And, since The Twilight Zone ended its original run in 1964, it has been rebooted in various forms: as an anthology film in 1983, a second TV series in 1985, a TV movie in 1994, another TV reboot in 2002, and finally a streaming series co-created by Jordan Peele in 2019. But none of these reimaginings caught on, perhaps for the simple reason that none of them had Rod Serling.

So who was Rod Serling? How did he accomplish what he did, what some have described as fundamentally changing the television landscape? And what should we make of a new short story from Serling’s archive that has plenty of horror but nothing supernatural? In today’s show, we hear an excerpt from a newly published story from Serling’s archive, “First Squad, First Platoon,” read by Matthias Jeske, followed by Nicholas Parisi, author of Rod Serling: His Life Work, and Imagination, and then Jodi Serling discusses her father’s legacy beyond The Twilight Zone.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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Whether you’re a fan of classic cinema or, say, just saw Barbie last year and wondered what that opening sequence was all about, you’re living in a world that is unmistakably in the shadow of Stanley Kubrick. You can’t help but recognize the Kubrick touch behind a Kubrick film, from their composition to their tone, to their sheer ambition. The number of monumental works he wrote, produced, and directed is nearly unparalleled, from early hits like Dr. Strangelove or 2001: A Space Odyssey to later titles shrouded in enduring mystery like The Shining or Eyes Wide Shut. Alongside his cinematic innovations and explorations, however, there existed (and exists) a growing mystique, an aura of mystery that pervades both his films and his persona. Kubrick is known not only for being a good director but for being a mystery that the films help viewers solve.

Today’s show seeks to identify where the man exists within the legends, as well as how much of the Kubrick mystique was a conscious construction of himself as a brand. You’ll hear from Filippo Ulivieri, author of the upcoming Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick Through Archival Research, as well as Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, whose latest book is Kubrick: An Odyssey.

Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.

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