The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

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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Donald Sutherland passed away in June at the age of 88 after a long, unusual, and widely celebrated career. His performances range from M*A*S*H to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Don’t Look Now to JFK and, more recently, The Hunger Games. This is to say that he never let himself become limited to one type of character, film, or genre. And, while he could seemingly play any range of character, he always maintained that Sutherland charm. What is the secret of his charm? We asked Daryl Sparkes, Sonny Bunch, and Bobbie O’Steen.

Sparkes is a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland and he wrote “Hollywood Didn’t Know Exactly What to Do with Donald Sutherland – So They Did Everything with Him” for The Conversation. Bunch is a film critic at The Bulwark and writer of “RIP, Donald Sutherland.” O’Steen is a historian and author of books like Making the Cut at Pixar and The Invisible Cut. You can find a great interview she conducted with Don’t Look Now’s editor Graeme Clifford on the film’s Criterion release.

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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We’ve talked before on this show about the concept known as the paradox of choice—that having infinite choices across infinite streamers and live channels is less of a utopia of riches than an overwhelming landscape of indecision. What’s worth your time? How do you know? Well, that’s what critics try to help with. They watch a lot more than the average person and, in particular when it’s easier than ever for movies to slip through the cracks of various streamers and digital releases, we decided that today’s show could be a chance to hear from a trio of critics about not only what you should check out from 2024 but where you can find it. We’ll hear from Marya E. Gates, Ethan Warren, and KIOS’s own Joshua LaBure across the show. 

Marya E. Gates has written for Roger Ebert.com, The Criterion Collection, IndieWire, and many more. She also has a Substack called Cool People Have Feelings, Too. Ethan Warren is a critic, essayist, author of The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, and director of West of Her. He also has a new book coming out next year called When I Paint My Masterpiece: Bob Dylan on Film and edits the journal Broad Sound. Joshua LaBure hosts KIOS at the Movies and recently directed In a Good Way.

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In part four of our four part series on Elaine May, it’s finally time to talk about her final directorial effort and what has become a cultural punching bag as the worst film of all time: Ishtar. The 1987 release saw May returning to her screwball roots with, as so much of her work centers on, a dysfunctional partnership pushed to its extremes. Unlike the darkness of Mikey and Nicky, though, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty play lovable idiots, men who are so desperate to become the next Simon and Garfunkel that they never stop to notice that they can neither sing nor write music.

But quickly the discourse around the movie had little to do with anything other than the movie’s high price tag and long production schedule, so when the movie eventually came out, audiences and critics alike seemed to be rooting against it. As for the reasons why and how the worst movie of all time can undergo a critical re-evaluation decades later, we’ll hear from Richard Brody, Elizabeth Alsop, Carrie Courogen, Matt Singer, and Lindsay Zoladz.

Check out Richard Brody’s New Yorker article “Better Late Than Never” on Ishtar here; Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; Matt Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever; and Carrie Courogen is the author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which hit bookstores this week.

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. Thank you for listening.

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Mikey and Nicky is unmistakably an Elaine May film and yet it stands out compared to her other directorial efforts as far less comedic and far more openly tragic. If her comedies drew criticism for their brutality, here the brutality is the star alongside Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. It is a film about the difficult of letting go and, as often was the case with Elaine May’s productions, one she went to extreme lengths to hold onto. To make sense of Mikey and Nicky, a dark gangster drama, and its place in the Elaine May body of work, we’ll hear from Lindsay Zoladz, Elizabeth Alsop, and Carrie Courogen.

Check out Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; and Carrie Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th.

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. Tune in next week for our episode on Ishtar.

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If A New Leaf was a romantic comedy with a tinge of attempted murder that ultimately gave way to sweetness, The Heartbreak Kid is a murderless romantic comedy that is much more brutal. Directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon, The Heartbreak Kid tells the story of Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a newlywed who falls out of love with his wife Lila (Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon, only to become infatuated with the beautiful and unattainable Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). What ensues is maybe the earliest example of what today we might call cringe comedy. And, despite the film attaining a classic status, good luck finding it by traditional means.

Today’s show features insights from Elizabeth Purchell, Carrie Courogen, Ethan Warren, and Matt Singer about the film’s production history, bizarre distribution purgatory, and legacy. Purchell is currently working with theaters around the country to bring The Heartbreak Kid back to the big screen from a newly discovered print. Courogen is the author of the upcoming Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which will be available wherever you get books on June 4th. Warren wrote about The Heartbreak Kid in his Bright Wall/Dark Room essay “Still Heartbroken After All These Years.” And Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever.

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. Tune in next week for our episode on Mikey and Nicky.

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