sportsalcohol.com podcast: Recent Episodes
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The SportsAlcohol dot com conclave assembled to discuss the Oscars for the movie year of 2024: What we'd vote for, what we predict will win, and who we considered SNUBBED, in the big eight categories and beyond. Hear Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse talk about Conclave, Emilia Perez, A Complete Unknown, Anora, The Brutalist, and more!
In our annual virtual get-together, the heaviest moviegoers of SportsAlcohol.com's roster discussed the movies on our collective Top 15 list for 2024, including but not limited to: Filming about architecture! Horrible bodies! Frawd marriages! Expressions of horniness! And many more. It's a long one but a good one; the episode also includes our outlier picks that only one person apiece voted for!
Belatedly venturing into a new decade for our summer flashback series, the SportsAlcohol.com crew looks back at the top 10 highest-grossing movies released in the summer of 1984! Recorded way back in the vintage summer of 2024, lost to time, and then recovered just in time for the tail-end of the year, this episode goes deep on mid-80s blockbusters featuring gremlins, ghosts, sports, spaceships, cops, breakdancers, and nerds (of course, there are always nerds on SportsAlcohol.com podcasts). So grab your proton packs, hold off on your electric boogaloos, and get ready to remember the summer movies of 1984!
Ten years ago, we did our first 20-years-ago flashback podcast about summer movies. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of these 20th anniversaries, we decided to circle back to 1994 and talk about ten movies that were very much not the ten highest grossers of that summer, including nascent superheroes, mad bombers, beloved and obscure indies, and a couple of natural born killers. Join us for another and even more eclectic trip down memory lane!
It's that time of year again: Time for the good people of SportsAlcohol.com to jump in their exclusively movie-related time machines and travel back 20 years for a look at the summer movies that were on top of the box office in 2004. Tom Cruise breaks bad! Hugh Jackman breaks worse! Michael Moore breaks records! Fox Searchlight puts out not one but two generational indie movies with their own individual backlashes! And who cares about Shrek when a new Riddick adventure is in the offing? These are the cultural events that Nathaniel, Jeremy, Jesse, and Marisa will be covering in great detail for our annual summer nostalgiafest!
Some months ago, Nathaniel, Jesse, and Marisa got together to talk about the then-new movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Since then, everyone's lives got real busy and Jesse didn't carve out any time to edit it. But now that Godzilla and Kong have made their way to HBO Max and will presumably remain there in heavy rotation for months, we've decided to belatedly unleash our episode on what still remains one of the biggest movies of the year. As a special bonus, we have a segment featuring an eight-year-old talking about how much she loved the movie. So enjoy this long-delayed episode as you rewatch Godzilla x Kong on Max!
In a follow-up to our recent Oscar special, the SportsAlcohol.com continues their discussion of the 96th Academy Award nominations, covering categories outside the big eight, which means nerdy discussion of music, animation, international features, cinematography, editing, and more!
The 2023-24 Oscar season has finally heading for the end, and the SportsAlcohol.com team has assembled to talk about our PREFERENCES, our PREDICTIONS, and our most treasured SNUBS in the top eight major categories! Place your bets, protect your faves, and listen up as we get our last build-ups and teardowns in on the films of 2023!
We may be arriving a little late with our discussion of the 15 best movies of 2023, but we still beat the Oscars to air! In a long and enthusiastic discussion of our collective favorites, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com take turns waxing rhapsodic over an eclectic group of 2023 movies that we loved, including major auteurs, exciting debuts, special-effects blockbusters, and small-scale indies. It's one of our biggest episodes ever and full of great streaming suggestions!
After a three-year hiatus to get our heads right, the SportsAlcohol.com pop-music contingent is back to talk about new discoveries, legacy acts, favorite albums, and more as we go through 2023 in music, featuring Boygenius, Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, The National, Belle & Sebastian, and... Joe Jackson?! Join Rob, Sara, Marisa, Jesse, and Jeremy as we try to make sense of our fractured and internet-addled music landscape!
Leapin' lizards! Everyone knows Godzilla is the King of All Monsters, but what this episode pre-supposes is... maybe he's also the King of All Media? With a new Toho Godzilla film in theaters, an American Godzilla movie coming in a few months, a Godzilla-related TV series streaming on Apple, and the big guy fighting the Justice League in the pages of DC Comics, Godzilla fans are, as they say, eating. After seeing Godzilla Minus One twice each, Jesse and lifelong Godzilla fan/expert Nathaniel sat down to talk about the overall state of the monster.
Happy Labor day from your pals at SportsAlcohol.com! We got you a podcast episode! Earlier this summer, Ben convened a small panel of labor experts (by which we mean Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) to talk about the bumper crop of movies about companies making products. Air, Blackberry, Flamin' Hot, and Tetris all came out within months of each other -- what gives? In this episode, led by a bona fide MBA, we talk about each movie, which ones (if any) appealed to us and why, and the greater meaning of this trend. (We recorded this episode before The Beanie Bubble dropped but you know what? It's barely worth discussing anyway!) Please, spend your hard-earned Labor Day (or months after Labor Day) with us!
Our annual summer nostalgiafest and re-evaluation continues further into the 2000s, as Marisa, Jesse, Becca, Jeremy, and Ben go through the eye-popping 17-title list of movies that made over $100 million domestic back in the summer of 2003. Superheroes! Pirates! Car chases! Multiple cops on the edge! And... fish?! Take a stroll through the early-to-mid '00s with us and revisit the best and the dregs!
It's that time of year again, where the SportsAlcohol.com crew gets together and has a wide-ranging, semi-nostalgic, semi-modern discussion of the biggest summer movies of decades ago. This year, we're kicking off our pair of anniversary episodes with the 30-years-ago version, throwing it all the way back to the summer of 1993, where dinosaurs (of the special-effects variety) and dinosaurs (of the dad-movie variety) ruled the box office! Join Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Ben as we talk Ford, Stallone, Arnold, Goldblum, Dave, Hanks, Ryan, and Dennis (the Menace, that is).
With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny now in theaters and wrapping up Indy's story for good, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel decided to take a look at the whole Indiana Jones saga, starting with the new movie and working our way back through the other entries -- and some ancillary materials courtesy of Indy expert Nathaniel! Last Crusade is impugned and defended! Crystal Skull isn't hated! Temple of Doom is revered! Has the world gone topsy-turvy?! Listen and find out!
It's Oscar season! Well, for another few days, anyway! In the run-up to the 95th annual Academy Awards, honoring achievements in cinema for the film year 2022, our OSCAR EXPERTS (hint: actually just Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) gathered to talk about who WILL win, who SHOULD win, and, of course, the SNUBS! We're really just talking about our general thoughts on the silliness of the awards competition in eight major categories, plus some bonus rounds that go beyond. We've got Oscar fever and we invite you to catch it!
2022 is over, but have you caught up on all of the great movies it had to offer? Maybe not! Five SportsAlcohol.com regulars voted on their 20 collective favorites from 2022, and in this podcast we run through the upper reaches of the list to discuss what movies got to us last year, and why -- including both consensus favorites and outliers that only made one contributor's list! From Irish infighting to Spielbergian family dynamics to multiversal variants, there are streaming (and, in a few cases, still movie theater!) recommendations galore on this episode, from your pals Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse.
Taking a break from endless movie-watching, the good people at SportsAlcohol.com celebrate another overwhelming year of Peak TV with a Ben-led discussion of their favorite shows in various categories, including workplace, romance, sci-fi, animation, and more! If you're looking for an absolute slew of TV recommendations, and a handful of vicious takedowns, look no further!
Watch out for the cultural impact! Avatar: The Way of Water is finally in theaters -- in fact, it's topped the box office for seven weekends in a row, garnered a Best Picture nomination, and has made over $2 billion worldwide. In light of this stunning failure to attract any audiences or acclaim, your SportsAlcohol.com crew hopped in their submersible and did a deep dive on the films of James Cameron, in all their water-y, tech-y, earnest glory. The Avatars, the Terminators, the Aliens, the various boats and choppers... they're all here in this two-hour-plus extravaganza that is still shorter than the runtime of Avatar: The Way of Water. Jesse, Marisa, Jeremy, Nathaniel, and Jeff are your guides through the floating mountains of Pandora and beyond!
We got a little bit behind editing this one, we admit: Our annual round-up of a dozen-plus indie movies from the summer blockbuster season is dropping closer to the end of the year. But you know what? That works, because this marathon episode includes tons of recommendations that might get lost in the end-of-year awards-movie shuffle. Enjoy our enthusiasm over indie horror, indie whimsy, indie young-adults-figuring-stuff-out, and all the rest! Featuring Aubrey Plaza, Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Maika Monroe, Marcel the Shell, Jessie Buckley, and more!
You thought the summer movie season was over?! Well, it is for 2022, but for 1992 it's beginning again! Join Nathaniel, Ben, Marisa, Jesse, Becca, and Jeremy as we revisit the top ten biggest summer hits from 30 years ago, featuring movies from Tom Cruise, Steve Martin, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Geena Davis, and Batman!
It's that time again! Your pals at SportsAlcohol.com are back to comb through the biggest but not necessarily best movies of 20 summers ago. We've worked our way up to 2002, a real mixed bag featuring masterpieces and junk piles alike. Cruise, Sandler, Bourne, Stitch, Lillard, and some kind of Ya Ya Sisterhood... the gang's all here! Join Marisa, Ben, Jeremy, Becca, Nathaniel, and Jesse as we relive the highs and lows of Summer 2002!
All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up: Sam Raimi put out his first new movie in nine years this summer, returning to the world of Marvel superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. We thought it would be a good time to revisit all of his older films and, in the process, analyze just how much of his voice can be heard in the MCU machine. And though Jesse did not edit this episode in a timely manner, Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange 2 is now on Disney+, so you can do a full Sam Raimi marathon, from Evil Dead trilogy to the normal-movie trilogy to the Spider-Man trilogy and beyond, from the comfort of home! Join Nathaniel, Jeremy, Marisa, and Jesse as we discuss every single Sam Raimi feature film, including his latest. Who defends Oz the Great and Powerful? Who was not feeling Darkman? Who loves The Quick and the Dead more now than as a callow teenager? Now dig on this and find out!
Every year, the SportsAlcohol.com crew of loyal Saturday Night Live viewers checks in to discuss a recent episode of the show and the season as a whole. For Season 47, we chose a late-season episode with host and musical guest Lizzo to assess the swollen 24-person cast and other changes as the show nears its 50th birthday.
It's that time of year again, finally: the 94th Annual Academy Awards are here, and so are Marisa, Sara, Jesse, and Jeremy, to discuss their predictions and preferences in the top eight big categories. We make movies better.
Better late than never, and still earlier than the Oscars! The SportsAlcohol.com crew convenes to discuss our collective list of the 15 best movies of 2021, including streaming suggestions galore! How many musicals, superheroes, kaiju, cartoons, morose motorists, and Bronco Henries made the list? Listen and find out!
We here at SportsAlcohol dot com were pretty excited about the recent release of The Matrix Resurrections, the 18-years-later legacy sequel to the Wachowskis' Matrix trilogy, written and directed by Lana Wachowski sans her sister Lily. After watching the movie in IMAX theaters and/or HBO Max, Jesse, Marisa, Ben, Jeremy, and Nathaniel got together to talk about how the new movie fits in with the legendary original, the controversial trilogy, and the garden of delights that is the full Wachowski filmography. So we start with The Matrix and then get into our full collective ranking of the Wachowski movies. Join us, won't you, after all these years... to go back to where it all started. Back to The Matrix!
In an episode we feely admit we should have recorded years ago, the SportsAlcohol.com pals talk about the full filmography of Wes Anderson, starting with his new movie The French Dispatch (now available on streaming/rental/disc/etc.!) and then working our way through a full ranking of his ten features films so far! Who put Life Aquatic much higher than anyone else? Who likes the stop-motion animation less than the others? What is our collective favorite? Listen and find out!
Our double-feature summer flashback continues with another thirty-years-ago sorta-nostalgia fest, as a whopping seven SportsAlcohol regulars get together and talk about a dozen-plus movies from the bygone days of summer 1991. The gang's all here: Michael J. Fox, Kevin Costner, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Leslie Nielsen, Ice Cube, and more! So think back to the days of Robin Hood trading cards and listen to us chat about 1991 summer movies!
Once again, the longest-running and most popular SportsAlcohol.com episode format returns to look at the biggest summer movies of 20 years ago. What the hell was going on in 2001? Sequels, dinosaurs, Diesels, and ogres, among others! Join Marisa, Jesse, Ben, Nathaniel, and Jeremy as we talk about the nine highest-grossing movies of that summer, because most of us refused to watch Dr. Dolittle 2. But we also include another half-dozen non-blockbusters that we genuinely love! It's another nostalgic yet skeptical trip down memory lane to summers past!
As a corollary to our recent discussion about BLACK WIDOW and CRUELLA, we went off on a little bonus tangent about box office reporting, streaming numbers, the ongoing release-plan evolution, and a bunch of stuff about modern entertainment journalism!
Disney put out two big-budget, franchise-driven, backstory-heavy summer movies starring two popular, multi-Oscar-nominated superstar actresses, so we decided to pair a discussion of Scarlett Johansson in BLACK WIDOW with a discussion of Emma Stone in CRUELLA and see what happened! We talk Marvel, Disney, villains, origin stories, directors in the franchise machine, star power and... SNL sketches?!
Ben and Jesse resume their podcast-within-the-podcast miniseries where each selects a movie and they watch them both together and talk about it. This time, we've set aside our usual business and sci-fi in favor of two movies about rock and roll, sort of: Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl and Walter Hill's Streets of Fire.
Is that show still on?!?!? YEP, IT IS, and some more members of the SportsAlcohol.com editorial orbit still keep up with Saturday Night Live on a weekly basis. So as part of our annual drop-in progress report, we checked in with the show between episodes 19 and 20 of its 46th season, reviewing the Keegan-Michael Key-hosted episode and looking back to other ups and downs of Season 46, ahead of the season finale airing on Saturday!
After a long, long, long awards season, the Oscars are finally almost over. But before we can all move on with our lives, the SportsAlcohol.com awards pundits are here to talk about, well, actually mostly which performances and movies in the big eight categories that we think should win, along with some predictions and, more often, complaints about movies that were unfairly overlooked. Do we all hope Carey and Chadwick win the big prizes? Are we united in favor of Mank? Who the hell still wants Aaron Sorkin to win one? Listen and find out!
To mark the momentous occasion of Godzilla fighting King Kong again, we convened another SportsAlcohol.com roundtable, featuring a lifelong fan of Godzilla and Kong and multiple viewings of the new movie, to talk about this latest installment in the Warner Bros. MonsterVerse.
Well, it's finally and improbably here: the four-hour Zack Snyder-approved version of his superhero opus JUSTICE LEAGUE has hit HBO Max, so Rob, Ben, Jesse, and Marisa watched all four hours and tried to process our experience with this rambling, shapeless, weirdly impressive superhero epic. We talk about everything from Jack Kirby and Joss Whedon to toxic workplaces and Watchmen. And at two hours, it's much less time-consuming than the movie itself!
Uncertain over how the rest of the year would go, we made a podcast episode in August of 2020 about the best movies of the year. But hey, it turned out there were plenty more great movies to come! So here's our supplementary podcast covering our collective favorites (and oddball outliers) from the rest of 2020, including talk about Nomadland, Soul, Tenet, Sound of Metal, and more!
Silence of the Lambs turned 30 on Valentine's Day this year, so a bunch of us decided to celebrate by watching this romantic movie (distanced, of course), plus various other Hannibal and/or Jonathan Demme movies, and then got together (distanced, of course) to talk about them. It's a pivotal movie for both Demme's career as a director and Hannibal Lecter's career as a major villain. Something something eat some fava beans and listen!
It was a weird year for everything, including music. But that didn't stop the SportsAlcohol.com crew from getting together (virtually) to discuss some of the artists and albums we listened to a lot this year, including Phoebe Bridgers, Waxahatchee, HAIM, Fiona Apple, and Run the Jewels -- plus thoughts on Taylor Swift, a bunch of random reissues, how our listening habits changed, and more!
Continuing our look back at the career of David Fincher in the shadow of his new movie MANK, this episode includes deep-dive explorations of FIGHT CLUB, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, PANIC ROOM, THE GAME, and more!
The recent movie Mank marks David Fincher's 10th movie as director -- or 11th, if you count the big-budget sequel that started his career and that he's since disowned. We figured his new movie, something of an outlier in his career, would be a good time to look back on his all of his features so far, in another two-part episode. In part 1, we take a look at Mank, plus other outliers like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Alien 3; and his triptych of serial killer films: Seven, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Our career-long deep dive into Martin Scorsese's storied career continues with conversations about the genre ones (Shutter Island; Cape Fear), the Leo ones (The Departed; Wolf of Wall Street; Gangs of New York; The Aviator); the religious ones (Silence; Kundun; Last Temptation of Christ); and more!
Over a year in the making, the SportsAlcohol.com crew finally dedicates a full episode to the films of Martin Scorsese... make that TWO whole episodes! In part one of our comprehensive career retrospective, we discuss the recent anniversaries of Goodfellas and Casino, then go from there to tackle The Irishman, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and Bringing Out the Dead.
The biggest superhero movie of the year hit HBO Max (and... movie theaters?!) on Christmas, and took the internet's biggest complainers by storm! But the nerds at SportsAlcohol.com have some bones to pick with the bone-picking, and also their own fresh and wonderful thoughts on this ambitious mixed bag of a sequel. Listen up as Rob, Jon, Jesse, and Marisa talk everything WW84!
Robert Zemeckis put out one of the more disappointing sorta-big movies of 2020 with The Witches, so we convened a special career-spanning episode of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast to talk about his career in greater depth--both how the new movie falls short, and why we had high expectations for it to begin with. Join Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Jeremy as we talk about EVERY Zemeckis movie so far!
With the recent release of Sofia Coppola's latest movie On the Rocks, the SportsAlcohol.com crew decided it was time for a comprehensive career review, discussing all seven of her films (including her new one), plus various ephemera. Bill Murray! Kirsten Dunst! ScarJo! Andy Garcia?! They're all here for this lively discussion and appreciation.
Look, it's been a long sort-of quarantine for everyone, including your friends at SportsAlcohol.com, and we haven't all completed the projects we thought would be our silver linings for this extended period of inactivity. For example: Thinking we could all use some laughs during a pretty dark time, a bunch of us recorded a comedy-centric podcast about what makes us laugh, back in the spring, when it seemed like maybe we'd be dealing with a pandemic through the summer. Jesse's neglect in editing this long but fun-filled episode turned out to be prescient, as it's now almost six months later, and here we still are, dealing with the pandemic, and maybe still in need of laughs? So here's Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sara, Jeremy, and Jon talking about, and analyzing, the kind of comedy (well, mostly comedy) that makes us laugh now, has made us laugh in the past, and we hope will make us laugh again in the future.
In the long-awaited, long-delayed conclusion of our 1999 Albums saga, Marisa, Jesse, and Magnetic Fields expert Ben take a look at the band's most acclaimed and best-known work. But is it actually their best album? Ben's complex answer may surprise you!
To celebrate the recent release of long-awaited trilogy-creator Bill & Ted Face the Music, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com got together to talk about the new Bill & Ted movie, discuss our wide range of opinions of how well it works, and then have a broader discussion about the state and mechanics of movie trilogies these days.
Well, after two and a half years of blown release dates and rumored (but not actual) reshoots, the final installment in the original X-Men movie series is here, as THE NEW MUTANTS debuts in movie theaters mid-pandemic. Four core members of the SportsAlcohol.com crew saw the movie--safely and not in traditional public screenings!--and decided to send off this series by doing what we always do: talking extensively about the X-Men.
One of our most popular recurring episodes is our annual trip back 20 years to discuss the high-grossing summer movies of yore, so we figured: why not try 30 years? In an effort to fill out our coverage of every summer of the '90s, we've done just that: a deep dive into the highest-grossing movies of Summer 1990. Swayze & Demi! Mel & Goldie! Warren & Madonna! And some non-high-grossing favorites to boot! It's an epic of nostalgia and confusion!
Usually, we do a seasonal episode about the various indie movies of the summer, and then an episode in January about the best movies of the preceding year. But honestly, who the hell knows what the rest of 2020 has in store for us? So this year we've decided to call the year over, and just talk about some of the best movies of 2020 at the end of the summer. Would TENET have made our informal list? Who knows?! But we talk about plenty of other good movies that you can watch at home without getting a coronavirus!
In one of our popular recurring episodes, the SportsAlcohol.com gang gets together for a selected journey through the Billboard Hot 100 Songs of twenty years ago -- that's right, it's Billboard 2000! Which atrocious pop-country songs make the list? Where in the evolution of Destiny's Child and Britney Spears do these charts find them? Who has TWO of the top three songs of the year?!? Listen in to your favorite ex-DJs and find out!
Our podcast doesn't often review single movies but sometimes something comes along and we just feel compelled to talk about it in full. We were so moved recently when Desperados, a movie starring SNL player Nasim Pedrad, appeared on Netflix seemingly without warning. So in this episode, Jesse talks to culture writer LaToya Ferguson about Desperados from a place of serious Nasim Pedrad and SNL fandom!
Yes, it's that time of the year again: The SportsAlcohol.com gang is back together to reminisce about the summer movies of 20 years ago. There may not be a summer movie season to speak of in 2020, but in 2000 business was a-booming with gladiators, mutants, car thieves, dinosaurs, and impossible missions! Take a detailed yet fast-paced trip down memory lane with us, replete with bizarre personal anecdotes!
The SportsAlcohol.com gang returns for the second half of our recommendation bonanza, focusing on titles available on Disney Plus, Hulu, and Apple Plus. Stay home, watch TV!
Several SportsAlcohol.com friends & fam are regular reviewers of the NBC late-night comedy-variety series Saturday Night Live, and we make it our business to check in with the show every season to see how it's progressing. This season was a particularly strange one, as the show switched to non-live, socially-distanced compilation specials for its final three episodes of an abbreviated 18-episode run. Nathaniel, Michael, Marisa, and Jesse got together (virtually) to talk about how these episodes switch up the SNL dynamic, and other highs and lows of Season 45.
Well, it's been a few months and many of us are still at home in some manner of quarantine, which means we're all looking for shows and movies to stream. In this multi-part special, a SportsAlcohol.com all-star crew goes around and recommends a whole bunch of #content for you to enjoy while stuck at home. This installment covers primarily Netflix and Amazon Prime offerings. Part 2 is coming soon!
Following an A.V. Club Q&A about favorite-ever mixtapes, the SportsAlcohol.com mixtape braintrust got together to reminisce about our mixtape past: tips, tricks, mishaps, and more from a different era of music consumption. So root around your closet, fish out your favorite, and listen along!
Our belated 20th-anniversary tour of notable 1999 records marches on as Rob, Jesse, and Sara discuss Sleater-Kinney's change-of-pace record The Hot Rock, in the context of the band's career and their 2019 change-of-pace record The Center Won't Hold! What does it mean for Sleater-Kinney to change pace, turn down the guitars, or possibly sell out? LISTEN IN AND FIND OUT!
Our 20th anniversary series on the albums of 1999 continues well past the 20-year date with our 21st-birthday-and-change celebration of Keep It Like a Secret by Built to Spill. Are BTS (no, the other BTS) hippies? Hobos? A jam band? We get into these questions and more on our latest bite-sized indie rock episode!
On the heels of our Best Movies of 2019 podcast, the SportsAlcohol.com movie crew stuck around for a quick, loose discussion of this year's Academy Award nominations: who we were happy to see, who was SNUBBED, and who might emerge victorious on Oscar night.
2019 may be well and over, but your pals at SportsAlcohol.com aren't quite done talking about the best movies of the year. To tie in with our collective list of our 20 favorites, Marisa, Nathaniel, Jesse, Sara, and Jeremy got together for a lengthy but snappy conversation about why we chose the movies we chose (and where we disagree with our own list!).
Star Wars is over, again, and also not over at all. But the most recent trilogy has indeed ended with Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. After taking in the movie somewhere between one and three times, your SportsAlcohol.com rebel alliance got together to talk about Rise of Skywalker, as well as the recently concluded first season of The Mandalorian. How did J.J. Abrams do in finishing off the trilogy he started, and the nine-film series he certainly didn't start? How much do we love Babu Frik? And how can we avoid comparing this new movie to The Last Jedi? The answers to these questions and more await you!
Something a little different from the SportsAlcohol.com crew: a combination get-psyched mixtape (preferably to be listened to on your way to see STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER this weekend or beyond) and trivia game (guess the uniting factor behind all of the non-Star Wars songs and samples!). See SportsAlcohol.com for more info!
From the SportsAlcohol.com mixtape archives: Here's a mix made back in 2015, when Star Wars: The Force Awakens was coming out.
For a special holiday episode (and a rare new-release movie review!), Jesse is joined by podcast expert and horror fan Becca, to talk about all three versions of BLACK CHRISTMAS: The 1974 original, the 2006 remake, and the new 2019 version in theaters now!
Continuing our ongoing 20th-anniversary celebration of assorted albums from the year 1999, we GET INTO IT about one of Beck's less universally beloved records, the party bomb Midnite Vultures. Who thinks it's Beck's best album? Who vehemently disagrees? And how do we define "serious"? Mix bizness with Rob, Jesse, Marisa, Ben, and Derrick to find out!
Our play-through of 20-year-old albums continues with a double feature, as Marisa, Jesse, Rob, and Randy talk about The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds Five and Utopia Parkway by Fountains of Wayne, two stylistically disparate records that nonetheless come from a similarly nerdy, suburban place.
Continuing our look back at some of the most interesting and beloved albums of 20 years ago, Rob, Sara, and Jesse talk about Fiona Apple's second album, commonly referred to as When the Pawn. How does it hold up two decades later? Was Fiona ahead of her time? Is this world bullshit? LISTEN AND DISCOVER!
As 2019 winds down, SportsAlcohol.com is looking back... to 1999 again! In a series of shorter, sweeter mini-episodes, we're dedicating individual discussions to some major albums from 1999 that mean a lot to us, then and/or now. First up is Emergency & I, the classic third record by the Dismemberment Plan. How did we love this album then and how do we love it now? Listen and learn, indie rock nerds!
While SportsAlcohol.com loves to look back at pop culture from 20 years ago, we also try to pay attention to what is happening RIGHT NOW--especially in the world of independent cinema. Each summer for the past bunch of summers, we've capped the season with a look back at a bunch of cinematic indies, good and bad. For the 2019 edition, we cover over a dozen titles, providing an excellent guide for what to catch up with on streaming or VOD or DVD or whatever this fall!
It's that time of year again, when the SportsAlcohol.com crew takes a look at where they were and what they (and the rest of America) were watching 20 years ago, examining a list of the highest-grossing box office attractions of summer 1999. Will Smith! Julia Roberts! Brendan Fraser! Jar Jar Binks! An apple pie! Pepe the Prawn?! All of your favorite 1999 stars are well-represented as Rob, Jesse, Nathaniel, Marisa, and Sabrina get deep into nostalgia mode.
In the second part of our epic exploration of Quentin Tarantino's nine-or-ten-film career, we talk about all of his previous films, from Reservoir Dogs to The Hateful Eight to however many Kill Bills you count as one movie, and everything else in between, exploring connections between them, and to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
With Quentin Tarantino's new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood debuting to big business and an avalanche of thinkpieces, the core of SportsAlcohol.com's film team thought it would be a good time to take a look at the fullness of Tarantino's career so far, in a Grindhouse-like double feature. In the first episode, we talk about the new movie, and get into the ending right away, so the spoiler-averse should hold off! What did Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel and Jesse think about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? LISTEN UP, because they all have a bunch of opinions about QT's latest.
The X-Men movies are over (sorta), long live the X-Men movies (sorta)! With the release (and flop!) of DARK PHOENIX, the process of X-tricating the long-running X-Men movie series from Fox and integrating them into the MCU has presumably, to some degree, begun. But before they're gone and rebooted, we got some X-perts together to talk about DARK PHOENIX, and the X-Men movie series in general, and its ups and downs over the past 20 (!) years.
We've done plenty of MCU-centric podcasts over the years, but we really brought out the big guns for the Phase 3 finale, as Marisa, Nathaniel, Jesse, and Ben discuss AVENGERS: ENDGAME, as well as INFINITY WAR, as well as our collective ranked list of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films so far. Who loves AGE OF ULTRON way more than INFINITY WAR? Who thinks the rest of us underrate Thanos as a villain? Who hate the soul stone the most? Who has great ideas for what the MCU should do next? (Answer to that last one: ALL OF US.)
Every year, the Saturday Night Live fans and loyalists at SportsAlcohol.com do a check-in on one of the only shows we all watch regularly, and assess on the show has been performing lately. This year, we timed our check-in to coincide with the return of former cast member Adam Sandler, hosting for his first time, 24 years after his unceremonious firing. We talk about what we thought of the Sandman, plus how SNL Season 44 is going as a whole. They're all gonna laugh at you!!!!!
If there's one thing the editorial core of SportsAlcohol.com knows, it's not so much sports, or alcohol, but popular culture of the late 1990s. In what has now become an annual tradition, Rob, Jesse, and Marisa scour the Billboard Hot 100 for all of 1999 and discuss certain key selections (not specified ahead of time, but chosen on the fly by Marisa). Travel back to '99 with us and decide if you like girls who wear Abercrombie and Fitch!
In a sequel of sorts to our all-Soderbergh episode from 2017, and also our sportsiest episode ever by far, Rob, Ben, Marisa, and Jesse all discuss the new Steven Soderbergh film High Flying Bird, now streaming on Netflix! It's a brisk assessment of Soderbergh, labor relations, sports, Moneyball, iPhone cameras, and more!
As Oscar season heads into its final weeks, why not take a break from litigating the Academy's dumb choices and spend some time listening to Nathaniel, Sara, Marisa, and Jesse talk about their favorites of the year? We've got Best Picture nominees, we've got stuff no one else ranked this guy, and we've got outliers! This engaging discussion of the best movies of 2018 has got. it. all.
The seventh (!) Spider-Man movie of the past 20 years came out last month with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. To celebrate this occasion, the SportsAlcohol.com skeleton crew, including Spider-Man expert Rob, got together and did an impromptu group ranking of all Spider-Man and Spider-Man-adjacent movies, talking about each and every one! Maguire! Dunst! Franco! Garfield! Stone! Holland! Captain America! Doughy Peter Parker! Spider-Ham! We talk about 'em all on our brisk countdown! Some of our rankings may surprise and infuriate you!
The new movie Second Act starring Jennifer Lopez is opening on December 21st! Jesse and Ben caught an early screening and discussed how it works as a non-rom-com, a zany business movie, and a Jennifer Lopez star vehicle. It's the latest in our mini-series where Ben talks about business movies.
WARNING: There are SPOILERS for the movie Second Act around the halfway mark of this episode.
Jesse and Nathaniel, the only two people you know who think Rocky V is better than Rocky IV, got together to discuss how the newest Rocky-ish movie, Creed II, stacks up against the original, as well as other Rocky sequels. Controversial takes abound! (See above RE: Rocky V.)
In addition to our group discussion of our site's Best Songs of the 2000s, Rob, Jesse, and Marisa sat down so we could talk about Rob's particularly arduous list-making process, and address some more quirks of our group list. A must for all of you fastidious music nerds out there!
After pulling together 20-plus ballots from various writers and music fans to form our definitive list of the BEST SONGS OF THE 2000s, the SportsAlcohol.com podcast crew convened a small panel of those writers to talk about the list: what we thought of the final product, the songs we love and the songs we hate, as well as how we constructed our individual ballots. Join us for a sometimes-contentious, always entertaining look back at a decade of disparate pop music!
With the release of the second Fantastic Beasts film, The Crimes of Grindelwald, now upon us, Marisa, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together to assess the state of the Wizarding World: Where this new series still holds promise, how it falls short, and what the hell is up with Eddie Redmayne. Accio takes!
For the fourth year in a row, SportsAlcohol.com's movie crew of Jesse, Marisa, Sara, and Nathaniel got together for a long talk about the many indie movies that came out in May, June, July, and August of 2018. We hit over a dozen major titles, from Hereditary to Eighth Grade to BlackKklansman to Skate Kitchen to Sorry to Bother You to First Reformed and on and on and on! Get your rental suggestions for fall with this wide-ranging discussion!
One undisputed bright spot of this year's crop of summer movies was Mission: Impossible -- Fallout, the sixth (!) movie in the deathless Mission: Impossible franchise. After Nathaniel, Jesse, Marisa, and Jon all caught up with the latest mission, and watched/rewatched previous entries in the series, we all sat down to talk about Fallout, and how the series got where it is today. Come for the Fallout discussion, stay for the geeking out over MI 1 through 5, and stay even longer to hear what we think should go down in the inevitable MI7!
It's that time of year again. In our longest running recurring episode, the SportsAlcohol.com crew takes a look back at the top-grossing movies of summer 1998, and recall what we thought then, what we think now, and where the hell we were in our lives when we first saw the American remake of Godzilla. Among others. Join Marisa, Rob, Nathaniel, Jesse, and Sabrina for a ruefully nostalgic and nostalgically rueful look back at blockbusters from 20 years ago.
Incredibles 2 is Pixar's 20th feature film, so this felt like a good point to talk about not just one of the most-anticipated sequels of the year but also all of the Pixar movies that preceded it. A supersized panel including Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Ben, Jon, and Sara talk through our personal highlights and lowlights from the Pixar canon, including our reactions to Brad Bird's latest!
The Soderbergh-free but all-star Ocean's 8 is currently heisting away plenty of money at the box-office, so Sara, Marisa, and Jesse got together to talk about the movie, how it measures up to the previous Ocean's films, and how it fits into the film careers of the many actresses involved: Sandra Bullock! Anne Hathaway! Cate Blanchett! Sarah Paulson! And more!
The founders of SportsAlcohol.com have stuck with Riverdale through an overlong rollercoaster of a second season and we have THOUGHTS about it: about the Black Hood, about the mafia's foothold in Riverdale, about just how stupid Archie is supposed to be, about the darkness inside Betty, about Veronica's real age, and about Jughead's mysterious double. We discuss all that and more in this full-season examination of why the hell we are still watching Riverdale!
In the second part of our comprehensive discussion of Steven Spielberg's career, we talk about Spielberg movies we recently saw for the first time, picks for overrated and underrated Spielberg projects, and make some varying cases for the Indiana Jones sequels.
Whether you're a fan of Steven Spielberg or not, his work looms large and moonlike over the cinematic landscape. On the occasion of his new movie Ready Player One (his fourth in the span of 2.5 years!), we got together to talk about both his newest foray into the world of sci-fi and his career as a whole. This wide-ranging discussion has been split into two episodes; this one, the first, covers Ready Player One as well as some of his trademarks as a filmmaker.
In conjunction with the release of the new They Might Be Giants album I Like Fun and our list of the best They Might Be Giants songs of all time, TMBG superfans Jesse and Marisa were joined by fellow TMBG superfans Alan Scherstuhl and Karen Han for an in-depth discussion of this cultishly beloved indie rock band. We talk about how we got into the band, how the new record stacks up, and our listmaking methodology, among many other TMBG-centric topics. A must for any and all equally obsessive TMBG fans!
With Phantom Thread performing surprisingly well in the recent Oscar nominations, we figured it was about time to go back and talk about the full eight-film oeuvre of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. PTA fans Marisa, Sara, Jesse, Jon, and Nathaniel discuss every phase of his career, our personal favorites, and what he might do next.
We don't have any inside dope on who's gonna win the Oscars this year, but that hasn't stopped Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sara, and Jon from chatting about who might win in the big six categories, plus, of course, our personal favorites. Who's delighted by Denzel's surprise nomination? Who's rooting for Willem Dafoe? Who's surprised to love Meryl Streep's obligatory nom? Who loves Lady Bird? (Well, to that last one: All of us.) Listen and then somehow win your Oscar pool!
In the third of our business/sci-fi double feature series, Ben and Jesse are joined by Nathaniel for a post-viewing discussion of 1987's The Secret of My Success, a business movie suggested by Ben (which Jesse and Nathaniel had not seen) and Mars Attacks!, a sci-fi movie suggested by Jesse and beloved by Nathaniel (and which Ben had not seen). Both movies feature Michael J. Fox, at opposite ends of his big-screen career. Join us as we hash out whether we were foolish to have missed these Fox movies for so long!
A lot of the editorial core at SportsAlcohol.com watches Saturday Night Live every week, so we like to periodically sit down and check in to see how the season is progressing. This year's edition covers our favorite new cast members (what's up Heidi Gardner!), how the show's political humor is working (watch out, Alec Baldwin!), and our favorite weird sketches that nobody (sometimes including other members of our panel) seemed to like.
It was a good year for movies (FOR MOVIES) that gave us a lot to talk about, so this super-sized episode gets right into the SportsAlcohol.com list of the 20 best movies of 2017, as voted by our quartet of film enthusiasts. We talk about what made the list and didn't, what we all loved and what made us disagree, with discussions of Three Billboards, Dunkirk, The Florida Project, The Shape of Water, Star Wars, Blade Runner, and many more!
Following on the heels of our episodes about The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and our December mixtape for The Last Jedi, a few SportsAlcohol.com mainstays got together over the holidays to talk about Rian Johnson's newest entry in the Star Wars saga. This is definitely a fan conversation intended for people who have seen the movie; spoilers and nerdiness abound. What did we love? What gave us pause? How were the porgs? And what does any of this have to do with Watto?
There was a hell of a lot of TV in 2017, but your SportsAlcohol.com pals managed to narrow it down to a 12-series list for your enjoyment. That list is detailed on the site, but we also recorded a podcast where Nathaniel, Marisa, Jesse, and Sara discussed all twelve shows -- plus others that didn't make the list! Curious what we thought about recent episodes of Riverdale or what we loved/hated about the second season of Master of None or who loved Twin Peaks the most? LISTEN IN!
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:
- Figure out when you will be arriving at your theater of choice to see The Last Jedi.
- Approximately 35 minutes before that time, hit "play" on the mp3 of our mixtape on your music-playing device of choice.
- 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
The last Spider-Man movie, Amazing Spider-Man 2, was the subject of SportsAlcohol.com's very first podcast. Over three years later, we're back with an ever-more-slightly-better-produced episode about the third cinematic reboot of Marvel's flagship character this century. Topics covered:
Betty Brant
Dennis Miller
Women named Marisa
How bad we are at podcasts
Also, as mentioned in the podcast, check out Rob's take on Betty Brant
SPOILER WARNING: This podcast assumes you've seen every movie every made with Spider-Man
Earlier this year, a meme was going around Twitter, Facebook, and presumably other soc-meds, too: People were listing their favorite movies for every year that they had been alive. This struck the SportsAlcohol.com core cinema team as a fun exercise, so Marisa, Nathaniel, Sara, and Jesse each produced one such list, sent it to each other, and discussed the results. Which years wound up with universal consensus? Which years were wildly divergent? Which directors turned up again and again and again? Who actually chose Titanic? Listen in and find out!
Having faithfully chatted about Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad, we were pretty excited to gab about Wonder Woman, a DC Comics movie that people actually like! Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse all saw Wonder Woman and then talked about it for an hour: how it's similar to other comics movies and what makes it different; the starmaking performance of Gal Gadot (and how to pronounce her name); what it means to see a female superhero kicking ass on the big screen; and more!
With the release of Ridley Scott's second Alien prequel, first Prometheus sequel, and third Alien movie overall, Alien: Covenant, we got together for a chat about all things Alien. Marisa, Nathaniel, Jesse, Sara, and Jon talk about: Evil aliens, evil nonevil robots, badass humans, franchise auteurism, Ridley Scott psychology, and yes, the times when the Aliens fought Predators. It's all here and ready to burst through your chest in spectacularly upsetting fashion.
If you're anything like us, everyone you know watches Riverdale for some reason. Following the first season finale of this teen soap du jour, based on the Archie Comics characters, Marisa, fellow redheaded dude Nathaniel, Jesse, and special guest Maggie got together to discuss the show: as a teen soap, as an Archie adaptation, and as a thing we watched for thirteen weeks this spring. We also talk a little about the 2001 feature film Josie and the Pussycats.
With The Fate of the Furious roaring through movie theaters and stars Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson roaring through the gossip pages, we decided to consider whether reports of the death of movie stars (in favor of special effects, superheroes, or other brand names) has been exaggerated. Listen in as Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel discuss the new Fast & Furious sequel, its stars, along with other big names like Anne Hathaway, Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, Nicole Kidman, Will Ferrell, and, of course, Jai Courtney.
Lena Dunham's divisive thinkpiece magnet Girls ended its six-season HBO run this week, and four of SportsAlcohol.com's regular podcasters are dedicated fans. So Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together to discuss the show: the finale, the season that led up to it, the series as a whole, and rejecting the conceit of who on the show is the worst. This conversation is a must for any Girls fans still mourning the loss of their favorite show -- or hatewatchers wondering what the fuss was about.
At the end of our recent podcast about Trainspotting 2, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse each took the opportunity to make some pitches for years-later sequels we'd like to see. What '90s and '00s favorites would we like to see revived? This minipodcast bonus track answers that question. Nathaniel guessed what Jesse's would be about 30 seconds after he thought it up.
Over 20 years after the release of the seminal British junkie dramedy Trainspotting, Danny Boyle and his crew of aggrieved Scottish addicts are back with T2: Trainspotting. Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Sara went and saw Trainspotting 2 and then talked about the movie and how it fits into the larger Danny Boyle filmography, and how it functions as a 20-years-later sequel.
- The first three weekends of March 2017 saw the release of three successive movies that are all, in some ways or another, franchise films about beastly men or manly beasts: Logan, about everyone's favorite member of the X-Men; Kong: Skull Island, a new take on the giant ape; and Beauty and the Beast, a sorta-live-action remake of the 1991 animated classic. X-Men/Kong/animation enthusiasts Nathaniel, Jesse, Marisa, and Rob got together to talk about all three movies and the beasts contained therein.
Sometimes you just record a podcast episode out of pure indie-rock geekery. Founding editors Rob, Marisa, and Jesse are nuts for the U.K. indie rock act Los Campesinos! so on the occasion of their new album Sick Scenes and their recent North American tour, we got together, along with relative newbie Sara, saw their show in Brooklyn, and had a wide-ranging conversation about the band, our favorite songs, our baseless speculation about their personal lives, and if indie rock circa 2008 really was so special. Indie rock fangirls and fanboys everywhere may relate.
A few of SportsAlcohol.com's founding editors are longtime Saturday Night Live viewers and fans, so we like to occasionally get together and check in with how the show is doing. SNL is getting record ratings this season, with special guest stars like Alec Baldwin doing his Donald Trump impression and Melissa McCarthy dropping by to play Sean Spicer. We discuss those sketches and more: what this means for a larger-than-average core cast, how Weekend Update is faring in the Funny News landscape, how this year's group of hosts has measured up, and what sketches we feel have been overlooked in all of the political hubbub. This conversation, recorded immediately following the most recent, Baldwin-hosted episode, is a must-listen for any SNL fan.