Movies, Podcast

The Sportsalcohol.com Podcast: Oscars 2026

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The Academy Awards may be nearing its centenary, but here at Sportsalcohol.com, we also have a long tradition of talking about the Oscars. For our eighth annual Oscars installment, Marisa, Jesse, Jeremy, Sara, Becca, and Ben conclave to discuss who will win, who we want to win, and who was rudely snubbed by the Academy, but not by the Sportsalcohol.com crew’s hearts. (Ahem, Twinless.) Tune in to find out:

  • Who do we think will win the heated Best Director race between Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler?
  • How many times do we bring up Ann Motherfuckin’ Lee?
  • Why The Rule of Jenny Pen deserved a spot in one of the categories? (At least according to one of us.)
  • Who will not play along with Marisa’s opening question?
  • Who can make heads or tails of this new casting category?
  • Which film does one 10-year-old thinks will win the Best Animated Short award? Behind-the-scenes gossip: Ben put “a c-note” on her prediction, so will one tween cost him actual, real-life dollars?

Get it while the prediction markets are still hot!

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Movies of 2025

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We may be well into the nightmares of 2026, but we can still look back on the movies that made the nightmares of 2025 slightly more bearable! The SportsAlcohol.com podcast committee convened an all-star panel consisting of Marisa, Sara, Becca, Jesse, Ben, Jeremy, and Nathaniel to submit lists of our favorite movies of 2025, which were then aggregated into a final list of the 15 best movies of 2025, counted down and discussed in this supersized but fast-moving episode. In addition to the primary best movies of 2025 list (which itself includes plenty of surprises), we also discuss our outliers — the movies each of us voted for that no one else did! So join us as we talk about the dramas, comedies, mysteries, sports movies, musicals, horror pictures, and unclassifiable stuff that moved us over the past year!

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Biggest Holiday Movies of 1995

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We here at the SportsAlcohol.com podcast like to mix things up. We don’t always have to talk about summer movies! (Though it’s very fun when we do.) For example, we could also talk about holiday movies. Not exclusively Christmas-themed stuff, mind, but the biggest-grossing movies that came out in November and December of 1995, a year we previously covered in our summer rewind series. But things are different in the colder-weather months. There are more comedy sequels. More old guys. More life-threatening pregnancies depicted as zany. More cops on the edge, where they gotta be. And more of Ian Fleming’s James Bond Agent 007. So hold on to your angst, walk away from your loved ones in 30 seconds flat, and check out our latest half-nostalgic, half-skeptical rundown of the cinema of yore!

Movies, Podcast

The Long-Awaited SportsAlcohol.com Anniversary Podcast Double Feature: 1985 and 2005

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Hey! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But that doesn’t mean that your friends at SportsAlcohol.com haven’t recorded a couple of terrific podcasts talking about summer movies of years past. In fact, we’ve laid down two; Jesse just took for-fucking-ever to edit and post about them.

First, we continue our tour through the summer movies of the 2000s with a look back at the summer of 2005, which has a shocking number of very good movies, if you ask me! Star Wars, Spielberg, Tim Burton, Cruise, Pitt, Jolie, and the Frat Pack, plus some clobberin’ time!

Then we take it way further back to 1985, where Star Wars was two years gone, James Bond was on the wane, Rambo was on the rise, and Chevy Chase was having the best year of his professional life while not appearing to have any fun!

TV

Happy 10th Anniversary to NBC’s ‘Hannibal!’

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Where does the difference between the past and the future come from? Mine? It was before I watched Hannibal and after I watched Hannibal.

NBC’s Hannibal aired its last episode on August 29, 2015. I didn’t watch it when it was on, but I caught up with it last year. I devoured the whole thing (pun intended), and it crawled under my skin and stayed there. It was a dark and beautiful show for a grim and scary time in my life, and I was lucky I found something that gave me so much to chew on so my thoughts wouldn’t turn to more worrisome, realer things. So here, 10 years too late, a selection of random musings on the show. I only hope that I could turn a phrase as well as Freddy Lounds in her Tattle Crime. (I wish I could’ve been the one to coin the phrase “murder husbands,” but, then again, I’m sure all writers do.)

Before I get going, though, I should remind everyone that we have a podcast episode about The Silence of the Lambs—one with actual, smart analysis, not just my fan-ish ramblings—and it touches on all of the other Hannibal Lecter-related media, including the TV show. I hadn’t seen it at that point, so you don’t have to worry about me gushing, That’s for here.

(Spoilers for Hannibal beyond the jump.)

Continue reading Happy 10th Anniversary to NBC’s ‘Hannibal!’ →

Movies

There Are ‘No Exit’ Triangles Everywhere for Those With Eyes to See

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Or at least I just like thinking about No Exit triangles.

The last one I was able to diagram was about Halt and Catch Fire. That turned into more of a parallelogram as Donna (rightfully) started playing a bigger role in the proceedings.

This time I was thinking about Challengers.  In our Best Movies of 2024 podcast, it came up that Tashi was sort of a thwarted character, because she lost her ability to play early on in the movie. But that’s what makes a No Exit triangle great — everyone has something that they want that one of the other points of the triangle has, and everyone has something themselves that the other points of the triangle want.

So I mapped it out, and here’s how it worked out this time.

How Tashi, Art and Patrick map out onto the qualities of ability to play, killer instinct, material comfort and love of a partner

Does this translate into a satisfying narrative arc for every point on the triangle? Hey, I just make the graphs.

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Oscars Special 2025!

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Do you miss Siskel & Ebert: If We Picked the Winners? Do you also like the movie Conclave, where a bunch of fussy weirdos are convened in an attempt to arrive at a consensus? Do you enjoy the Oscars, predicting the Oscars, making your own Oscars, and complaining about the Oscars? Do we have a podcast for you! In what has become an annual tradition, SportsAlcohol.com has provided all the will-win, should-win, too-SNUBBED!-to-win coverage you could possibly want out of an Oscars podcast in one convenient special that is shorter than any of this year’s Best Picture nominees! Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, and Jesse are here to sort through all the major categories, plus bonus rounds and sidebars on several more!

Listen below, or wherever else you get your podcasts!

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 1984

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SportsAlcohol.com belatedly ventures into a brand-new, way-old decade for summer movie nostalgia. Having conquered the 1990s, and while continuing to make our way through the 2000s, we’ve added a new set of anniversary years into the rotation, examining summer movies from 40 years ago. For this summer (or for this year, anyway; technical difficulties delayed release), that meant exploring a different world, where gremlins, ghosts, jocks, breakdancers, and nerds all jostled for mass-cult attention.

Books, Movies, Parenting, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Summer 1994 B-sides!

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Having semi-recently completed our quest to cover all the biggest summer blockbusters of the ’90s, your pals at SportsAlcohol.com decided to circle back and take a look at some summer movies just or sometimes very far outside the 1994 blockbusters that kicked this whole series off more than a decade ago! Jesse, Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, and Becca got together to talk about summer movie ranging from sorta unconventional takes on superheroes to Oliver Stone going sicko mode to a noirish thriller you may never have heard of! It’s all here, from goths to preps!

Movies, Parenting

Stop Trying to Make My Kid Cry!

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Listen, I get it. I think back on some of my favorite childhood movies, and there’s a darkness there.  I’m part of the generation that watched Dorothy get shock-treatment at the beginning of Return to Oz, saw Artax sink into the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story, and realized that, even if Inigo Montoya got his revenge in The Princess Bride, he’d never get his father back — and I emerged a mostly functional adult. So yes, I understand that kids can handle tough emotions in media. And that it’s probably healthy for them to experience those feelings in small doses in a  controlled, safe environment, where they can build up some resilience they can draw upon and use in other, real-life situations.

But seriously, you have to quit it. Stop trying to make my kid cry at the movies.

Continue reading Stop Trying to Make My Kid Cry! →