Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Do you like winning your office Oscar pool? Well, look no further, unless you have a lot of money riding on it, in which case we may not be able to help you! The SportsAlcohol.com crew of Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, Jesse, and Jon may not have all the answers in all the categories, but we sure know how to discuss the hell out of the big six for the 2018 Oscars, chatting about our best guesses as well as our personal favorites or anti-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 for reasons unrelated!
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Ben and Jesse are back at it again. After our first business/’90s sci-fi double feature of Pretty Woman and Starship Troopers and our follow-up pairing Other People’s Money and Dark City, we got together to watch 1987’s The Secret of My Success (previously unseen by Jesse) and 1996’s Mars Attacks! (previously unseen by Ben), a business/sci-fi double feature heavily featuring Michael J. Fox. We pulled in Mars Attacks! number one fan and expert Nathaniel, and had a nice little chat about gruesome demises, nepotism, particularly camera-friendly ways of turning around, and other hallmarks of business/sci-fi/Fox cinema.
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes!If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
The SportsAlcohol.com crew includes a lot of regular Saturday Night Live viewers, so we’ve made it an annual tradition to get together and check in with the show at various points to see how it’s doing. We can do this because a famous space cowboy is hosting, or a famous piece of total garbage is hosting, or because that famous piece of garbage is president now and must be repeatedly addressed by the show, or, this year, because WE LOVE YOU NATALIE. So Marisa, Nathaniel, Michael, and Jesse stayed up even later than usual after the recent Natalie Portman-hosted episode of SNL to podcast about this most recent episode (the show’s last for about a month), the recent run of episodes including hosting gigs by Will Ferrell, Jessica Chastain, and Sam Rockwell, and how Season 43 has been going so far: in politics, in cast members, in sketches that only a handful of people love. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll probably enjoy hearing us yak about what we love and hate. NOW SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT JAR JAR BINKS.
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes!If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
Hopefully you’ve gone through our list of the 20 best movies of 2017, and maybe if you did, you had some questions, such as: Where was this or that movie? Did everyone like every movie on this list a near-equal amount? Is there a way I could listen to Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse talk about the movies of 2017 for a feature-length amount of time? Luckily, we have a podcast for that.
Nathaniel defends The Shape of Water! Sara expresses frustration with Dunkirk! Jesse compares Call Me By Your Name to Brawl in Cell Block 99! Marisa talks about watching The Florida Project with a stranger! It’s all here.
I should note that because some of these movies have been covered extensively on other podcasts, we tried to steer conversations away from some of them. Here’s a quick list of supplemental podcasts you may have missed that also feature movies from our best movies of 2017 list (you know, in case two hours isn’t enough):
As Marisa will mention in an upcoming podcast, last year felt like it was about seventeen goddamn years long, but that doesn’t mean we shied away from the challenge of combing through the approximately one million 2017 releases to determine which, of this year’s many fine offerings (finer than what the year had to offer in general, for sure) constituted the 20 best movies of the year. Regular SportsAlcohol.com Film Gang Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse each submitted individual Top 20 lists which were aggregated into a single Top 20 which featured relatively few movies with four-for-four list support (about 25%, I believe) but plenty of movies that got two or three of us way on board (unlike past years, no single-vote wonders made the list). Now that the mechanics are out of the way, let’s get to the movies themselves. A podcast, as always, will follow.
Do you like Star Wars? Do you like talking about Star Wars? Do you like listening to nerds talk about Star Wars? Did you like Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Did you hate Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Did you find yourself reinvigorated and more ready to talk Star Wars than ever before after watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Do you want to know what some avowed prequel-likers thought about Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Do you have opinions about Canto Bight? Do you have opinions about Brick? Do you have opinions about BB-8 driving a [redacted]? What about Luke Skywalker? Do you think you’re Luke Skywalker? Do you think you’re Han Solo? Do you think you’re Finn or Rey? Are you interested in what Rob and Jesse and Marisa and Sabrina thought about Star Wars: The Last Jedi even though it came out weeks ago because you’re still thinking about it yourself?
Here is a podcast about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes!If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
Hey, you guys watch TV, right? So do your pals at SportsAlcohol.com, so Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together for an end-of-year TV podcast where we discuss our recent Top 12 list and go beyond it, talking about shows that didn’t make the cut, and sometimes offering different opinions than those offered in our blurbs. 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? This is the TV podcast for you.
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes!If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
It’s been a rough year, but there’s always television. So much television! It’s really a wonder that even a small group of SportsAlcohol.com editors and contributors — your usual pals Nathaniel, Marisa, Jesse, and Sara, plus novelist Maggie Lehrman and playwright/actual TV professional Jon Kern — was able to reach any kind of consensus over what we liked best. And in some ways, we didn’t; I’m not sure if there’s a single show mentioned on this list that all six of us have seen in full. (Maybe number three.) But it’s an eclectic and often electrifying group of shows we really love. In other words, a twelve-part miracle. Let’s get to miracle-in’ then! Continue reading The Top 12 Best TV Shows of 2017→
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, though we will have some individual write-ups of songs we love throughout the rest of the month and maybe into January. But Marisa, Sara, Rob, and Jesse did sit down to talk about our faves (and other opinions) from this year in popular musics. (They also took selfies. See above.)
For our best music of 2017 wrap-up, we decided 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), which band(s) Sara cannot deal with right now, and which show got Rob feeling real emotional in a rough year.
We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes!If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
For the impending end of 2017, some of our writers are going back and talking about beloved songs from this year, especially from artists not covered on our upcoming podcast.
Is it really so ridiculous that Miley Cyrus would sing about feeling young? It might seem redundant, I guess, because she’s only 25, which to me, racing toward 40, sounds so impossibly fresh and dewy now. But I don’t know that I felt that way about 25 when I actually was 25. Bless anyone who maintains uncomplicated feelings about aging for 25 whole years.
Moreover: Miley Cyrus has been making music for a decade. Yes, she’s the kind of showbiz lifer who was born into it and made a beeline for the Disney machine, but Younger Now, the 2017 record whose title song I adore, is her sixth album. It’s the first one I’ve ever bought; I got Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz from whoever was kind enough to rip a free mp3 version from the free streaming version that was the only version available for a while (it’s now available as a paid download, and honestly, I kind of recommend it). I bought “Wrecking Ball” but not all of Bangerz. I downloaded “Party in the USA” from a music blog that encoded its source album as Shit Guys, Miley’s Done It Again!
There was a time when that fake title was only half-ironic. People like “Party in the USA” and especially “Wrecking Ball.” In the annals of teen or teen-like stars getting grown-up and weird, people do not so much like Dead Petz, the album where she fronted the Flaming Lips and (I assume) smoked a lot of pot, displaying a lot of vulnerability – and genuine, not overproduced, weirdness – in the process. People do not so much seem to like Younger Now so much, either. I gather that it’s considered kind of a clumsy, opportunistic pivot back to pop-country after a series of failed cultural appropriations. Though the record is country only insofar as it sounds kind of country-ish compared to the Flaming Lips, it is inarguably uneven. Miley Cyrus is not a savant who makes Top 40 pop that we wish actual Top 40 pop sounded like, like Carly Rae Jepsen. But then, Carly Rae Jepsen is 32. She knows things. This is why we (Rob and I, anyway) love her.
Which brings us back to “Younger Now.” Like the album of the same name, it’s not perfect. It has at least one production touch I actually hate: the fake or fake-sounding drum-ish fills that sound way too much like the fake record-scratching noises everyone started using around 1997 or so. (Again: I am not 25.) The lyrics are rife with clichés, especially in the chorus: “No one stays the same.” “What goes up must come down.” “Change is a thing you can count on.” But as on Dead Petz, the weakness and awkwardness in her music now feel achingly sincere, and both the melody and sentiment of “Younger Now” soar with an unforced wistfulness, and faux-drum stutters aside, the production lets that wistfulness breathe, showcasing Cyrus’s vocals. She’s never sounded more confident or comfortable or hopeful. You know, like how you feel for a few fleeting moments when you’re young, if you’re lucky.
