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Lists, Movies, Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Disney Songs

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In conjunction with our recent, definitive list of the Top 20 Disney Songs So Far, list contributors Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Jonathan, Maggie, and Rayme got together to talk about our individual lists, our group list, and how it reflects our thoughts and feelings about all of these great and not-so-great Disney movies, rides, and TV shows from over the years. It’s a lively and insightful discussion of what we look for in a Disney musical, and also sometimes a baby pipes up with her opinions. Find out who doesn’t like The Jungle Book and who eloquently defends it! Find out how it is that Nathaniel didn’t vote for a Disney song sung by Vincent Price! Find out our feelings on Peabo Bryson! No need to wish upon a star for any of this; it’s just here, in this magical episode.

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Lists, Movies, Music

The Best Disney Songs: Our Beloved Outliers

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Our recent list of the twenty best Disney songs wasn’t without its controversy and heartbreak – or anyway, we all voted for songs that didn’t make it on the list. But there’s a particular specialness to the outliers – the songs that only one person apiece voted for on their list, often very high on that list, and that no one else included. Here, before we get to our Disney songs podcast, I’ve asked some of our contributors to defend their orphan choices for the best Disney songs.
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Lists, Movies, Music

The Top 20 Disney Songs of All Time (So Far)

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For so many of us, before we become self-styled experts in whatever kinds of pop music we like best, there are Disney songs. They’re inescapable, nearly; who among you, readers, cannot name or hum or sing or belt out at least one, if not half a dozen? With the current Disney cartoon Moana scoring rave reviews and mega box office as it completes the company’s re-embrace of its musical heritage, we thought it would be fun to establish a Disney Song Canon – the competition Moana‘s strong set of tunes faces as they hope to achieve immortality in the Disney songbook, which I believe is located somewhere inside the Disney Vault, possibly on the shelf above all of the Black Cauldron merch.

Of course, Disney music is not limited to animated features, and so neither was this list: live action releases from Disney (though generally not Touchstone or Hollywood Pictures) were fair game, along with theme park songs and any applicable Disney Afternoon theme songs. Songs from subsidiaries such as Pixar, Marvel Studios, Muppet Studios, and Lucasfilm were not eligible, because those entities’ existences predated Disney, as much as Pixar movies are now identified with the Disney brand.

Your usual SportsAlcohol buddies Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sara, and Maggie were joined by self-taught Disney experts Jonathan Lill, Rayme Shore, Bayard Templeton, and Jennifer Vega, compiling lists of our favorites and synthesizing them into a single Top 20. We’ll be back later this week with a podcast where we talk a little more about our choices and their movies. But for now, enjoy this ultra-definitive, well-considered list. These are the Disney songs that feel like magic to us.
Continue reading The Top 20 Disney Songs of All Time (So Far) →

Movies, Music, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Pop Culture Disappointments

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We’ve talked about our pop culture tears and fears, but what about that weird combination of the two, where you fear something will let you down so much you feel like crying? Either you’re listening to a Tears for Fears album, or you’re experiencing the universal feeling of pop-culture disappointment. For this episode, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse talk about stuff that’s let us down over the years, from childhood to our teenage years to our wizened old age. We talk about singing food products, great directors who swung and missed, Broadway musicals, bands we grew out of, and more! After an extremely disappointing election and 2016 in general, maybe talking about some less harmful letdowns will be helpful.

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: What Makes Us Scared at Movies

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Last time we talked about visceral reactions we have to movies, it involved the movies (and TV shows) that have made us cry. In the spirit of Halloween, Nathaniel, Rob, Marisa, Jesse, Sara, and Rayme got together to discuss movies that make us cry… WITH FRIGHT! We discuss what movies scared us as kids, what scares us as adults, what horror classics never did it for us, and more! Some of these movies are traditional horror; some of them are just dramatic thrillers or children’s TV shows. If you want to find out who started to cry from fear at Signs or who hid under the bed during Fraggle Rock, this is your chance!

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Career of Tim Burton

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Tim Burton is easily one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood, with a name awareness up there with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Christopher Nolan. Yet in recent years, the director, whose new movie Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children just came out, has been the target of plenty of scorn, too. Is he an underappreciated auteur, a self-plagiarizing hack, or something in between? Is Miss Peregrine a comeback or did he not really go anywhere? What’s up with how much the internet hates Alice in Wonderland?

These questions and more are at the heart of our Tim Burton podcast, where Nathaniel, Marisa, and Jesse started with his new movie and wound up discussing every single feature he’s directed in some capacity. We talk about the best, the worst, the unloved and the underloved. Who sticks up for what? Who has a hot take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? And what have any of us bought at Hot Topic? Listen up and find out.

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Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Hot Takes on the Pop Music Canon

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Welcome to the internet! We have hot takes here. SportsAlcohol.com has plenty of contrary and bizarre opinions to go around, and for this podcast we focused on albums from the pop music canon. Rob, Sara, Marisa, and Jesse got together to chat about which albums they think are secretly inferior to other, less acclaimed albums by the same artist. It’s a simple formula that generates hot take after hot take! Here are just some of the artists we cover in this trim 40-minute session:

The Beatles!
Bruce Springsteen!
U2!
The Stone Roses!
Radiohead!
Sleater-Kinney!
Simon & Garfunkel!
Coldplay for some reason!
Liz Phair!

AND MORE!

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll become infuriated with our hotness.

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Indie Movies of Summer 2016

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Everyone thinks of summer as blockbuster season for movies, but the truth is, May, June, July, and August always see the release of a ton of indie movies, often of high quality. For the second year in a row, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together in Brooklyn to talk about the smaller-scale fare they watched over the past few months, blazing through hot take after hot take on over a dozen recent releases. If you’re sick of Suicide Squads, pets with secret lives, and Jason Bournes, go ahead and find out what we thought of The Lobster, Cafe Society, A Bigger Splash, The Neon Demon, Hell or High Water, and more indie movies you can add to your Netflix queue (or in some cases, still catch in a theater near you) as fall approaches.

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Movies, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: What Makes Us Cry at Movies (and TV)

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When was the last time you cried at a movie? That’s a question posed toward the beginning of this Very Special episode of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast, in which Nathaniel, Marisa, Jesse, Sara, and Jon get personal about crying at movies (or TV shows): how often it happens, when we respect it and when we resent it, and why we react the way we do to certain types of emotional button-pushing (or lack thereof). Crying at movies is a near-universal topic, and we’ve tried to be very specific in our wide-ranging discussion that we promise is not a total bummer.

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Movies, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Saturday Night Live at the Movies

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Hey, have you guys heard about the new Ghostbusters movie coming out this week? Many of the film’s cast members have one obvious thing in common… that’s right, many of them were on Saturday Night Live (is there some other difference you were thinking of?). The casting of Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and (in a supporting role) Cecily Strong establishes a clear lineage with the 1984 original, which featured Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd acting out (and riffing on) an Aykroyd-cowritten script. The first film remains one of the most successful to star Saturday Night Live alumni, which got your SportsAlcohol.com crew thinking about how cast members on that program have made the transition into movies. Nathaniel, Sara, Marisa, Jesse, and Jon got together to talk about this rich history for roughly the length of a Saturday Night Live episode to talk about official SNL movies, unofficial SNL movies, and a whole lot of actors.

Listen and find the answers to the following questions, and more!

  • Does Mike Myers work without makeup?
  • Which one of us saw Bordello of Blood in the theaters?
  • How young is too young to watch Beverly Hills Cop?
  • What movie is an even less distilled expression of Aykroyd-ness than Ghostbusters?
  • Have Tina Fey and Amy Poehler really made it in the movies yet?
  • Which SNL players do we want to see star in their own movie?

How To Listen

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