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Movies, Music, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Holiday Entertainment!

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To celebrate the corridor between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, which apparently also includes Christmas, the SportsAlcohol.com crew convened for a holiday podcast to talk about holiday-themed entertainment: what counts, what’s great, and what we wish we could ban from the airwaves every December. Hear us talk about Love, Actually, Paul McCartney, Mariah Carey, TGIF, Home Alone, and so much more! The SportsAlcohol.com holiday podcast is guaranteed to brighten your spirits. Probably.

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Bonus Mini-Podcast: Victor Frankenstein

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As a bonus addendum to both the SportsAlcohol.com Thanksgiving summit in upstate NY and to our ongoing coverage of Frankenstein-related media, all of this site’s founding editors plus our buddy Derrick went out to see the new film Victor Frankenstein over the weekend and then piled into Rob and Sabrina’s five-seat hatchback car to talk about it. Rob was in the trunk. In this special bonus Victor Frankenstein podcast, We briefly discussed James McAvoy, Daniel Radcliffe, hunchbacks with too many jobs, the Sherlockification of Frankenstein, and the slashiest Frankenstein movie since we don’t know when. Check it out, why not? It’s only ten minutes and you’ll feel like you’re crammed into the car with us.

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Donald Trump SNL

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Several SportsAlcohol.com founders are regular viewers of Saturday Night Live, and not especially fans of Donald Trump. So when the Trump SNL aired, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel got together (with founding baby Eloise serving as a silent partner) to discuss the show so far this season, and the Trump SNL in particular. We touch upon impressions, political satire, expectations of the show, and the best and (lots of) worst of the Trump episode.

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Movies

Spotlight on the Social Issue Drama: David Gordon Green and Thomas McCarthy take their shots

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When David Gordon Green broke away from his indie roots to make the mainstream stoner comedy Pineapple Express, followed by the idiosyncratic (and less financially successful) but still mainstream Your Highness and The Sitter, much was made of this unexpected career left turn. Green has since swung back into indie territory with a trio of lower-key dramas (Prince Avalanche; Joe; Manglehorn), albeit with bigger stars than anyone who appeared in All the Real Girls or Snow Angels, and his fluid, prolific toggling between genres makes clear both his talent and his personal stamp. Though not everyone recognized it, his loopy broad comedies are not so far removed from his loopy, less broad character studies or Malick-ish dreamscapes; the scrappy chase narrative of Undertow shares a certain kinship with Pineapple Express, and the aimlessness of Pacino’s Manglehorn and Jonah Hill’s feckless babysitter have a certain, subtle rhyme scheme.

It turns out, if you really want David Gordon Green to stretch, assign him to do a George Clooney/Grant Heslov/Participant Media social-issue drama. Producing partners Clooney and Heslov aren’t formally involved with Participant, but they have a taste for the kinds of high-minded material the company seeks out; though Participant has worked on plenty of films, some of their most notable have won Clooney an acting Oscar (Syriana), announced his seriousness as a writer/director (Good Night, and Good Luck), and supported Clooney’s frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh (The Informant!; Contagion). Now Participant has produced Our Brand Is Crisis, a fiction-film version of the same-named documentary, once earmarked for a Clooney directorial project. At some point, Clooney (who still produced with Heslov) passed the project to Green, having gained a star in Sandra Bullock, who signed on after screenwriter Peter Straughan (who also worked on the non-Participant but Participant-ish The Men Who Stare at Goats, co-starring Clooney) agreed to flip the protagonist’s gender to female.
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Lists, Movies, Music

90s Music Goes to the Movies

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We intentionally dedicated last week to ’90s songs, rather than albums or movies or TV shows; the decade is too big to cover in great depth in a single week. But as Rob alluded to in his essential Soundtracks with Elastica Songs piece, a lot of great ’90s tunes turned up in a lot of great (and not-so-great) ’90s movies, for reasons both artistic and mercenary. So here we’re taking a look at how some of our Top 90 Songs of the ’90s fared in movies that actually came out during the ’90s, with a big assist from film fan and music enthusiast Sara Batkie. A lot of them involve Scenes of Teen Partying.

90s Music at the (90s) Movies

“Fake Plastic Trees” (#61) in Clueless (1995)
“Wah wah wah.” This is how Cher Horowitz reacts to Radiohead in Clueless, with the band standing in for all complaint rock that typically plays on college radio or at least does in Cher’s version of California. I didn’t realize until looking the soundtrack up that it’s actually an acoustic version of the song as its appearance in the film itself is brief and pretty muffled. It is notable, however, for backing the scene that introduces Josh, Cher’s ex-stepbrother and eventual love interest, a plaid-and-Amnesty-International tee-shirt-wearing foil to Cher’s candy-colored Beverly Hills princess. Like Thom Yorke’s sweetly abrasive crooning on the soundtrack, which is otherwise a mix of peppy pop rock numbers by Supergrass and Smoking Popes and sunny covers of Mott the Hoople and Kim Wilde, Josh doesn’t fit his surroundings at first glance. But Clueless remains a classic of its genre for its inclusiveness, from Di and Murray to stoner Travis, even teachers like Ms. Geist and Mr. Hall. In the end, just like Josh and Cher, “Fake Plastic Trees” works with the film because of its differences, not in spite of them. – Sara Batkie

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Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: ’90s Music

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The SportsAlcohol.com list of the 90 Best Songs of the 90s led to our biggest podcast yet, with seven panelists — plus a special call-in guest! — talking for eighty minutes about ’90s music. In a wide-ranging discussion, Rob, Jesse, Marisa, Sara, Ben, Craig, Nathaniel, and phone participant Jason talk about where our ’90s music list went right, where it might have gone wrong, what bands got screwed over and what songs from that decade we’ll always love and/or hate. Find out:

  • Who wasn’t listening to ’90s music during the ’90s
  • What Rob and Jesse agree is the best R.E.M. album
  • Which album made the guy at Tower Records insult Ben during college
  • Why Rob feels like Marisa is gaslighting him
  • Why at least one of us hates that Meat Loaf song
  • And so much more!

Join us, won’t you? It’s like having a special ’90s music brunch with a bunch of your best nerd friends.

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Lists, Music

Best Songs of the 90s: Lonely at the Top

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In the process of putting together our list of the best songs of the 90s, certain brave people made certain brave tastes known. These list-makers might not have known they were committing an act of bravery at the time, but no fewer than seven of our 22 participants submitted #1 votes – choices for the single best song of 1990-1999 – that no one else in the poll voted for at all. Some were from artists whose other works were recognized; others were from artists whose works were roundly ignored in any form. I so admire this kind of free-thinking that I asked these people to write a little about their particularly distinct choices. Below are the responses I received. (And for the record, six of my personal 40 received no other votes from anyone else.)
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Lists, Music

Best Songs of the 90s: Behind the Scenes

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Now that the official SportsAlcohol.com list of the best songs of the 90s has been revealed to the world in full, I thought I’d offer the list geeks among you a quick peek behind the scenes at the making of the list. So if you’re wondering why Pavement didn’t make the cut or how assured Nirvana’s victory really was, read on!

Participants
As mentioned, we had 22 voters each assemble a ranked top 40 list. There were twelve women and ten men, and most of the participants spent at least some time as teenagers in the ’90s, though one of us didn’t enter teenagehood until after the turn of the century.

Because of the high number of participants, a single number-one vote was not enough to propel a song onto the master list. Every song on our final list garnered at least two votes, and while it was theoretically possible to make the list without any of those votes being in anyone’s top ten, that was not the actual case when all was said and done. Every song on this list was on at least one person’s Top Ten of the ’90s, and in fact several songs with two votes (where one was passionate enough) beat out a number of songs that garnered three or even four votes. That four-vote wonder, the most-voted song that failed to make the list? The subject of founding editor Sabrina’s t-shirt: “It’s a Shame About Ray” by the Lemonheads. A shame indeed; sorry, Dando.
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