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.
Did you guys hear that a new Star Wars movie came out?! With enormous gravitational force, this event drew four of SportsAlochol.com’s founding editors together to watch the movie (twice) and talk about it (a lot). For what I imagine will be the first Star Wars podcast of many Star Wars podcasts, Rob, Sabrina, Marisa, and Jesse talked a lot about The Force Awakens. Listen to our Star Wars podcast to hear:
–Analysis of how J.J. Abrams differs from George Lucas!
–Controversial nerd-baiting opinions about how the prequels rule and maybe Han Solo isn’t the best character in the original trilogy (Rob would like to point out that it’s all Jesse on that one)!
–Geeking out about our favorite scenes!
–The Mary Sue issue, addressed!
–Praise for our new hero BB-8!
AND MORE!
How To Listen
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.
SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.
With Halftime Report, your good friends at SportsAlcohol.com revisit some of their favorite films from the first half of this decade.
Hang me, oh, hang me. I’ll be dead and gone.
Hang me, oh, hang me. I’ll be dead and gone.
Wouldn’t mind the hanging, but the laying in the grave so long
Poor boy, I’ve been all around this world.
In 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis was met by film fans with an enthusiastic array of reactions that has become fairly familiar for a new Coen Brothers film (particularly the films they’ve released since 2007’s No Country For Old Men). There’s the poring over their meticulous technique, the debates about where the latest film ranks among the brothers’ oeuvre, speculation about how much the film can be read as personal expression by the famously puckish filmmakers, the debates about how despairing or cynical the film’s worldview truly is AND the attendant speculation about how much of that is sincere and how much is a joke on audiences. This last one is something of an evolution of the charge levied against them from the beginning of their career that they hold their characters (and possibly their audience) in contempt. Like A Serious Man, with its story about midwestern Jews in the 1960s that gave critics the purchase to finally analyze a Coen picture with an eye to their biography, Inside Llewyn Davis‘s story of a man adrift after losing a close friend and artistic partner offered a critical approach that allowed people to sidestep whatever lingering questions they still have about the Coens’ sincerity. Here was a movie working through the guys’ feelings about an imagined scenario where one of them died, leaving the other to muddle on alone. It’s a pretty satisfying reading of the film, and it suggests that we can perhaps also map the movie’s take on art, commerce, and the life of an artist as a similarly personal exploration by a couple of filmmakers who have a strange and interesting outsider relationship with Hollywood. But watching it now, after those initial conversations have subsided, I was struck by the way that it employs a classic Coen Brothers shaggy dog comedy of errors structure to tell their most emotional story, crystallized in perhaps the most devastating moment in any of their films. Continue reading HALFTIME REPORT: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)→
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.
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:
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.
SportsAlcohol.com cofounder Nathaniel moved to Brooklyn, as you do. His hobbies include cutting up rhubarb and laying down. His favorite things are the band Moon Hooch and custard from Shake Shack. Old ladies love his hair.
With Halftime Report, your good friends at SportsAlcohol.com revisit some of their favorite films from the first half of this decade.
It’s become part of the conventional wisdom about Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1976 satire Network that modern viewers will miss the comic exaggeration in its depiction of a craven and amoral American media landscape. The darkly absurd predictions it makes about ratings-hungry producers and networks have been rendered commonplace (or even quaint) by reality in the last four decades. I had this in mind when sitting down to watch the woefully under seen terrorism comedy Four Lions again for the first time in a few years. I figured the character comedy would still work, but I wondered if the recent horrifying attack in Paris and incredible brutality of ISIS, along with their bizarre success in recruiting westerners, would render the film’s group of buffoonish Al-Qaeda dead-enders similarly quaint or outdated. Continue reading HALFTIME REPORT: Four Lions (2010)→
Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
With Halftime Report, your good friends at SportsAlcohol.com revisit some of their favorite films from the first half of this decade.
There comes a point in all artistic endeavors when the project that one has toiled over must be turned over to the public to do with it what they will. This can have mixed results, particularly when one’s endeavor is ironic or satirical, as many rappers can attest (to take one recent example: Kendrick Lamar, whose song “Swimming Pool (Drank)”, an indictment of alcoholism in the projects, became a party anthem for white bros. And, to be fair to the white bros, it is really catchy, in a lethargic sort of way.) In the realm of film, Martin Scorsese may be one of the most co-opted artists of his time, whether it’s his method or his message. His seminal 1976 film Taxi Driver was condemned on release as a glorification of the violence it abhors and his elegiac, thoughtful religious picture The Last Temptation of Christ was picketed, sight unseen, by Christian groups as blasphemous. Both films are now rightly regarded as classics but suffice to say, the man knows a bit about having his work twisted by consumers. So perhaps he wasn’t surprised by the reception of The Wolf of Wall Street, his twenty-third feature film and one of the higher-grossing of his career.
To be fair to his critics, the movie walks an extremely fine line between inducing rage and adrenaline. While watching it, I shifted how I felt about it from moment to moment; it’s so much fun to experience and yet everything that happens in it is ugly. What might be most infuriating about it is that its central figure, Jordan Belfort (played by a game Leonardo DiCaprio,) is, essentially, a bro-tastic good time guy that’s easy to latch onto. He’s not particularly smart but he knows how to harness the energy in a room and game a vulnerable system. And boy are the United States’ financial institutions vulnerable. This film came out a scant five years after the Great Recession started and depending on what side you were on (or wanted to be), The Wolf of Wall Street plays very differently. Much like Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street before him, Belfort could be seen as either a savior or a destroyer, someone to aspire to or despise. Scorsese, to his immense credit, never plays his own hand openly though if one knows anything about him, it’s not difficult to figure out where he stands. Still, that didn’t stop many viewers from seeing Belfort’s splashy exploits as an endorsement of their own repulsive behavior.
The other major critique of the film was its length but in hindsight that seems purposeful, the rigor of the runtime matching the strenuousness, often amphetamine-aided, of its subject until it feels like a party everyone should have left a long time ago. For those who think of DiCaprio as a mechanical, joyless actor, I highly recommend a YouTube viewing of the sequence where Jordan is on Quaaludes, an incredible feat of physical comedy that acts as a bit of a funhouse mirror to the contorting of his more self-serious performances. By the end you’re practically begging for this prick to finally get his comeuppance but this is America and it doesn’t work like that, as anyone at Goldman Sachs can tell you. In many ways the closing shots are some of Scorsese’s most disturbing: the camera turned back on the audience, gazing on Belfort, now a motivational speaker, in adulatory awe. There are plenty of monsters in Scorsese’s back catalogue but Jordan Belfort may be the scariest because he’s a villain without a moral compass – even the gangsters of Goodfellas had a code – and he knows for most people that doesn’t matter if you’re saying something they want to hear.
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.
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:
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.
Rob is one of the founders of SportsAlcohol.com. He is a recent first time home buyer and it's all he talks about. Said home is in his hometown in Upstate New York. He never moved away and works a job to pay for his mortgage and crippling chicken wing addiction. He is not what you would call a go-getter. This may explain the general tone of SportsAlcohol.com.
All of the sportsalcohol.com founders were not only upstate for the holidays, we’ve also read all of the Hunger Games books and seen all of the movies. On the heels of the release of Mockingjay, Part 2, we talked about it all: the plague of breaking up books into multiple movies, the chemistry of Jennifer Lawrence and her co-stars, multiple directors, and Josh Hutcherson’s sweet skateboarding moves.
How To Listen
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.
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.
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. Continue reading Spotlight on the Social Issue Drama: David Gordon Green and Thomas McCarthy take their shots→
Gloria Beth Amodeo, or GBA as she may or may not be called, has a few hidden talents, including balancing pencils and pens with her face. Her less-hidden talents include fiction, reviews and interviews that have appeared in various publications. Her karaoke go-to is "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" by Celine Dion. Photo credit: Bethany Michaela Photo.
It was my experience that movies helped a lot during puberty. I don’t know about other people, but all my friends and I wanted to do was watch a bunch of R-rated films and talk until the sex scenes — when we’d stop talking.
Chris usually got up to rewind once the scenes were over.
“You’re a pervert!” we’d say. But no one stopped him. We were too guilty for soft-core porn and Monster’s Ball was teaching us stuff.
We rented everything from the oldest rental shop in town, Video Dimensions. Blockbuster was running them out of business but they still had the most bizarre VHS selection we could ever hope to encounter. I’m talking Teeth, front row center, flanked by numerous bins of narrative gold. We’d scour them for NC-17 ratings, scoring obscure titles like Bliss and The Pillow Book.
It was in one of these bins that Itoro and I first found Queen of the Damned.
Aaliyah on the cover as a badass-looking vampire was enough to pique our interest. And then we noticed a guy lurking behind her, sans shirt, with a hint of chiseled abs. The rental deal was sealed.
What I remember most about watching that movie for the first time was thinking that Lestat (played by Stuart Townsend) was a vampire-version of Frodo Baggins in resemblance and demeanor, with a tad more angst. I also thought the rock music soundtrack was super cool, and Aaliyah was a goddess.
“She was life-giving,” Itoro says now, remembering Aaliyah’s ancient Egyptian-style boob plates and ability to make other vampires incinerate from the inside-out. “We felt like outcasts in high school, and she helped us dream.”
It was true. We were not very popular, and Queen of the Damned became an outlet for our torment. A weekly tradition was born from that viewing, which involved us fighting with Itoro’s little brother for control of the television and never, ever returning the rental property to Video Dimensions.
Before watching Queen of the Damned again, this time in my late twenties, I eased myself into the experience by viewing the trailer and was struck by this summation of the film, as told by ominous voiceover:
“All she wants is hell on earth.”
She refers to the Queen of the Damned (as portrayed by Aaliyah) who, in one scene, torches a building with the enflamed corpses of 20 to 30 other vampires. “Was she really that evil?” I thought to myself now. “And why?”
Why did she do this?!
The trailer also introduced Stuart Townsend as Lestat (previously played by the superstar likes of Tom Cruise) and I thought about how interesting Queen of the Damned is timeline-wise. In terms of high-profile vampire movies from 1994 to 2008, QOD falls right in between Interview with a Vampire, Blade, Underworld and Twilight, making it the middle child of vampire movies of its era.
And after watching it again, I can safely say that, in other ways, it truly is the middle child of all vampire movies.
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.
The dream of the ’90s is still alive at SportsAlcohol.com, and during our thorough examination of the decade, we did the following:
…ranked and wrote about the top 90 songs of the ’90s in three groups (90-51, 50-11, and 10-1), and included a little behind-the-scenes about the voting process. (Before you ask: Yes, there is a Spotify playlist.) The ranked lists are worth clicking on for the era-appropriate photos of our contributors alone.
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