Lists, Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Billboard Hits of 1999

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The SportsAlcohol.com editorial core has kind of a thing for the ’90s. But sometimes just talking about the best of that decade isn’t enough; sometimes we need to travel back in time exactly 20 years and go through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the annual Billboard Hot 100. We did it for 1996, and in this anniversary year for 1999, we’re at it again! Shania Twain, Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Brandy and/or Monica, N’Sync and/or Alabama (whoever they are)! They’re all here and you’ll never guess which ones Rob and/or Jesse and/or Marisa love and/or hate! You’ll have to listen to fin dout.

We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Lists, TV

The Dads of Game of Thrones, ranked from best to worst

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Game of Thrones is back for its final season and its time SportsAlcohol.com got in on some of those sweet sweet SEO clicks. I think a majority of our primary contributors don’t even watch the show, but I do and I actually re-watched the whole thing for the season premiere so I’d remember who was who and why I hate them. For a show that famously kills tons of characters, there are still far too many people to remember! One thing that really struck me on re-watch is that it’s like an Aaron Sorkin show on steroids based on the number of terrible fathers. Given all this competition, who’s the worst? Let’s get into it!
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Movies

PET SEMATARY wants to punish Jason Clarke, and everyone else, for being such a fuck-up

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With Pet Sematary, Jason Clarke has truly arrived. Not as a Hollywood leading man; he’s already played John Connor (in a Terminator if not The Terminator), the main guy in a Planet of the Apes sequel, and a bunch of prominent roles in prestige-y pictures like Mudbound, The Great Gatsby, and Chappaquiddick. In 2019, Clarke has arguably already blown past the traditional leading-man phase of his career, and gone into Patrick Wilson territory, which I would define as operating in a perpetual state of former leading man.

This is not the same as a perpetual Baxter/Ralph Bellamy type, like Bill Pullman in 1993, or James Marsden in the early 2000s, playing the nice, handsome, normal guy who often loses the girl to someone cooler, handsomer, and less normal. Those characters are hardly ever actually leading roles, their reduced screen presence tipping the audience off about who the real star is. But Jason Clarke is the main character in Pet Sematary, just as sure as Patrick Wilson is the male lead of Insidious, Little Children, Watchmen, and Young Adult among others. He’s not playing the same guy in all of these movies, but there’s definitely a vibe (reinforced by his work on the indelible Girls episode “One Man’s Trash”): the handsome guy who’s in some supposed position of power, authority, or contentment, but operating with some kind of faded glory, lack of gumption, or dark secret. He is, whether pleasantly (Young Adult) or destructively (Insidious), the golden boy gone slightly to seed. He’s often a husband and/or a father, and he’s usually trying, if not necessarily his best. Often, he’s just a little too passive or outmatched by someone. He gets in over his head. It’s not his fault, except it kind of is.
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Comics, Movies

Shazam! is another superhero movie that’s not like all the other superhero movies that aren’t like other superhero movies

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Shazam!, based on the DC Comics hero originally called Captain Marvel and originally not published by DC Comics, stars Zachary Levi, who once appeared in a Thor movie for Marvel Studios. Levi plays the hero; the bad guy is played by Mark Strong, who also played a supporting role (and unrealized future bad guy) in Green Lantern, based on the DC Comics hero, but unconnected to the current DC Comics movies. Shazam! also co-stars Djimon Hounsou, who also has a supporting role in Captain Marvel, currently in theaters, a separate character from Shazam, the former Captain Marvel, and based in part on the Marvel Comics hero originally called Ms. Marvel.

Shazam! is about a teenager learning to wield his superpowers responsibly, like Marvel’s Spider-Man; it’s also concerns the effects of those superpowers on family dynamics—sort of like The Incredibles, a Disney film which is not based on a comic book, but owes a lot to the Fantastic Four, whose movie rights were recently welcomed back into the Disney fold when Disney completed its purchase of 20th Century Fox’s film division. The end credits of Shazam! feature charmingly scrawled drawings of the main character’s superheroic antics, followed by a post-credits scene goofing on another superhero, both elements that recall Deadpool, an offshoot of the X-Men series, which was also recently absorbed back into Disney via Fox. Disney, of course, owns Marvel, and Captain Marvel, but not Shazam!, which belongs to Warner Bros., which owns DC, which bought the character from Fawcett, the company that originally published stories about Shazam, back when he was called Captain Marvel.
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Lists, TV

4 and 3 and 2 and 1: Counting Down the Best Episodes of Broad City

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When Broad City premiered back in January 2014, it was easy to underestimate. Pitched as an affable stoner millennial version of Laverne and Shirley, it didn’t quite announce itself as the “voice of a generation,” like another hyped-up NYC-set girl-centric show. But as one of the first female-produced series to get a full order from Comedy Central, it had to thread a more delicate needle, smuggling in its fiercely feminist, queer worldview amongst the requisite scatological and drug humor, proving itself the more subversive in the process. Not that the women of Broad City would ever think of themselves as competing with anyone else. Ultimately what makes the show so memorable and endearing is the central partnership of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer and the specificity of the city they inhabit. The genuineness of their love for one another and the seat-of-the-pants mode of their survival felt more realistic to me as I navigated the same metropolis for over a decade (minus the Vicodin-induced Bingo Bronson sightings, regrettably). That I was preparing to leave New York just as the final season of Broad City premiered seemed oddly right. But wherever the series decides to send Abbi and Ilana next, their legacy will continue to live on in shows as varied as HBO’s High Maintenance and Insecure to TBS’s Search Party, and in every “Yaas Queen!” shouted to the heavens. Before we bid farewell, in true SportsAlcohol tradition, let’s celebrate with the five best episodes of this singularly absurd, delightfully daffy show.
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Movies

Watching Mel Gibson Again: DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE

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Mel Gibson was “canceled” in Hollywood before “canceled” was really a thing that could be done to a person instead of a TV show, but in a weird way, his shunning was (for lack of a better phrase) well-timed, beyond even the apparent breaking point of his drunken violence, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. Gibson didn’t really fall from grace until the mid-2000s, saving him the trouble of adapting to a re-aligned movie-star economy. His ‘90s peers in superstardom dealt with it in different ways: Julia Roberts stepped back, Tom Cruise tried to push forward like nothing had changed, and Tom Hanks made a graceful transition to late-middle-aged muse-following (give or take a terrible Dan Brown adaptation or three). Gibson seemed to be pivoting to directing when he made the torturous megahit The Passion of the Christ and the less mega (but also less tedious, honestly probably career-beest) Apocalypto, but after his star fell, he seemed keen on pivoting back into movie-star pulp and/or image maintenance. Audiences mostly stayed away, except for his recent part in the recent Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg sequel Daddy’s Home 2.
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Movies

GLORIA BELL: Is it time for Generation X to get its groove back?!

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Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria Bell, a remake of his Chilean film Gloria from six years ago, follows the broad outline of a light dramedy about a middle-aged woman getting, as the Terry McMillan phrase goes, her groove back. Gloria (Julianne Moore) is fiftysomething, gainfully employed, outwardly cheerful and maybe a little bit lonely. Her children are grown, her divorce long since finalized, and she even has a cute-movie-ready hobby: We first see her out at a dance club, populated by other middle-aged folks, eyes searching and hopeful. She likes to dance, though a lot of her moves are tentative.

Early in the movie, Gloria meets Arnold (John Turturro). They dance together, and soon they’re in a bona fide relationship–passionate, but seemingly with potential that extends beyond a sexy post-club fling. Re-energized sex life… romantic restaurants… her groove! Is it back?! But with the basic framework of a middle-age-revitalization story in place, Lelio feels free to dance around it. Stories like this, especially when they’re focused on providing some degree of fantastical wish-fulfillment, are often belabored with exposition about the protagonist’s normal, perhaps humdrum life. In Gloria Bell, we learn a lot of details about Gloria’s life with a quickness and a clarity that recalls Greta Gerwig or Noah Baumbach (he even captures Moore singing along in her car, alone, in a few shots that recall the intimacy of Gerwig’s earliest moments in Baumbach’s Greenberg). She works for some kind of insurance firm, mostly on the phones. Her young-ish son (Michael Cera) is a single parent to an infant. Gloria does not own a cat, but a hairless one keeps slipping into her apartment somehow. All of this plays out in concise and well-observed micro-scenes, with a near pathological avoidance of overstaying their welcome.
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Movies, Podcast, Sports

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: High Flying Bird

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The SportsAlcohol.com affinity for Steve Soderbergh has been well-documented, and then Soderbergh had to go and do something to entice us even more: He put out a movie on Netflix that we could all watch, about sports (Rob), business (Ben), and the commodification of the body, again (everyone!) that reminded some people of Moneyball (Rob again). So naturally, Marisa, Jesse, Rob, and Ben convened a podcast summit to talk this all out. How does this stack up to past Soderbergh triumphs? Is this the Moneyball we deserve? Will we ever seize the means of production?! Listen to our crisp DIY episode (and our sportiest episode ever!) and find out!

We are now up to SEVEN (7) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Movies

Is Neil Jordan’s GRETA deliciously bonkers, or just kind of bad?

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Neil Jordan’s new movie Greta is a thriller in which a just-graduated young woman (Chloe Grace Moretz), still grieving from the death of her mother, finds herself bedeviled by Greta (Isabelle Huppert), an older woman who initially appears to be a sweet surrogate mom figure but turns out to be a dangerous obsessive. It’s the stuff early-’90s stalker movies were made of, and the throwback angle combined with access to new technology and Jordan’s considerable talent, not to mention a plum role for Huppert, give the movie a buzz of anticipation as it starts to unfold.

That buzz grows dimmer and more erratic as the movie explores the life of Frances (Moretz), who has moved to New York (played mostly by Canada and Ireland) to share a fancy Tribeca apartment with her spoiled best friend Erica (Maika Monroe). The two women speak mostly in awkward exposition, like, well, a couple of middle-aged guys making their best guess at what 22-year-olds sound like. Restless and unsure of herself in the big city, Frances finds a purse abandoned on the 6 train. She tracks down the owner, Huppert’s Greta, who invites her into her charming little house (of undetermined location) for tea. Soon Frances is going to dinner with Greta and helping her adopt a dog, as Erica rolls her eyes over her friend’s weird social engagements.
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Movies

How to Train Your Dragon 3, Lego Movie 2, and kid movies that won’t grow up

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Given the logistical undertaking of making a movie franchise out of big-studio animation, it must be a blessed relief not to have to include live-action performers in the mix. Voice actors can often fit their performances into packed schedules, they can change their appearance without affecting production, they can let natural aging take its course—and if the studio’s hand is forced, they can be replaced with minimal fuss.

It’s notable, then, that the sequels to the 2010 film How to Train Your Dragon have decided not to take advantage of the medium’s potential for eternal youth. The first movie is about a Viking teenager’s bond with the dragon he’s supposed to be hunting; in the sequels, released in 2014 and now in 2019, the boy ages more or less in parallel with the passage of real-world time. He’s taller and more assured in How to Train Your Dragon 2, and in The Hidden World he’s old enough to lead his tribe and think about getting married. Another recent (mostly) animated sequel aimed at kids, The Lego Movie 2, also works the passage of five years into its storyline. The walking, talking Lego minifigs who populate the movie don’t suffer much wear and tear, but in the movie’s parallel live-action storyline, the boy from the first movie is now approaching teen-hood—and his shifting interests are an engine of the sequel’s plot.
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