The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast Lost Episode: Indie Movies of Summer 2022

Hey there! It’s been a while, I know! We recorded our annual wrap-up of highlights from an indie-movie summer (and recommendations for a healthy streaming fall) back in September, but life, paid gigs, and occasionally COVID got in the way of Jesse actually editing the damn thing and getting it out into the world. I thought this particular movie podcast episode might feel outdated now that it’s December, but as it turns out, this is a terrific compendium of summer indies that will probably be largely overlooked as we head into the big end-of-year list-making season. Plus, some of these movies are newly available on Netflix and/or Hulu and/or old pals at AMC Plus, an organization that we make a case should be sponsoring us on this very episode! So let Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse take you on a whirlwind tour of the movies you might have missed last summer while you were seeing Top Gun 2 a third time! You won’t regret it!

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The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 1992

Summer 2022 is officially and unequivocally over. Long live summer 1992! As we continue to sweep the corners on summer movies past, we have arrived at the summer movies of 1992, which looks a hell of a lot different from 2022 or 2002. Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin haven’t yet teamed up for Bowfinger (and are both trying their hands at screwball rom-coms of sorts). Jack Ryan is only on his third actor. Tom Cruise is there, but he’s Irish. There’s just one superhero movie, and it’s way hornier than usual. And girls?!? Playing baseball??! To sort through all of this, we’ve reunited Nathaniel, Ben, Marisa, Becca, Jeremy, and Jesse to talk about our experiences (largely but not entirely facilitated by home video!) with this eclectic and occasionally maddening look at the summer movies of 1992.

If you need to catch up before checking out the latest and greatest, here’s the complete history of this project:

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PEARL is a pandemic horror movie, but not how you might think

Earlier this year, Ti West released his horror movie X, which was shot one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, just before the wide availability of vaccines, taking advantage of New Zealand’s rigorous quarantine standards and relatively contained virus. The movie, about a small crew attempting to shoot a porn movie on a secluded farm in 1979, is a recognizably pandemic-related production in its limited locations and modest cast size, but that’s ultimately just a behind-the-scenes tidbit—one of many COVID-era productions where the precautions and nerves are allowed to stay mostly offscreen. X has plenty else closer to front of mind, too, about the joys of low-budget filmmaking, the desperate drive of young flesh and corresponding frustrations of old age, and how society expects sexual desire to dwindle with time, especially in women. (It’s also, somehow, a wildly entertaining slasher picture.) There was no need to make it a pandemic movie, too. But it turns out, West and his star Mia Goth did actually make a pandemic movie out in New Zealand; they just didn’t tell anyone until X was all done.

Pearl, a prequel of sorts to X, offers an origin story for that movie’s principal killer (played by Goth in old-age makeup in the film, the better to double her with Maxine, the aspiring porn actress still in full command of her youthful heat). It doesn’t best X, but it certainly out-pandemics it: West and Goth co-wrote the movie quickly during their New Zealand arrival quarantine, preparing to take advantage of the X sets by placing Pearl largely on the same farm sixtysomething years earlier. Beyond that practicality, though, Pearl is a COVID movie in its soul, even if the movie doesn’t exactly come out and say it.
Continue reading PEARL is a pandemic horror movie, but not how you might think

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 2002

As the 2022 summer movie season continues its extended wind-down period, maybe you’re thinking wistfully about summer movie seasons of the past. Here at SportsAlcohol.com, we are near-constantly thinking about summer movie seasons of the past, as part of our ongoing project to discuss the biggest summer hits of the past 20-to-30 years. This year, it’s time to talk about summer movies of 2002. (And 1992’s turn will be coming up shortly.) It’s another transitional period for the American Summer Movie, as we see the beginning of Bourne, the end of Austin Powers, a new beginning for Adam Sandler, and the beginning of the end before the next beginning of Tom Cruise. And we’ve got an all-star crew of Nathaniel, Jeremy, Becca, Ben, Marisa, and Jesse here to talk about our experiences with these movies back in the day, and also today. Hear Ben and Nathaniel debate Attack of the Clones! Take a tour of Becca’s long-standing movie-star crushes! Find out which movie made Marisa burst into tears of fright and which movie Jeremy absolutely hated! It’s all here, in our summer movies of 2002 extravaganza!

If you need to catch up before checking out the latest and greatest, here’s the complete history of this project:

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RESURRECTION is a well-shot workshop-level mediocrity

The new psychological horror-thriller Resurrection burns slowly, with two elements guaranteed to hold my attention. One is Rebecca Hall, who has become one of the movies’ foremost chroniclers of a loosening grip on rationality, in large part because she projects such an unwavering intelligence. The other is the city of Albany, located 30 miles south of where I grew up, and rarely captured on film with such evocative clarity. (Usually, if it’s being captured at all, it’s to stand in for other cities.) Hall plays Margaret, a successful executive and single mother, whose Albany-based life is a feat of imposed order, reflected in the modernist/brutalist architecture of the city skyline. She’s a mentor at work at a doting, perhaps overprotective mother to her teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman), who is close to leaving the nest for college. And when David (Tim Roth), a figure from her past, re-appears, she slowly begins to unravel.

David seems to know he would have this effect on her. At first, their encounters are barely that—Margaret thinks she glimpses him in the distance, or finds him on a public bench, seemingly minding his business. Is he a hallucination, even? He’s such a ghostly figure that it seems possible, though no one looks askance when the two appear in public together. Margaret may wish that she was merely talking to herself, but that’s not the case. Fearing for the safety of her child, she tightens her grip, and of course Abbie, and the rest of her world, resists this attempt at control. David won’t make a move to generate suspicion in the eyes of anyone else, but he also refuses to be denied.

I may have just described to you an eerie, unnerving horror movie of rare discipline and exactitude. If so, I apologize, because Resurrection is, for the most part, a well-shot crock of shit.

As a slow burn, it’s intriguing but ultimately low-key incompetent. Half a movie’s worth of creepy build-up gives way to a monologue from Hall that’s obviously supposed to be a bravura minimalist one-take set piece, where she unloads her character’s entire salient background as it pertains to her nightmarish relationship with David. There’s relief, at first, in the way the movie finally lays its cards on the table after so much intentional withholding—a clever reversal after creating the expectation that maybe writer-director Andrew Semans would keep everything close to the vest for the entire runtime, or at least until the final minutes. But though Hall gives this scene her best—if she can convincingly feign concern over a massive CG ape in Godzilla vs. Kong, of course she can kill it with a juicy monologue—it’s also the point where Resurrection no longer seems to trust her carefully calibrated performance. She can convey so much through her expression or her behavior, as she does in The Night House and countless other movies; giving her a baldly expositional ten-minute monologue doesn’t necessarily serve her character or performance. It serves the movie’s desire to shock and provoke.

It is provocative, I’ll give it that; this is a movie dying for its “F” CinemaScore badge of honor. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, I’ll say that Margaret reveals the details of an abusive relationship she had with David when she was a young woman, capped by an off-screen (both in terms of the movie and her own eyes) act of pure evil, made especially insidious by Margaret being forced to rely on David’s account of the incident. His telling adds a layer of fantastical impossibility, and now that he’s returned to her orbit, the psychological gravity of his bizarre claims threatens to pull her back in.

The thing is, what David tells Margaret about their old life together sounds like incoherent (and, conceptually, rather abstract) ranting, delivered with am eerie (some might say minimally acted) calm by Roth. It’s a gambit doubtless designed to make Resurrection really go there. The movie is clearly trying to say something both about the controlling, irrational nature of abuse, and, perhaps secondarily, about the psychological horrors of a parent attempting to keep their child safe. Mainly, that… they really suck and can make you do bad stuff? That central monologue does both too much and too little; it explains everything so precisely and directly that it breaks the film’s mysterious spell, while also failing to make a convincing case for Margaret believing something that is not just highly unlikely, but literally impossible. Yes, yes, this is the insidious and seductive nature of abuse, illustrating how that power may never actually go away, and so on. But if this is metaphorical, it’s also tautological: Believing stuff your abusive partner says is as irrational and unwinnable and damaging as… believing stuff your abusive partner says.

A movie canny enough to simply rip off The Vanishing might have shifted the emphasis from the impossible to the unknown: David is in the position to promise Margaret access to something she desperately wants, if only she submits to him. Isn’t that more in the realm of abuse, the promise of something that could technically happen—that the abuser will provide some semblance of what the abused desperately wants—but in reality will not? Instead, David promises Margaret something absolutely insane, and she submits to him.

This could make a case for operating on a more abstract, dreamlike level if Resurrection was more visceral, or even just entertaining. On a purely practical level, this revelation sends the movie into a slog of repetition: Margaret faces David, spits venom at him, tries to strong-arm him into leaving her alone; he reacts with an unflappable, sanguine smugness; she bends to his will in some way or another; repeat, repeat, repeat. Add in some boilerplate scenes of Margaret trying and failing to exert control over her daughter, and Semans also sours a potent metaphor about parenting into programmatic plot points (while tacitly insisting that these are no mere plot points).

All of this simmering tedium does come to a head, in a scene that is, admittedly, a wild ride—though perhaps it seems more like one because the movie has heretofore self-consciously restrained itself beyond all reason. Resurrection ultimately feels like it was reverse-engineered to reach this big confrontation between Margaret and David, and look, the sequence has its moments; there is one in particular, involving the appearance of a knife, that made me laugh in delight, a momentary heedlessness taking over all the preciously arranged writer’s conceits. Then—and again, trying to avoid spoilers on a movie I by this point despised—there’s a “crazy” turn as predictable as any writing workshop short story, chased with an equally predictable note of ambiguity in the denouement. These aren’t moments of impossible-yet-inevitable clarity that dot good literary fiction; they’re the only moves Semans can really make, because the movie’s nightmare logic is narrower than it looks. Mostly, it looks a lot like an “elevated” horror movie greenlit in the wake of Hereditary. Even the distinctive Albany Look gradually recedes from view.

At best, Resurrection is a geek show. At worst, it’s a game of three-card monte that’s all shuffling and no meaningful catharsis. It’s one thing to rig a card game; it’s quite another for the dealer attempt to convince you it’s actually been an interpretive dance.

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Doctor Strange 2 and the Films of Sam Raimi

All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up: Sam Raimi put out his first new movie in nine years this summer, returning to the world of Marvel superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. We thought it would be a good time to revisit all of his older films and, in the process, analyze just how much of his voice can be heard in the MCU machine. And though Jesse did not edit this episode in a timely manner, Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange 2 is now on Disney+, so you can do a full Sam Raimi marathon, from Evil Dead trilogy to the normal-movie trilogy to the Spider-Man trilogy and beyond, from the comfort of home! Join Nathaniel, Jeremy, Marisa, and Jesse as we discuss every single Sam Raimi feature film, including his latest. Who defends Oz the Great and Powerful? Who was not feeling Darkman? Who loves The Quick and the Dead more now than as a callow teenager? Now dig on this and find out! (And if we don’t talk enough about Spidey for your tastes, there’s always this old episode!)

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The Best Movies of 2021

It’s been a long year. I’m referring, of course, to 2020, which is still going, some 800-plus days after it started. Oh, it’s 2022?! Ah, shit. That means this list is super-late. Sorry! But maybe we could all use some extra time to think about our choices, and how extremely correct they all are. I won’t waste any more time. Let’s get to the list for another year where everything was garbage but the movies. You can listen to us defend our choices here.
Continue reading The Best Movies of 2021

The SportsAlcohol.dom Podcast Double Feature: Best Movies of 2021, and the Oscars

It’s been a quiet winter, podcasting-wise, at SportsAlcohol.com HQ, but now Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, and Jesse are back with two new retrospective episodes! In the first, we continue our annual tradition of counting down our collective top 15 movies of the year (that’s 2021, not 2022). The full list will be on the site soon, but you can get a preview with our discussion of group and personal faves. Then we convened to talk about some of the best-and-other movies of 2021, offering our predictions, preferences, and occasional complaints about the recent Oscar nominations. Sure, it’s March, but the Oscars still haven’t happened yet! So why not take a last listen to us talking about the highlights (and occasional Oscar-honored lowlights) of the 2021 movie year? It’s been a rollercoaster year-plus, but keep in mind: Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

We are now up to SEVEN (7) 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.
  • I don’t really know what Stitcher is, but we are also on Stitcher.
  • SportsAlcohol.com is a proud member of the Aha Radio Network. What is Aha? It’s kind of like Stitcher, but for your car.
  • You can download the mp3 of the episode directly here for the best movies of 2021 and here for the Oscars.
  • Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud. We don’t always have it working right but there’s good stuff there regardless!
  • You can listen to the episodes in the players below.

TRACK MARKS 2021: “4Runner” by Rostam

Track Marks is a recurring SportsAlcohol.com feature that invites writers to briefly discuss a song that is meaningful to them in any way. Though they can appear on the site at any time, we always run a bunch of them around the turn of a new year, looking back at the previous year in music.

There was a brief, blink-and-you-missed-it period when it seemed like everything was going to be okay. That we’d pull through this whole COVID mess; the masks could be doffed, the social distance between us closed. It’s hard to believe now as Omicron continues to wreck its havoc on vacation planning and school reopenings, but during the weeks of June and July 2021 when it seemed like this great disaster was about to be in the rearview, Rostam’s swoony “4Runner” was my personal soundtrack.

This isn’t to say I was spending a lot of that period driving around; even two and a half years after moving back to the Midwest I still don’t have a car. But like the titular vehicle, “4Runner” is a track designed for the open road, even if it’s just one you’re riding in your mind. Rostam seemed to anticipate this by releasing the single way back in March of 2021, when most of us were still homebound, in advance of his second solo album Changephobia. Though he hasn’t collaborated with Vampire Weekend in several years now, the song recalls some of their breeziest work, though it’s much less indebted to Paul Simon’s multicultural melange than the self-consciously cinematic sweep of Roxy Music.

Employing a surging mix of 12-string acoustic guitar, drums, and a Moog bass, Rostam constructs a euphoric ode to queer love and the freedom that can be found as much in a lover’s arms as the wind in your hair. The lyrics paint a nostalgic portrait of a couple who could be on the road or on the run: the 4Runner they’re driving has stolen plates, after all. A sense of illicitness, even danger, hangs over the scene; at one point Rostam mentions the knife his partner keeps in the passenger door. The song never boils over into melodrama, though. This isn’t a Thelma & Louise story, doomed to end in tragedy. There are no cars careening into canyons here. Instead there’s an acknowledgment that uncertainty is part of the trade-off of partnership, and might even be one of the rewards. “I’m waiting down the street. Take all the time you want to come,” Rostam sings, the music fading beneath him like a sunset, a daily event that can still feel momentous despite its constancy. It was difficult to be spontaneous this past year, but “4Runner” reminds us what it feels like to throw caution to the wind and take off somewhere unmapped, if only for three-and-a-half minutes at a time.

TRACK MARKS 2021: “Final Girl” by Chvrches

Track Marks is a recurring SportsAlcohol.com feature that invites writers to briefly discuss a song that is meaningful to them in any way. Though they can appear on the site at any time, we always run a bunch of them around the turn of a new year, looking back at the previous year in music.

The music of Chvrches has always had a widescreen quality: With its swooning synths and pealing guitars, it’s virtually engineered to soundtrack a Michael Mann epic. But on “Final Girl,” the Scottish synth-pop trio isn’t just making music fit for the movies; they’re placing themselves within the movies. The title, as those steeped in pop culture well know, refers to the sometimes-virginal victim of a horror film, the last woman standing (and screaming) after the killer has eviscerated her hapless friends. Is lead singer Lauren Mayberry equating the burdens of feminine fame to the terrors of haunted-house mayhem, with toxic internet trolls swarming her with the destructive zeal of an inexorable slasher? She certainly seems battered, if not broken; whereas in the past she “could drown it out by filling up the silence with an organ sound,” now she’s wondering if she should just quit and go get married.

Final girls can’t give up, though. They’re defined by their endurance, their pluck, their defiant survival. And if a decade of commercial success has sapped Mayberry of her artistic enthusiasm, that’s news to Chvrches’ listeners, because “Final Girl” represents a band at the peak of its musical powers. Structurally, there’s nothing fancy about the song; it’s just a couple of verses, along with the usual pre- and post-chorus. But the compact, muscular arrangement bristles with precision and verve, the steady repetition paradoxically creating kinetic momentum. All of the harmonizing instruments—the glittering keyboards, the sliding guitars, the punchy percussion—are perfectly synchronized, and appropriately subservient to the clarion beauty of Mayberry’s voice. (During the chorus, she muses whether she should have changed her accent to make herself sound more attractive, a wistful piece of self-reflection which ignores the fact that her accent totally rules.) This exactitude lends the imagery a chilling vividness; when Mayberry conjures the vision of someone finding their daughter in a body bag, you can practically see the coroner pulling up the zipper.

“Final Girl” deftly mingles the personal with the professional—it’s an introspective diary entry that’s been crafted with brash, boisterous confidence—but in the spirit of the best slasher flicks, it saves its biggest twist for the finale. Mayberry has already mentioned the track’s title on her initial run through the post-chorus, but the second time around she asks, “There’s a final girl / Does she look like me?” It’s a jolting question, one that ponders just how much of ourselves we see when we’re staring at a movie screen. “She should be screaming!” Mayberry sings, her voice cresting with urgency as the mix gradually dissolves into an extended hiss of reverb. It’s a fitting non-ending, one that primes you to anticipate a sequel. And why not? With music this rich and taut and assured, Chvrches deserve a whole damn cinematic universe.