Tag Archives: godzilla

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Godzilla vs. Kong

Leave a comment
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

After numerous pandemic-related delays, the Godzilla vs. Kong title bout is finally here. For basically as long as SportsAlcohol dot com has existed, we have been your go-to source for monster-movie expertise, especially as it pertains to King Kong and Godzilla. Whether that involves exhaustive Kong History, sharing valuable Godzilla information out in the wild, seeing the Kong on Broadway, cataloging opponents, or re-experiencing the 1998 Godzilla movie, we have been here for Godzilla, Kong, and now, of course, Godzilla vs. Kong, a new movie where the two giant monsters fight and fight and fight. With the invaluable input of our in-house monster expert Nathaniel, we got together to discuss the new movie, which some of us made sure to see twice in the span of half a day, just to give our analysis the extra kick (and punch, and bite) you need. Once you’ve watched Godzilla vs. Kong on HBO Max or, if you can do so safely, in movie theaters worldwide, come back here and listen in on the nerdy conversation you wish you were having at the 24-hour diner!

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 this episode directly here
  • Our most recent episode or two will sometimes be available on our Soundcloud
  • You can listen to the episode (and a bunch of great songs!) in the players below.

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Movies of Summer 2000

Leave a comment
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

It’s that time of year again: Time for us at SportsAlcohol.com to get together and go on a long, wild, fast-paced trip down memory lane to look at the highest-grossing movies at the U.S. domestic box office from twenty years ago. This year, that brings us up to the year 2000, and we may be feeling especially nostalgic given that the summer 2020 movie season is more or less canceled. But not to worry! You can re-experience summer movies past with our own longest-running franchise! From the studio that brought you 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1994 comes our take on the blockbusters of 2000, including:

    • Star vehicles for Cage, Murphy, and Crowe!
    • Nathaniel’s quest to see his most anticipated movie of the summer!
    • A weird schoolyard story about one of the stars of The Perfect Storm!
    • One of our most-discussed movies ever, back for another relitigation!
    • Chickens!!!!
    • AND MORE!!!

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

Lists, Movies

The 20 Best Movies of 2019

Leave a comment
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

There are other lists that came out faster, but are any more accurate than this one? SportsAlcohol.com stands by its years–long track record of delivering not the first best-of-the-year list, but the best one. No other list aggregates the sometimes-disparate, sometimes alarmingly-in-sync opinions of Marisa LaScala, Nathaniel Wharton, Sara Batkie, Jesse Hassenger, and Jeremy Beck. So I won’t take up a lot of time with a fancy intro. You want to see how right we are about everything, and who am I to hold you up? Let’s do it!
Continue reading The 20 Best Movies of 2019 →

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 1998

Leave a comment
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

The summer movie season means sequels galore, and we here at SportsAlcohol.com are happy to oblige with the latest installment of our own long-running series! Since 2014, we’ve been recording a podcast wherein we go through the top summer box office attractions of 20 years earlier and discuss what it was like going to movies in a different era, and how we feel about some of these beloved/despised/moneymaking/money-losing projects now. So, in the tradition of 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1994 comes our blockbuster episode on summer 1998, including:

  • Two asteroids!
  • Two big comedies!
  • One big comedy star trying drama!
  • More Disney song critiques!
  • Unsold Godzilla merchandise languishing at JC Penney!
  • A lightning round of non-blockbusters!
  • AND MORE!

For supplemental reading about the summer of 1998, you might also check out this site’s story “Godzilla ’98” and its companion piece “Armageddon ’98”!

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

Events

SportsAlcohol.com Founder in the Wild: Kevin Geeks Out About Kaiju

Leave a comment
Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
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.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

One Week From Today!
One Night Only!

As you may have noticed, SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Nathaniel is a bit of an expert when it comes to all things Godzilla. If you’re in the NYC area, you get the chance to see him smash through the structures of Monster Island ignorance in person ONE WEEK FROM TODAY at Kevin Geeks Out About Kaiju. The event takes place at the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where you can have a warm peanut-butter-banana cookie with your monster mash. Official description:

The two-hour show features rare clips with everything from fan favorite kaiju to obscure creatures, with appearances by smog monsters, flying turtles, giant bird-beasts and more. With footage you won’t find on Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.

You definitely want to head over to the Alamo website to check out the event trailer.

Okay, now that you’ve done that, you probably want in. Details:

Date: Thursday, July 20, 2017
Time: 7:30 pm
Ticket Price: $15
Rating: NR
Run Time: 120 minutes
Format: Digital
Language: English
Age Policy: 18 and up

BUY TICKETS HERE

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Best Movies of 2016

4 Comments
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

After we voted on our definitive list of the 20 best movies of 2016, naturally we had to get together and talk about it. So Marisa, Sara, Jesse, and Nathaniel assembled on a winter evening to go over everything from The Neon Demon to La La Land; from the movies all four of us listed to the handful that got on the list with the support of just one; from the movies we loved to the movies we really fucking loved. Just like last year, it’s a wide-ranging yet quickly paced conversation that takes you through a year in film way better than any old Oscars ever could!

How To Listen

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

Lists, Movies

The Top 20 Best Movies of 2016

1 Comment
Jesse
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.
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

If the Oscars can wait so long to unveil their best-of-the-year picks, why not us? After all, ours are demonstrably superior to the Academy’s: More eclectic, less predictable, sometimes more weird (often, also, more musical). 2016 wasn’t good for a lot, but it was, as it turned out, a good year for movies. So our core film group — Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Sara — went ahead and picked not 10, not 15, but 20. There was room; there could have been room for even more. We’ll be back with a podcast where we discuss our choices. For now, enjoy our tributes to the movies that moved us most in 2016.
Continue reading The Top 20 Best Movies of 2016 →

Movies

Shin Godzilla (2016)

3 Comments
Nathaniel
Nathaniel
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.
Nathaniel
Latest posts by Nathaniel (see all)

First things first: Shin Godzilla is here! There’s a new Japanese Godzilla film currently playing theaters in the United States and it is pretty spectacular. With a franchise that has lasted over six decades and twenty nine films, audience members will obviously approach it with a wide variety of expectations, so it’s best to know going in that it is a film much more in the vein of the original Godzilla (or 1984’s The Return of Godzilla) than the sillier alien invasion epics that characterized the 60s & 70s. It’s a film with seriousness of purpose, with the most frightening depiction of the title monster in the entire franchise (with the possible exception of the original). But it’s also a deeply eccentric film, with a strain of satire running throughout, and extremely propulsive and idiosyncratic filmmaking choices that render a talky, procedural story breathlessly involving (it’s the Contagion or Apollo 13 of Godzilla movies, or The Martian if Matt Damon was roughly 35 stories high and oozing radioactivity). The story is certainly familiar to fans of the genre, but the presentation can be dizzyingly unfamiliar. Presented in this country with subtitles, it’s an incredibly dense film, with whip fast dialogue (sure to be too talky to some) sometimes fighting for room with other onscreen text (including a running gag where every character with a line is identified by name and title/rank/governmental position, including some characters who get multiple titles as their position changes during the story). It’s a very political film, with some material that will be easily grasped by western audiences and some material that will (and, no doubt in my case, did) fly over their heads. Oh, and the monster sequences are beautiful, thrilling, and full of images that left this Godzilla fan’s jaw on the floor. So, that’s the short of it. Go see the movie! But there’s a lot more to talk about. So, if you want to go deeper, let’s get to it.

(NOTE: I’m going to talk about the story of the film in some detail below. But I’m only going to put another big spoiler warning before I discuss some details about the film’s depiction of Godzilla himself because there was some stuff there that genuinely surprised me!) Continue reading Shin Godzilla (2016) →

Movies

Godzilla: King of the Hollywood Trends

1 Comment
Nathaniel
Nathaniel
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.
Nathaniel
Latest posts by Nathaniel (see all)

For one week, starting today, fans in America and Canada will be able to see Shin Godzilla, the first new Japanese Godzilla movie in twelve years. The film was a smash hit this summer in its native country, and is already proving controversial (mostly sight-unseen) with western fans for both its politics and its portrayal of the title monster. While controversy is certainly not new to the series, its existence surrounding the twenty-ninth(!) entry offers promise that there is still room to try something new as Godzilla enters his seventh decade on screen.

One area that Shin Godzilla seems to be striking new ground in the series is that it is apparently a completely fresh start, establishing its own continuity and not functioning as a sequel to any prior film. That’s right, Shin Godzilla is a reimagining/remake/hard reboot/what-have-you. It’s all the more surprising that his hasn’t happened before when you look and see that so many of the other storytelling trends that Hollywood studios have been chasing over the last fifteen years have been well covered in the Godzilla series. Godzilla wasn’t always there first, but he was usually there early, and I needn’t tell you how big those footprints are.
Continue reading Godzilla: King of the Hollywood Trends →

Movies

Godzilla Week!

Leave a comment
Nathaniel
Nathaniel
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.
Nathaniel
Latest posts by Nathaniel (see all)

Run in terror before SportsAlcohol.com‘s week of Godzilla coverage! We’ve got:

…a Godzilla primer for the uninitiated.

…a rundown of Godzilla’s appearance through the ages.

…a list of suitable opponents, should a sequel arise.

…a look into Godzilla’s work as a TV pitchman and general celebrity.

…a work of short fiction (or is it a memoir?) about the disappointment of seeing Godzilla in 1998.

…a look back at the four movies titled Godzilla (including a reaction to the new film!).

…and a Tumblr where you can see one of our founders as a youth attending a Godzilla convention in a tie-dyed Star Wars t-shirt.