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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Best Movies of 2016

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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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!

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Lists, Movies

The Top 20 Best Movies of 2016

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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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.
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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Star Wars, Rogue One, and the Forever Franchise

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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Just as TV shows don’t really end anymore, the new platonic ideal for a movie series, at least for some fans and/or execs, is one that keeps going indefinitely, with no end designed or in sight. That’s what seems to have happened to the Star Wars series following its 2012 sale to the Walt Disney Company, resulting in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first Star Wars movie without an “episode” designation. Naturally, Rob and Sabrina and Nathaniel and Marisa and Jesse went to see it and naturally we all had some opinions.

Our second Star Wars podcast, then, examines Rogue One and our thoughts on it, along with how it fits into this new mass-media landscape of franchises that just don’t know when to quit. Glory to our thoughts on Rogue One as a prequel, the uncanny valley, our internal squabbling over the status of the various Extended Universes, and our many impromptu pitches for further Star Wars spinoffs, and that’s before we even get to talking about the Fox X-Men movies and the DCEU. It’s all very nerdy and spoilery and you’re gonna love it.

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Career of Tim Burton

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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Tim Burton is easily one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood, with a name awareness up there with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Christopher Nolan. Yet in recent years, the director, whose new movie Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children just came out, has been the target of plenty of scorn, too. Is he an underappreciated auteur, a self-plagiarizing hack, or something in between? Is Miss Peregrine a comeback or did he not really go anywhere? What’s up with how much the internet hates Alice in Wonderland?

These questions and more are at the heart of our Tim Burton podcast, where Nathaniel, Marisa, and Jesse started with his new movie and wound up discussing every single feature he’s directed in some capacity. We talk about the best, the worst, the unloved and the underloved. Who sticks up for what? Who has a hot take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? And what have any of us bought at Hot Topic? Listen up and find out.

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Indie Movies of Summer 2016

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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Everyone thinks of summer as blockbuster season for movies, but the truth is, May, June, July, and August always see the release of a ton of indie movies, often of high quality. For the second year in a row, Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse got together in Brooklyn to talk about the smaller-scale fare they watched over the past few months, blazing through hot take after hot take on over a dozen recent releases. If you’re sick of Suicide Squads, pets with secret lives, and Jason Bournes, go ahead and find out what we thought of The Lobster, Cafe Society, A Bigger Splash, The Neon Demon, Hell or High Water, and more indie movies you can add to your Netflix queue (or in some cases, still catch in a theater near you) as fall approaches.

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Comics, Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol Podcast: Suicide Squad

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Rob
Rob
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.
Rob
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By the time you listen to this, The Suicide Squad movie will have set a box office record for August while receiving such bad reviews its fans are petitioning to shut down review aggregate site rottentomatoes.com. So is it any good? There’s actually a lot to break down here:

  • Studio meddling
  • Racism
  • Ike Barinholtz
  • Sexism
  • Soundtrack cues
  • The triumph of Margot Robbie
  • Unnecessary DC vs Marvel comparisons
  • The many lives of Jai Courtney’s career
  • How much worse Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was
  • Hollywood It Boy Joel Kinnaman
  • Method Acting
  • Ike Barinholtz again for good measure

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Movies, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: What Makes Us Cry at Movies (and TV)

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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When was the last time you cried at a movie? That’s a question posed toward the beginning of this Very Special episode of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast, in which Nathaniel, Marisa, Jesse, Sara, and Jon get personal about crying at movies (or TV shows): how often it happens, when we respect it and when we resent it, and why we react the way we do to certain types of emotional button-pushing (or lack thereof). Crying at movies is a near-universal topic, and we’ve tried to be very specific in our wide-ranging discussion that we promise is not a total bummer.

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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Independence Day: Resurgence and Long-Gap Sequels

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
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Happy almost Independence Day! And, perhaps, less-happy Independence Day! That’s right, the 1996 blockbuster is back with Independence Day: Resurgence, a direct sequel that’s already underperforming compared to the original (at least at the U.S. box office). Undeterred by bad buzz or lack of press screenings, Marisa, Nathaniel, and Jesse went to see it, then reconvened to discuss the movie, as well as what goes into an effective twenty-years-later sequel. We talk about what we thought of Independence Day: Resurgence, of course, but we also touch upon Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Dumber and Dumber, Wild Wild West, Space Jam, and lots of other stuff you might not expect.

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Movies

WIENER-DOG inspires the bold question: Does Todd Solondz hate us?

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

Twenty years on, and I’m still having trouble getting a bead on Todd Solondz. Wiener-Dog is not exactly a twenty-years-later sequel to 1996’s Welcome to the Dollhouse to accompany this weekend’s twenty-years-later sequel to 1996’s Independence Day. Yet briefly, it totally is. One quarter of the movie’s dog-connected anthology follows Dawn Wiener, the awkward twelve-year-old played by Heather Matarazzo in Dollhouse, as a thirtysomething woman played by Greta Gerwig.

Close followers of Solondz’s work will not a discrepancy: We were told at the outset of his film Palindromes that Wiener gained a bunch of weight and killed herself. It was a non-grace note in a movie that wasn’t even about Dawn Wiener, but did have its main character (her cousin) played by eight different performers. Since that movie, he made one called Life During Wartime that is a direct sequel to the movie Happiness, except with every single character recast. In Dark Horse, Selma Blair quietly reprises a character she played in Storytelling who no longer looks or acts much like she did in the earlier film. The title of the Dawn-resurrecting Wiener-Dog is also the cruel nickname the character was given at school in Dollhouse, but here actually refers to an actual wiener-dog, who scampers through a series of owners, including Dawn Wiener.

So, again I ask: What the hell is going on with Todd Solondz? Does he think of his filmography as an ongoing, mutating art project, where recasting characters throws them into ever more fascinating contexts? Or do a lot of actors not want to work with him again? Does he compulsively revisit aspects of Dollhouse to tweak expectations about how his movies will compare to his still-biggest success? Or can he not leave well enough alone? And am I being a nerdy pedant for finding it kind of annoying, for not ginning up the interest to see Life During Wartime because I thought Happiness was great and had no desire to see a different rep company inhabit and sequelize those roles?
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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Summer Movies from 1996

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Jesse
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.
Jesse
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

Summer is here! It may not technically start until June, but Memorial Day Weekend is sort of the cultural kick-off to summer. It used to be when the first big summer movies would start to roll out, but those have been moved up to the first weekend in May. Our latest podcast throws back to a time when that tradition wasn’t quite in place; as per our now-annual tradition, we took a look back at the ten highest-grossing movies from summer 1996. Summer 1996 saw the release of a variety of audience favorites and forgotten non-gems; please enjoy our thoughts about a bunch of old movies and in some cases, what we were up to twenty years ago. What’s our favorite Michael Bay movie? What summer 1996 movies wouldn’t fly today? Which stars had hot streaks continue or crash and burn? These are the questions this podcast will endeavor to answer.

Spoiler Warning: Lots of spoilers for movies that are two decades old.

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