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PODCAST

School of Movies

Alex & Sharon Shaw

Super in-depth analysis of movies (and occasionally TV, and video games). Hosted by veteran podcasters Alex & Sharon Shaw with different guests for round-table chats every week.

tv & film

All Episodes

01:45:58

The Road to El Dorado

School of Movies ·

2022/04/15

[School of Movies 2022] Back at the turn of the century Dreamworks were going after Disney hard. The first lasting challenge to the mouse monopoly of animated cinema in the west involved a similar hand-drawn traditional style to match their 90s Renaissance. Notably that was a period of amazing achievement following mediocrity, thanks in no small part due to Dreamworks very own Lord Farquaad, Jeffrey Katzenberg. The four films in this soon-abandoned endeavour were The Prince of Egypt, which did

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01:57:22

Withnail & I

School of Movies ·

2022/04/08

[School of Movies 2022] A cult British classic made in 1987, set in 1969 and an utter failure at the box office. With the advent of affordable videos in the 1990s this one later became very popular with students who warmed to its story of two out of work actors living in ridiculous squalor. It's insanely quotable and darkly funny if you have the corresponding frequency of humour (I think I'm going to use this term in future. It's not a binary thing and that misconception is used all too often as a

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01:59:19

Secret of NIMH / American Tail / Land Before Time

School of Movies ·

2022/04/01

[School of Movies 2022] A trio of films that are considered by many to be the crowning glories of Don Bluth's oeuvre. He was one of the only serious competitors to Disney in the last two decades of the 20th Century that they had dominated, in terms of what constituted animated cinema in the west. We take a documentarian approach to how he started, and cover the flourishing of the next few years, breaking off at their high point, actually beating Disney at the box office. After this it was a slow

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02:21:13

Mario Kart

School of Movies ·

2022/03/25

[School of Everything Else 2022] Lunatic eats strange fungus, throws reptile carcases and banana peel out of his car. Everyone cheers! One of the most beloved of game series, the racing title that prides itself on accessibility (most of the time) and appeal to all ages, with a consistently high bar of quality (imagine if every Sonic game had that) and a lasting appeal that both piques nostalgia and makes us excited for the future. What began as a multiplayer sequel to vintage SNES launch title

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01:41:34

Bound

School of Movies ·

2022/03/18

[School of Movies 2022] We continue an unexpected year of diving into the back-catalogue of The Wachowskis. Speed Racer is on the way, and this right here is a dark little neo noir about stealing from murderous mobsters. It's all claustrophobic labyrinthine interiors, black and white, red and green with overtones of German expressionism. Bill Pope the same Director of Photography as the first three Matrix films, Don Davis who likewise handled scoring detail, and Zach Staenberg as editor *and* Joe

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01:35:47

Sing & Sing 2

School of Movies ·

2022/03/11

[School of Movies 2022] This was unexpected... followed by yet more unexpectation. When I first saw the teaser trailer for the original film, all the way back in 2016 I thought the dancing pig picture would be inane and perpetually irritating, only to find out from trusted critics that there was way more below the surface. And they were right, I loved it immediately. Ever since then we've been promising to do a show. So, now we've finally got around to it, as the commission escorted to the front of

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02:01:24

Street Fighter

School of Movies ·

2022/03/04

[School of Movies 2022] Picture the scene; It's late 1994 and young teens who have thrown a thousand hadoukens in arcades and on home consoles throughout the early 90s finally get to go to the cinema and see their favourite characters battling in live action. The casting seems superficially solid. Jean-Claude Van Damme is at the peak of his career path, Raoul Julia was wildly entertaining in the Adams Family movies and The Locomotion... is a catchy tune performed by Australian soap star Kylie

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01:25:31

Akira

School of Movies ·

2022/02/25

[School of Movies 2022] Your eyes do not deceive you, we are doing anime this week. Ironically the only other Main Event show we've done of this ilk is Kiki's Delivery Service, which emerged the year after this film and replaced it as the most expensive Japanese animated cinematically-released production of the era. You wouldn't think it, comparing that sweet tale about an enthusiastic girl who gets burnout in Stockholm to this cyberpunk epic. As striking today as it was in 1988, this is a film of

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01:54:06

Hawkeye

School of Movies ·

2022/02/18

[School of Everything Else 2022] Bouncing back from What If? Marvel came out swinging with a street-level Christmas crime caper. This served the dual purposes of finally giving the least-loved Avenger some substantial spotlighting, and ghosts of his past to deal with, and introducing us to a brand new Hawkeye in the form of Kate Bishop. Hailee Steinfeld was offered the role the moment she walked into casting director Sara Halley Finn's office. Kevin Feige had seen her in Bumblebee, Spider-Verse,

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02:34:15

The Matrix Resurrections

School of Movies ·

2022/02/11

[School of Movies 2022] We come to it at last, maybe the final Matrix film directed by a Wachowski. Though this vein of property is worth too much money to the IP-owner to leave unmined. Representing a refinement and evolution of the philosophies laid down two decades ago. This film was launched a week after Spider-Man: No Way Home and just before Christmas Day, due to a prior arrangement with HBO. This dismal decision, coupled with Lana Wachowski's revised approach to both storytelling and action

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02:23:16

The Matrix Revolutions

School of Movies ·

2022/02/04

[School of Movies 2022] The least-loved, most-hated, and in consequence least-explored of the Matrix saga finally gets the School of Movies treatment. The 1999 original is turned on its head here, resulting in a film that almost seems the inverse of everything that got us fired up in the first place. But it was a necessary refocusing in order to expand outwards from Morpheus' dogmatic vision of "Us vs. Them". Philosophically this lands in a healthier place, even if so much of what we see feels

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01:47:48

The Animatrix

School of Movies ·

2022/01/28

[School of Everything Else 2022] A very solid argument could be made for this being a movie, and thus being in the "Everything Else" category being erroneous. However, the focus of this episode is the trans-media endeavour that The Matrix series became. It straddles four films, a PS2 game named Enter The Matrix, an MMORPG named The Matrix Online and this anthology of nine short animated films, and it is ALL official story canon. The only release which doesn't quite fit this is The Path of Neo,

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02:54:43

The Matrix Reloaded

School of Movies ·

2022/01/21

[School of Movies 2022] For this one we went all-out. It was an incredibly rich and dense discussion for the initial recording and I have added a ton of extra content, all to the sounds of the eclectic soundtrack and the rarely-heard extended score of Don Davis. This is the first part of an evolution of the binary Us vs. Them dichotomy of The Matrix (1999) and was far less successful in ensnaring audiences with expanded perspective. What Film 2 sets up, Film 3 knocks down, and then decades later,

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02:29:31

The Matrix

School of Movies ·

2022/01/14

[School of Movies 2019] NOTE: This is a re-release of the 2019 episode. It is one of our best shows and constitutes vital groundwork before we cover the three sequels over the next few weeks. This one has been a phenomenally long time coming. Not only is it a dense and complex movie that's impossible to fully summarise even in our lengthier shows, not only does it mean a huge amount to millions of people, not only is it intrinsically linked with disappointing sequels (whom some claim don't even

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02:03:04

Avatar

School of Movies ·

2022/01/07

[School of Movies 2022] Highly appropriately we cap off the James Cameron season with both the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. We are starting 2022 with the original Avatar from 2009, and hopefully we will be finishing the year with Avatar 2. But with four more sequels planned out over the next decade it's very possible this man will spend the rest of his life on Pandora. And that feels weirdly appropriate. He spent the first half of the 2000s under the sea, obsessively

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02:27:19

Spider-Man: No Way Home

School of Movies ·

2021/12/31

[School of Movies 2021] A lively and enthusiastic end of one trilogy and setup for a different flavour of future web-slinging, this thing drew gasps, cheers and applause, even from my British audience, and we don't cheer for anything except football. This is a really special and important Spider-Man movie. Beyond all hyperbole and landmark moments in comic-book style crossovers it is a story about the serious toll that being Spidey extracts from everyone under that signature mask. Guests: Brenden

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03:09:43

Titanic

School of Movies ·

2021/12/24

[School of Movies 2021] This is the big one, folks. This is the movie I didn't realise how passionate I was about until we started engaging our analytical style to it. I've had Titanic in the back of my head as a film I really wanted to talk about for many many years, and I suspect i was waiting for The Abyss and True Lies to hit blu ray so we could do a James Cameron Season, or at least for Avatar 2 to finally emerge. In the end we just had to go ahead and hoist the anchor without them. As it turns

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01:21:22

The Ref

School of Movies ·

2021/12/17

[School of Movies 2021] Taking a break from Cameron Season to focus on a holiday movie hardly anybody has seen or knows about. This one from 1994, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer is one of the anti-Christmas set. One for people who see the entire family coming over as a bit of a nightmare, rather than the most wonderful time of the year. The focus is on Lloyd and Caroline Chasseur, a married couple on the rocks, at one another's throats the whole time and each sitting on a powder-keg of resentment

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01:49:33

True Lies

School of Movies ·

2021/12/10

[School of Movies 2021] The Cameron season continues with yet another massive blockbuster for its time that is almost impossible to find in HD today. You can see why we held off this long, just waiting for Jim and the studios to get their act together and release these from the vaults. (Un)luckily(?) Disney have handed the IP over to a new director to make a Disney+ show. It almost certainly won't contain Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jamie Lee Curtis, and the world we're in right now is wildly

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02:10:54

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

School of Movies ·

2021/12/03

[Digital Drift 2015] This was originally released in 2015 in a series covering the (then) five Terminator movies. But it seemed wildly appropriate to recover and spotlight the first two as the Cameron-directed pair stand tall as recognised classics while the rest imitate (though we maintain that Dark Fate from 2019 is a worthy completion of a Trilogy. Check out our April 2020 episode on that woefully overlooked conclusion). Unlike The Abyss everyone has seen T2. So we delve into the subtleties and

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