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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

02:29:10

10 Possible Futures

School of Movies ·

2020/10/30

[School of Everything Else 2020] This is a special episode deliberately timed to around the American Election and not far off the official Brexit from Europe. It's a time of great anxiety, so we wanted to give ourselves and our listeners a dose of perspective. So I've collated ten different types of future seen in movies, and I've ranked them from the very worst to the very best. That way we can talk them all through in order, starting with horrendous scenarios that make what we're experiencing

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02:02:06

Deep Impact vs. Armageddon

School of Movies ·

2020/10/23

[School of Movies 2020] Duelling Comets! In 1998, because of the way the movie industry works (or used to) we got not one but TWO films within months of each other, about the Earth facing an extinction-level event from the heavens. Both films largely concern themselves with the American response, both involve sending up a shuttle to blow the meteor apart, both feature lower-scale destruction as a fireworks show selling-point, and both are filled with bad performances from a cast that includes great

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01:42:20

Minority Report & War of the Worlds

School of Movies ·

2020/10/16

[School of Movies 2020] To date Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise have worked together twice in their careers. And since they were two dark future-shock movies that were released close together in the early 2000s we figured we'd cover them both as a double-bill. It's fairly extraordinary what a different world we are seeing here, than just a few years beforehand in the 90s. And in particular the age of terror paranoia of War of the Worlds now feels like a distant memory, what with everything

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01:21:02

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

School of Movies ·

2020/10/09

[School of Movies 2020] What existed for years as an ongoing project for Stanley Kubrick became one of the only treehouses he let his friend Steven in on. Eventually Stan decided his approach alone could not ideally shape A.I. for the screen, and that this story needed Spielberg to direct. Stan offered to play producer. And then he died. So Steven picked up the pre-production art, concepts and development, including the Robin Williams footage directed and recorded by Kubrick himself, abandoned what

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01:18:41

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

School of Movies ·

2020/10/03

[Digital Drift 2015] The second 2015 re-release from our dino season. You can go back to the separate School of Movies Archive podcast feed that a lot of people don't know about, but it has more than 200 of our pre-2017 shows. On there you'll find our episodes on Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World and at some point in the future we'll tackle Fallen Kingdom. This one is a weird and tonally dissonant path, relative to the original masterpiece. We uncover the movie of the book that Michael Crichton

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01:06:43

Schindler's List (Hook & Jurassic Park Revisited)

School of Movies ·

2020/10/02

[School of Movies 2020] A long time ago, around late 2013, Sharon and I recorded a shortish piece on Hook. It was just before Robin Williams passed, and so the file sat in our archive, unreleased, along with the one on Mrs Doubtfire. We just didn't want to be scornful of something he had done during that period of shock and mourning. Eventually in 2015 we combined that section with a new one on the 2003 Peter Pan to make a comparative show, and it did not compare favourably. I put that down to us

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02:54:13

Jurassic Park

School of Movies ·

2020/10/01

[Digital Drift 2015] Way back when Jurassic World was released (and we were all excited for what might have been the first really good Jurassic sequel) Digital Drift as this show was known at the time, put out one of our best episodes ever, on the 1993 original. So this is both a re-release and an essential, restored component of the Spielberg season. Still as fresh and endlessly entertaining to us as it was decades ago, this film is rarely out of our re-watching rotation, and as such I know it

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02:13:12

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

School of Movies ·

2020/09/25

[School of Movies 2020] The man in the hat is back, and this time he's brought his father. What could have been a much goofier, hapless escapade, diffusing the focus of Raiders, turned out to be the most personal journey for Henry Jones, (Junior and Senior). There's a real thrill to be had from the idea of picking up a search that has spanned thousands of years and racing the Nazis to this immensely symbolic artefact, which itself contains a tricksy definition of what Eternal Life entails. This film

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01:39:41

Flight of the Navigator

School of Movies ·

2020/08/21

[School of Movies 2020] A boy gets snatched out of 1978 Florida by an alien intelligence and dumped back there eight years later, having only lost a few hours. A quirk of lightspeed travel that screws up his entire existence and has wrecked his family. That's right it's a fun little sci-fi from Disney! Navigator was one of those also-rans. Not renowned for its cinema release but dearly beloved by the kids who discovered it on video and TV. It has a Twilight Zone concept that it takes seriously, it

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01:52:32

Mystery Men

School of Movies ·

2020/06/05

[School of Movies 2020] As we languish in the ellipses between Phases 3 and 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as Batman goes on hold, Superman hangs in the balance, Wonder Woman waits for her delayed sequel release, and the X-Men are quietly reshaped by Disney's Fungineers, and the only big bit of news for this breakdown in the age of superheroes is the Snyder Cut finally getting a chance to be put together. So tonight, we here at School of Movies remember the other guys (not the movie with Mark

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02:13:06

Raiders of the Lost Ark

School of Movies ·

2020/02/28

[School of Movies 2020] Our year of Spielberg continues. Prior to Jaws in '75 he directed Duel and The Sugarland Express, and after it came Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941. We talk about all of these on our Quick Review Patreon bonus feed, but we are saving the Main Event shows for the ones we have a LOT to say about. In 1981, a year after The Empire Strikes Back, Steve collaborated with his buddy George Lucas to give Harrison Ford his second iconic silver screen role; embodying the most

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02:16:07

The Sound of Gonzo: Vol 13 [The Star Wars Prequel...

School of Movies ·

2019/12/27

[School of Everything Else 2019] In a bid to search for the best in everything I recruited James Batchelor to journey back to the three films with which I started my movie podcast career in earnest. Back in 2010 that took the form of a raw torrent of frustration and derision, but I'm trying to save that for the deserving. Instead, this time round, my enthusiastic colleague and I have found the best pieces of scoring within those three films, to showcase for all of you. Join us for a journey from

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02:27:25

The Dark Crystal

School of Movies ·

2019/12/20

[School of Movies 2019] In this episode we cover both the 1982 Jim Henson movie and the 2019 Netflix series; Age of Resistance. You can listen to our podcast first, it will make both better. One of the most striking, extraordinary and dignified attempts at the fantasy cinema of the 1980s, the original movie was massively important to few, but Sharon was among them. There was absolutely no rational reason why Netflix would attempt a show based on a property that didn't exactly set the box office

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01:55:57

Big Hero 6

School of Movies ·

2019/12/06

[School of Movies 2019] It appears to be decreed that Disney must sandwich every princess film in their animated classics canon with one that is either accessible to the whole family (like Zootopia) or one that at least suggests it will appeal to male-coded interests. In this case Wreck-It Ralph with all those video games (that girls love too) and Big Hero 6 with all its superheroes (that girls love too). In this case Disney's first attempt at adapting a Marvel comic book with no connection to the

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03:11:05

Frozen

School of Movies ·

2019/11/28

[School of Movies 2019] The Disney series continues, and in fact this run of four episodes (including the re-release of the 2016 show on Zootopia) marks our project finally coming up to date, since we began this way back around the time Frozen was being released. We will of course return in years to come with another stretch of episodes on Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya and the Last Dragon and whatever comes next. But for now this gets us to a place we want to be. I think people

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02:18:01

The Shining

School of Movies ·

2019/11/15

[School of Movies 2019] The Kubrick season concludes with arguably his most celebrated film (the only other contender being Space Odyssey). This is the one we set out to talk about, but we had to try our level best to understand the men behind it as we did so. Making this a continuation of our Stephen King adaptations series where we compare the book and film (including IT, Pet Sematary and at some point in the future Stand by Me, Misery, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption). So we watched

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01:29:47

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

School of Movies ·

2019/08/23

[School of Movies 2019] This was an unexpected one. We geared up for a Quick Review mere minutes after coming back from the cinema and then stuff just came flooding out. We send that recording to a few people to see if it was Main Event material and they pretty much demanded we get this out for everyone. So we added new sections and recorded a companion piece round-table session with two new guests (being released this week as a Cutting Class episode). Quentin Tarantino's ninth film has made critics

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01:51:06

Sing Street

School of Movies ·

2019/08/16

[School of Movies 2019] The second commissioned show of our summer quickly grew from a film we liked a lot to one of our absolute favourites. This little-seen gem about teenage rebellion in Dublin, Ireland, 1985 is something we would love more people to know about. Directed by John Carney, the man behind Once and Begin Again, this is semi-autobiographical and features a measure of authenticity and respect for young people that the very best films about growing up thrive on. It's also got some of the

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02:12:25

Fate of the Furious + Hobbs & Shaw

School of Movies ·

2019/08/09

[School of Movies 2019] It feels like a lifetime since 2015. Back then, during the tail end of the Obama administration we were enjoying the run-up to new Star Wars movies and Mad Max was about to blow everyone away with one of the greatest automobile stunt-fests of all time. But also Sharon and I were getting back into the Fast & Furious films very late after drifting away for a while. We were able to appreciate films 5, 6 and then the real life tragedy of 7 with a sharp immediacy. Since that

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01:56:57

Dark Phoenix

School of Movies ·

2019/06/21

[School of Movies 2019] Time to close the book on the Fox X-Men movies and the podcast series that Sharon and I started in 2014. If you haven't seen the film (and statistically this is the case) we will talk you through it. We can't spoil anything. There's no surprises TO spoil. It might sound like we're furious and that we hate this thing, but our response is something more like intense disappointment spread over two decades, so that it becomes *expected* disappointment. It stems from a place of

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