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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

01:27:57

Beetlejuice

School of Movies ·

2024/11/01

[School of Movies 2024]A perennial Halloween favourite for our family, this was Tim Burton's Sophomore effort, after his debut with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure but before he became a Hollywood Titan with Batman (starring Beetlejuice). And I know we give him a hard time a lot, as a purveyor of populist Goth chic to the masses, but when he hits right you get this movie. And it really does hold up after three and a half decades. Possibly because it's so much fun and so child-friendly that new generations

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02:48:22

Horror is a Spice

School of Movies ·

2024/10/25

[School of Everything Else 2024]This is a special episode I've been planning for many years, ever since the notion that 'Horror' as we know it is largely a marketing construct, and that stories that deliberately jab at our Fear-response can be found pretty much everywhere. This is why I decided to go with my favourite metaphor; food) and hone in on the precept that Horror is not a story type, but a spice (or indeed a series of differently flavoured spices with differing properties) that can be

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01:55

SOM Winter Commissions Season

School of Movies ·

2024/10/24

The window for our Winter Commissions season is now open.Coming up this October we have shows on the first two Psycho films, (as well as touching on the ill-advised Gus Van Sant 1998 remake of the Hitchcock original.) Then a long-planned episode discussing the Horror genre in a new light. And finally on Halloween, we got us a hot, steaming bowl of Beetlejuice. Following that we have Nolan-Vember, from the makers of Cloon-June. Sharon and I will be talking about four of his films on the Main Event

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01:22:42

Psycho II

School of Movies ·

2024/10/18

[School of Movies 2024]This was a commissioned episode for Dean R who was very keen for us to examine this 1983 follow-up to the 1960 classic. This film brings back Anthony Perkins after Norman has served his time and behaved well in crazy-jail, with the 'Mother' persona seemingly dormant. But now we, as the audience may find ourselves strangely onside with the mild-mannered, respectful man, seemingly genuinely trying to go straight, and surrounded by people who want to give this multiple-murderer

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01:27:52

Psycho

School of Movies ·

2024/10/11

[School of Movies 2024]For this rather special episode, we firstly welcome to the show for the first time, director Alfred Hitchcock, as we examine his most famous and most revisited film, Psycho (1960). This became the wellspring from which modern-day detective thrillers emerged. But it also has tangled roots in Horror and the grubby stepchild of its sub-genres, the slasher. While other films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955) and John Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962) -both weirdly

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01:16:08

Godzilla Minus One

School of Movies ·

2024/10/04

[School of Movies 2024]If New Empire is the best Kong film, this one qualifies for us as the best Japanese Godzilla film. Kaiju fans are being blessed with an embarrassment of riches in this era (check out the charming and dazzling animated Ultraman Rising for even more of this) and there has never been a better time to wrap your head around why this enormous nuclear lizard is such an enduring icon in his home country. Journeying back to the 1954 original Gojira, this film re-stages those events in

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01:29:28

Kong X Godzilla: The New Empire

School of Movies ·

2024/09/27

[School of Movies 2024]Fixed the title on this one, to both distinguish it from 2021s Godzilla vs. Kong, AND to give the rightful prominence to the Great Ape whose movie this most definitely is. Willow suggested the original title would be as misleading as "Loki x Thor: Ragnarok". This is my favourite of the new MonsterVerse films, by a narrow margin, considering Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is still absolutely magnificent. Just like that 2019 entry, it's also one of my favourite films of the

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02:13:48

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

School of Movies ·

2024/09/20

[School of Movies 2024]The initial and glowingly positive reviews are coming in for Transformers One this week. It's the first entirely-animated Transformers movie since the infamous Optimus-Prime-slaughtering 'The Transformers: The Movie' in 1986, and I am happy and hopeful for the future in that regard. But what of the state of the live action films? The fifth and final Michael Bay-directed mess was The Last Knight in 2017, which did almost HALF the box office of the obscenely successful Age of

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02:09:25

Deadpool & Wolverine

School of Movies ·

2024/09/13

[School of Movies 2024]One of the biggest films of the year, and the greatest success for the MCU... which weirdly seems to avoid going anywhere near Earth 616, instead acting as either a swansong for the X-Men series, begun in the year 2000, or possibly a phoenix-cry. It really depends on how Marvel handles the Mutants in the next few years. However, as a focused distillation of some of the greatest strengths of those 13 movies this one succeeds where so many others fail, not by being

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03:03:40

Almost Famous

School of Movies ·

2024/09/06

[School of Movies 2024]This one is special on a level I am going to find challenging to articulate in a medium as clumsy as the written word. It is a show that has been promised for well over a decade, it took me four recording sessions and a protracted edit over the month of August. It is so densely and richly layered that I would put it in the same category as our shows on Guillermo del Toro and the Lord of the Rings (ironic, since that was the book the writer/director used to convince his mother

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01:55:55

FELLAS... Is it Gay to...?

School of Movies ·

2024/08/30

[School of Everything Else 2024]This is a very special episode, and might be a lot of folk's favourite of the year. What is a “FELLAS…” scenario? It feels like most of us will have encountered them in the wild as we doomscroll our way through the doldrums of the Misinformation Age. Simply put, it’s when a man asks other men if it is in fact gay to do something in particular, OR it is when a man (and a very cis man at that) makes an empirical statement pronouncing something in particular that a man

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01:58:01

Star Trek: Prodigy

School of Movies ·

2024/08/23

[School of Everything Else 2024]This was a commissioned show for Tylor and Chris Finik. It covers the first two seasons of this animated show which can be found on Netflix, Paramount+ and Nickelodeon. You can listen to the whole thing without fear of anything being made worse, and we keep a lot of secrets and surprises under wraps since statistically most of you won't have seen this. On first inspection it might seem like Star Trek for Babies or Star Trek: Rebels, however, spend some time with it

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02:11:03

Dazed and Confused

School of Movies ·

2024/08/16

[School of Movies 2024]What is a "hangout movie"? It's a film that concerns itself far less with telling one grand, overall story of one or two people's development or journey, and far more on literally spending time with the ensemble cast of characters. In this show I draw the comparison between the characters we see here and animals in a safari park, but I don' mean they are simply placed there for our amusement, and don't matter. What I mean here is that we are experiencing a world based on

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02:10:54

Damsel

School of Movies ·

2024/08/09

[School of Movies 2024] This is a special show for Chris Finik. It would have been a relatively straightforward endeavour for Sharon and I to delve into this one. It's a story that feels familiar and contains many of our very favourite elements; A betrayed lady thriving on her own untapped resourcefulness with help from a chain of women begun long ago, a dragon with an AMAZING voice and a Royal Family squatting on an exploitative predatory system that all needs to be burned down. Plus, we love

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02:08:39

Avatar: The Rise of Kyoshi

School of Movies ·

2024/08/02

[School of Everything Else 2024]This was a commissioned show for Self AKA Selfproclaimed. Ever since The Legend of Aang wrapped in 2008 there have been comics expanding upon what followed the defeat of Fire Lord Ozai. This, however, was a pair of books; 'The Rise of Kyoshi' and 'The Shadow of Kyoshi' detailing what occurred four centuries prior to the adventures of Team Aang. And the 2019-2020 release of these two novels, penned by F.C. Yee with consultancy from co-creator of Avatar Michael Dante

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01:35:46

Klonoa

School of Movies ·

2024/07/26

[School of Everything Else 2024]This was a commissioned show for Dean R who just happens to sit at the ideal age to have discovered Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Vale on PlayStation 2 in 2001 as a kid. After it had a profound effect upon him, he went back to examine the original Klonoa: Door to Phantomile on PS1 from 1996. And while these puzzle-platformers with their poochified, Sonic-looking rabbit/cat thing might on first inspection hold nothing of particular interest I was glad to have been contracted to

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01:25:12

No One Will Save You

School of Movies ·

2024/07/19

[School of Movies 2024]This is a commissioned show for Chris Finik. And unlike the marketing for this straight-to-Hulu film our show is going to be a little more mysterious about the details, because it definitely was worth going in completely ignorant like we did. I even made some arresting artwork for this episode to better convey that this is not your regular thriller. If you have Disney+ that's your evening. It's a silent movie, and I say that as A Quiet Place: Day One is doing quite well in

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01:42:28

Beavis & Butt-Head Do America

School of Movies ·

2024/07/12

[School of Movies 2024]After many years of thinking about how to tackle these two absolute idiots, we found the best angle for us. Ostensibly this is about the 1996 movie, which still holds up today and makes for an appealing, surprisingly general-audience-friendly and brisk hour and 21-minute comedy. This is an achievement, considering their extremely sketchy first incarnation as a pair of cruelly observed Texas teenagers being horrible to frogs. What Sharon and I do here is fill out the absence

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02:25:36

Out of Sight

School of Movies ·

2024/07/05

[School of Movies 2024]Cloon June finally comes to a close with a magnificent romantic thriller, written by Elmore Leonard, the author of Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma and Rum Punch, which became Jackie Brown. This one hit at the tail end of the 90s, and became a significant landmark in the careers of George Clooney, director Steven Soderbergh and George's co-star, a relative newcomer named Jenifer Lopez. Deliberately stylised to evoke the crime thrillers of the 1970s, we do time with smooth-talking

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01:31:40

Tomorrowland

School of Movies ·

2024/06/28

[School of Movies 2024]Initially we were going to cover this 2015 movie as the After School Club to close out Cloon June, but the more we delved into it, the more weighty and disturbingly messy it became. From the mind of visionary animated filmmaker Brad Bird (Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol) comes a movie based on a themed area of Disneyland from 1955 which envisioned a great big beautiful Tomorrow. Now, 60-70 years later, having arrived at a mild dystopia, how can we reconcile what our

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