Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Episode 2 - 20 - 12

It's the end of February, which means the Oscars are approaching and the time for our annual blaxploitation special is at hand. Ooh, we made it funky, dropped a few beats, put a l'il stank on 'em, and sent them out to sensuously massage the ears of a grateful public. In between seriously groovy musical diversions from 70s heavy-hitters Quincy Jones and Curtis Mayfield, we discussed the controversial history of the genre and the lingering influence it had on the careers of Samuel Jackson and Quintin Tarantino, to name a few. And, blegh, speaking of funky...we also had to review a truly cloacal film, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. I don't even know why this was a Ghost Rider film at all, as it bears no resemblance to its shitty precursor, or even the comic franchise as a whole; it just happens that a fireskull monster appears after Nicolas Cage clearly goes off his bipolar medication. And seriously, this contained some of the best Nic Cage-ing since "Not the bees!!!" and it still wasn't watchable. This is unacceptable.

We heard music from the following:

Across 110th Street, 1972 - J.J. Johnson
Supafly, 1972 - Curtis Mayfield
Roots, 1977 - Quincy Jones & Gerald Fry
Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon, 1985 - Various
Cleopatra Jones, 1973 - J.J. Johnson

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Episode 2 - 13 - 12

A precipitous snowy day turned into a dreary, drizzling mess before today's show - an appropriate forecast rejoinder to tomorrow's Valentine's Day, that saccharine baby of a holiday America should've aborted before grew up to be the sanctimonious, spoiled attention-whore we coddle out of guilt and social pressure. Yes, I'm single, why? We did our best to serve you soft-skulled suckers the gooey, love-jaculate you yearn for through music from several (sarcastically) romantic films. Maybe I'm just cynical because the film I saw this week was Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which I expect to win the meaningless Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for its sheer emotional brutality. It was a wonderful film, but ye gods, let's just say don't watch it on a weekend that your lithium prescription hasn't been renewed... or you'll be fucked...which is, ironically, what most of us won't be this Valentine's Day. Woe.

Tonight we heard music from:

Big, 1988 - Howard Shore
The Karate Kid, 1984 - Bill Conti
Indecent Proposal, 1993 - John Barry
Blue Valentine, 2010 - Grizzly Bear
American Beauty, 1999 - Thomas Newman

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Thursday, February 9, 2012

Episode 2 - 6 - 12

We were both grumpy today. And how. The seethe was palpable in the air, and we did our best to harness it for good radio comedy. Up on review this week were the "Stop calling me, Harry Potter" Dan Radcliffe-helmed Woman in Black by Hammer Horror(!) and the young super hero archetypal angstgasm chronicle Chronicle, which started strong and fizzled in the second half due to the prescribed arc the writers were determined the film follow. Shame, but it was a good attempt at tapping into the comic book mythologies we're already so used to. As for Woman in Black, the Boom Operator was marginally-impressed with it as a chiller. I've been a huge fan of the book/stage play/1989 BBC film since I was a wee scared kiddie, so I'll probably catch this before too long.

We heard music from the following:

127 Hours - A. R. Rahman
28 Days Later - John Murphy
Ladyhawke - The Alan Parsons Project
Hawk the Slayer - Harry Robertson
Blue Velvet - Angelo Badalamenti


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Episod 1 - 30 - 12

Sour moods abounded on this last show of January, in which we suffered yet another technological meltdown. The day in which I and/or the Boom Operator greet the next software malfunction with a genuine psychotic break and thereafter lay waste to the studio with a rusty piece of rebar is soon approaching. Anyway, we started the show with the delectable (and hard to assemble) soundtrack to Hobo with a Shotgun, a nice bit of postmodern musical patchwork. It was a typically scatterbrained show: topics ranged from the treachery of Netflix to the penile-regurgitation scene in the recent Piranha 3D. We ended with reviews of Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and the Oscar-fellating Hollywood meta-wank The Artist, which followed Hugo's trend of self-congratulatory cinematic historicism. Le meh.

We heard music from:

Hobo with a Shotgun - Various
Brick - Nathan Johnson with the Cinematic Underground
Tokyo Godfathers - Various
Big Trouble in Little China - John Carpenter
The Artist - Ludovic Bors
Terminator - Brad Fiedel