Once again, SportsAlcohol.com has assembled a crew of movie experts/fans/nerds to talk about the best movies of the year, for our Best Movies of 2023 podcast episode. Nathaniel, Jeremy, Sara, Jesse, Marisa, Becca, and Ben all submitted lists of their best movies of 2023, which were then aggregated into a master list for a lengthy discussion. Indies, blockbusters, auteurs, Godzillas; it’s all here…
Godzilla: He’s the King of the Monsters, and also, right now, the King of All Media. As Godzilla Minus One sets unexpected box office records in the U.S., Monarch: Legacy of Monsters finishes up its first season on Apple TV, and Godzilla fights the damn Justice League in a current comics series, AND with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire coming out in just a few short months, Jesse and lifelong…
Welcome to the 95th Annual SportsAlcohol.com Oscar Special! True, our podcast has only been around for nine years (!), but the Oscars have apparently been at it for 95, and one day they’ll get it right! Will that happen for the 2022 movies, including Everything Everywhere All At Once facing off a bunch of challengers including The Banshees of Inisherin, Top Gun 2, Avatar 2, All Quiet on the…
“Worlds within worlds.” That’s the well-worn descriptor—Quotation? Catchphrase? Cliché? Really, that universal catch-all-three “from the comics”—one character uses to characterize the primary setting of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The characters are goggling at the previously glimpsed and now heavily explored Quantum Realm, a beyond-microscopic section of the Marvel Cinematic Universe…
LAST NIGHT IN SOHO and ANTLERS on the horror elevator
Edgar Wright seems like he was born to make horror movie. In a sense, he already has, depending on your analysis of the horror-to-comedy-to-squishy-drama ratios in Shaun of the Dead (or your tolerance for the millennial antics of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; it’s my favorite Wright movie so far, but seems to be one of his more divisive works). Even in his non-zombie pictures, there are dark…
NYFF59 Part 1: The Worst People
I’ve been trying and failing to wrap my head around Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Grade: C) and the enthusiastic reaction it’s received at New York Film Festival press screening sand elsewhere, wondering if I might have been more receptive had the content warnings before the movie not characterized it as a comedy. I admire its bizarre juxtapositions: It opens with graphic and unsimulated sex,…
DEAR EVAN HANSEN has broken all contracts
The new stage-to-film musical Dear Evan Hansen tosses out established, unspoken contracts left, right, and center. It nixes the contract between stage production and audience, dictating that the energy of live theater overrides desire for literal realism in casting, sets, and developing relationships. It violates the contract between film musical and audience, where we accept the artifice of…
Acting, My Dear Boy: THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE and BLUE BAYOU
In The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a new sort-of biopic about the spouse of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, Jessica Chastain gives us the visible-acting works. She does stuff to her voice, taking on a pinched midwestern sing-song, and does stuff to her face, using both her expressiveness and a ton of makeup—the latter used first to emulate the ritual face-slathering undertaken by her subject, and…
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Summer Movies of 2001
We’ve recorded a whole lot of podcast episodes here at SportsAlcohol.com, but it’s safe to say our most popular episode format has been our annual exploration of the top summer movies of the past — specifically, 20 years past, which means this year we’ve reached summer 2001. (And also, in a few weeks, 1991, because we’ve expanded to 30-years-ago summers in an attempt to sweep the corners on the…
THE GREEN KNIGHT is a gnarly dorm-room poster I don’t know how to review
Usually, I delight at the opportunity to write about a new movie in a simple new-release-review format, preferably at one of the outlets that care to indulge me in that regard, but sometimes on this website, where I don’t have to pitch my pre-constructed take on a particular film or filmmaker keyed to the zeitgeist, or a more specific demographic than “people who want to read a review of a new…
THE SUICIDE SQUAD is a gory, beautiful reboot
Here’s one sign among many of how the world of movie franchising has expanded over the past 20 years. It’s not as if there weren’t 20th century sequels—hundreds of ‘em!—but there was a time where the idea of a follow-up to a movie called Suicide Squad, especially one that inspired such mixed reactions, would be a cheap premise for a joke about Hollywood’s bankruptcy. Whaddaya call it, Suicide…
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Oscars 2021!
Oscars 2021 are finally here, which means Oscars 2021 are also finally nearly over! It’s been a long spring and a long awards season and a weird distended eligibility period, which has given us Marisa, Sara, Jesse, and Jeremy plenty of time to watch all of the Oscar contenders, except those that we just couldn’t get to. Just like years past, we are focusing on who we want to win across the…
The 20 Best Movies of 2020
Back in the fall, we were so uncertainly about the prospects of discussing the best movies of 2020 in a timely fashion that we decided to call it early and do a best-movies-of-the-year podcast in September. Who knew when anything would get back to normal, if ever? As it turns out, we’re well into 2021 and things still haven’t gotten back to normal (and no amount of pushing the Oscars into April…
COMING 2 AMERICA Sells Itself Short
Sometimes, usually around the Super Bowl, an enterprising corporation will entice a famous actor to reprise a famous role for 30 or 60 seconds at a time. Whether it’s Jeff Bridges briefly returning to The Dude or Mike Myers and Dana Carvey doing one more Wayne’s World sketch, these reanimations can light up our nostalgia receptors with warm hit of recognition. They’re also commonplace enough to…
The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Films of Martin Scorsese
For an episode so long in the works that we decided to make it two episodes, the SportsAlcohol.com film buddies decided to take on the filmography of Martin Scorsese. He doesn’t have a new movie out, and probably won’t until 2022, but we’ve been stuck inside for much of the past year, and Scorsese has such a rich (AND VARIED) filmography that it’s always a pleasure to go flipping back through it.…
