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Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 2004

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Remember 2004? Remember the summer? Remember the summer movies you saw and how maybe only one starred a superhero because you didn’t see Catwoman? Remember Tom Cruise going gray? Remember seeing the new M. Night Shyamalan movie at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan, your first time there since Brother Bear? Remember the IMAX in Nyack where you saw the new Harry Potter movie and how it was demonstrably better than its predecessors within about 15 seconds? Remember that you found out that real IMAX screen closed a few years ago? Remember Uncle Rico? Remember the Shins and Natalie Portman and Natalie Portman telling you to listen to the Shins? Remember that she was recommending stuff off of Oh, Inverted World even though Chutes Too Narrow was already out? Remember when Hugh Jackman wanted more than Wolverine? Remember animated prequels to Universal franchise-starters that didn’t start?

Remember Riddick?

SportsAlcohol.com remembers. And we’re ready to help you remember, too, with this action-packed look back at the summer movies of 2004!

This is the latest in a series and if you want the other 2000s-era installments in the series, here they are:

2000
2001
2002
2003

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Oscar Special 2024

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In the spirit of the Oscars’ natural excess, your friends at SportsAlcohol.com have prepared not one but TWO podcast episodes for you ahead of this weekend’s 96th Annual Academy Awards! In the first episode, Sara, Jeremy, Ben, Jesse, and Marisa go through the eight biggest categories with our predictions, preferences, and lists of SNUBS! In the second, we get a bit more granular on this year’s Oscars, covering categories related to animation, music, international film, and more!

You can stream both episodes below, or download them, or find us on Apple or whatever; we’re not picky.

Lists, Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Best Movies of 2023

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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 in our Best Movies of 2023 extravaganza! Listen, download, whatever you want, using the player below. And scroll past if you want to go directly to our list and a little bit of contextual discussion outside of our audio joshing.

Continue reading The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: The Best Movies of 2023 →

Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Music of 2023

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Just in time to miss the Grammys entirely, and following a three-year hiatus, the SportsAlcohol.com music enjoyers are back to talk about how they experienced the best music of 2023, whether that’s through indie rock, pop, old favorites, new discoveries, streaming or old-fashioned LPs. Sara, Marisa, Rob, Jeremy, and Jesse are all on hand to chat about trends and antitrends in the year’s music, including thoughts on Boygenius, The National, Caroline Polachek, Olivia Rodrigo, Belle & Sebastian, Blondshell, The Hold Steady, ancient legacy acts, the best shows and albums and singles of the year, and, of course, Joe Jackson.

You can listen or — if you still have a device that plays mp3s — download using the player below. Better yet, you can download the mp3, break it into two parts, and burn it onto a pair of CDs to make the double-album podcast of your dreams!

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Labor Day Special

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Happy Labor day from your pals at SportsAlcohol.com! We got you a podcast episode! Earlier this summer, Ben convened a small panel of labor experts (by which we mean Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse) to talk about the bumper crop of movies about companies making products. Air, Blackberry, Flamin’ Hot, and Tetris all came out within months of each other — what gives? In this episode, led by a bona fide MBA, we talk about each movie, which ones (if any) appealed to us and why, and the greater meaning of this trend. (We recorded this episode before The Beanie Bubble dropped but you know what? It’s barely worth discussing anyway!) Please, spend your hard-earned Labor Day with us! Download link available on the embedded player below!

About Us, Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Top Summer Movies of 2003

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Remember 2003? Remember the summer? Remember the summer movies of 2003? Remember Hulkmania? Remember how The Matrix Reloaded was going to blow everyone’s mind? Remember just whatever random cop movies making $125 million? Remember the X-Men starring in what was considered the best superhero movie ever made? Remember going to see 2 Fast 2 Furious by yourself, maybe sneaking in as part of a double feature with maybe Wrong Turn? Remember the Pirates defeating the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Remember going full throttle? Remember that weirdo sitting next to you at Bruce Almighty who was visibly and vocally moved by the film? Remember how Seabiscuit was nominated for Best Picture? Remember Eddie Murphy doing uninspired family comedies that you’d skip and they’d make $100 million anyway? Remember sequels, sequels, sequels? Remember when sequels took over and never relinquished their grip? Remember?!?!?

SportsAlcohol.com remembers. We remember everything! So here, continuing our look at the biggest summer movies of the 2000s, is our look back at summer movies of 2003. Most of us were in our twenties. One of us was younger. Jesse, Marisa, Jeremy, Ben, and Becca assemble to talk about our memories of the summer movies of 2003, our new observations from fresh watches and rewatches,

In case you’re collecting SportsAlcohol.com podcasts about 2000s summer movies, here’s the complete set so far:

2000
2001
2002

And here’s the latest and greatest, including a download link if you need it:

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Movies of 2022

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Movies! Now more than ever! For this late-but-not-that-late episode on the Best Movies of 2022, the SportsAlcohol.com movie core of Marisa, Sara, Jeremy, Jesse, and Nathaniel each submitted a list of, yes, their 20 favorite and/or best movies of 2022, aggregated into a single list. Four of us then run through those collective choices in this loose countdown, which means talking about movies that are and are not actually about the magic of cinema. Musicals, multiverses, Hitchcockian thrillers, dark comedies, and emotional devastation… this year’s best movies of 2022 had it all! Along with our group’s consensus choices, we offer occasional dissent with each other’s picks, plus a quartet of outliers that only made certain individual lists. There’s a lot to enjoy here, so get to listening!

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Streaming TV of 2022

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You may have heard of a coming streaming recession or TV apocalypse, but regardless of what the future may hold, right now, there is still a hell of a lot of streaming TV out there for your consumption, whether your streaming provider is Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, Apple, Disney, Tubi, or all of the above (or just Tubi because Tubi is the best). Sensing a need for categorization and consensus in this vast streaming TV landscape, Ben called an emergency session of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast crew to talk about our favorite shows of 2022, sorted neatly into a series of categories: workplace shows, relationship shows, fantastical shows, funny shows, animated shows… all the types of shows, as favored variously by Ben, Jeremy, Sara, Marisa, and even TV agnostic and confirmed “movie person” (ugh) Jesse. So before you just shrug your shoulders and fire up that new season of Mad About You that you missed a few years ago, why not listen to us stump for our favorites (and run down a few of our anti-favorites)? We’ve got something for just about everyone, and if you watch all of these shows already, you can hear us praise and/or debate them. Happy listening and watching!

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Avatar 2 and the Films of James Cameron

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Avatar is back! Everybody brace for cultural impact! James Cameron’s special-effects extravaganza Avatar: The Way of Water has finally made it to movie theaters — in fact, it’s now topped the domestic box office for seven weekends in a row, garnered a Best Picture nomination, and raked in over $2 billion worldwide. In light of this stunning failure to attract any kind of substantial audience or acclaim, your SportsAlcohol.com crew hopped in their submersible and did a deep-dive podcast on the films of James Cameron, in all their water-y, tech-y, earnest glory. The Avatars, the Terminators, the Aliens, the various boats and choppers and motion-captured Na’vi… they’re all here in this two-hour-plus extravaganza that is still shorter than the runtime of Avatar: The Way of Water. Discussion points include high frame rate, 3-D, sending Bill Paxton to explore the real Titanic, the names of characters in Avatar, Cameron’s facility with sequels and what sets the Avatar follow apart, Titanic opening-night memories, and more. Jesse, Marisa, Jeremy, Nathaniel, and Jeff are your guides through the floating mountains of Pandora and beyond! And if you feel the need to do some penance following this epic appreciation of megablockbuster entertainment, we did do a podcast about a bunch of recent indie movies!

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Movies, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast Lost Episode: Indie Movies of Summer 2022

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Hey there! It’s been a while, I know! We recorded our annual wrap-up of highlights from an indie-movie summer (and recommendations for a healthy streaming fall) back in September, but life, paid gigs, and occasionally COVID got in the way of Jesse actually editing the damn thing and getting it out into the world. I thought this particular movie podcast episode might feel outdated now that it’s December, but as it turns out, this is a terrific compendium of summer indies that will probably be largely overlooked as we head into the big end-of-year list-making season. Plus, some of these movies are newly available on Netflix and/or Hulu and/or old pals at AMC Plus, an organization that we make a case should be sponsoring us on this very episode! So let Sara, Marisa, Jeremy, and Jesse take you on a whirlwind tour of the movies you might have missed last summer while you were seeing Top Gun 2 a third time! You won’t regret it!

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast: