Rambo

[School of Movies 2019] 

We cover the five movies each in turn.

0.00 First Blood (1982)

0.25 Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

0.49 Rambo III (1988)

0.59 Rambo (2008)

1.12 Last Blood (2019)

It's quite a wild and bumpy ride, going from a sobering critique of the military industrial machine and what it does to our soldiers, to a critique on political chicanery and lack of transparency in warfare to just an all-out blockbuster western with tanks to a gruesome revenge-porn exploitation action and finally to a grim take on American/Mexican border-relations.

There are good and bad elements to be found within, as a shell-shocked soldier morphs into an unbeatable saviour and then into basically Jason Vorhees minus the hockey mask. 

IT: Chapter Two

[School of Movies 2019]

The follow-up to our extensive discussion on both the source novel and the 1990 miniseries, and then our lengthy discussion on the amazing 2017 movie.

Few horror sequels are as eagerly anticipated as this one, and bettering or even matching the kids' story was always going to be an insane challenge. King didn't really manage it with his book, the TV version delivered a lukewarm, erratically paced exercise in uncertainty of purpose and true to form this one disappointed a lot of returning viewers.

However, our little Losers Club found a rich vein of complexity to mine, and plenty to infer in this tale of graduating adult fears and anxieties. We begin with twenty minutes of unbridled praise, just to establish a base of quality, and then follow it up with two hours of discussion on the mixed bag on offer, the good, the bad and the Pennywise.

Guests

Brenden Agnew of Cinapse  @BLCAgnew  

From Sequentially Yours  Kaoru Negisa  @Moonpanther22 

and Debbie Morse  @bastet8300 

Arrival

[School of Movies 2019] 

This one is going to be a challenging listen.

Arrival is a story about humanity utilising alien contact as a way of looking inward. It's an examination of our fears, our sacrifices, of language and of time. It's astonishingly powerful and perhaps the greatest performance of Amy Adams' career, requiring her to experience emotions that -as Mikey Neumann pointed out- we don't even have names for yet. 

Get yourself a quiet 80 minutes to listen, and some time afterwards to reflect upon it. And for the love of God see the film before you take in our show.

This episode was commissioned by Andy Rodriguez.

What We Do in the Shadows

[School of Movies 2019]

After a heavy couple of weeks, it's a welcome break to call in at a ridiculous, black comedy. This is a mockumentary investigating a house of vampires. They're a hapless collection of preening nincompoops, fragile egos and buckets of outdated neurosis (in other words very normal people).

This film, directed by mad Kiwi Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok) takes many trappings of how vampires have been classically depicted in horror, and even the later subversions and flips them further by adding a layer of ludicrous, embarrassing mundanity to how they unlive.

Next Week: Arrival