School of Movies

Gonzo Adventures: The Tower of the Sorcerer

[Digital Gonzo 2013]

The 150th episode of Digital Gonzo.

This was a one-off show inspired by the episode of Community 'Advanced Dungeons & Dragons'. It's a sit-down gaming session conducted over Skype with myself as Dungeon Master and my guests as a team of adventurers. For this one we were using the flexible, simple ruleset of Advanced Fighting Fantasy by Graham Bottley which itself stems from the gamebooks of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Deathtrap Dungeon) and detailed in the starter book Dungeoneer. This is the first of the two adventures within that book.

I wanted to bring you guys something different, in the style I have honed over the years so there's music and sound FX as well as a hefty chunk of silliness and getting into character. The lengthier fights have been edited for pacing but you're mainly missing a lot of dice rolls. The team that begins this story comprises of the following.

Thrale Copperhelm: A tough-as-nails dwarf, played by Neil Taylor of GameBurst
Lastern Darkfire: An elf fresh out of the forests, played by Mark Reay of The A.I. Bots
Kellis Payge: A human mage from the city watch of Chalice, played by Sharon Shaw of School of Movies
Harron Brondyn: A sarcastic thief played by Matt Ramsey of Do Try This at Home

Focus is on character and story over action and complex systems, almost closer to an audio drama than the recording of a game. The guest soundtrack for this week is the original World of Warcraft OST by Jason Hayes, Tracy W. Bush, Derek Duke, and Glenn Stafford. Many thanks to my guests, who played brilliantly and went easy on me in my first-time role as Dungeon Master. The combat rules were still being learned by all of us, also Gonzo is an adult podcast and we use adult language in this. 

And thank you all for making this one of the warmest, smartest, funniest communities on the internet for 150 episodes of Gonzo.

No Country for Old Men / True Grit

[School of Movies 2023]

The final main feed instalment of our Coen Brothers series goes out with a double-bang of exceptionally gripping Westerns.

No Country for Old Men (2007, written by the recently departed Cormac McCarthy) is a tense game of cat and mouse. Josh Brolin discovers a drug deal gone very wrong and walks off with the money, and Javier Bardem plays the dead-eyed Terminator slowly but surely closing in on him. This whole case is followed by Sheriff Tommy Lee Jones who is scratching at his head to fathom the trail of violence he is witnessing.

And in True Grit (2010) the second adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel, a brand new Hailee Steinfeld, aged 13 commands a grizzled old frump of a bounty hunter played by Jeff Bridges to help her track down her father's killer and see justice done. It somehow manages to surpass the classic John Wayne version in every way. And both of these were influences on my own writing.

If you want to hear what we have to say on the remaining Coen Brothers films you can catch our Patreon-excusive After School Club shows on The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, Burn after Reading, A Serious Man, Hail Caesar, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and The Tragedy of Macbeth.

2007: No Country for Old Men

2010: True Grit

The Studio Ghibli Series Part 4: Porco Rosso

[School of Movies 2023]

This was a whimsical period for Ghibli, they tried a few new things, and established one or two absolute mainstays. 

1991: Only Yesterday (1m 50s)

1992: Porco Rosso (11m 50s)

1993: Ocean Waves (25m 10s)

1994: Pom Poko (41m 10s)

1995: Whisper of the Heart (59m 40s)

There's a disarmingly frank and sympathetic story of a schoolgirl hitting adolescence wrapped in a Hallmark movie about returning to your rural home town after the big city has crushed your spirit. Conversely there's a high school romance about a doormat crushing on a girl who thinks only of herself.

Then there's two of the most abiding and beloved of their canon, in the tale of a high school girl who likes a musical boy which winds up being a powerful statement on creativity, and then there's the World War II pilot who was turned into a pig. But he's much rather be porcine than  fascist. 

And finally, an ecological parable starring enormous raccoon testicles! 

In the Heights

[School of Movies 2023]

Lin Manuel Miranda's first big break into the off-Broadway musical scene. This 2021 movie adaptation, directed by Crazy Rich Asians-helmer Jon M. Chu is a squeaky-clean but heartfelt tale of the upper east side of Manhattan and its proud, passionate, talkative, motivated yet frustrated population of first, second and third-generation immigrants. It's a story of inheriting the dreams of your parents and trying to reconcile forging your own path. 

This one has been a long while coming. We wanted to do a show on it as soon as the cinema release, but since that was just after Lockdown ended it was unlikely many of you folks could safely make a screening. And we wound up recording it last winter, but since it's such a heights-of-summer movie I've waited until now to release it.

This week I needed something to lift my spirits, since Sharon has been confined to the bedroom in a self-imposed COVID quarantine. It made the final show unexpectedly painful to put together, but worth all the blood, sweat and tears. 

Guest:

Nama Chibitty @namathenerd

Follow Nama's sister's art: Bunny_the_Artist

John Wick: Chapters 2/3/4

[School of Movies 2023]

We covered the first film in May 2019 just before the third hit theaters, and since then they have shaped up to be four of the finest action films ever made. They boast laser-focused attention to choreography, physical genius, artfully photographing long, unbroken takes with astonishing lighting and otherworldy music. All of it revolves around a firestorm of a performance from Keanu Reeves, himself experiencing a deserved renaissance.

The fourth film ends on a definitive and deeply satisfying melancholy note. So, while the series itself limbers up for all manner of spin-offs, sequels, prequels, TV shows, video games, reboots and action figures, let us take stock of what made this quartet special. 

'John Wick Turbo' has been a re-editing project, where I sought to trim away a little of the second film's world-building, adjust the third film's pacing and dial back the fourth film's runtime, bringing all of them to the 101-minute sweet spot of the 2014 original. And talking about this process allows us to really get granular about the impressive strengths of each. 

The Flash

[School of Movies 2023]

This one was a long time coming. There's a solid argument to be made that to set the tone for the planned DC Cinematic Universe all the way back in 2012, around the time Avengers was doing gangbusters by brazenly copying the Marvel formula by building up the characters the general public don't know yet *before* throwing Superman and Batman at us again.

But since Green Lantern was terrible in 2011 Warner Bros. clearly concluded they needed to establish a foundation of superheroes everybody knows *then* do a Justice League, THEN introduce us to those new superheroes in a way that feels more like a spinoff than a build-up. They did not have the faith that these costumed icons could carry a movie without Batman. So, accordingly this film that now seems to be closing out that first protracted attempt has (at least) two Batmans!

Against expectations, considering the nightmare production, the lead actor's disturbing real life crime spree and the extremely muddled tone and story, I actually enjoyed this well-intentioned mess. Full spoilers of course, but I feel like everyone's level of enjoyment on this movie is going to be the same whether they know what's coming or not.

Batman Beyond

[School of Everything Else 2023]

The DC Animated Universe marathon watch, which began all the way back in 2020 as Lockdown started continues! And this is a show Sharon and I had never sat down to watch before, so it was almost entirely new to us. 

I knew this was pitched as "What if Batman was Spider-Man?" but I did not know the circumstances of how that premise came about. Warner Bros. wanted an animated series about a specifically *young* Batman. Toy marketing indicated that kids would engage more with a teenager than they would with a man in his thirties. The double-bind was that Kevin Conroy's Batman, as established in this continuity didn't don the cowl until well into adulthood. 

It was this information that Bruce Timm and company conveyed at a meeting with the studio heads. Then when asked to think of a way around it "What if Bruce Wayne was old and got a younger person to wear the suit and do all the superheroics?" was put on the table. Then they had to dream up an entire show to fit with that premise.

Guests:

Toby Jungius @TJungius of Through the Wind Door

Kevin Veighey @KevinTimeGeek86 whose Let's Plays on YouTube can be found here

Chris Finik @finmonster09

Bradford Yurkiw 

The Big Mermaid

[School of Movies 2023]

For many years we have been planning a show or a series of shows on the Disney live action + CG remakes. The plan was to start with the 2015 Cinderella (or even the 1994 Jason Scott Lee version of The Jungle Book, thence to 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close) and we would watch every single one of them, and talk about the good and the bad. 

But over time, having covered the details of all of the originals in our Disney animated series, the job itself grew insanely huge and exhausting, with so little to say that wasn't already being said by every film pundit on YouTube (because Disney gets you maximum clicks). Luckily this one came along, 8 years into the remake period that boasts both high points and low for the whole concept. 

By absolutely NO means anywhere near the level of the small original 1989 film with its $40m budget and its changing of the world of cinematic animation in a way that would not be matched and diverged from until Toy Story and then Shrek, there are still definitely things to like about Mermaid '23, including the earnest and talented Halle Bailey as Ariel. 

However, with its $250m budget and the remit of adherence to photorealism at the expense of abstraction that Disney seem to have slammed all of these with, it makes for an extensive focus point to talk about many of the elements which have been frying our fishes. Back as a special guest this week is Willow. 

F9: The Fast Saga / Fast X

[School of Movies 2023]

Another ton of fun for the summer as we go back to the most unkillable series of all time. You kill this thing and it will come right back, walking out of the explosion to cool music. If this franchise has any enemies they will be friends the next time we see them. Did I say friends? I meant FAMBLY!

What we have here to start with is an edited, supercharged version of my first impressions of F9 (one of the very first movies I got to see when cinemas reopened in summer 2021). 

After that is my brand new talk about 2023s Fast X which brings Jason Momoa to the barbecue. We look at the recurring issues as the series moves from era to era and zero in on how they may have shot themselves in the foot in terms of the drama that this Nos-Opera hit the big leagues with. 

Black Adam / Shazam: Fury of the Gods

[School of Movies 2023]

This is the second and third instalments of the Shazam Trilogy, we covered the first back in 2021. Now The Rock will assure you that Black Adam is nothing to do with Shazam, but we have comics that say otherwise.

We start with my 2022 first impressions of Black Adam having just returned from the cinema, originally put out as a Patreon Exclusive. Then we follow up with a brand new section where I tell Sharon about Shazam's last movie, at least with this cast and format. 

What we said back when we talked about the original still stands, kids grow up, but also grown actors do and say regrettable things that impact the metatext of otherwise simple sci-fantasy action films. 

Coming this weekend to the Patreon bonus feed, we talk about one of my favourite movies starring the Rock, one where he gets knocked all over the place and comes off better for it; The Rundown.