School of Movies

It’s a Wonderful Life

[School of Movies 2022]

Perhaps the oldest film we have covered as a Main Event show to date, as well as one of the most significant from that era. Frank Capra's seminal Holiday classic is often dismissed as syrupy fluff by those who haven't yet seen it, or misremembered as light comedy by those who caught it in fragments over the years without sitting down to really take in what it's saying.

It's neither of those things, and the greatest tragedy is how searingly relevant this 1946 post-war exercise in picking up the pieces of a nation still is. Sharon and I have been earmarking it for the SOM treatment for many years, but always putting it off as too heavy or too daunting, and also too beloved to cover in any way that wasn't 200% satisfying for all. 

Luckily Chris Finik came along with a shred choice of Commissioned show, and now you all get to listen to what it sounds like when we pull out all the stops.

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe

[School of Movies 2022]

We've been planning Narnia shows for many years. This was a very special book series to me as a child, informing on my worldview and writing. It was also the first long-form live action fantasy series I watched on television, as the BBC production which ran from November 1988 to December 1991 adapted four books over three 6-episode seasons. I always wondered why they stopped at The Silver Chair. Later I began to understand the kind of scope and budgets and potentially thorny territory that the remaining three stories would entail. The quaint, very British project was already more ambitious than anyone would have expected. 

After that were many long years of waiting for a cinematic incarnation (not counting the insanely cheap and rushed 1979 animated version). The achievement and success of New Line's Lord of the Rings films at the same time as Warner's Harry Potter imbued Disney with a desire to seek out its own epic fantasy series to bring in all the dollars. 

While compared unfavourably with Weta's perfectly magnificent Rings Trilogy it is frankly amazing that the director of the first two Shrek films was able to achieve something in this 2005 film which both surpassed my experience of reading the book, and even my loftily-soaring imagination of what the events could look, sound and feel like. We will be covering the duet of films that followed in 2008 and 2010 and lingering cancellation of the seven-part series next year. 

Guest:

Nama Chibitty @namathenerd

Early Commissions 2023

This is a quick lowdown of what we have coming up in the next few weeks, along with official notification that the window for our Early 2023 Commissions Season is opening up right now.

So if you have an episode you want crafted by us, the standard price for a film is $150 with video games and TV shows scaling that amount, depending on the hours we will have to invest. 

Get in touch via Patreon Messenger, Discord, Twitter or email, and have a very happy holidays. 

Superman: The Animated Series

[School of Everything Else 2022]

Following the tremendous critical and commercial success of the first ever dedicated  animated Batman show, the same creative team turned their eyes to his sunny counterpart, the original, archetypal superhero, the last son of Krypton.

It's always more challenging creating a successful, beloved Clark Kent than it is a Bruce Wayne. People like the brooding and the darkness. By contrast it is natural to be mistrusting of someone who purports to be so utterly GOOD all the time. Surely there's an angle. Look how naïve he is. What if he turned bad? Unfortunately this last prospect is the Superman story we keep returning to in pop culture. Because we can understand why someone would wield supreme power as a conquering weapon.

This, however is THE definitive Superman. Christopher Reeve is no doubt the most wonderful, memorable, impeccably performed live-action Kal-El, but this show which ran for three seasons from 1996-2000 is most definitely the place to go to find the *context* for Superman. A world based on the comics that the creative team love and have actually read! A rogue's gallery that aren't all just Lex Luthor and General Zod, and the finest Lois Lane we may ever see.

This Animated Series is a gift. 

Guests:

Toby Jungius @TJungius of Through the Wind Door

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

Riddick

[School of Movies 2022]

Nine years after his Chronicles, Richard B. Riddick is sat upon his iron throne, the crown hanging heavy, too many pie suppers since he was at his physical peak and too many wenches left in wordless ecstasy, sloughing around his greasy bedsheets. 

This is the story of how he gets easily tricked, shot in the back, left for dead on a barren planet filled with beasties designed exclusively to kill you, and soon after making a four-legged friend, he becomes beset by not one, but two separate groups of rotten mercenaries. 

Possibly the yellowest film you will ever witness, Riddick (2013) is what happens when one attempts to return to one's roots after an age of hubris. Does it succeed?  

Next Week: Superman - The Animated Series.

The Chronicles of Riddick

[School of Movies 2022]

After knocking it out of the park on the first try with Pitch Black, David Twohy and Vin Diesel limbered back up four years later with a complete change of pace, scale and even sci-fi sub-genre. If you look at Pitch Black as The Hobbit, then where they took the series next was their Lord of the Rings.

However, there is a world of difference between what went into the expansion and historical goings-on of Professor Tolkein and the Conan-the-Barbarian-in-space that Riddick metamorphosed into. Suddenly, rather than a dangerous prisoner he became the chosen one of a massacred world, destined to avenge his people against a rampaging horde of death-worshipping necromongers! 

The results of these changes were frequently frustrating and marginally absurd!

Pitch Black

[School of Movies 2022]

This one is really rather special and arguably the longest time coming of any of our shows. Pitch Black, released in February 2000 in the USA didn't make it to the UK until November of that year. There's even some confusion in this episode because I wasn't sure if Sharon and I were actually together as a couple when we saw it (turns out we were, just). But significantly, this was our first movie where we left the cinema together on fire with analysis that we were twanging back and forth like verbal badminton.

It's a tight, focused, visceral, planet-survival thriller, drawing from many inspirations but managing to combine them in a way that keeps it continuously gripping, even after all these years.

This is the first of a dedicated three-week series of episodes revolving around the transmedia franchise that sprang from this standalone movie; a handful of very savvy decisions mixed with a bucket of bad ones. 

The chronological order goes...

1. Escape from Butcher Bay (Patreon Exclusive Episode)

2. Assault on Dark Athena (In a double-bill with Butcher Bay)

3. Pitch Black (Main Event)

4. Dark Fury (Patreon with the video games)

5. The Chronicles of Riddick (Main Event)

6. Riddick (Patreon)

See you in a few days for a delve into Vin Diesel's career and the Peter-Chung-animated 30-minute short, followed by the sprawling, pretentious Conan-the-Barbarian-in-Space of "The Chronicles of Riddick" next week. 

Retro Emulation Gaming

[School of Everything Else 2022]

This one has been many years in the making. 

Around about the time the pandemic hit, followed by the global chip shortage there was a series of jumps in both quality and quantity of retro gaming machines being manufactured in China and shipped out to folks stuck in lockdown with a serious hankering to revisit a simpler less-apocalypsy past.

At the same time the secondary collector's market for vintage hardware, cartridges and discs also ballooned, and those with the engineering abilities started restoring and upgrading classic handhelds and consoles. 

This show is not a buyer's guide, nor an overly technical breakdown of the processes. It's a focused, historical slice of perspective on gaming; past, present and future. It is an exploration of the fragile nature of what we play and the lengths we will often go to, in order to recapture those memories. It's about the sheer joy of curation, archiving and preservation, and the strangely benign communities that have developed around these principles. 

New Book: The Lights from Distant Bonfires: 18 Gothic Tales (Promo)

In case you didn't catch this at the end of the Company of Wolves show yet, Sharon, myself and even Willow have helped put together an anthology of Gothic tales written by members of the School of Movies community.

It's available to buy right now on Amazon and if as many of you as possible buy it at once, talk about it on social media, (and if you want to be extra specially helpful leave us an honest, positive review when you've finished and recommend it to friends) that should help it get some visibility.

It's called "The Lights from Distant Bonfires" and we've been preparing it for many months now. These stories are stirring and spine-tingling and should conjure up haunting images to dwell on this Fall. We are keeping the price low and selling the paperback at cost to get it into as many trembling hands as possible. 

USA Edition

UK Edition 

The 14 Authors:
Lincoln Alpern, James Batchelor, Nama Chibitty, Greg Downing, Jesse Ferguson, Chris Finik, Nick Jaragosky, Hanna Peregrine, Alexander Shaw, Sharon Shaw, Willow Shaw, Maya Souris, Alejandra Vargas, Bradford Yurkiw

The Company of Wolves

[School of Movies 2022]

This is an obscure coming-of age fable from the director of Interview With the Vampire and The Crying Game. It was made on a very low budget in 1984 in Shepperton Studios, England, but it has some of the best werewolf fiction within its toothy confines. 

The framing device is a young girl who has gone to bed with tummy cramps. In her restless dreams she ties together various cautionary tails about Red Riding Hood, the boy who cried wolf, visitations from the Devil himself, wedding-day curses and strange men with one eyebrow and shocking yellow irises. The teller of many of these stories is the great Angela Lansbury, who at the time of release for this show, only just closed the last page of her own book. 

And the whole thing is an allegorical anthology about the girl's growing, changing body, her sense of identity and burning curiosity.

Stay tuned to the end for news about a brand new Gothic Anthology book we've helped to create.