School of Movies

Beavis & Butt-Head Do America

[School of Movies 2024]

After many years of thinking about how to tackle these two absolute idiots, we found the best angle for us. Ostensibly this is about the 1996 movie, which still holds up today and makes for an appealing, surprisingly general-audience-friendly and brisk hour and 21-minute comedy. This is an achievement, considering their extremely sketchy first incarnation as a pair of cruelly observed Texas teenagers being horrible to frogs.

What Sharon and I do here is fill out the absence of texture in this rare 2D American-animated adult(ish) film by delving into who the boys are, and their pitiful background, as portrayed in various key episodes of the original show, which ran for only four years, but made two comebacks -both solid- with the current one still ongoing on Paramount Plus (which means most people can't see it, or the 2022 sequel movie which propels them into the 21st Century).

If you HATE Beavis & Butt-Head this podcast probably won't change your mind, but if you have never delved into this grubby world or indeed have some fond memories from their mid-90s heyday we may bring you a persistent giggle.

 

10 Recommended Beavis & Butt-Head Episodes to Watch

1. No Laughing (S2E12)

2. The Great Cornholio (S4E31)

3. Prank Call (S6E13)

4. Walkathon (S5E7)

5. Butt Flambé (S7E28)

6. Candy Sale (S5E23)

7. Werewolves of Highland (S8E1)

8. Dumb Design (S8E12)

9. It’s a Miserable Life (S6E8)

10. Choke (S5E4)

Out of Sight

[School of Movies 2024]

Cloon June finally comes to a close with a magnificent romantic thriller, written by Elmore Leonard, the author of Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma and Rum Punch, which became Jackie Brown. This one hit at the tail end of the 90s, and became a significant landmark in the careers of George Clooney, director Steven Soderbergh and George's co-star, a relative newcomer named Jenifer Lopez.

Deliberately stylised to evoke the crime thrillers of the 1970s, we do time with smooth-talking bank robber Jack Foley, finally hitting a point of realisation that he is going to die of old age in prison. However, in striking out against that eventuality with an audacious piggybacked prison jailbreak he crosses paths with Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal with a shotgun and a Chanel Suit. Against all odds, after spending time in the trunk of a getaway car, the two of them wind up separated, with thoughts dwelling on each other. Karen pursues Jack from Miami to Detroit, but does she want to lock him up forever or bed him and find herself a new way of life?

This absolute cherished favourite has been hugely influential on my work, especially The Princess Thieves: Available on Bandcamp.

Tomorrowland

[School of Movies 2024]

Initially we were going to cover this 2015 movie as the After School Club to close out Cloon June, but the more we delved into it, the more weighty and disturbingly messy it became.

From the mind of visionary animated filmmaker Brad Bird (Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol) comes a movie based on a themed area of Disneyland from 1955 which envisioned a great big beautiful Tomorrow. Now, 60-70 years later, having arrived at a mild dystopia, how can we reconcile what our grandparents thought the Future would be like, against what we've had building up around us our whole lives?

  The YouTube channels featured in this episode include. (but are not limited to...)

• Jenny Nicholson

• Climate Town

• and Undecided with Matt Ferrell

We recommend you subscribe to all three, and specifically track down those latter two videos featured to get full links to ways that you can proceed with the concepts discussed.

Next week: Out of Sight closes out Cloon-June in Clooni-July.

Ocean's 11, 12, 13 and 8

[School of Movies 2024]

Cloon June continues with the slickest and arguably best Las Vegas heist movie. This 2001 remake of the underachieving 1960 Rat Pack original is less about establishing characters with any kind of arc and more about setting up the perfect mousetrap with eleven skilled individuals we can have fun with. It's a big old magic trick, with the prestige reveal to us, the audience being the punch that makes it satisfying.

We weren't going to cover the sequels on the main feed, but we got curious and delved back into 12 and 13 for the first time since the cinema in 2004 and 2007, finding most of the best drama in there. And finally, a re-edit of our 2018 After School Club on Ocean's 8, featuring Toby Jungius.

Finally, we round off with a dream-team cast pitch for a rebooted Ocean's 9. Next week, we make an unscheduled stop at Tomorrowland, to see what Brad Bird thinks of the future we wound up in. After that, extending Cloon June into July, Soderburgh and Clooney, along with Jennifer Lopez and composer David Holmes hit their absolute cinematic peaks with Out of Sight.

From Dusk till Dawn

[School of Movies 2024]

Cloon June, the month dedicated to George Clooney movies continues apace with his first significant lead part after over a decade of appearances in shonky Z-List horror and then two years of his breakout role in E.R. as eminently desirable paediatrician Doctor Ross. This is a firestorm of a counterpoint to that gentle healer, fugitive thief Seth Gecko is a deeply angry man, though he is a charming picnic next to his monstrous brother.

This episode is also an intersection between two director-seasons we have in preparation, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Rarely has a collaborative movie been made that is such an appealingly riotous showcase of the distinct styles of two auteurs, whilst being humbly grimy, memorably quotable, and so very excited just to exist.

WARNING: This movie is nasty, and we will be discussing sexual assault, extreme violence, florid language and Quentin being a weird creep.

One Fine Day

[School of Movies 2024]

It's not often we handle romantic comedies, but this one has more going on beneath the surface. With particular emphasis placed on the back and forth script, fast-flowing, overlapping dialogue and highly quotable, this extremely 90s movie showcases one of the most appealing onscreen couples in cinema history; Batman & Catwoman.

Two single parents, one an irresponsible fun-time Dad, the other juggling career and motherhood furiously, find themselves and their kids entangled during a rainy, chaotic Manhattan workday that threatens to drive them all insane..

It also kicks off "Cloon-June", four weeks of George Clooney's early forays into acting on film. Coming up we have From Dusk Till Dawn, Out of Sight and a mystery fourth movie. He's always been one of my favourite actors, he had a lot to prove at this stage in his career, and it ties in with Pride month as he was kind of the celebrity in the 90s that most guys would shruggingly admit to maybe crushing on.

Red Eye

[School of Movies 2024]

Another unexpected Commission that came out of nowhere. Big thank you to Dean R for requisitioning this. Far less well-known in Wes Craven's body of work than the slashers, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, this one is going outside his comfort zone.

Starting out like a romantic comedy, an aspect highlighted in the trailer, starring the stunning and wildly talented young actors Rachel McAdams (fresh from Mean Girls and The Notebook) and Cillian Murphy (recently of 28 Days Later, and about to play Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins) this movie turns a corner at the beginning of Act 2 and becomes a taut, tense, claustrophobic, dialogue-based Hitchcokian thriller.

As it happens, this is Sharon's favourite of ALL of Craven's body of work, and you will find out why in this extremely enthusiastic episode.

Hazbin Hotel (Season 1)

[School of Everything Else 2024]

This was a show that was recommended to us a few times, but then wound up an unexpected commissioned episode. Compounding this, Willow has been a lover of this crazy, twisted, queer-friendly HELL for years, since the pilot surfaced on YouTube. They had already seen all eight episodes of Amazon's 2024 first season, and considering a now maturing and emotionally complex Gen Z is the target audience for this, we got Willow on as our special guest.

For the majority of you that haven't delved into Hazbin Hotel (or its brother-series Helluva Boss), it is an animated musical about the ongoing conflict between Heaven and Hell, with the titular hotel being set up by the wildly optimistic Disney-Princess daughter of Lucifer; Charlie Morningstar. Charlie believes the denizens of damnation have it in them to be redeemed and ascend to Paradise, and the hotel is the site of their rehab. Unfortunately the officials of both afterlives are various degrees of incredulous about this plan.

We talk about the whole thing, but I don't consider this as spoiling the experience for newcomers. It can only help you enjoy the show all the more if you listen to this first, and the toe-tapping, frequently genuinely excellent songs will live in your head from now on. If you like The Good Place Good Omens, The Owl House or even Hades, you will find plenty of similar philosophical musing and humour in here.

Drop Dead Fred

[School of Movies 2024]

Statistically speaking, very few of you have seen this movie. Those who have either detest it with utmost derision or love it so much it makes them cry. Garnering a pathetic 11% on Rotten Tomatoes one would think this an unmitigated disaster, easily summed up as "Grown woman remembers imaginary friend, he returns and wrecks her life."

But look at the run time on this one... two and a half hours. And you know us, if we've talked for that long about something so obscure that literally nobody has ever asked us to cover on the show then it means there's something special below the surface which 89% of professional film critics in 1991 either didn't see or meant nothing to them.

So, for everyone who hasn't seen this movie, come along with us, and find out the extent of what was overlooked.

Guest Lecturers Matt Reeves & Rupert Wyatt on Directing the Apes

[School of Movies 2024]

With the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Maze-Runner helmer Wes Ball emerging this week, we went back to look at a Trilogy that emerged without any overarching grand plan, changing directors after the first instalment, with both men just trying to make the absolute best film they could with the opportunity they had.

And they succeeded! This is one of the best low-key trios of films based on a long-existing franchise that nobody had any real expectations of, and that were easy to overlook in the decade when superheroes ruled the big screen.

You will find out here what the creators' aims were, and the challenges of crafting films like these where the stars won't be in the picture until Weta Digital paint them in, and yet so much of those characters are right there in the human performances. If you ever doubted that Andy Serkis deserved a Best Actor nomination, regardless of digital makeup, this may convince you.