History Lesson Part II

[Reuploaded due to audio exporting issues] Sources: Aaron Sorkin versus reality | Salon.com Why Zuckerberg should like the Facebook movie - CNN.com (archive.org) Facebook Founder Says The Social Network ‘Emphasizes Things That Didn’t Matter’ (archive.org) Mark Zuckerberg rejects his portrayal in The Social Network | Film | The Guardian Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network” (cnbc.com) “The Social Network” will inspire an entirely new generation of entrepreneurs | Social Media Today (archive.org) “The Social Network” will inspire an entirely new generation of entrepreneurs (archive.org) Mark Zuckerberg rejects his portrayal in The Social Network | Film | The Guardian (archive.org)

We discuss Ken Loach's brilliant war epic The Wind That Shakes The Barley in an unintentionally relevant episode. Plus: Jackson takes a pop quiz.

Cody joins us again to talk Spaghetti Westerns and the ways they channel both Italian and US politics of the 1960s and 70s.

In part 1 of our miniseries on Westerns we discuss a trio of movies with varying degrees of Hollywood Blacklist connections with our friend and first guest, Cody Severtson.

We discuss Jay Roach's Trumbo (2015), a pretty ok biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. We also talk about a few much shittier movies about the blacklist, including The Front (1976), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and Good Night and Good Luck (2005).

We talk Gerard Johnstone's delightful horror-comedy M3GAN as well as Ex Machina, Black Mirror, and Blade Runner in a jumbo-sized ep about how much AI sucks.

We do things a little different this time by discussing our philosophy towards film criticism and film more broadly. We also discuss the importance (or unimportance) of the artist's intent, how much we weigh the ideology of the film, and whether or not attempting to review films objectively is even possible.

In Episode 11, we discuss John Sayles' brilliant Matewan (1987), which dramatizes the events leading up to a violent skirmish between striking miners and the Baldwin-Felts detective agency in 1920s West Virginia. This one was already long enough so no theme music this time.

In this episode, Jackson and Tyler discuss "Barry", the godawful 2016 Barack Obama biopic chronicling the former president's first year at Columbia University.

Jackson and Tyler discuss the Knives Out cinematic universe, the difficulties of parodying Elon Musk, and contrast Glass Onion's attempts to satirize tech bros with Gerard Johnstone's M3GAN (2022).

We discuss our favourite (and least favourite) movies of 2022

In part 2 of our Christmas mega-sode, we discuss the murderer's row of blacklisted screenwriters that worked on early drafts of the film's script, its second life as tv holiday staple, and its inclusion in a 1947 FBI file on communist influences in Hollywood.

We discuss Frank Capra's deceptively complex 1946 Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life and its relationship to both left and right-wing poltiics.

For the first time, we discuss multiple works of a director rather than a single movie itself. In episode five, Jackson and Tyler dive into the films of Bong Joon-ho, specifically The Host (2007), Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017), and Parasite (2019). They also have their first major disagreement of the show, with Jackson expressing a dissenting opinion on Parasite that is sure to elicit a clam and rational response from fans of the film. 

We discuss Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Fred Hampton, The Panthers, and how desperately we lack figures and organizations like them on the modern left. We also talk a little bit about the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, and read some excerpts from a wide-ranging array of reviews and press clippings related to the movie.

It's Halloween, so we're bringing you all a new episode a few days early. We talk about the satirical horror film Ready Or Not, which features the spookiest monster of all... fuckin' rich people!

In episode 2, we discuss Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints (1999), which is quite possibly the worst movie we've ever seen. We also inevitably talk a lot about Pulp Fiction, and a little about Overnight, the fantastic documentary that chronicles Duffy falling ass-backwards into directing a successful movie.

In our debut episode, we discuss Steven Soderbergh's 2008 war epic "Che", which chronicles Che Guevara's role in the Cuban Revolution as well as his subsequent capture and death in Bolivia in 1967.