FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

  Few artists approached television music quite like Vince Guaraldi; he scored millions of childhoods with a style of music that on its surface would seem like the least likely choice.  The legendary jazz pianist recorded the music for It's a Mystery Charlie Brown throughout December 1973 to January 1974, with sessions at the legendary Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, California. The result was an innovative piece of music which showcased his genius and thoughtful approach to scoring children's entertainment. Having written the iconic 1960s instrumentals for A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, the intention going into the mid 1970s was to broaden his sound. He worked with an incredible group of West Coast musicians, including Seward McCain on bass, Tom Harrell on trumpet, and a double-drummer duo of Mike Clark and Eliot Zigmund. Guaraldi stepped away from his traditional grand piano and experimented with many different instruments, including elect...

If you purchased a ticket to watch Surf Nazis Must Die in 1987, then you probably knew what you were getting yourself into. This Troma Entertainment-distributed movie directed by Peter George sits close to the top of the cult schlock hall of fame due to its amazing title and poster artwork. However, the movie itself is a weird and slower-paced post-apocalyptic film that rarely lives up to the hectic and bloody marketing. However, if you love rough, low-budget 80s exploitation movies set on sunny California beaches with basic synth soundtracks, then this is a very endearing movie. This 80s bargain bin gem has been given a full 4K UHD release by Troma, giving George's earthquake-ravaged California a surprisingly fresh look, with plenty of special features on the disc. The plot is basic. A huge earthquake strikes Los Angeles, causing chaos and a lawless state of affairs along the coastal area. Rival gangs form from the wreckage; however, the Surf Nazis are the strongest force along th...

Let's get this out of the way first: Hadestown was not intended to be a traditional Broadway blockbuster, and its reaching the Walter Kerr Theatre is practically a miracle. What began as a DIY 2006 community theater production mounted in a school bus touring Vermont by Anaïs Mitchell has been through conceptual indie-folk albums, an Off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop, Edmonton, London's National Theatre, and finally a sweep of the 2019 Tony Awards. With this physical home release, capturing the performance on disc, we can see how it holds up when removed from the dark auditorium and placed on the living room television. Short answer first: It holds up surprisingly well, if lacking some theater sweat, though we lose a little bit of the rawness that makes theater unique. But before getting into the technical specs of the transfer and the audio mix, it's a good idea to discuss the merits of the production: what makes Hadestown tick, what the special qualities were o...

Travis Knight's live-action Masters of the Universe is not something that will play well with the Academy; it will not be a hotly debated work in film schools; hell, I am not even sure I can call it a good movie in the traditional critical sense. Yet, as I watched it, grinning ear to ear, on my couch for over two hours, I was transported back to my childhood, wood paneling on the basement walls, an action figure in one hand and a bowl of sugar-drenched cereal in the other. It is an unabashedly campy, but thoroughly enjoyable movie that delivers a feel-good, 80s-style lark.  If the goal was to produce a slick, multi-generational franchise launchpad that would appeal to the current crop of Gen Z and Alpha audiences, it is safe to say that they have not accomplished it. The dialogue is sometimes unintentionally hilarious, and the lore, to the uninitiated, could feel like a convoluted soap opera in an unfamiliar language. However, if the silent wish of the creative team was to deliver ...

Following a relatively uneven pair of seasons that saw the creators double down on their streaming platform’s serialized format, Season 27 sees South Park return to its episodic roots, with the show’s creators toning down the scale while focusing on the familiar antics of the four children as they try to understand the increasingly ridiculous world around them. And what better way to kick off the season than with a Biblical tale of Christ returning to the town to bring his sermon to the confused residents of South Park? In “Sermon on the ‘Mount’,” Jesus attempts to teach the Gospel to the locals in the midst of the end of the world, but it quickly becomes clear that the only spiritual guidance these people truly want comes from the verified Church account on social media. “Sermon…” sets the tone for the rest of the season, which sees the show’s sharp satirical edge turned towards the ever-growing content creator complex and the way people use the Church to justify their actions. It is ...

Adapted by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth from the popular French series Le Bureau des Legende, The Agency Season 1 delivers a less glamorous, more grounded version of the typical Hollywood blockbuster. It focuses not on James Bond-style spy adventures but on middle-aged bureaucrats in dreary offices in London, who, as they sip cold coffee from a styrofoam cup, make life-altering decisions that affect the lives of people a world away. The series follows the life of Brandon Colby, a CIA operative known as “Martian” to his colleagues. Michael Fassbender portrays the tormented double agent who has spent six years in deep cover in Ethiopia. After he is recalled to London, he is forced to shed his false identity as Paul Lewis, toss away his burner phone, and return to his old office in the heart of England. The problem with undercover assignments, as Martian discovers too late, is not the assumed identity but the fact that, after living a lie for so long, the lie starts to feel like the tru...

 In today's episode, I sit down with director Ángel Gómez Hernández to talk about his fun, creepy horror film Crawlers. We discuss the inspiration behind shifting from supernatural horror to a more tangible, comic-book-style creature feature reminiscent of classic Joe Dante or Sam Raimi movies. We also chat about casting lead actress Matilda Lutz, the intense process of shooting long takes with imaginary spiders, and the balance of real spiders filmed on blue screens and visual effects that brought this thrilling roller-coaster ride to life. Crawlers is in theatres now! I hope you enjoy the show

So, I have finally gotten around to watching all five seasons of The Brady Bunch on DVD. It is 117 episodes of 1970s middle-class suburban comfort food. Watching them all in 2026 is an odd experience; one is forced to confront the fact that the show lives in a parallel universe where the most pressing matters of the day are who gets to go to the bathroom and who stole whose diary. There is no Vietnam, no Nixon, no inflation, just astro-turf and a healthy amount of orange interior paint. For most, if you pick up the complete set, it is either for the nostalgia or the sheer curiosity of seeing how television sitcoms used to be made, or that sitcoms used to be a thing. As such, the set is straightforward, with no bells and whistles apart from the usual dynamic menus and a decent-quality remastering of the video. However, getting the set is a worthwhile experience, as it provides an unparalleled view of the transition from a realistic drama about a broken family to full-blown camp. The fir...

Some movies go off the rails purely by accident, runaway studio budgets, corporate micromanagement, or well-meaning creatives hopelessly out of their depth. Some of these trainwrecks are fascinating and endlessly rewatchable. Then there are the movies that feel like they were summoned directly into existence by the internet's darkest, most reactive algorithms, crafted specifically to pick scab after scab of the modern culture war. Citizen Vigilante belongs firmly to that second category. You can't sit through it without realizing you are looking at one of the weirdest artifacts of modern bargain-bin cinema, a project that feels less like a narrative motion picture and more like a fevered comment section brought to life. Uwe Boll directed, wrote, shot, and produced the film, a filmmaker whose name carries over twenty-five years of infamous baggage. Boll spent the early 2000s terrorizing video game fans with cheaply made adaptations like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and ...

I just finished rewatching Scary Movie, and I'm trying to figure out how a twenty-six-year-old parody flick holds up after all these years. Honestly, watching this today is just strange. Back in the summer of 2000, every multiplex was completely clogged with self-aware teen slashers trying to ride the wave Scream started. Everyone was wearing baggy cargo pants, listening to late-era nu-metal, and taking I Know What You Did Last Summer a bit too seriously. The Wayans brothers took one look at that whole trend and decided to just burn it to the ground with the support of a proper studio budget. The movie works way better than all those terrible mid-2000s knockoffs like Epic Movie or Date Movie because the Wayans crew actually understood horror tropes. They weren't just throwing random pop culture references at the screen for the sake of it. They specifically tore apart the structure, the beats, and the visual language of the movies they were roasting. They knew how slasher setups...