Midweek Mention Episodes

Stanley Kubrick's cinematic treatise on violence and free will, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), gets the Bad Dads treatment as we tackle the story of Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), leading his gang of droogs and getting ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence accompanied by the bliss and heaven of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Controversial, sexually violent and disturbing and that's just our review. We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely d...

Based very loosely on "The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick, NEXT (2007) tells the story of Chris Johnson (Nic Cage), cursed with the ability to see 2 minutes into the future, except for when the plot demands it. Using his gifts to make modest wins in Las Vegas casinos and hiding behind the façade of being a cheap stage magician, Johnson finds himself reluctantly drawn into solving a terrorist plot by FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore). One of the stupidest movies ever made, and I mean that ...

Danny DeVito’s blackly comic THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989) charts the disintegration of a marriage as Barbara and Oliver Rose try anything and everything to drive each other out of the shared marital home during a vicious divorce battle. Capitalising on the obvious chemistry between leads Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as well as their shared cinematic history in 80's romantic comedies ROMANCING THE STONE and THE JEWEL OF THE NILE, director Danny DeVito chooses to frame the story by having hi...

When pseudocidal proto-emo Harold meets his opposite, manic pixie Grandma Maude, at a funeral, both will enrich the others’ lives in Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy metaphor about the circle of life. Harold is obsessed by death, Maude by life and a blink and you'll miss it shot in the final third of the movie adds extra depth and context to its message. Bud Cort's muted, subdued and often monotone Harold is the yin to Ruth Gordon's spirited and energetic yang, and the movies pitch black sense of h...

The last few weeks Top 5 discussions have included Dinner Scenes and Hitchhikers and understandably that's seen us talk about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), one of the most influential horror movies of all time. Director Tobe Hooper together with co-writer Kim Henkel establish fundamental and often repeated conventions of the slasher sub-genre such as the Final Girl trope, the connection of sex with death and physically imposing masked men chasing people wielding blunt instruments in this m...

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004) began life as a straight parody of Bruckheimer style action movie tropes before morphing into something more satirical after the commencement of the Iraq War, and successfully captures the sardonic fury of those who accused the US of pursuing recklessly jingoistic and interventionist foreign policies in the wake of 9/11, whilst simultaneously spearing the hypocrisy and vanity of the narcissistic Hollywood liberal elite and their self-interested and superficial v...

George Clooney explains how to be a Jedi to Ewan McGregor in director Grant Heslov’s debut feature, satirical war movie THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. Reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) investigates the New Earth Army, a branch of the US military tasked with advancing America's interests by exploiting the paranormal and the psychic. A stellar cast and a smart Coen-lite script gives us some funny moments but the tone wavers between screwball and scathing and sometimes misses both targets. Think Fear and...

Garth Jennings's adaptation of THE HITCHHIKERS'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY starts much like the source material, when the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, before veering off on a contrived and underwritten love triangle which makes this 2005 sci-fi comedy only moderately successful. Hapless Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) and his friend, the experienced galactic journalist Ford Prefect (Mos Def), find themselves aboard a stolen spaceship piloted by two-headed Galactic...

BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III picks up immediately after the cliff-hanger ending of the second movie, with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) receiving a letter from a stranded but happy Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), after a freak burst of lightning struck the DeLorean. Discovering that Doc was killed a week after writing the letter, Marty travels back to The Old West in 1885 to rescue his eccentric friend... For such a beloved franchise, the BACK TO THE FUTURE series has always carried some ideas tha...

Wouldn't it have been fun to review THE FLY (1986) and also the 1958 original version? I guess we'll never know, having only found time to cast our critical eye at the DAVID CRONENBERG remake. There's no messing about as the movie immediately throws the two main characters together at some kind of nerd convention. I'm a fan immediately getting on with the story and not wasting precious time with wearisome world building. We've got a podcast to make and efficient story telling such as this is a ...

Steve Martin apparently worked on the script for L.A. STORY for seven years before he and director Mick Jackson brought this romantic fantasy comedy to the big screen in 1991. Martin plays Harris K. Telemacher, a depressed weather presenter, trapped in an unfulfilling relationship with his socialite girlfriend and disheartened by the superficiality of the Los Angeles scene. After being dumped by his girlfriend and receiving cryptic relationship advice from a freeway sign he begins to fall for Sa...

Produced and directed by prolific Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To, PTU: POLICE TACTICAL UNIT (2003) spawned a multi film franchise about which none of us knew a thing. When Sergeant Lo (Lam Suet) has his service weapon stolen during an altercation with local gangsters putting his dreams of promotion at risk, uncompromising Sergeant Mike Ho (Simon Yam) of the PTU gives him until dawn to recover it, but their situation starts to become more complicated when a local gang leader is murdered. Set in a H...

Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book which in turn was inspired by the 1962 Rudolph Maté sword and sandals epic THE 300 SPARTANS, 300 (2006) is Zack Snyder's very loose retelling of the events of the Battle of Thermopylae taking place circa 480 BC and I don't really think I can reasonably cram 1 more number into this sentence before it loses any semblance of aardvark. Gerard Butler plays Leonidas, master chocolatier and King of the Spartans, the most feared and formidable of all forces in an...

The late 90's saw a run of films which deconstructed the idea that reality was an illusion; THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE MATRIX, DARK CITY all explored this theme in some way but David Fincher's 1997 THE GAME is the most paranoid of all of them. Michael Douglas is superb as affluent control freak Nicholas van Orton who finds himself involved in a conspiracy when brother Conrad gives him a gift certificate for the blandly-named Consumer Recreation Services promising a "profound life experience". Some ty...

SWINGERS was released in 1996 and Sidey in particular has loved it ever since. Dan joined in the conversation as the guys try to pin down exactly why this film is such a hit with the fellas. Is it the eminently quotable dialogue, the brilliant soundtrack or the gents style? Possibly all of those things. This movie launched the careers of Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Doug Liman. Not to give too much away, but we love this movie!

Having frittered away this weeks budget on extravagances like cheese and pickled chillies, the Dads were forced to choose a movie available to them at no extra costs. Step forward TRANSPORTER 3 starring the very excellent Jason Statham. A strange choice by Sidey, as he hadn't seen either Le Transporteur 1 or 2! Mr Statham plays Frank Martin, a man whose name confused your hosts a lot more than it should have. Frank is the Transporter in question. A courier of dubious goods, who has a code, but...

6 years after an assassination attempt goes horribly wrong, resulting in the death of his young son, FBI Agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) finally captures and subdues international terrorist Castor Troy (Nic Cage) however with time running out to defuse a bomb that will destroy the entire city of Los Angeles, Archer decides to undergo experimental face transplant surgery in order to pose as his nemesis and infiltrate a secret underwater prison where he can meet Troy's brother Pollox, the only o...

This week's notes were written before all the technical flummoxing that occurred, scuppering our collaboration. They are however too good to delete so please enjoy, whilst pretending there's finally someone interesting on this show to listen to! __________________________________________________________________ Charlie Bingham, host of the Mountain Conversations podcast and archaeologist with a specialist interest in the common ancestor between humans, chimps and bonobos may well see her work ...

Of course, it seems obvious now to reimagine the iconic video game characters for 1993's SUPER MARIO BROS. movie as being captives in an alternate dimension steampunk police state where people evolved from dinosaurs, which has been infected by a sentient testicle fungus and opponents of the fascist regime are de-evolved into barely conscious lumbering abominations but it took the largely untried husband and wife team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, writers for MAX HEADROOM, to bring this creati...

In the spirit of the movie we are reviewing I thought it would be humorous to make the show notes excessively long so that it would take you three hours to read them but it turns out that a) no one reads the show notes anyway and b) that would take me an extremely long time so instead you can recreate that experience by simply looping over these next sections a few thousand times. Frank Darabont had already directed the Stephen King adaptation THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, initially a box office di...

We have been subjecting ourselves to THE PENTAVERATE for reasons it is hard to explain so when Johnny Utah responded to our call for suggestions of movies that listeners think are worth revisiting, Mike Myers 1993 follow up to the pop culture smash hit WAYNE'S WORLD seemed like a good fit with our viewing trends. It was a surprise to me though that this week’s movie, SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER, would reference the recent Netflix's series central conceit, proving the Canadian has had the idea i...

Sidey enthusiastically nominated the 2010 cult favourite, SCOTT PILGRIM Vs THE WORLD. This could possibly be the most Edgar Wright movie of all the Edgar Wright movies. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but something to do with sharp, quick editing, great soundtrack and fantastic casting. Whilst we know at least one of the Dads loves this movie, the movie was not a global smash. This one sadly lost out at the box office, and the audience's lukewarm response to the movie was reflected in th...

Mark Steven Johnson's GHOST RIDER (2007) sees daredevil stuntman - see what I did there because the same director also did the Ben Affleck superhero caper about a blind gimp lawyer called DAREDEVIL - Johnny Blaze make a Faustian pact with Mephistopheles which ends up in him becoming a flame-skulled bounty hunter. You know how those Faustian pacts can be. With steampunk Neo-clone villain Blackheart and his band of easily dispatched elemental douchebro's desperately seeking the maguffin which will...

Reegs selected the 1986 Disney sci-fi classic FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR for our viewing entertainment. Joey Cramer stars as David Freeman, a 12-year old boy who falls into a ravine in 1978 rendering himself briefly unconscious and presumably sustaining terrible brain injuries, explaining the events of the rest of the movie which involves time travel, an initially hostile sentient machine from the planet Phaelon named Max (Paul Reubens) and the villainous NASA agency headed up by Dr Faraday (Howard...