Electronic dance music took Europe by storm in the years following 1989. The music became the soundtrack across the unifying continent for the post-Cold War euphoria of the decade when the world went online. In this episode, Rutger reviews five films that depict events from the "second Summer of Love" in Manchester in the late eighties to the early noughties in Berlin: 24 Hour Party People (2002), Trainspotting (1996), Wasted (1996), It's All Gone Pete Tong (2004) and Berlin Calling (2008). For this episode, there exists a 45-minute mix of some of the songs featured in the films and discussed in the review. This can be found at https://www.ourpodacademy.com/post/techno-on-film
It is somewhat perplexing how the basic premise of so many different films across genres have one recurring theme when it comes to men wanting to get back with their exes: male performance, female castration, male domination, female submission. Our films for this episode are: Outbreak (1994), Die Hard (1988), 2012 (2009), War of the Worlds (2005), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
The story of the flood and Noah's ark has been a staple of human storytelling for 2500 years, with the latest version being the avant-garde Darren Aronofsky 2014 Noah film, with its distinct gravitas, starring Russel Crowe, Jennifer Connely, Emma Watson, Ron Winstone, and Anthony Hopkins. How is this 21st-century version of this tale different and what does it tell us about the evolution of storytelling? What makes this biblical adventure still relevant today? A collaboration with Garry Stevens from History in the Bible Podcast https://www.historyinthebible.com/
Time travel is an awesome power that, apparently, is wielded by manchildren in order to groom and gaslight women. Gil and Rutger review the highly similar films, The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) and About Time (2013). As a palate cleanser, the shockingly oedipal Back To The Future (1985).
In our series on time travel, we treat ourselves to one of the greatest film franchises of all time: Back to the Future. Gil and Rutger explore the evolution of our morals from the depicted 1950s (and 1880s and 2010s) through the time the films were made, and on to our present day. Are time machines just tools for manipulating the world into getting what you want - especially from women - or can we aim higher?
How do South African Films portray post-Apartheid crime? Why is there crime? Who are the criminals? What is their life like? Is race more important than class? Gil has South African-raised Jessina Marenga again to look at how South Africans are telling their own stories about crime.
Wall Street and its flaws are a common theme in movies, which emphasize the excesses, the risk-taking, and the societal fallout. But once upon a time, banking and finance were boring, steady occupations - and even before that, they were the domain of Florentine family businesses and Venetian Jews. What changed, and why? Gil and Rutger discuss Hollywood portrays the world of finance capitalism over 50 years: Merry Poppins (1964), Wall Street (1980), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Big Short (2015)
The 2020 thriller dark comedy Promising Young Woman breaks new ground on the feminist film continuum, parodying former female revenge movies, narratives about rape as an awesome origin story, and eviscerates the trope of the "nice guy". Lireza Elezaj joins Gil to discuss.
Since the pandemic, the world of sports has changed. We see it all over the world, across athletic fields, across populations, languages, cultures and whatnot: feelings of empathy and collectiveness are on the rise, while the haters have quarantined themselves into a corner. Gil and Rutger discuss Simone Biles and many other cases of extreme global feelings of thankfulness and appreciation.
What would happen if time didn't simply move forward linearly, but instead the same trajectory could be taken multiple times? What would the experience be like emotionally, or philosophically? What would the paradoxes be? In this episode, Gil and Rutger explore this scenario through sci-fi films.
