What’s the deal with Netflix’s The Electric State? Well, for one thing we know that IT’S ELECTRIC… boogie woogie woogie. But also, it’s a movie arguing for the primacy of real-life connection that feels utterly algorithmically designed, what with its Chris Pratts and Millies Bobby Brown and cute robot pals, and it cost… $320 million?? That can’t be right. There must be a smudge on these accounting sheets. Anyway, we talk about it!
Elliott puts on his greasy overalls to look under the filmic hood, as we figure out what makes a good “robot movie,” ask why Heartbeeps was a bad one, and see if we can pull out the robot defibrillator to restore its cinematic heartbeep.
We tie a bow around Max Fun Drive 2025 and our “Movies Without Spider-Man” series with (?) Paul Schrader’s (?) magnum opus, Heartbeeps. It’s the classic tale of a guy robot and a girl robot in love and also there’s a bad stand-up comic robot and a mean cop robot and a baby robot and Andy Kaufman does one of the world’s most irritating voices and what the fuck is this thing?
“Movies Without Spider-Man” Max Fun drive continues (please consider supporting our show!) with the thrilling (?) conclusion (??) of the Venom saga — Venom: The Last Dance, the touching story of a boy and the black sentient goo he wears on his body that sometimes eats people’s heads. There’s one more week of Max Fun Drive […]
We start out our special “Films Without Spider-Man” theme month (in honor of Max Fun Drive — please consider supporting our show!) with one of the more ostentatiously-Spider-Man-free films of last year: Kraven the Hunter. C’mon, Kraven, we KNOW you guys know one another–remember that last hunt? Just swallow your pride and phone Spidey to drop by! We’re cravin’ it!
We welcome one of the godfathers of bad movie culture, Harry Medved, of the seminal books “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” and “The Golden Turkey Awards,” and discuss his PBS show “Locationland” where he and comedian Dana Gould visited the filming sites for Plan 9 From Outer Space! And we also spend a little time talking to Locationland producer Harry Pallenberg about his father’s work with John Boorman on Exorcist II: The Heretic (the Golden Turkeys’ pick for #2 worst movie of all time) and the oft-referenced Zardoz!
Wow! The first new Star Trek movie in eight years! What’s that you say? Oh. TV movie? And it’s less a “movie” and more a “we were going to develop a new series and that fell through so we made it a one-off, 90 minute thing?” Huh. Well, Star Trek: Section 31 may not be a “movie” in the same way we’ve used that word for most of its existence, but it was still a good excuse to hang out with our friends Adam and Ben from Max Fun’s terrific Trek shows Greatest Gen and Greatest Trek, so every cosmic cloud has a silver lining, we guess.
The Goofmaster returns to quiz Stuart and Elliott about some IMDb “Goofs” from 1980’s movies that didn’t live up to the standards of viewers with enough free time to log movie goofs on IMDb.
