The long-awaited biopic of Sir Elton Hercules John - wait, Hercules? Yes, Hercules - was always going to be a flamboyant affair, but no-one suspected it would be a full-scale, dancing-in-the-streets musical. Yet that is exactly what director Dexter Fletcher and screenwriter Lee Hall delivered in 2019's Rocketman. This week, the Ben, the Ben, the Ben is back to help Graham make sense of the extraordinary results. Along the way, we discuss the many names attached to the lead role before Taron Eger...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr
Phyllida Lloyd's 2008 film Mamma Mia! was a box-office sensation - so why are we vaulting straight over it to review its 2018 sequel? A lot of reasons, as Mark and Graham discover on this week's episode of Pop Screen. Beginning with an absolutely gonzo rendition of When I Kissed the Teacher, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again takes plenty of big, weird chances, not least the decision to pattern its plot structure on The Godfather Part II. This new ambition can only be ascribed to a change of writer and...
Jul 01, 2021•50 min
Look at the film we're covering on this week's Pop Screen. Who can say it's not beautiful? That's right, this week Graham and Ewan are reviewing True Stories, the sole directorial credit for Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. A drily comic compilation of stories inspired by Byrne's love of local tabloids, it gave John Goodman an early starring role, it gave Thom Yorke a band name and it gave Warner Bros.' marketing department a headache as they struggled to sum it up in a trailer. It's a strang...
Jun 24, 2021•59 min
Christina Aguilera waited ten years to make her first film, and when she did the reviews suggested she could have waited a little longer. This week, Joe and Graham look at Burlesque, which pairs Christina with one of the most accomplished (Oscar-winning!) singers-turned-actors in history, Cher. It's a strange mix of let's-put-the-show-on-here cliches, Bob Fosse lifts and discussion of local zoning laws. Yet it wasn't as big a flop as you might remember, and its soundtrack has a bizarrely prestig...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min
On paper, Light of Day has everything going for it. One of the first films Michael J Fox made after Back to the Future, it's a gritty tale of rock 'n' roll as a blue-collar pressure vent, aptly made by the director of Blue Collar, Paul Schrader. Its supporting cast has acting royalty in the form of Gena Rowlands, rock royalty in the form of Joan Jett, and a theme song by Bruce Springsteen. And yet... after disappointing at the box office it disappeared so thoroughly it's never released an Englis...
Jun 10, 2021•54 min
Pop Screen takes its first dip into the flamboyant world of Japanese director Sion Sono with Tokyo Tribe. Adapting a manga by Santa Inoue, Sono takes the characteristically weird decision to tell it in the form of a hip-hop opera, with dialogue rapped by a mixture of actors and real Japanese rappers like Young Dais. It works better than it sounds, and Geek Show head honcho Rob Simpson is here to guide Sono newbie Graham through its neon-lit wastelands. Along the way we discuss Riki Takeuchi's co...
Jun 03, 2021•42 min
The prospect of a Frank Zappa episode of Pop Screen is likely to get you either cheering or groaning, which is of course why we're doing it. This week, confirmed Zappa obsessive Aidan Fatkin joins regular host and Zappa dunce Graham to talk him through the jazz-rock-classical-comedy titan's career - his epic discography, exhaustive production techniques, ribald wit and many, many, seriously many battles with the forces of censorship. We're also here, of course, to talk about his 1971 film 200 Mo...
May 27, 2021•56 min
Today we know Morrissey as a character on The Simpsons, but are you aware he also taught Villanelle how to do local government admin? This is just one of the revelations in Mark Gill's 2017 film England is Mine, a film about Morrissey's early life starring Jack Lowden as the indie icon-in-the-making. Released just as Morrissey exhausted the patience of his remaining fanbase by threatening to sue Der Spiegel for accurately reporting his terrible opinions, it vanished quickly - but did it deserve ...
May 20, 2021•47 min
It's the film that's so punk, it annoyed even the punks - Derek Jarman's Jubilee, with its motley cast including Toyah Wilcox, Rocky Horror legend Richard O'Brien, a pre-fame Adam Ant and at least one former tightrope walker, is our subject of discussion this week. Join We Are Cult's Mark Cunliffe and regular host Graham Williamson as they discuss Jarman's influence as a film-maker, a gay rights advocate and even a gardener, as well as the film's fascinated yet critical overview of Britain's fir...
May 13, 2021•56 min
It would be fair to say that Battleship, Peter Berg's $250 million dollar Hasbro adaptation, does not arrive with the greatest of advance press. And yet, on this week's Pop Screen, our hosts are still astonished at how much goes wrong. Join Graham and Andrew (from Behold! podcast ) as we anatomise the film's scanty, mostly burrito-focused characterisation, its unfortunate obsession with the acronym "RIMPAC", its unexpectedly cute alien baddies and its truly beyond-parody choice of end credits so...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Brian De Palma is not a name commonly associated with campy rock-opera frivolity, but his 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise is closer to Rocky Horror territory than you'd expect from the Carrie auteur. A gonzo melange of Gaston le Roux, the Faust myth and the 1970s music scene before it figured out how to be cool, it's like nothing else you've ever seen before, and this week Graham joins his Directors' Lottery colleague Rob Simpson to figure it all out. Along the way, we discuss De Palma's caree...
Apr 29, 2021•45 min
Before we find out if Chadwick Boseman is going to win a posthumous Oscar for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, let's take a look back at Get On Up, his previous brush with the Academy's sweet tooth for musical biopics. Widely predicted to be a frontrunner in the 2015 Oscar race, the Mick Jagger-produced biopic of James Brown walked away empty-handed. It would be one thing if it was a competitive year, but this was the year when the big winner was The Revenant, so, y'know. What went wrong? Well, as Ben ...
Apr 22, 2021•56 min
Pop Screen roars back, like an army of mods on scooters, with Quadrophenia. One of the definitive British cult movies, a peerless translation of an ambitious concept album and a loving tribute to a scene that, in its era, was so dangerous that the term "moral panic" was coined to describe the press reaction. It's the film that made Brighton rock. But even this is selling Frank Roddam's film short, as Mick and Graham discover. It worked in the 1970s because it tapped into the disaffection and rag...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 6 min
What better time for a mockumentary than April Fools Day? The history of music industry mockery is long and storied, but Graham, Sarah and Mark went for a recent example - Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a note-perfect spoof of the early 2010s style of pop-promo documentary. A flop on its initial release in 2016, time has shown that ever since this film was born, it was dope. Join our trio of reviewers as we consider the career of The Lonely Island, the comedy hip-hop trio who created and st...
Apr 01, 2021•46 min
Pop Screen continues its dive into the strangest products of the 1980s trend towards long-form music videos with a lost gem of British pop surrealism - Jack Bond's It Couldn't Happen Here, starring the Pet Shop Boys. Arguably the first stumble in the relentless upwards trajectory PSB were enjoying, it's been disowned by the band and archly reappraised by Bond as "the first post-Brexit movie". After joining Graham to review Spice World in Episode 2, Ewan Gleadow makes his Pop Screen return for th...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr
We have taken out our Invisalign, and this is the podcast: Mick Snowden of Behold! rejoins Pop Screen to review Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry. It's basically a piece of embedded journalism from the household of a very 21st-century pop star, from the day she first uploaded 'Ocean Eyes' to being tapped to write a Bond theme at the age of eighteen. Along the way, Graham and Mick will debate whether 140 minutes is the right length of time to document a career that's still only one album...
Mar 18, 2021•54 min
This week, Mark Harrison from Film Stories and VODzilla returns to the podcast to talk all things Josie and the Pussycats! Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont's Archie Comics-derived spoof was received poorly on its initial release - yikes - twenty years ago, but with Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina revitalising the source material and Framing Britney Spears turning the world's eyes back to the turn-of-the-millennium celebrity landscape, there's no better time to reconsider its beguilin...
Mar 11, 2021•48 min
It is the future. 2009. A CGI Anthony Hopkins wants Emilio Estevez's body, but not in a sex way. Which badass bounty hunter does he dispatch to bring Estevez for processing in the - I swear to god, this is what it's called - "lobotomizer"? Why, Mick Jagger, of course. That's the set-up for Freejack, which despite a generous budget and a skilled production team went straight to VHS in the UK. One disappointed Blockbusters patron was Archaeon, aka Prob, who joins Graham to discuss the film this we...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 8 min
The title is Buddy Holly, the star is David Essex, and the mood is pure Edward Heath. Claude Whatham's 1973 coming-of-age film might be set in the 1950s but it's really an artefact of Britain's long post-60s comedown, bleak, pessimistic and extremely brown. Remarkably, this tale of a wannabe rock star shrugging and screwing his way through a drizzly holiday camp made Essex a teen idol, and it has a slew of '50s and '60s stars supporting him: Keith Moon, Billy Fury and, as his sleazy mentor, no l...
Feb 25, 2021•48 min
This week's episode of Pop Screen is about Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers, a film whose tonal balancing act is as precarious as Jennifer Lopez's gravity-defying pole dance. A feminist movie set at a strip club, a warm-hearted caper comedy about sexual exploitation and the credit crunch, a serious crime drama with a festival's worth of pop star cameos... can anyone pull this risky job off? Join Graham and Sarah as they discuss the film's complex feminist credentials, the musical careers of Lopez, Liz...
Feb 18, 2021•51 min
This week's Pop Screen is about Silibil & Brains - and if your reaction was "Who the hell are Silibil & Brains"?, allow Jeanie Finlay's fascinating 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax to explain. Finding themselves shut out of the rap industry for their Dundee origins, they decided to pretend they were from California. Ridiculously enough, it worked, and they were groomed for stardom until, inevitably, things started to unravel. This week's guest host is Andrew Young from Behold! pod...
Feb 11, 2021•53 min
Absolute Beginners! If you were part of the British film scene in the mid-80s, you knew it as the coolest project in development: a lavish, experimental musical from punk director Julien Temple, adapted from Colin MacInnes's cult novel, with a cast including Patsy Kensit, Sade, Edward Tudor-Pole, Bruno from Strictly and - standing atop the film as though it were a giant globe - David Bowie. Then the film came out, and nobody went to see it. A film made in the 80s about the 50s with stars from al...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Strap in and get ready for a wild ride, because this week on Pop Screen Graham and Mark are explaining Holy Motors. No false advertising, no ironic trickery - we guarantee that a viable interpretation of Leos Carax's infamous 2012 head-scrambler will be posited as we travel through each of the bizarre tasks imposed upon M. Oscar (a truly phenomenal Denis Lavant). And where does all that leave us? It leaves us with a heartfelt appreciation of the life and screen career of Kylie Minogue, as it sho...
Jan 28, 2021•56 min
Love knows no boundaries, nor does rock, and nor does Pop Screen, which journeys outside of Britain for the first time to look at Wild Zero, a delirious horror-comedy-musical road movie starring the uncompromisingly rock-oriented band Guitar Wolf. Join Graham and Rob as they try and piece together what they've just seen, a journey which involves tighty-whities, UFOs, gender identity and Link Wray's 'Rumble'. Somehow they also find the room for digressions on Adam Buxton, the beauty of Bandcamp, ...
Jan 21, 2021•45 min
That's right, it's the Spice Girls! And they're dressed as each other! Isn't it a howl? If you do not, in fact, think it's a howl, their film Spice World might be a bit of a slog - yet despite near-universal disdain from critics it remains the all-time highest-grossing movie starring a pop band. In episode two of Pop Screen, Graham and Ewan pick their way through the film's minefield of skits, celebrity cameos and quickly-abandoned subplots. They also re-examine the film as part of its cultural ...
Jan 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min
The Geek Show's new podcast about pop stars in the movies couldn't start with any other film. It's 1964, the Beatles are running away from a mob of schoolgirls, and Richard Lester is about to reinvent the rock and roll movie with A Hard Day's Night. But how did this landmark in both musical and cinematic history come to be? Join Graham and Joe for a tale involving The Goon Show, banned documentaries, working-class playwrights and a serious loophole in the Beatles' EMI contract, all somehow addin...
Jan 07, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Tomorrow sees the launch of The Geek Show's new podcast Pop Screen. But what is a Pop Screen, and why should I listen? Not to worry, here's Graham with a quick explainer.
Jan 06, 2021•2 min
