Pop Screen's Oscar month goes back to, er, 2021 with the film widely predicted to win Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Less a biopic of the titular blues singer and more a drama about temptation and (often racial) exploitation adapted from August Wilson's play, it nevertheless features a powerhouse, Oscar-nominated turn from Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. This week, Ewan Gleadow from Cult Following returns to argue the merits and demerits of the film's obsessive fidelit...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr
March is Oscar month on Pop Screen, and as luck would have it one of this year's frontrunners is absolutely made for us. A goofy, shaggy 1970s coming-of-age comedy featuring a Tom Waits cameo, the entire band HAIM and their parents - seriously, their real-life parents - it's inspired rabid devotion and some dissent for its treatment of racial prejudice, age-gap relationships and its outspoken pro-water-bed stance. This week, Graham is joined by Mark Harrison from Den of Geek to discuss Paul Thom...
Mar 10, 2022•56 min
What kind of film do you think the above image is from, listeners? If you answered "Why, a biopic of a 1960s rock band, of course", congratulations - you are Oliver Stone, and this is an episode of Pop Screen about your 1991 film The Doors. Join Doors fan Aidan and Doors, uh, not-fan Graham for an exploration of this fabulously lavish, maddeningly shallow account of Jim Morrison's life and death, which occasionally remembers there were some other guys with instruments standing behind him. Along ...
Feb 24, 2022•1 hr
Back in 2007, Wong Kar-Wai could have done anything for his first American film. What he chose to do was cast easy-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones in a road movie where she would play alongside David Straithairn, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Natalie Portman, and tell her not to take acting lessons because she's such a natural. Which, you must agree, is a choice! On this week's Pop Screen, Sarah and Graham discuss the resulting film, which the passing of time has not made any less befuddling. It has all...
Feb 17, 2022•1 hr 5 min
The 1960s were, depending on your viewpoint, either the best or the worst time to release a film about political assassinations, and there weren't many wilder examples than John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. A wildly paranoid tale of a returning military veteran convinced that one of his brothers-in-arms is now a brainwashed Communist assassin, it essentially created the conspiracy thriller as we know it, and had a knockout cast including Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury and - the re...
Feb 10, 2022•54 min
Looky looky at our black booky: this week Pop Screen is looking at an artefact of the utmost early '90sness, Vanilla Ice's first and only starring vehicle Cool As Ice. Deeply influenced by the teen rebel films of the 1950s and shot by Spielberg's future DoP Janusz Kaminski, these classy influences sit uncomfortably with a story in which Kristin Minter falls in love with the Iceman after he nearly gets her killed in a horse fall. This week, first-time host Jeff joins us to unpick the layers of th...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Pop Screen is 50 episodes old! To celebrate, we've got Gav Smith from the My Favourite Film podcast back in to cover one of the big names (in terms of profile, if not in height) that we haven't covered so far - Prince, and his blockbuster first movie Purple Rain. Gav is a Prince superfan, Graham a Prince ignoramus - can he be converted? More a vehicle for the extraordinary album accompanying it than a narrative movie, Purple Rain nevertheless maintains a cult following, thanks in part to encapsu...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Pop Screen makes another foray into the documentary realm this week, with Aidan rejoining regular host Graham to look at Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck. An ambitious film rooted as much in its subject's imagination as it is the facts of his life, it was highly acclaimed as a portrait of the late Kurt Cobain, even as its strict factual accuracy was debated. As well as Morgen's film, we'll also be discussing Nirvana's legacy across the decades, and how Cobain and the wider ...
Jan 20, 2022•51 min
A pop movie is normally a chance to consolidate, rather than destroy, an image, which is why the Monkees' sole trip in front of the camera is such a strange affair. Produced by BBS Productions at the same time as they were making Easy Rider - and with the Dennis Hopper cameo to prove it - 1968's Head is a freeform collection of surrealist sketches, musical numbers and anti-war agitprop, shot through with a viciously sarcastic take on the band's status as a consumer product and co-written by Jack...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 2 min
After making one of the definitive rock biopics with Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox was hired to document The Pogues, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello as they toured Nicaragua. When it was decided that sending a bunch of rock stars to tour a country which had recently been at war was a bad idea, Cox made Straight to Hell instead, a spaghetti Western parody with Strummer as the leader of a group of bank robbers whose attempted getaway lands them in a sinister town ruled by a coffee-addicted bandit gang...
Jan 06, 2022•59 min
Cum on Feel the Podcazt! This week Pop Screen celebrates the festive period with a band who, without a sleigh bell in earshot, conjure up the spirit of Christmas. It can only be Slade, who got debutant director Richard Loncraine to make their one and only feature film, the oft-mistitled (not least by us) Flame, in 1975. Despite being released at the height of their popularity, it wasn't a hit - so much so that Mick, this week's co-host, heard the album a ridiculous 46 years prior to actually sit...
Dec 23, 2021•56 min
Pop Screen is going all topical this week, eschewing our usual cult classics and reviewing a film released this year - so be warned, there are spoilers! It's Annette, an extraordinary, divisive musical by extraordinary, divisive director Leos Carax, with a full original score by extraord... you get the picture, it's Sparks, the score is by Sparks. Join Graham and Mark as they examine this surprisingly linear but deeply eccentric film from the director of Holy Motors. Among other issues, you'll h...
Dec 16, 2021•46 min
We hope all our American listeners had a happy Life Day recently - if not, let this week's Pop Screen put you in the party mood. In 1978, just one year after A New Hope was released, the stars of George Lucas's original blockbuster reconvened for a bizarrely misconceived variety show that's never been officially re-released. They were joined by guests including Art Carney, Jefferson Starship and Bea Arthur in an officially licensed production that nevertheless has the same relationship to the ma...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Shahid Mohammed, cut it with precision: this week Pop Screen is going back to the Daisy Age of hip-hop with Michael Rapaport's documentary Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Somewhat incredibly the first ever documentary about a hip-hop band, this warts-and-all look at Tribe's history annoyed Q-Tip by focusing on the tensions between him and the late Phife Dawg. But the film as a whole is fonder and more sensitive than Rapaport's career as a social media nuisance would...
Dec 02, 2021•48 min
Pop Screen is back, back, back with Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (x2) as Cult Following 's Ewan Gleadow rejoins Graham to talk about I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's surreal anti-biopic with six different stars embodying different aspects of Dylan's persona. There's Cate Blanchett as the controversially-electrified superstar Dylan, Christian Bale as protest-singer Dylan, Richard Gere as enigmatic roots weirdo Dylan, as well as Heath Ledger, Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Whishaw as the other Bobs D...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Hey you! It's time for Pop Screen to tackle one of the earliest, most expensive and most flamboyant product of the 1980s crossover between music video and cinema: Pink Floyd - The Wall. Based closely on Roger Waters's semi-autobiographical songs, director Alan Parker and animator Gerald Scarfe produced an epic fantasy of isolation, trauma, totalitarianism and grief that caused no less a figure than Steven Spielberg to mutter "what the f*** was that?" at its Cannes premiere. This week, we're brin...
Nov 04, 2021•44 min
It's the most wonderful time of the year - Halloween, obviously - and Pop Screen is convening Graham, Rob and Mick to discuss one of the all-time great horror movies featuring a pop star - David Cronenberg's Videodrome, featuring Blondie's Debbie Harry as a media psychotherapist who discovers a conspiracy to use video signals to suppress the new flesh. And what is the new flesh? We've all watched this film more than once and we're still not sure. It might want for a coherent narrative, but it's ...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Since its premiere at Chicago's Cinepocalypse festival, Glenn Danzig's directorial debut Verotika has gone down in legend. Not a good legend, but then as Countess Elizabeth Bathory would tell you not all legends are good. This week on Pop Screen, Ewan Gleadow from Cult Following rejoins us to discuss Danzig's three-part magnum opus, based on stories from his own Verotik comics imprint. Along the way we discuss the first story's strange Los Francegeles setting, the challenges of writing Tales fro...
Oct 21, 2021•58 min
Well, we're certainly not pro-bellum. This week Mick from Behold! pod joins us again to look at a film that seems to have everything going for it: a pair of hotly-tipped debuting directors, a provocative, mind-bending premise, and a quality cast. Even more promisingly, that quality cast is headed up by Janelle Monae, who Graham cites as the only musician capable of filling the void left by Prince and David Bowie. And yet Antebellum received a tepid reaction on release, and Graham and Mick are he...
Oct 14, 2021•51 min
A trilogy of Black horror and science fiction tales, hosted by the disembodied floating head of funk legend George Clinton? It happened! Kicking off Pop Screen's Halloween month, Geek Show kingpin Rob joins us once again to look at one of the stranger products of HBO's post-Tales from the Crypt hunt for a new anthology series - Reginald D Hudlin's Cosmic Slop. Quickly forgotten, it was edited into a three-part feature for the home video market, and was rediscovered in the run-up to Jordan Peele'...
Oct 07, 2021•52 min
This week, Pop Screen has been thinking about a line drawn in the sand: specifically, a line drawn between the reasonable criticisms of PJ Harvey's 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, and the ones that took her to task for not working out a viable model for bringing stable democracy to Afghanistan. (Yes, really) 2019's Seamus Murphy-directed documentary A Dog Called Money reopened the controversies, and it is this film that Aidan and Graham have gathered to discuss this week. On the way,...
Sep 30, 2021•50 min
Oi! I said oi! Pop Screen has its hardest-hitting episode this week - yes, perhaps even grittier than Spice World - with Ben "Plan B" Drew's directorial debut Ill Manors. A multi-stranded tale of drug-dealing, deprivation and all-round dodginess in Forest Gate, it has its roots in Drew's 2008 short film Michelle. On release, however, it became an unexpected talking point thanks to the then-recent English riots - enough of a hot-button release for the Observer to get Lethal Bizzle and Edwina Curr...
Sep 23, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Once a reviled commercial disaster, today David Lynch's Dune is... a tolerated commercial disaster? It has its fans, it has its naysayers, so before Denis Villeneuve launches his much-anticipated adaptation of (the first half of) Frank Herbert's novel Graham and Archaeon are convening to deliver the final verdict on a film Lynch hated so much he asked for the extended cut to be credited to "Judas Booth". Topics include Dino de Laurentiis's surprisingly decent history shepherding art-house direct...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Best remembered for containing Damon Albarn's one film acting performance, as wet-behind-the-ears aspiring gangster Jason, this week's Pop Screen argues that Antonia Bird's 1997 movie Face deserves more credit. A British gangster movie made in that brief moment before Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels inspired every screenwriter in the country to write a gangster movie, it's a brutal postmortem on eighteen years of Conservative government disguised as a brutal heist-gone-wrong thriller. Thos...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 14 min
There's always been a steady stream of British acts trying to make it in America, but the American acts trying to make it over here are a more rarefied bunch. Along with Sparks, one of the few US artists to try their hand at the notably Brit-centric early '70s glam rock scene was Suzi Quatro, who arrived with an unforgettable image, a massive bass guitar and some songs you'll know even if you don't know her name. She's still touring today, and Liam Firmager's documentary Suzi Q tracks her from t...
Aug 26, 2021•43 min
We're doing a Madonna movie! No, come back! This week, Graham and Sarah go back to the Material Girl's breakthrough moment, when her Nile Rogers-produced sophomore album Like a Virgin proved she wasn't a fluke, and Desperately Seeking Susan became one of the top five highest grossing films of 1985. But don't think this is a safe choice for a young pop star: it's a screwball comedy, a tough genre to get right, by Susan Seidelman, a director with only one, punk-inflected, previous film. And wait u...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min
A biopic of Brian Wilson had been mooted ever since the late 1980s, but it wasn't until 2014 that Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy was released, with its bold time-hopping structure that allowed both Paul Dano and John Cusack to play the Beach Boys' chief songwriter. The former played Wilson as he recorded Pet Sounds and his legendary unrealised Smile project, the latter played him as he struggled to escape the control of his abusive quack therapist Eugene Landy. It sounds a bit heavy - and it is ...
Aug 12, 2021•53 min
Could the King of Pop have become the King of Cinema? Not, perhaps, on the evidence of 1988's Moonwalker, a curious, personal but deeply overbudgeted melange of music videos, live performance, claymation and a bewildering plot-line where Jackson fights back against Joe Pesci's not exactly Scorsese-worthy drug dealer by turning into a car. Critics at the time found it bizarre, self-indulgent and incoherent, and while that's not exactly wrong, its frequent songs and dance routines do remind you wh...
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 27 min
The director of Deliverance made a film starring the Dave Clark Five? It happened! This week, We Are Cult's Mark Cunliffe rejoins the podcast to talk about John Boorman's very uncharacteristic debut Catch Us If You Can, starring Clark as a stuntman who goes on the run with Barbara Ferris's frustrated advertising spokeswoman. Made in the shadow of A Hard Day's Night, its unsettling satire on the PR industry and strikingly direct drug references make it a precursor to the more pessimistic counterc...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 7 min
There aren't many pop movies of the 2010s that won an Oscar, but then there aren't many pop movies as well-crafted and emotionally devastating as Asif Kapadia's 2015 documentary Amy. A bruising look at the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse told with intimate archive footage, it's both a celebration of a unique talent and an excoriation of the culture that led to her death. On this week's Pop Screen, Aidan joins Graham to discuss who, if anyone, the villain of the movie is, what it says about 2000s ...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 4 min
