This week on Pop Screen there's a new Sherrif in town. Well, just for this one single episode, anyway. This is Rob of Directors Uncut typing right now. You can find Directors Uncut here Pop Screen has crossed over with our sister podcast, Directors Uncut, for an epic review of 2022. You can already find part a bonus to these bonus episodes for free on our PATREON . The snake truly is eating itself with that one. This is part two of said coverage, which looks at the 10-6 from this lovely bunch of...
Jan 05, 2023•2 hr 29 min
The year is nearly done, but Pop Screen lingers on with an episode about Todd Haynes's documentary The Velvet Underground. Covering the turbulent career of one of the most confrontational yet influential bands of the 1960s, it's a film that's got everything from deep discussions of minimalist composition to amusing anecdotes about how their black-clad smack-addled racket played with California's hippie scene. (Spoiler alert: badly!) This week, Graham is joined by Left Lion's Oliver Parker to dis...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 85
[drum hit] AND IIIII-EEE-AAAYYY... Yes, some songs are born Christmassy, some achieve Christmasiness, and some have Christmas thrust upon them, as is the case with Whitney Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You. Arguably the best-remembered Christmas number one of the nineties, it prompted us to make a festive episode about The Bodyguard, the Lawrence Kasdan film whose soundtrack it graces. Here's something they don't tell you: The Bodyguard is a really tonally weird film. Grah...
Dec 15, 2022•57 min•Ep. 84
Pop Screen has confronted some horrors in its recent Halloween month, but nothing like what Graham and Mark come up against this week: Noel Edmonds. The DJ-turned-mystical guru pops up in Glitter, one of two episodes of the 1970s anthology series Second City Firsts that feature pop stars, and it's enough to send Graham into a journey into the heart of Blobbyland. But there's also the film's main star to reckon with - Toyah Wilcox, captured here just before her punk makeover, committing the ultim...
Dec 01, 2022•50 min•Ep. 83
This week, Pop Screen is taking you to Spatula City with this episode about America's pre-eminent polka-crazed pop parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic and his 1989 film UHF. Prior to this month's parody biopic Weird - in which he's played by Daniel Radcliffe, in Radcliffe's second era-defining role after Swiss Army Man - this was Al's only major motion picture. But that still leaves decades of recordings to discuss, and that's why Al superfan Jeff Pizek is back on the podcast to help bewildered Briton ...
Nov 17, 2022•45 min•Ep. 82
Listeners, are you in the mood for some folk horror? Some folk horror with Bjork? Some, if you will, fjork horror? If so, do we have the podcast for you, as Aidan F rejoins the podcast to discuss this early entry in the Icelandic maverick's small but impeccably on-brand screen canon. Along the way, we discuss her collaborations with Robert Eggers, Matthew Barney, Peter Strickland and David Attenborough, as well as naming our favourite Bjork records. None of this, quite rightly, overshadows the f...
Nov 03, 2022•43 min
Listeners, are you aware that Shuhada Sadaqat - or Sinead O'Connor, as she was - once played the Virgin Mary? If that sounds like a provocative idea, you ain't seen nothing yet. Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy is one of the darkest and most mordantly funny entries in a directorial career that's also included Interview With the Vampire and The Company of Wolves, and we've got We Are Cult 's Mark Cunliffe back in to talk about every deliriously sick moment. The story of a school bully spiralling int...
Oct 20, 2022•57 min
It's spooky season again on Pop Screen, and this month we're kicking off with a look at Ti West's saucy seventies slasher X, starring Kid Cudi along with Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson and Mia Goth again. And since it's not a Halloween show without Directors Uncut host Rob, we've got Rob back in to talk about the film's generational politics, praise its light-touch evocation of the 1970s, and wonder if it's more of an insult to call this elevated horror or un-elevated horror. Along th...
Oct 06, 2022•53 min
It was sixty years ago... well, not today, exactly, but soon, when the Beatles released their first single, so to celebrate Pop Screen is returning to their screen canon for the first time since our very first episode . An experimental, influential animated freak-out, Yellow Submarine was made to fill out the band's movie contract but became so, so much more (although being more than that isn't difficult. Whatever. It's good). To celebrate, we've helpfully reminded Mick from Behold! podcast that...
Sep 22, 2022•56 min
Ah-hah, hush that fuss, Pop Screen is back with Graham and Dreaming Machine 's Joe to take a look at OutKast's 2006 movie vehicle Idlewild. It's not uncommon for rappers to make their big-screen debuts by playing gangsters, but as ever Andre 3000 and Big Boi found their own unique way of doing things, by setting it all in an anachronistically-scored Black bohemia in the 1930s. It's a gangster movie, it's a backstage musical, it's a Prohibition drama, it's a hip-hop film... it's so many things, i...
Sep 08, 2022•56 min
This week's film is one that Graham struggles to accept really exists - which is why it's a good job Mark Harrison from Film Stories has rejoined the podcast to reassure him that this wasn't a hallucination. Did we really watch a movie where Status Quo try and foil SNL veteran Jon Lovitz's underground organ trafficking ring in an extended homage to The Deer Hunter? It appears that we did, and now you can enjoy our confusion in podcast form. Among the many topics of discussion, we talk about Stat...
Aug 25, 2022•52 min
This week's Pop Screen is for people who like their cars fast, their movies mellow and their Californian singer-songwriters practically horizontal, as Aidan returns to the podcast to look at Monte Hellman's cult road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. A none-more-70s tale of dead-end lives on the open road, it owes something of its laid-back cool to its two lead actors: Laurel Canyon mainstay James Taylor and Beach Boys alumnus Dennis Wilson. It would be fair to say Aidan and Graham have differing opinion...
Aug 11, 2022•50 min
Dust off your tinfoil hats, Pop Screen is going conspiracy barmy with this week's episode on 1983's Wavelength. A Roger Corman-produced science fiction thriller starring The Runaways' Cherie Currie as a psychic who guides her singer-songwriter friend towards a military base full of captured extraterrestrials, it's notable for a great Tangerine Dream score, striking location shooting at LA's ominous Lookout Mountain facility, and having nearly been released before Spielberg's ET before it was del...
Jul 28, 2022•50 min
This is (for) hardcore (fans): in celebrating the work of singer, radio host, memoirist and Greatest Living Englishman Jarvis Cocker, we could have picked anything from a Wes Anderson film to a Harry Potter one. Instead, Graham and Ewan have reunited for a look at a true collectors item, his 1999 Channel 4 documentary series about outsider art. See Jarvis tour the world visiting houses, gardens, castles and churches made by people with no architectural training, all of which look better than tha...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min
This week, Pop Screen is warming up its fingers to peruse the lexicon of love with Mantrap, a short film starring ABC - but mostly their lead singer Martin Fry - and directed by Pop Screen's patron saint Julien Temple. Once again, we're joined by Gav Smith from the very fine My Favourite Film podcast, as he takes on his most challenging assignment to date - persuading Graham that early '80s synth pop is good, actually. Along the way, we discuss the film's romantic lead Lisa Vanderpump and her la...
Jul 14, 2022•47 min
It's in the trees! It's coming! Yes, this week Pop Screen is gleefully hopping on board the Kate Bush bandwagon - what else were we going to do, wait for a new album or tour? - with a look at the Blessed Kate's two main acting credits. The Line, The Cross and the Curve is her now-disowned directorial debut, released to tie in with her album The Red Shoes and loosely inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of that name. Join Graham and Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult as they dig into its o...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 34 min
Pop Screen's Bowie month ends in the only way it was ever going to: with a lot of talk about Muppets and 'packages'. Made during a critical and commercial low point in Bowie's musical career, this elaborate Jim Henson-directed fantasy nevertheless gave him one of his most celebrated screen roles - and, in its maddeningly catchy musical numbers, gave us easily the most enjoyable songs of his mid-80s lull. This week, Archaeon rejoins the podcast to talk about traumatic childhood memories, the surp...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 1 min
The centrepiece of Pop Screen's Bowie month could only be one thing: David's first, extraordinary lead role, as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg's trippy science fiction masterpiece. For those unfamiliar with the film, Bowie plays an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to bring water back to his home planet, funding his return trip by patenting alien technology. But the world of high finance drags him off course, as do Earthly temptations like alcohol and weird sex. Lots of weird sex. I...
Jun 16, 2022•56 min
Yeah, when we announced a month of David Bowie movies, you weren't expecting this one, were you? An adaptation of an obscure early Berthold Brecht play that Bowie recorded for the BBC in between Scary Monsters and Let's Dance, Baal is quite probably the most challenging artefact in his screen career - and we're including the Twin Peaks movie in that tally. But it's also thematically linked to his music in a number of interesting ways, and it paired him with a great British director - the late Al...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Pop Screen kicks off a special month dedicated to the films of David Bowie with perhaps his last great role, as the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's equally enigmatic thriller. A story of magic, revenge and dead wives (look, we said it was a Christopher Nolan film), it sees Bowie join a remarkable cast including Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Andy Serkis and Gil from Frasier. On this week's show, Ewan from Cult Following joins...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr
We normally use a still from the film for our episode image, but who could resist this photo from the premiere of Neill Blomkamp's Chappie? It perfectly encapsulates the bizarre appeal of the film, which assembles an enviable cast of blue-chip movie stars and reliable character actors, then has them play support to a Johnny 5/Robocop hybrid and a South African rap group, not necessarily in that order. This week, Andrew from Behold! returns to Pop Screen to authorise the launch of the Moose, by w...
May 26, 2022•52 min
It's no surprise that Pop Screen keeps going back to the 1960s - in many ways, that decade saw the birth of the pop movie as a recognisable genre. That doesn't mean that every film became a classic, although the film we're looking at today became a cult classic of the most disreputable type. Famously described by Mark Kermode as "the Plan 9 from Outer Space of musicals", Robert Hartford-Davis's Gonks Go Beat mixes cheapo science fiction, musical comedy and Romeo and Juliet into a bewildering ste...
May 19, 2022•56 min
When Graham and Sarah decided to do an episode on Never Rarely Sometimes Always, it was not a topical film. Its storyline, about a young girl crossing state lines in order to get an abortion, now puts it at the forefront of a major American news story, but there's much more to Eliza Hittman's film than being merely newsworthy. It's a haunting, measured, beautifully acted and shot film that never lets its unmistakable anger overwhelm its humanity, complete with a small but meaningful appearance f...
May 12, 2022•59 min
Can you believe this is our first Jim Jarmusch episode? The white-haired director's habit of casting musicians means pretty much all of his films qualify for this show, with regular collaborators including Tom Waits, Iggy Pop and RZA. All of them turn up in this, his ensemble zombie comedy from 2019, along with the rather less expected name of Selena Gomez. (Gomez's presence does at least mean this is the second show in a row where we mention Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, and no, we weren't ...
May 05, 2022•1 hr
We're returning to the pop landscape of the early 2000s this week, a pop landscape that had your host Graham wondering whether there was any point being a pop cartographer any more. The dominant feature of said landscape was TV talent shows, usually run by either Simon Cowell or his Salieri, Simon Fuller, the latter of whom masterminded this week's film. A modern-day beach party movie starring first-season American Idol finalists Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson, From Justin to Kelly was legend...
Apr 28, 2022•56 min
Pop Screen is going into hardcore auteur territory this week, with a film directed by and starring the one and only Barbara Streisand. A story of hidden family secrets, illicit affairs, licit affairs, quasi-licit affairs - look, there's a lot of affairs, alright? - it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars while Streisand was snubbed for Best Director, suggesting her music career was preventing her being taken seriously as a film-maker. On this week's Pop Screen, Aidan and Graham discuss h...
Apr 21, 2022•55 min
Pop Screen is going a bit off the beaten track this week, but rewardingly so. Peter Watkins is a maverick British director whose previous film The War Game was banned on the instruction of then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, so when he was hired by Universal to make a teen-focused rock and roll film they probably expected something insurrectionary. What they might not have expected is for Watkins to train his satirical weapons on the pop world they were hoping to tap into, in this documentary-sty...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 13 min
Can you believe this is Pop Screen's first animated film? Better late than never, as Gav Smith of My Favourite Film rejoins us to talk about Interstella 5555 - The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. A story as epic as its frankly overlong title, it was created by Daft Punk as both a homage to the anime they loved growing up and a visual accompaniment to their classic 2001 album Discovery. On this week's episode, Gav and Graham discuss Daft Punk's career from their house beginnings to their increas...
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 4 min
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a-Moonstruck, a film which is not exactly subtle in its depiction of Italian-American culture but is at least witty, well-written and full of heart, thanks to its script by John Patrick Shanley. This week, Pop Screen closes out its Oscars month by inviting playwright Sarah Hayton back on to discuss Norman Jewison's 1987 film, which won Cher a Best Actress award. Frankly, she's so good in this you overlook the fact that her and Nicolas Cage...
Mar 31, 2022•54 min
Pop Screen's Oscar month continues with one of the 21st century's biggest collectors of little bald gold men - Rob Marshall's Chicago. Among its twelve nominations and six wins was a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1990s hip-hop stalwart Queen Latifah, who gets a solo number crammed with innuendo, but she was beaten to the win by her own cast-mate Catherine Zeta-Jones. This week, Cliff from the Devil Times Five horror podcast joins us again to talk about his uncharacteristic love for this...
Mar 24, 2022•1 hr 17 min
