Pop Screen
754 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★ - 2 ratingsPop Screen is The Geek Show's new podcast tackling movies starring, about or by pop stars - and that's all genres, from rock to hip-hop, jazz to disco. Each week Graham and one of his stable of trusty co-hosts picks a pop movie and examines its history, its film-making and its music in-depth. It's an irreverent ride through an oft-misunderstood strain of cinema, from era-defining masterpieces to kitsch atrocities.
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Episodes
Ice Cube in Boyz n the Hood - Episode 118
April 17, 2024 23:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBJohn Singleton was 21 - 21! - when he made one of the most acclaimed debuts of the 1990s, one which led to him becoming the first African-American to get a Best Director nomination at the Oscars. It would be the perfect punchline if it was bad, but annoyingly for this deeply unserious podcast it's great: a frontline dispatch from a world plagued by violence and poverty that still feels vital, and also finds room for more humour and tenderness than you might expect. Join Rob and Graham as th...
Rita Ora in 50 Shades of Grey - Episode 117
April 03, 2024 23:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBSam Taylor-Johnson is about to release Back to Black, her second music biopic following 2009's Nowhere Boy. So naturally Pop Screen decided to review... her EL James adaptation? Yeah, why not, it's got Rita Ora in it. Returning co-host Joe did a lot of Ritasearch for this podcast and was delighted to remember that she only has about a minute of screentime. Not that there's any shortage of other things to talk about when it comes to 50 Shades of Grey. Its status as a cultural phenomenon, its...
Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come - Episode 116
March 21, 2024 00:00 - 49 minutes - 92.4 MBThere are some pop movies that capture the appeal of an entire genre. Such was the case with Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, a crime drama that was such a hit it essentially popularised reggae in the United States. Such things are possible only with a star of the calibre of Jimmy Cliff, plus soundtrack and screen appearances from the likes of Toots and the Maytals and Prince Buster. This week, Aidan rejoins Graham to talk about Henzell's film, and uncover the reason why he might be th...
Lol Creme (10cc) with the Lunatic (1991) - Episode 115
March 07, 2024 12:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBIn 2024, Pop Screen is spending a month in Jamaica, hailing the island's mighty presence in the field of music. And to kick off, we're talking about... er, 10cc? Yes, when they said they don't like reggae, they love it, few could have expected that love would manifest itself in multi-instrumentalist Lol Creme directing a 1991 Jamaican comedy about a small-town eccentric who thinks he can talk to trees, cows and cricket balls becoming involved with a lusty German photographer. As you do. The...
The Alarm in Vinyl (2012) - Episode 114
February 22, 2024 00:00 - 46 minutes - 86.3 MBIn 2004, the veteran Welsh rock band The Alarm pulled off an audacious hoax, releasing their single '45 RPM' under the alias of The Poppy Fields. The Poppy Fields were supposedly a new band of teenage rock stars in skinny jeans, as was the style at the time. As the song ascended the charts, Alarm mainman Mike Peters revealed the deception, kicking off a debate about ageism in the music industry. It's a fascinating story, so fascinating that Mick has dragged himself out of his sickbed to tal...
Cyndi Lauper in Vibes (1988) - Episode 113
February 07, 2024 12:00 - 46 minutes - 87.1 MBGood vibes only this week, as Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult rejoins the podcast to talk about Cyndi Lauper's lead role in the 1988 supernatural comedy Vibes. A film so inspired by Ghostbusters that Dan Aykroyd was briefly attached to star, it has an enviable cast fronted by Lauper, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Falk. And yet, somehow, it tanked. On this episode of Pop Screen, then, we attempt to solve the timeless Fortean mystery of why people didn't watch this at the time, taking detours to talk ...
Mick Jagger in Performance (1970) Episode 112
January 25, 2024 14:48 - 53 minutes - 99.4 MBMemo to you: Pop Screen is back for 2024 and we're covering one of the wildest, most controversial and most ambitious rock movies of the 1970s. Starring Mick Jagger among a motley cast of models, gangsters, boxers and one father of a national embarrassment, Performance saw Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell join forces for a joint debut like no other. On this episode, Rob and Graham reunite to talk about the film's turbulent production, its difficult journey into a form Warner Brothers - who t...
Pop Screen Best of 2023
January 11, 2024 00:00 - 2 hours - 392 MBLast week, our sister podcast Uncut took you through January through to June in our two-part review of 2023. Now, Pop Screen takes up the reigns with Vincent, Naomi, Rob, Graham, Kat, Simon, Mike, Oliver and James all returning to give their favourite films of the second half of the year - culminating in that all-important top ten. What will make the cut? Who did Barbenheimer on the day of release? How many diverging opinions on Saltburn can we get? And who put the Puss in Boots sequel above...
Metallica in Some Kind of Monster (2004) Episode 111
January 10, 2024 09:56 - 50 minutes - 93.9 MBPop Screen finishes 2023 with a movie that could not be less stock to our ears - Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Granted unprecedented levels of access to the world's biggest heavy metal band, the directors of the Paradise Lost trilogy made a raw documentary about a band somehow staying together and making an album despite unprecedented personal turmoil. The punchline: the album they make is St. Anger, perhaps the most reviled album in their back catalogue...
Metallica in Some Kind of Monster (2004) #111
December 28, 2023 00:00 - 50 minutes - 93.9 MBPop Screen finishes 2023 with a movie that could not be less stock to our ears - Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Granted unprecedented levels of access to the world's biggest heavy metal band, the directors of the Paradise Lost trilogy made a raw documentary about a band somehow staying together and making an album despite unprecedented personal turmoil. The punchline: the album they make is St. Anger, perhaps the most reviled album in their back catalogue...
Mariah Carey in Glitter (2001) Episode 110
December 13, 2023 00:00 - 51 minutes - 95.2 MBAll we want for Christmas is this: Mariah Carey's notorious film vehicle is the subject of Pop Screen's festive episode. Equally reviled and unfortunate, it's the tale of a foster child who grows up into an aspiring singer, and whose rise to fame is, shall we say, subtly patterned on Carey's own career. Its soundtrack album was released on 9/11, which stymied its commercial potential. That inspired a #JusticeforGlitter campaign many years later; the film was less fortunate. On this year's P...
Nick Cave in 20,000 Days on Earth (2014) Episode 109
November 30, 2023 12:00 - 52 minutes - 97.1 MBGet ready for (a) love (-in): Graham is joined once again by the Uncut Network's Rob for a look at Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard's massively acclaimed sort-of documentary about Nick Cave. As well as providing an intimate look at the Australian legend's creative process and history, it also features appearances from his deeply unexpected celebrity friends: Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue, together at last! Along the way, there's time to consider the idiosyncratic concert demands of Nina Simo...
Olly Alexander in It's a Sin! (2021) Episode 108
November 16, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBOn this week's Pop Screen, Graham has a very important and special guest: Mark's dog! And, fine, yes, also Mark, with our favourite quizmaster and Film Stories writer coming back to talk about Russell T Davies's most personal drama. Set across the early years of the AIDS crisis, It's a Sin has a cast full of breakthrough young stars, memorable cameos from acting veterans, plus Olly Alexander, whose day job in Years and Years allows us to cover the show. Not that we need much of an excuse to...
Dexter Gordon in 'Round Midnight (1986) Episode 107
November 02, 2023 12:30 - 48 minutes - 90.3 MBOur Halloween special is over and done with, but this week Graham faces his most terrifying challenge yet - enjoying a film about jazz. If you're going to watch one film about jazz, though, Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight is the one to watch. Its bona fides are impeccable: named after a Thelonious Monk song, starring Dexter Gordon, with a score by Herbie Hancock and inspired by the lives of Lester Young and Bud Powell. That's a lot of jazz, and fortunately Aidan is back on the show to ...
Frankie Avalon in the House House of Horror (1969) Episode 106
October 19, 2023 11:00 - 58 minutes - 109 MBOh god, Graham's shining the spooky light under his face again - sounds like time for a Halloween special. And it is, with Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult joining the show once again to talk about The Haunted House of Horror, a 1960s British horror movie with an all-bases-covered title. It's the familiar tale of a group of horny and stupid teens who go to an old house for a seance and end up beset by entities even older and more sinister than Frankie Avalon, the Beach Blanket Bingo star who pla...
Jack Jones in The Comeback (1978) Episode 105
October 05, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBDon't call it a comeback! Literally, given the number of alternative titles Pete Walker's 1978 chiller goes under. Best-known as The Comeback, stars crooner Jack Jones as crooner Nick Cooper - a stretch, then - who is all fresh from a stay in rehab and ready to record his comeback album. The process is interrupted by artistic conflicts, record industry politics, scary ghosts and a hag-masked killer armed with a sickle. Not necessarily in that order. The first in Pop Screen's 2023 Halloween ...
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2021) Episode 104
September 21, 2023 11:00 - 58 minutes - 108 MBWhen we announced a month of Madonna-themed movies, we could have just looked at her acting performances, maybe a documentary or two. Instead, we felt like it was our journalistic duty to blow the lid off her steamy affair with 'Weird' Al Yankovic. That's just one of the extremely accurate facts contained in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a merciless lampoon of biopic cliches which Weird Al superfan Jeff is back on the podcast to discuss with Graham. The film immediately received attention f...
Madonna in Dick Tracy (1990) - Episode 103
September 07, 2023 11:00 - 59 minutes - 111 MBThis week, Pop Screen is showing you Dick. As part of our ce-e-le-bration of the fortieth anniversary of Madonna's breakthrough single Holiday, we're taking you back to 1990, when Warren Beatty became one of the few men to ever tell her what to do as he directed his then-partner in the comic book hit of the summer, Dick Tracy. Obviously, the landscape of comic book adaptations has changed since the days when a 1930s detective strip was a box office smash and Captain America was the subject ...
X-Ray Spex in Poly Styrene: I am a Cliche (2021) - Episode 102
August 24, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBSome people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but Pop Screen says: welcome to our episode on Poly Styrene: I am a Cliche! Co-directed by Celeste Bell in collaboration with Paul Sng, it follows Bell's journey to explore her late mother's iconic time with the punk band X-Ray Spex, as well as her troubled life and - more important than it sounds, this - her one-of-a-kind fashion sense. The documentary is based closely on the book Day-Glo, by Bell and Zoe Howe, and on this episo...
X-Ray Spex in Poly Styrene: I am a Cliche (2021)
August 24, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBSome people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but Pop Screen says: welcome to our episode on Poly Styrene: I am a Cliche! Co-directed by Celeste Bell in collaboration with Paul Sng, it follows Bell's journey to explore her late mother's iconic time with the punk band X-Ray Spex, as well as her troubled life and - more important than it sounds, this - her one-of-a-kind fashion sense. The documentary is based closely on the book Day-Glo, by Bell and Zoe Howe, and on this ...
Austin Butler in Elvis (2022)
August 10, 2023 11:00 - 50 minutes - 94 MBThis week, Mark Harrison from Film Stories rejoins Pop Screen to taunt Graham about one of his most extravagantly failed predictions. Remember our The Dead Don't Die episode? Where we looked at that film's star Austin Butler's upcoming movies and decided there was no way an Elvis biopic was going to make bank in 2022? WELL... Actually, the strangest thing is not that it made money, but that we enjoyed it. Join Mark and Graham as they discuss their mixed feelings towards Baz Luhrmann, the "c...
Austin Butler in Elvis (2022) - Episode 101
August 10, 2023 11:00 - 50 minutes - 94 MBThis week, Mark Harrison from Film Stories rejoins Pop Screen to taunt Graham about one of his most extravagantly failed predictions. Remember our The Dead Don't Die episode? Where we looked at that film's star Austin Butler's upcoming movies and decided there was no way an Elvis biopic was going to make bank in 2022? WELL... Actually, the strangest thing is not that it made money, but that we enjoyed it. Join Mark and Graham as they discuss their mixed feelings towards Baz Luhrmann, the "c...
Olivia Newton John in Xanadu
July 27, 2023 11:00 - 52 minutes - 97.6 MBIt's our 100th episode! And what better way to celebrate than to look back at one of the great musical flops of all time, 1980's Xanadu. Starring Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly and a guy from The Warriors, it's the story of a Greek Muse sent to Earth on a mission to inspire. If she knew she was going to inspire him to make a swing dancing/roller disco fusion club, she'd have stayed on Mount Olympus. One of the films that led to the foundation of the Golden Raspberry awards, Xanadu neverthel...
Olivia Newton John in Xanadu (1980) - Episode 100
July 27, 2023 11:00 - 52 minutes - 97.6 MBIt's our 100th episode! And what better way to celebrate than to look back at one of the great musical flops of all time, 1980's Xanadu. Starring Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly and a guy from The Warriors, it's the story of a Greek Muse sent to Earth on a mission to inspire. If she knew she was going to inspire him to make a swing dancing/roller disco fusion club, she'd have stayed on Mount Olympus. One of the films that led to the foundation of the Golden Raspberry awards, Xanadu neverthel...
Diana Ross & Scott Walker in Beach Ball (With Mick Snowden)
July 13, 2023 11:00 - 54 minutes - 100 MBAfter last week's voyage into self-importance courtesy of U2, Pop Screen tackles a film that couldn't possibly be more lightweight - the 1965 teen comedy Beach Ball. Strange, as it features one of the most tortured souls in '60s pop - Scott Walker - and one of its defining divas, Diana Ross. But this is an entry in the brief but prolific fad for beach party movies, in which mysteriously parent-free teenagers meet on the shore to date and do nothing that threatens a U certificate while listen...
U2 in Rattle and Hum (with Joe Millar)
June 29, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 123 MBIt's a story we keep running into here on Pop Screen: a band are so big, so acclaimed, that they think "We could make a film, how could that go wrong?" and the universe then demonstrates exactly how that could go wrong. Coming just one year after their worldwide smash The Joshua Tree, U2 decided to make Rattle & Hum, a documentary about their American tour. It earned them their first negative reviews, and caused people to reflect - for the first time, if you can believe it - that Bono...
Martin Kemp in Embrace of the Vampire (with Robyn Adams)
June 15, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBVampires! Undead creatures of the night who people also find really hot! If you think fancying a walking corpse is #problematic, wait until you see the actions of Vampire, the imaginatively-named vampire played by Martin Kemp in 1995's Embrace of the Vampire. In Anne Goursaud's film, he's looking to get his fangs on an underage girl before she's legal, just like [NAME REDACTED ON LEGAL ADVICE] There are more tangents than usual on this episode, possibly so Graham and guest host Robyn Adams ...
Motley Crue in The Dirt (2019) (With Kat Hughes)
June 01, 2023 11:00 - 55 minutes - 103 MBPop Screen doesn't cover much metal, and a cynical listener might counter that we're not about to start now, as we look at the 2019 Netflix film The Dirt. A biopic of Motley Crue, it offers a visceral look at sex, drugs and rock and roll, but maybe not enough into why hair metal (the stuff Americans heretically call "glam rock") remains so divisive. To address this and so many other questions, Graham is joined by Kat from The Hollywood News to talk about their mutual soft spot for the much-...
Run DMC in Tougher than Leather (with Jeffrey Pizek)
May 18, 2023 13:17 - 51 minutes - 96 MBHow do you weather the changes in a genre your band helped define? It's tricky. Run-DMC tried to rebrand with Tougher Than Leather, the title of both an album and a film directed by their producer Rick Rubin. A tough yet strangely naive premonition of the gangsta rap years to come, it also features one of Rubin's other proteges, The Beastie Boys, just as their career took off. It's got serious time capsule value, then, so it's no wonder it prompts hosts Graham and Jeff to reflect on the odd...
The Undertones in Good Vibrations (2012) (With Mark Cunliffe and Rob Simpson)
May 04, 2023 11:30 - 1 hour - 124 MBIf there's one thing pop music needs almost as much as it needs musicians, it's people who won't hear the words "Actually, that's a really bad idea". Terri Hooley was one such man. Record shop owner, record label owner and focal point for Belfast's punk scene, what he lacked in business sense he made up for in passion. Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros d'Sa's biopic Good Vibrations tells his unbelievable story. We've got an expanded cast on the show to celebrate the film, too, with Graham joine...
Adam Ant in World Gone Wild (1987) (With Ben Jones)
April 20, 2023 11:15 - 56 minutes - 106 MBRidicule is nothing to be scared of, which is probably for the best, as Adam Ant earned a fair bit of it for his role in this post-apocalyptic action movie. The product of veteran journeyman director Lee H Katzin, it also stars Bruce Dern in a role he literally does not remember filming as the last hippie, fighting against the diminutive Man and his army of bad choirboys. No, really. This week we're joined by the Cymreig Samurai himself, Ben Jones, as we discuss how Adam Ant's cult nearly h...
The Who in Tommy (1975) (With Mick Snowden)
April 06, 2023 11:00 - 51 minutes - 98.4 MBSee it! Feel it! It's finally time for Pop Screen to scale the all-time summit of the rock opera form - Ken Russell's Tommy, based on the album by The Who. Pete Townsend's achingly personal tale of a traumatised kid mistakenly hailed as a messiah, it's got a soundtrack of some of The Who's most indelible tracks and a visual style that is one hundred per cent pure, uncut Uncle Ken. This week, Graham is joined by Mick from Behold! podcast to discuss this absolutely singular work, with its ecle...
The Dandy Warhols in DiG! (2004) (With Ewan Gleadow)
March 23, 2023 12:30 - 57 minutes - 107 MBThis episode of Pop Screen is about the rivalry between '90s psych-rock revivalists The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre - and if you think that's a niche subject for a film, that's how Ondi Timoner's DiG! came across before its premiere in 2004. Yet it was immediately and rightly hailed as a classic film about rock music, the nature of genius and selling out, becoming a cult classic for audiences far outside the two bands' pre-existing fandom. This week, Ewan from (Don't) Lis...
Johnny Cash in A Gunfight (1971) (with Aidan F)
March 09, 2023 12:20 - 47 minutes - 89.8 MBSome pop stars like to take the easy route into acting by starring opposite lightweight co-stars. And then there's Johnny Cash, whose acting debut in 1971's A Gunfight sees him playing alongside no less than Kirk Douglas, with Karen Black, Jane Alexander and a young Keith Carradine in support. It wasn't a big hit - largely because calling a Western A Gunfight is like calling an action movie A Car Chase - but it's well worth a look for fans of the Man in Black. And you have seen one bit of it...
Terry Hall, Madness, The Beat + More in Dance Craze (1981) (With Mick Snowden)
February 23, 2023 12:30 - 43 minutes - 82.2 MBThe shocking death of Terry Hall at the end of 2022 sent Pop Screen back to this document of him in his prime: Dance Craze, a relentlessly energetic concert film showcasing all the greats from the first wave of British ska. As well as Hall with The Specials, there are classic performances from Madness, The Beat, The Selecter, The Bodysnatchers and Bad Manners: an unmissable line-up by anyone's standards. Neglected for decades, Dance Craze is about to get a spiffy BFI Blu-Ray release, but be...
Sonny Bono in Escape to Athena (with Mark Cunliffe)
February 09, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBCan you believe Telly Savalas, Claudia Cardinale, David Niven, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono and Mr. Bronson from Grange Hill were in the same movie once? We can't - and this is before you get to lovely old Roger Moore playing a Wehrmacht captain! It can only be Escape to Athena, one of a series of star-studded flops produced by British TV mogul Lew Grade - and this one has an ace up its sleeve in the form of future Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P Cosmatos. It's the kind of fil...
The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (with Aidan F)
January 26, 2023 18:00 - 38 minutes - 72 MBWilko Johnson, the Dr Feelgood guitarist with the eyes of a killer and the legs of a Riverdancer, died last November, which sent Aidan and Graham back to his previous obituary. Made as the pub rock pioneer fought an apparently terminal cancer, The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson is less a rock documentary and more a fable about life, death and the creative spirit - a typically modest affair, then, from Julien Temple. Temple, perhaps the ultimate Pop Screen director, is not new to these shores, but...
Joanna Newsom in Inherent Vice (with Rob Simpson)
January 12, 2023 18:00 - 49 minutes - 91.6 MBHey you! Pop Screen welcomes in 2023 with a dose of los paranoias as Graham and Rob tackle Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice. The only adaptation - and likely to remain that way - of a Thomas Pynchon novel, it has an all-star cast headed up by Joaquin Phoenix's stoner PI Doc Sportello, and features suitably ethereal narration from the world's coolest harpist - again, not much competition - Joanna Newsom. On this week's Pop Screen, we tune in our doper's ESP to the karmic thermals - or so...
Pop Screen's Best of 2022 (Part One)
January 05, 2023 18:00 - 2 hours - 341 MBThis 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 bun...
Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground (2021) (with Oliver Parker)
December 29, 2022 18:00 - 59 minutes - 112 MBThe 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 t...
Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard (with Mark Harrison)
December 15, 2022 18:00 - 57 minutes - 107 MB[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....
Toyah Wilcox in Second City Firsts (with Mark Cunliffe)
December 01, 2022 18:00 - 49 minutes - 93.3 MBPop 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 u...
"Weird Al" Yankovic in UHF (with Jeffrey Pizek)
November 17, 2022 18:09 - 45 minutes - 41.7 MBThis 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 Bri...
S2 Ep81: Bjork in The Juniper Tree (with Aidan F)
November 03, 2022 18:00 - 42 minutes - 39.6 MBListeners, 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 ...
S2 Ep80: Sinead O'Connor in The Butcher Boy (with Mark Cunliffe)
October 20, 2022 17:00 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MBListeners, 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 spirallin...
S2 Ep79: Kid Cudi in X (with Rob Simpson)
October 06, 2022 17:00 - 53 minutes - 49.2 MBIt'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. Alo...
S2 Ep78: The Beatles in Yellow Submarine (with Mick Snowden)
September 22, 2022 17:00 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBIt 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 ...
S2 Ep77: OutKast in Idlewild (with Joe Millar)
September 08, 2022 17:00 - 56 minutes - 52 MBAh-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...
S2 Ep76: Status Quo in Bula Quo! (with Mark Harrison)
August 25, 2022 17:00 - 52 minutes - 48.3 MBThis 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...
S2 Ep75: James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in Two-Lane Blacktop (with Aidan F)
August 11, 2022 17:00 - 49 minutes - 46.1 MBThis 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 op...