Words and Movies
113 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsSean Gallagher and Claude Call find two seemingly different movies and find the common thread between them. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wordsandmovies/support
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Episodes
Reel 12: Backstage Intrigue
March 10, 2021 05:49 - 1 hour - 74.7 MBIt's Women's HIstory Month! And as our means of taking advantage of a remarkable coincidence, in today's episode we're looking at two films where the bulk of the primary cast is female. That said, the theme this week is stories related to the theater. First, we're looking at a favorite of the both of us, 1937's Stage Door, starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou. After that we jump to 1950, where we learn All About Eve, along with the likes of Anne Baxter, Bette Davis a...
Reel 11: Apocalypse Later
February 23, 2021 06:36 - 1 hour - 63.1 MBIn this episode we've chosen a couple of near-future films in which humanity seems doomed for one reason or another. First up in our Double Feature is 1995's 12 Monkeys, directed by Terry Gilliam, involving a plague, time travel, mental illness and, of course, World War One. After the Intermission we're looking at Children of Men, co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón and released in 2006. Was there a plague? We don't know. Will this situation resolve? Again, we don't know. But for all...
Reel 10: Sorkinfest Part 5--The Uncredited Rewrites
February 09, 2021 06:52 - 1 hour - 68.7 MBWe wrap up Sorkinfest with a look at two films for which Aaron Sorkin did NOT receive any writing credit. Bulworth, and Enemy of the State, both from 1998. Listen in as we discuss the two films on their own merits and try to figure out which parts Sorkin left his fingerprints on. And because I can't read a calendar, Reel 11 will be released next week instead of two weeks from now. COMING ATTRACTIONS: Next time around we're prematurely celebrating the end of the pandemic as we look at a...
Reel 9: SorkinFest Part 4--The Credited Rewrites
January 19, 2021 06:42 - 1 hour - 61.7 MBWe're closing in on the end of SorkinFest as we get to Part 4 of our five-part series looking at the work of Aaron Sorkin. And this time around we're looking at a couple of films that Sorkin had a public hand in writing--or, more accurately, re-writing: 1993's Malice, starring Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin, and Moneyball, the 2011 film starring Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman. These two films couldn't be more different in their subject matter or their approach to storytelling, but Aa...
Reel 8: SorkinFest Part 3--Almost-True Stories
January 05, 2021 05:41 - 1 hour - 73.2 MBThat's a little bit of a misnomer, but not by much. This episode--the third in our series of five episodes dedicated to Aaron Sorkin's work--looks at two films he worked on that told stories about specific individuals: Steve Jobs (2015), Directed by Danny Boyle, and Sorkin's film directing debut, 2017's Molly's Game. Now, with Steve Jobs, Sorkin took some of the storylines provided by Walter Isaacson's biography, and placed them into specific contexts, with the upshot being that many of the ...
Reel 7: Sorkinfest Part 2
December 22, 2020 07:24 - 1 hour - 76.3 MBSorkinFest continues with the two films that Aaron Sorkin wrote after his series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was cancelled after only one season. (Interestingly, the same people who seemed kind of disappointed in Studio 60 as it aired are viewing it a little more generously in retrospect.) First we take a look at 2007's Charlie Wilson's War, the more-or-less true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas, who manages to almost single-handedly drum up political and financial support for...
Reel 6: SorkinFest Part 1--The Rob Reiner Films
November 10, 2020 06:21 - 1 hour - 84.9 MBIt's time for SorkinFest! For the next few weeks, we're going to talk about the work of Aaron Sorkin, and in our usual fashion we're going to do it in a way that the films are paired up by common threads. This week we're looking at the films that were directed by Rob Reiner. First up is the 1992 film A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollak and Jack Nicholson. This one was adapted from Sorkin's own play script, but he's managed to make changes that make the story just a...
Reel 5: The Film Was Better
October 21, 2020 19:07 - 1 hour - 79.3 MBDon't you hate it when ALL your software is just being so...jerkstore? Just me then? Okay. In this episode we take a look at a pair of films that were adapted from books. That, in and of itself, isn't unusual, however while the usual rap on this sort of thing is "The book was better," Sean makes an argument that in this case, it's the other way around. Subplots and overly-descriptive text get excised, and the result is a tighter and brighter story in both cases, even when the subject mat...
Reel 4: One-Song Musicals
October 06, 2020 04:45 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBIn this episode we take a look at a pair of films that center themselves around a single piece of music. First we have 1992's The Mambo Kings, directed by Arne Glimcher. It's a bittersweet film that gives us a look at a pair of Cuban immigrants who briefly achieve success as musicians in the 1950s, due to a song that one of them has written about a lost love. There's a story to that lost love, however, that he doesn't discover until several years later. And while both Armand Assante and Ant...
Reel 3: Gordon Willis and The Godfathers
September 22, 2020 13:08 - 1 hour - 85.2 MBDifferent eras of film can often be traced to specific "generations" of directors who came up together and had similar mindsets, and while that's true, sometimes they can be attached to technological advances, some of them not initially part of the industry. For example, with the rise of teen culture and a general boom in consumerism, the drive-in movie exploded in popularity, which meant that studios had to create film prints that were very bright so they could project a long distance. T...
Reel 2: Malcolm X, Selma
September 08, 2020 00:42 - 1 hour - 75.5 MBMalcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were contemporaneous civil rights icons of the 1960s, and they had very different images in the eyes of the general public. In this episode we look at Spike Lee's biopic Malcolm X (1992) and Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014), which, while not a biopic specifically, gives us a close look at Dr. King's motivations and methods. And we discover that philosophically, the two were much closer together than most people think. --- Support this podcast: https://podc...
Reel 1: 1968 Science Fiction
August 24, 2020 23:33 - 1 hour - 68.9 MBWe have to start at the beginning! Sean's beginning, that is. We go back to the year of his birth and check out a couple of science fiction movies that were both released in 1968, but which have very different outlooks on what the future is going to be like. Sit back and enjoy as we discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Planet of the Apes. This being our first "real" episode, we do hope you'll forgive a couple of weird technical glitches that we've been working on, and focus inste...
Episode Zero: Who Are These Guys?
August 18, 2020 05:25 - 44 minutes - 46 MBWelcome to our inaugural episode! Sean Gallagher and Claude Call introduce themselves to you and talk about what makes them so smart (hint: one of us is SMART, the other is S-M-R-T), plus what sort of stuff we'll be talking about, the overall approach we'll be taking to the films we discuss, and a preview of our first three episodes. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wordsandmovies/support