“Borat” on Politics and Embarrassment–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast Discussion #67

in Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | November 5th, 2020

Let’s stop obsess­ing about elec­tion mat­ters and con­sid­er instead a clown who brings out racism in rubes. Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, Bri­an Hirt, and our guest musician/actor Aaron David Glea­son con­sid­er the com­e­dy of Sacha Baron Cohen, in par­tic­u­lar the new Borat Sub­se­quent Moviefilm, which you should def­i­nite­ly go watch before lis­ten­ing, unless it’s the kind of thing that so repuls­es you that you’ll nev­er watch it, in which case this is the pod­cast to tell you what the fuss is about.

A few ques­tions we explore: Is it uneth­i­cal to use unwit­ting peo­ple who signed your release form as your sup­port­ing cast? Is it OK to use racism to expose racism? Are cam­eras now so ubiq­ui­tous that many peo­ple feel per­fect­ly com­fort­able let­ting their true col­ors show on film? How dehu­man­iz­ing is the nature of retail in Amer­i­ca that all these shop keep­ers would go along with Borat’s bizarre and/or racist requests? Cohen claims that this new film was about demon­strat­ing the human­i­ty of his sub­jects; how evi­dent was that pur­pose on screen? How does this film dif­fer from Cohen’s oth­er work? Was the film actu­al­ly fun­ny, or did it tran­scend (or fall short of) com­e­dy in its pol­i­tics and its king-size serv­ings of embar­rass­ment?

Watch Cohen and Maria Bakalo­va on Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca explain­ing the film. Look at the Wikipedia arti­cle for info on how and when sequences were shot. You can browse through the crit­i­cal reac­tions your­self.

After we record­ed this, Cohen pro­vid­ed finan­cial help to his very sym­pa­thet­ic vic­tim, Jeanise Jones (the babysit­ter). And to set­tle one issue that came up in our con­ver­sa­tion, Judith Dim Evans (the nice old lady in the tem­ple who sub­se­quent­ly passed away) did­n’t know the gag dur­ing film­ing, but Cohen revealed it right after­wards.

Hear Aaron’s music on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music #71. Lis­ten to Aaron, Eri­ca, Mark, and oth­ers includ­ing Lucy Law­less and Emi­ly Perkins on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Play­ers’ read­ing of Lysis­tra­ta. Learn more about Aaron at aarondavidgleason.com, and you can fol­low him on Insta­gram @aarondavidgleason.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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What Scares Us, and How Does this Manifest in Film? A Halloween Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#66)

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | October 30th, 2020

Why do peo­ple enjoy being scared by films? How does what counts as fright­en­ing in a film actu­al­ly con­nect with what scares us in real life, and how does this in turn relate to child­hood fears? What’s the deal with “hor­ror” movies that are good but not scary or that are ter­ri­ble yet still scary in some way? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by actor/special effects-guy Nathan Shel­ton (who runs the Fright­mare The­atre Pod­cast) for a Hal­loween con­ver­sa­tion where no one gets a rock.

We present our picks for what scared us as kids: Tril­o­gy of Ter­ror, Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978), Dark Night of the Scare­crow, and Copy­cat, and go on about Arachno­pho­bia, The Blair Witch Project, Hal­loween, Fri­day the 13th, The Thing, and Night­mare on Elm Street. We also dis­cus­sion hor­ror aimed at women, body hor­ror, tropopho­bia, hor­ror movie music, and Stephen King. Final­ly, we con­sid­er the revival in art hor­ror by the likes of Mike Flana­gan (Dr. Sleep, Haunt­ing of Bly Manor), Ari Aster (Mid­som­mar, Hered­i­tary), and Robert Eggers (The Witch).

We drew on a break-down on the var­i­ous ele­ments that make up the hor­ror genre from Matt Glas­by, in an arti­cle called “The Scari­est Films Ever Made and How They Fright­en Us.”

For a lengthy aca­d­e­m­ic look at the top­ic, try “(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empir­i­cal Research on Psy­cho­log­i­cal Respons­es to Hor­ror Films” (2019) by G. Neil Mar­tin.

If you don’t mind a key scene from The Thing (1982) being spoiled, check out this land­mark grody spe­cial effect scene.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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Chris Matheson, “Bill & Ted” Writer, Talks Cosmic Satire with Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #65

in Books, Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | October 22nd, 2020

Chris Math­e­son has writ­ten a bunch of com­ic movies includ­ing the new Bill & Ted Face the Music, and he’s con­vert­ed reli­gious texts into fun­nier books on three occa­sions, most recent­ly with The Bud­dha’s Sto­ry. Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt talk with him about what uni­fies these projects: Why the big ideas of sci­ence fic­tion, fan­ta­sy, reli­gion, and phi­los­o­phy are beg­ging in a sim­i­lar way to be made fun of.

We get into the big ques­tions: How does humor relate to fear? Would a soci­ety based on Bill and Ted (or Keanu Reeves) actu­al­ly be desir­able? How bad is the evi­dent lit­er­al absur­di­ty of many reli­gious texts? Plus, the B & T joke that has not aged well, and much more!

A few arti­cles that we found but did­n’t real­ly draw on includ­ed:

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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“The Last of Us” Franchise: Can Video Games Be Cinema? A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast Discussion (#64)

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Video Games | October 15th, 2020

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Bri­an Hirt, and Eri­ca Spyres all played both The Last of Us, and more recent­ly immersed them­selves in the length­i­er The Last of Us 2, which has been gen­er­at­ing a lot of acclaim but also con­tro­ver­sy. Actu­al­ly, Eri­ca just watch­es her hus­band Drew Jack­son play these things, but he showed up to this dis­cus­sion too. Yes, these cre­ations of Neil Druck­mann with the Naughty Dog team are ground­break­ing, and riv­et­ing, but by design not nec­es­sar­i­ly “fun,” or there­by involv­ing much “play­ing.”

The fran­chise is osten­si­bly about a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse and an immune girl that might be its cure, but it’s real­ly a drawn-out dra­ma about loss, fam­i­ly, and the cycle of revenge… You know, in between run­ning around look­ing for scraps to craft weapon upgrades and skulk­ing around dri­ving shivs through the necks of numer­ous mon­sters and peo­ple.

We com­pare The Last of Us to oth­er zom­bie media like Walk­ing Dead, address the shift­ing points of view in the game (playable flash­backs!), rep­re­sen­ta­tion, fan and crit­i­cal reac­tion, the effec­tive­ness of the game’s mes­sage, and more.

This con­ver­sa­tion should work both for lis­ten­ers who’ve actu­al­ly played the games and those who are just curi­ous about what the fuss is about. There are some plot spoil­ers about the end of the first game and events near the begin­ning of the sec­ond game nec­es­sary to dis­cuss the nar­ra­tive.

Lis­ten to the offi­cial Last of Us pod­cast. For anoth­er play­er per­spec­tive, check out the Besties pod­cast.

Oth­er resources:

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith

in Comics/Cartoons, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | October 7th, 2020

Is there no end to the seem­ing­ly end­less fas­ci­na­tion with super­hero media? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Travis Smith, who teach­es polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty, to dis­cuss. Travis sees their res­o­nance as a mat­ter of metaphor: How can we do more with the abil­i­ties we have? His book Super­hero Ethics: 10 Com­ic Book Heroes, 10 Ways to Save the World, Which One Do We Need Now? match­es up heroes like Bat­man vs. Spi­der-Man for eth­i­cal com­par­i­son: Both “act local­ly,” but Bat­man would like to actu­al­ly rule over Gotham, while Spi­der-Man engages in a more “friend­ly neigh­bor­hood” patrol.  What phi­los­o­phy should gov­ern the way we try to do good in the world?

Lurk­ing in the back­ground is the cur­rent release of sea­son two of the Ama­zon series The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ graph­ic nov­els, which assumes that pow­er cor­rupts and asks what reg­u­lar folks might do in the face of cor­po­rate-backed invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. This cyn­i­cal take is part of a long tra­di­tion of ask­ing “what if super-heroes were lit­er­al­ly real?” that goes through Watch­men all the way back to Spi­der-Man him­self, who faces finan­cial and oth­er mun­dane prob­lems that Super­man was immune to.

Giv­en Travis’ book, we did­n’t real­ly need sup­ple­men­tary arti­cles for this episode, but you can take a look at this inter­view with him to learn more about his com­ic book loves and the Cana­di­an her­itage that led him to start fight­ing crime (you know, indi­rect­ly, through eth­i­cal teach­ing).

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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Mulan Re-Disneyfied: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#62) Discussion with Actor Michael Tow

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 30th, 2020

Is the new Mulan the equiv­a­lent for Asian-Amer­i­cans what Black Pan­ther was for African-Amer­i­cans? The largest enter­tain­ment machine we have fea­tured an all-Asian cast telling a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese sto­ry aimed at the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Did it work?

Actor Michael Tow joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the devel­op­ment, aes­thet­ics, and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the film. The vision of fem­i­nism changed between the orig­i­nal poem from ca. 550 C.E. (“When the two rab­bits run side by side, how can you tell the female from the male?”) to the present, and the “just be you” eth­ic (with your mag­i­cal chi!) is not the norm for Chi­na in any peri­od. Was the project in its very con­cep­tion doomed to fall short of some of its goals? Was the live-action an improve­ment over the 1998 ani­mat­ed ver­sion?

Read the poem, and watch a read­ing of the illus­trat­ed 1998 Robert San Souci book Fa Mulan that the films were based on. There have been many adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry in Chi­na.

Oth­er sources we read to pre­pare includ­ed:

Fol­low Michael on Twit­ter @michaelctow and check out his imdb cred­its. Michael host­ed a Q&A with the Mulan cast short­ly after the film’s release.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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The Philosophy of Photography with Amir Zaki on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #61

in Photography, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 24th, 2020

Amir Zaki teach­es at UC-River­side and has had his work dis­played in numer­ous gal­leries, in his recent book Cal­i­for­nia Con­crete: A Land­scape of Skateparks, and pro­filed via a short film.

Amir joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to con­sid­er this com­mon act that can stretch from the mun­dane to the sub­lime. How have our var­i­ous pur­pos­es for pho­tog­ra­phy changed with the advent of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, the intro­duc­tion of social media, and the ready access to video? What deter­mines what we choose to take pic­tures of, and how does tak­ing pho­tog­ra­phy more seri­ous­ly change the way we expe­ri­ence? We touch on icon­ic and ide­al­ized images, cap­tur­ing the spe­cif­ic vs. the uni­ver­sal, wit­ness­ing vs. inter­ven­ing via pho­tog­ra­phy, and more.

See more of Amir’s work at amirzaki.net.

A few of the arti­cles we looked at to pre­pare includ­ed:

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Fol­low Amir on Insta­gram @amir_zaki_.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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A Short Introduction to Manga by Pretty Much Pop #60 with Professor Deborah Shamoon from the National University of Singapore

in Comics/Cartoons, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 17th, 2020

One of our goals on Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast has been to look into not just our favorite cre­ators and gen­res but into things that get a lot of buzz but which we real­ly don’t know any­thing about. Man­ga is a great exam­ple of a “look what these crazy kids are into today” kind of area for many (old­er) Amer­i­cans.

Deb­o­rah Shamoon, an Amer­i­can who teach­es Japan­ese stud­ies at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and  has loved man­ga since ado­les­cence, here schools man­ga noobs Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt–along with Eri­ca Spyres, who also does­n’t read man­ga but at least has a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry with ani­me. What are the bar­ri­ers for Amer­i­cans (whether comics read­ers or not) to appre­ci­ate man­ga? For some of us, man­ga is actu­al­ly eas­i­er to appre­ci­ate than ani­me giv­en the lat­ter’s sound and pac­ing.

We talk about man­ga’s pub­li­ca­tion his­to­ry, how fast to read man­ga, and its use of iconog­ra­phy to depict sound and move­ment. Deb­o­rah gives us the truth about the famed Osamu Tezuka’s place as “god of comics”; we dis­cuss his Metrop­o­lis, Astro Boy and Princess Knight, which is not as you may have been told the first “sho­jo” man­ga, mean­ing aimed at girls. Sho­jo man­ga is Deb­o­rah’s spe­cial­ty: She wrote a book called Pas­sion­ate Friend­ship: The Aes­thet­ics of Girls’ Cul­ture in Japan. We dis­cuss The Heart of Thomas, Sailor Moon, and how Tezu­ka actu­al­ly copied that big-eye style from Hideko Mizuno’s Sil­ver Petals. Do you need to get a han­dle on these old clas­sics to appre­ci­ate the new­er stuff that’s made such a dent in Amer­i­ca like Death Note? Prob­a­bly not, though some Aki­ra would­n’t hurt you.

A few of the arti­cles we looked at includ­ed:

We also looked at some “best of” lists to know what titles to try to look at:

Deb­o­rah rec­om­mends the Japan­ese Media and Pop­u­lar Cul­ture Site from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo for aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing on man­ga. She wrote an arti­cle on sho­jo man­ga for that site that sums up the his­to­ry con­veyed in her book. She’s also been inter­viewed for the Japan Sta­tion and Mei­ji at 150 pod­casts.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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