The Weekly Stuff Podcast #383 – Batman on Film Part 9: THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) with Christian Bale)

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Our ongoing Batman on Film series reaches perhaps the single most iconic and influential film the Caped Crusader has yet starred in with 2008’s The Dark Knight. 13 years later, neither of us quite feel the way we do at the time, and find the movie ripe for reevaluation in a lot of ways. There are plenty of inarguably great elements on display here, from Heath Ledger’s epochal portrayal of the Joker to Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s incredible score, but there are also a lot of structural and narrative shortcomings, and the movie’s Bush-era apologia really doesn’t sit right with us as adults. It makes for a complicated and compelling discussion, and before all that, Jonathan talks about Mario Golf: Super Rush, Sean belatedly plays Nioh 2, and we both take a few minutes to discuss the joys of Mechagodzilla.

Enjoy!

Time Chart: 

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:03:40

Stuff: 0:03:40 – 0:32:35

The Dark Knight: 0:32:35 – 3:22:52

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #383

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Subscribe to the WEEKLY SUIT GUNDAM Podcast!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

Weekly Suit Gundam #32 – Two-Year Anniversary Celebration & Rankings

It’s time for Weekly Suit Gundam, a show exploring the world of Mobile Suit Gundam from The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman. You can subscribe for free in iTunes by following this link.

Two years ago today, Weekly Suit Gundam was born, and what a wild ride it’s been! Just as we did on its first anniversary, we’re using the show’s birthday to take stock of everything we’ve reviewed up to now. With a particular focus on the “Year Two” shows – namely G Saviour, 0080: War in the Pocket, 0083: Stardust Memory, The 08^th MS Team, Gundam SEED, Gundam SEED Destiny, Gundam 00, and MS IGLOO – we rank the best mobile suits and best songs from the series we reviewed this year, and adjust our master rankings for those topics from last year’s anniversary show. For the main event, we each rank all 21 Gundam shows and movies we’ve reviewed these past two years, and then come together to create our complete, unified, official Weekly Suit Gundam series rankings thus far. With listener feedback, lots of reflections on the show’s second year, and a roadmap for year 3, today’s episode is a really fun trip down memory lane and a great start to the next, climactic phase of the series, as we inch closer to Gundam’s present day.

Enjoy, and come back Monday, July 5^th for our review of Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway after it’s July 1^st debut on Netflix!

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel! 

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #382 – Weekly Suit Gundam 2-Year Anniversary Celebration & Rankings

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Two years ago today, our sister series podcast project Weekly Suit Gundam was born, and what a wild ride it’s been! Just as we did on its first anniversary, we’re using the show’s birthday to take stock of everything we’ve reviewed up to now. With a particular focus on the “Year Two” shows – namely G Saviour, 0080: War in the Pocket, 0083: Stardust Memory, The 08^th MS Team, Gundam SEED, Gundam SEED Destiny, Gundam 00, and MS IGLOO – we rank the best mobile suits and best songs from the series we reviewed this year, and adjust our master rankings for those topics from last year’s anniversary show. For the main event, we each rank all 21 Gundam shows and movies we’ve reviewed these past two years, and then come together to create our complete, unified, official Weekly Suit Gundam series rankings thus far. With listener feedback, lots of reflections on the show’s second year, and a roadmap for year 3, today’s episode is a really fun trip down memory lane and a great start to the next, climactic phase of the series, as we inch closer to Gundam’s present day.

Enjoy!

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #382

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Subscribe to the WEEKLY SUIT GUNDAM Podcast!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #381 – Nintendo at E3 2021 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Review

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

We’ve got two big topics this week, starting with a wrap-up of E3 2021, which we mostly covered in last week’s show, but wrapped up on Tuesday with Nintendo, by far the best showcase of the event. With big surprises like Metroid Dread, welcome new entries in the WarioWare and Mario Party series, our best look yet at Shin Megami Tensei V, and our first gameplay footage from the Breath of the Wild sequel, it was a great show that put everyone else at E3 to shame. After that, we dive deep with Insomniac’s incredible Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, an outstanding PS5 exclusive that offers great storytelling, nigh-perfect gameplay, and some of the most amazing technical accomplishments we’ve ever seen in a game. It gets our highest recommendation, and it’s a ton of fun to talk about.

Enjoy, and come back on Thursday for a second podcast this week, with our Weekly Suit Gundam 2-Year Anniversary Celebration! 

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:05:46

Stuff, including Sean’s Beta Corner: 0:05:46 – 0:30:06

E3 News & Nintendo: 0:30:06 – 1:22:01

Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart: 1:22:01 – 2:52:34

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #381

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Subscribe to the WEEKLY SUIT GUNDAM Podcast!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

Ranking All 9 Fast & Furious Movies for the Series' 20th Anniversary

In advance of F9’s debut in American theaters next week, Universal has been playing each of the Fast & Furious movies in theaters on Friday nights, for free, over the last two months. With the first screening neatly coinciding with my full vaccination, these screenings were a big part of my return to theaters. Each movie was preceded by the same pre-roll video, advertising F9 while also containing a sincere welcome back message from Vin Diesel himself:

A video which, of course, led to an amazing SNL parody version that my brother and I now quote regularly to each other:

“The movies…”

In any case, over the course of these screenings, I found myself enjoying this series, which I’d always liked a lot, more than I ever had before. Maybe it was the rush of finally being back at the movies after over a year away; or maybe it was the pleasure of seeing all 8 films, in order, for the first time, some of which I’d never seen on the big screen. Either way, it solidified for me how much I genuinely love these very silly films, their ridiculous action, soap opera plotting, and extremely earnest character dynamics creating a strange, deeply endearing blend unlike anything else in the blockbuster space right now. They are, simply, a delight.

Over the course of the screenings, I kept some running notes to eventually rank all the movies, including the spin-off film Hobbs & Shaw. This is all relative and subjective, of course, and there’s no film in the series I outright dislike. But with the new film on the horizon, and in appreciation of all the ludicrous, wonderful memories the series has given us over the last 20 years, here my rankings of all 9 Fast & Furious features:

Continue reading after the jump…

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #380 – E3 2021 Analysis Spectacular! (Part 1) – “The E3 That Almost Wasn’t, But Then Was”

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

After being cancelled in 2020, E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo, aka “That Week With All the Video Game Trailers” – is back, sort of, for 2021, in entirely online form. And as we’ve done since the beginning, we’re covering all of it, with today’s episode going over the shows from Ubisoft, Microsoft/Bethesda, Square Enix, and the Summer Games Fest, with Sean’s traditionally exhaustive and/or obsessive notes as our guide! It’s not a particularly good E3 so far, but with looks at Elden Ring, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Forza Horizon 5, Babylon’s Fall, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 and more, there’s still plenty of interesting stuff to talk about. And before we dive into the E3 news, we also break down some interesting news from the world of Gundam, and give first impressions of Insomniac’s PS5 exclusive Ratchet + Clank: Rift Apart, which is pretty wonderful so far.

Enjoy, and come back next week for the rest of our E3 coverage, including Nintendo’s showcase! 

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:07:43

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Impressions: 0:18:33 – 0:36:52

Jonathan’s Resident Evil Adventures: 0:36:52 – 0:46:35

Gundam News: 0:46:35 – 1:00:26

E3 2021 Analysis: 1:00:26 – 3:16:47

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #380

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Subscribe to the WEEKLY SUIT GUNDAM Podcast!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes. 

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #379 – Batman on Film Part 8: BATMAN BEGINS (2005) with Christian Bale

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Our BATMAN ON FILM series starts catching up to the modern age of superhero films this week with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the 2005 franchise reboot that marked a new degree of seriousness – not just in theme and tone, but also in production value, casting, and direction – for films about the Caped Crusader, and set the stage for Batman’s biggest moments of mainstream global popularity in the years to come. The movie was undoubtedly a refreshing, impressive change of pace at the time, but 16 years later, how does it hold up? Nolan asks us to take Batman seriously, not just as a character, but for the first time on film, in how he relates to something resembling the real world. That means this film’s ideas are worth taking seriously, and not all of them sit right with us today, nor do some of the structural and plotting choices that have always felt awkward. It’s an impressive movie in many ways, but does it really hold together as a good one? All this and more makes for another great Bat-Podcast.  

Enjoy! 

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:07:43

Batman Begins: 0:07:43 – 1:57:46

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #379

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Subscribe to the WEEKLY SUIT GUNDAM Podcast!

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in Apple Podcasts!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.