Watching the End of the World

Took a while, but we finally covered a movie about a guy with an eyepatch. Bear with us as we rank the best live births in film, severely misinterpret a Rolls Royce joke, and manage to only make ONE covid-19 comparison. All this and more(?), in Cornel Wilde's No Blade of Grass!

Welcome back to WTEOTW, now without all the red tape. This month, we plug into Pulse, the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa's prescient, terrifying examination of love and loneliness in the digital age.

Peer behind the veil into a world not unlike our own, where fiction subsumes reality, fandom precipitates violence, and John Carpenter directs a monster movie within an inch of its life. It's In the Mouth of Madness, adapted from Sutter Cane's novel of the same name, starring John Trent, Linda Styles, and Jackson Harglow.

Your favorite show is back - and so is this podcast! In what we're noncommittally declaring our "season 2 premiere", we pick the brain of YouTube wunderkind and longtime pal Patrick Willems (@patrickhwillems) on all things 80s, up to and including Paul Michael Glaser's The Running Man. Don't change the channel!

Carve out some time, because this one's meaty; let's hope we didn't butcher it. It's time to dig into Delicatessen (1991), un film français de Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro.

Hold on for dear life as we go all in on Richard Kelly's densely-layered political panorama Southland Tales, one of the boldest, messiest, most polarizing passion projects of the aughts. This is, as always, the way the world ends.

With friends like these, who needs penalties? This week, with the aid of Batting Around cohost/accredited beefcake expert Stephen (@TangoGolfKilo), we cast an analytical eye at Norman Jewison's 1975 dystopian sports drama Rollerball. Yes, we figure out what Rollerball Twitter would be like; no, it is not good.

After an unplanned and probably undeserved break, we're back to discuss in great detail the ecological particularities of Los Angeles "roof rats," prominently featured (alongside impending nuclear holocaust) in Steve De Jarnatt's real-time romp Miracle Mile (1988).

All roads lead to anime. Bryan listens patiently as Cole foams at the mouth for two straight hours about Angel's Egg, Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano's dreamlike, desolate interpretation of a world abandoned by God.

Silent Running doesn't shy away from the big questions. Is Joan Baez cool?  Can effective environmentalist agitprop be produced under the aegis of Dow Chemical? What if a guy you basically agreed with was still really annoying? Run wild in the sun with us as we pick apart visual effects wiz Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut, a flower-power space opera as technically impressive as it is tonally confounding.

Welcome to the Vortex, year 2293. This week, it's all about Zardoz, visionary filmmaker John Boorman's oft-underrated treatise on life, death, sex, aging, violence, love, eugenics, sex again, family, religion, artificial intelligence, class warfare, human spirit, British hubris, and sex.

Soylent Green... is podcast. Join us for a raucous discussion about ham and cheese hot pockets, Charlton Heston's fetid little neckerchief, and, with luck, the 1973 cult eco-terror hit Soylent Green. DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed herein are our own and do not reflect those of our employer (the Soylent Corporation).

Bryan and Cole introduce themselves, establish some ground rules that they'll probably break, and kick off the podcast (or "pod," if you will) with a discussion of Philip Kaufman's 1978 thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers.