August 24, 2012

Podcast: “A Movie & An Argument”—Tony Scott Memorial Edition

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This marks the second episode of our new podcast: A Movie & An Argument, With Alyssa and Swin.

Each week, I’ll be sitting down to chat with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg (who also does killer work at The Atlantic and Slate‘s “Double X“). We’ll talk, argue, and laugh about the latest movies, television shows, and pop-cultural nonsense—with some politics thrown in just for the hell of it.

Below, you’ll find the audio for this week’s episode, in which we discuss:

  • The life and work of filmmaker Tony Scott and trailblazing comedienne Phyllis Diller, both of whom died earlier this week (my joint obituary can be found here, and Alyssa’s obit for Scott is here).
  • The phone-sex-related comedy For a Good Time, Call… (a film Alyssa thoroughly endorses), which stars Ari Graynor, Lauren Miller, Seth Rogen, Justin Long, and Nia Vardalos. It gets a limited release on August 31.
  • The monstrously awful Dax Shepard movie Hit and Run, which I say is currently running neck-and-neck with That’s My Boy for title of Lousiest Film of 2012. (It also features perhaps the lamest prison-rape joke ever captured on camera.)
  • That new movie coming out in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt rides a bicycle for an hour-and-a-half.

Alyssa describes herself as being “equally devoted to the Star Wars expanded universe and Barbara Stanwyck, to Better Off Ted and Deadwood.” I (everyone calls me Swin) am a devoted lover of low-brow dark humor, Yuengling, and movies with high body counts. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and tune in during the weeks to come.

We’ll be featuring guests on the program, and also taking listeners’ questions, so feel free to Tweet them at me here, and we’ll see if we can get to them during a show.

Thanks for listening!

Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To hear or download more episodes of this podcast, click here.

To check out Alyssa’s Bloggingheads show, click here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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