Jen blasts off with Bitter Karella in search of the meaning of an artifact from 2011: the motion-capture kid’s flick Mars Needs Moms.
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We glibly refer to the film as “one of the biggest box office bombs of all time,” as well as THE biggest, but narrowing down the actual Failure of All Failures is tough. Wikipedia has an unranked list of box office disasters.
Bitter Karella guested on the show for three episodes on music producer and grotesque sex criminal Jonathan King. If you’re interested in true outsider art and also have a strong stomach, check them out!
Jen and Tim suffer through an ill-starred attempt at an international caper, Shanghai Surprise!
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Life With My Sister Madonna is a delightfully juicy read penned by her late brother, Christopher Ciccone. (And of course she’s hairy, she’s Italian!)
Madonna has denied that Sean Penn physically abused her during their relationship, but rumors still abound regarding an alleged domestic abuse incident in December 1988. The LA Sheriffs have since purged the report from their records, unfortunately.
The core creators of Yacht Rock (both series and genre classification) host the delightful Yacht or Nyacht podcast, in which they rate the yachtiness of user-submitted songs. Highly recommended!
The venerable British news magazine show World in Action took a look at American radio all the way back in 1971, and even included an interview with celebrated chronicler of the working class Studs Turkel! The theme song to this show goes hard as FUCK, incidentally.
Jen and Tim wicky-wicky-watch a mostly loathed tentpole film from 1999, The Giant Mechanical Spider Invasion, aka Jon Peters’ Wild Wild West (come on, it might as well have his name right above the title).
Errata: Jen says “Tanpei Monogatori” when she meant “Tantei Monogatari,” the detective TV show starring Black Rain’s antagonist, Yūsuku Matsuda. All those wasted years as a weeb and she still can’t pronounce Japanese words properly. Sad!
Jen welcomes show regular Bitter Karella and wild card Moodyferret to evangelize a Gore Verbinski flop that didn’t deserve the massive shrug it got from the public: the 2016 psychological thriller A Cure For Wellness.
Errata: we all say in the episode that this movie came out in 2016, but it actually arrived in theaters on February 17, 2017 before almost immediately disappearing. Oops! That said, the movie was originally slated for an October 2016 release, which seems to indicate that 20th Century Fox lost their nerve and dumped the film in Fuck-You February.
Fox made a last-ditch effort to hype the film with this Super Bowl teaser, mimicking a pharma company ad. This is the one that Jen vaguely described in the episode.
Every previous Bitter Karella appearance on the show may be found in our collection!
Jen and Tim look back at an all-star polemic from 1990, The Earth Day Special, a plea on behalf of Mother Earth that made a powerful impression on a young Tim. Also, we better not catch you pouring any old house paint down the drain.
Watch the special at the Internet Archive (and if so inclined, maybe throw them a small donation for collecting all that health data recently purged from US government websites).
But the same powers of manipulation continue to function: the chemical manufacturers will plant some trees, and even the “forest products” magnates will, as they generally do, plant some trees. George Bush has called for the planting of a billion trees—but none of the rulers or their allies mention the possibility of refraining from cutting a billion trees (in particular, say the last few remnants of old growth forests, but also anywhere where woods are coming under the developers’ blades). These forces, these institutions are concealing their grisly daily business with a multimedia extravaganza, a spectacle that converts a natural love of what is alive into a pointless civic ritual.
Market Realist has an easily digestible rundown on who actually founded Tesla and who merely came on board shortly afterward to leech off other people’s work and push the founders out of the nest like a shitty South African cuckoo.
The editing is terrible! Tim and Jen howl at the moon, which is an ovoid shape, and critique the amateurish werewolf film Lycan Colony, at least when they can make out what’s onscreen. Take a drink every time Tim says the editing is terrible!
Do you love podcasting? Do you love clicking on links? Well here’s one that’s related to both of those things! Zencastr features an incredible suite of podcasting tools your hosts can vouch for personally. Record, edit, promote, and more with Zencastr!
Jen and Tim hold Josh Boerman of The Worst of All Possible Worlds podcast hostage in order to talk about a holiday musical that really wasn’t: The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t!
Tim and Jen cover an unusual holiday movie that features a man beaten down by an uncaring society enough to become a self-appointed assassin. Wait, what year is this? It’s 1980 and this is Christmas Evil!
There is a whole ass website about Whamageddon with the ruleset and everything, if you’d like to play or simply to inform yourself. We won’t be participating, though, because we love Wham! too much to refrain from listening to them. You could also listen to this “Last Christmas”-free megamix!
