Episódios
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Hello! Long time no post! Alissa is writing her book and Sam is working on [REDACTED] and we have let this fall by the wayside a little bit in the interest of drawing out the length between episodes, since we have precious little time to record these days. But we really ought to announce that sort of thing in the future, and for this we apologize. We have a very fun episode for you today, a little out of date but none the worse for wear, with the great Mason Mennenga, on James Wan’s faith-based film The Conjuring. We hope you enjoy it.
The image on the website is plate 43 from Francisco Goya’s series of 80 aquatint etchings, ‘Los Caprichos.’ The inscription on the stone table where the sleeping figure is resting their head reads translates to “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” Via The Met.
This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Conjuring is copyright 2013 Warner Bros. All other m
aterial is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Hello! We are back with friend of the pod Jamelle Bouie to talk about the new Batman flick, which is good. We hope you enjoy it! Soon Alissa’s book will be out and we will announce the winner of our subscriber contest!
This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Batman is copyright 2022 Warner Bros. All other material is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Hello! We have acquired a wonderful producer, John Kemp, an old friend of Sam’s who offered to help a bit ago and whom Sam in his generalized lack of organization finally followed up with much more recently. John’s great, as you can hear, and we’re thrilled to have him aboard. This may also mean a more regular pod sked for a bit, and as such, we offer yet again a plea to subscribers: Please become one! This month (April, not March, as Sam says on the pod), if you subscribe, we will enter you in a drawing to receive an autographed copy of Alissa’s book! We’ll draw the names out of a hat on a future ep.
This week we talked about Drive My Car, a gorgeous film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi about cars and love and fatherhood and Uncle Vanya. Sam talks a little about having been a stage actor briefly; Alissa read the original short stories and has wise thoughts.
This episode of Young Adult Movie Ministry is produced by John Kemp. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Don’t Look Up is copyright 2021 Netflix; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. Trust us, that’s all we had to do with it. All other material is copyright 2022 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Hello! Today we watched the critically acclaimed and Best Picture-nominated 138-minute $75 million Netflix dramedy Don’t Look Up so you don’t have to! We hated this. We hated it so much we didn’t have the heart to make a guest watch it. Sam is kind of ranty on this one. If you like hearing him angry, please subscribe. If you can’t do that (we understand!) please leave us a good review on your podcatcher of choice (but especially Apple Podcasts) so that more people can hear us. It’s the environmentally friendly thing to do.
Our image on the site is a screengrab via the Frinkiac from the “Treehouse of Horror VI” short “Attack of the 50ft Eyesores” in Season 7 of The Simpsons. It is a much better use of your time.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Don’t Look Up is copyright 2021 Netflix; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. Trust us, that’s all we had to do with it. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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This episode we have the marvelous Helen Shaw, New York magazine’s theatre critic, to talk about Joel Coen’s new film of Macbeth, which we all enjoyed immensely. The movie can be streamed on Apple TV and might still be in theaters; it’s good. Watch it.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Secret of Kells is copyright 2009 Cartoon Saloon; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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We got to have Jeffrey Overstreet back! Hooray! Jeff is the author of the Auralia’s Colors fantasy novels and Through a Screen Darkly, as well as being writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University. We hope you enjoy this one. It’s free, but please subscribe if you haven’t!
Jeff, Alissa, and Sam are talking about The Secret of Kells, Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s 2009 animated fantasy feature about the preservation of the great illuminated book of the gospels.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Secret of Kells is copyright 2009 Cartoon Saloon; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: Merry Christmas! This week’s episode is about The Muppet Christmas Carol, NOT A Muppet Christmas Carol, or Carol. Or Scrooge. Or Scrooged. There are lots of versions of the Charles Dickens novella, which you can see in its original manuscript form here. You can also visit it in person at the home, now museum, of real-life Scrooge JP Morgan!
This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!
or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Muppet Christmas Carol is copyright 1992 Jim Henson Productions; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: It is a two-episode week! Sam has finally gotten around to editing our episode on Free Guy, a very good one, if we do say so ourselves. The movie is fun! It’s neither a stone classic nor something we feel the need to apologize for inflicting on you, but it is fairly new and we do have to spoil it for you a bit to talk about it, so check it out before listening to the pod if that kind of thing bothers you.
This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!
or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Free Guy is copyright 2021 20th Century Studios; brief audio excerpts from the film are used here for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week’s returning guest is the wonderful Tyler Huckabee, of Relevant magazine! He knows his Jack Kirby upside-down and backwards and he was definitely the guy to talk abou Eternals, Chloe Zhao’s new, much-discussed Marvel movie. It is… okay? There’s a lot of theology in it.
This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!
or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Eternals is copyright 2021 Marvel Entertainment. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is Meg Conley, the terrific writer of homeculture, a newsletter about, uh, home culture! It’s very good and you may have seen it around as Meg’s work often attracts the kind of attention that elevates thoughtful writing into the general discourse. Meg was incredibly forthright and insightful about this week’s movie, Arrival, one of our favorites, and very open and honest about her own life in the Mormon church, as well. We thank her for it.
This is a free episode, so please consider subscribing!
or buying your hosts a coffee using ko-fi.com/samthielman. Thank you for listening! We love you!
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Details, credits, errata: This week we watched Netflix’s incredible, terrifying show about [SPOILER] and Christian theology, Midnight Mass, which I don’t think I call Black Mass during the episode but if I do, please know that Alissa has already teased me about it and you will only be encouraging her if you do the same. Black Mass isn’t very good, whereas Midnight Mass is. Our guest us the delightful Andy Levy, costar of the only watchable show Fox News ever broadcast, Red Eye (long since canceled, obviously), now ascended to the highest planes of Twitter, where he is very funny.
This is one of our two spooooooooky episodes for Halloween (we’ll have another subscribers-only one up shortly) so if you are upset by scary stuff, we recommend AVOID AVOID AVOID on this one because it is especially frightening if you are a Christian! That is why your hosts enjoyed it and probably also why Andy didn’t think it was as scary as we did (though he did like it), but I can easily imagine finding it absolutely gut-wrenchingly disturbing in a bad way.
Our image is Netflix’s incredibly vintage-y painting for the show, which I love. If you know who painted it, @ me on twitter.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Midnight Mass is copyright 2021 Netflix. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
Please consider a subscription or send a ko-fi to Sam with “Young Adult Movie Ministry” in the message!
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Details, credits, errata: This week Alissa and I watched Dogma, Kevin Smith’s goodhearted, filthy movie about theology and goofy stoners, a film that is very easy to watch but very hard to see! Alissa notes that there’s a YouTube upload and an Internet Archive version, neither of which seem terribly legit but since there’s no way to stream the movie or buy it from the distributor, we do not recommend watching a bootleg version but we also do not have an alternative.
Sam mentioned Terry Schiavo, and Alissa mentioned the You’re Wrong About episode on her, which can be heard here.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Dogma is copyright 1999 Miramax. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great Vinson Cunningham, theater critic at The New Yorker, essayist, humorist, and all-around terrific writer whose work we heartily recommend to you. We watched P.T. Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, beloved of our hosts but new to Vinson. Vinson is really wonderful and open about his own experience of charismatic worship and we are very happy to have him on this one.
Our photo on the site this week is of a Baptism near Mineola, Tx. in 1935, taken by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the researcher who helped to popularize Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. Alissa recommends this SNL clip.
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Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. There Will Be Blood is copyright 2007 Paramount Vantage. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is Friend of the Pod Isaac Butler, journalist and cultural historian who has a new and very good book called The Method coming out in February; he would be grateful if you’re able to toss him a pre-order—he’s a terrific writer and you won’t regret it. He also hosts a podcast of his own, Working, at Slate. Check him out!
The movie we’re talking about is David Lowery’s The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, and Joel Edgerton. It’s still in theaters most places and rentable on Amazon Prime, among other services. We recommend the movie and we recommend against the novel coronavirus so we suggest you make an informed and responsible decision and beg you not to go to a movie theater if you haven’t had a vaccine. We love you and want you to live!
The image on the site this week is the opening lines of the poem on which the movie is based, from the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, now at the British Library.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Green Knight is copyright 2021 A24. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: Our guest this week is the delightful Lyz Lenz, returning to watch another awkwardly erotic 1950’s Biblical epic with us. It’s a goofy one. Our film is The Prodigal, a notorious turkey that lost the studio a ton of money despite having the beautiful Lana Turner as a fertility priestess. It is, as you might imagine, “based on” the parable from the Gospels in only the loosest possible sense of that phrase. Please buy Lyz’s books! They’re good.
Our image is a gorgeous Wally Wood illustration from his lengthy parody of this film, “The Prodigious,” from MAD Magazine #26, published 1955, with text by Harvey Kurtzman. There aren’t any print reproductions of the issue but DC Comics put out a big Complete MAD on CD that has nice hi-res images of the early issues of the magazine. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it large enough here that the text can be read if you’d care to click on the image. It’s pretty funny
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Prodigal is copyright 1955 MGM. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: Welcome back! We took a break and now are thrilled to return to you with a new episode about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake, and guest Jeff VanderMeer, short-story writer and novelist whose masterly book Annihilation got made into a terrific movie by Alex Garland and whose books Hummingbird Salamander and A Peculiar Peril are both very well-reviewed (and good!) and available at Midtown Reader signed and inscribed, should you so choose, by the author himself.
This movie has been made a few times! The original was made in 1956 by Don Siegel, two years after Jack Finney’s novel of the same name was published (our image on the website is a detail from the cover to the 1967 Dell edition). Finney revised the novel the year the Kaufman movie came out, and the story was officially adapted again in 1993, as Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, and in 2007 as The Invasion. It’s also the basis for a fun and trashy Robert Rodriguez 1990’s high school flick called The Faculty.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is copyright 1978 United Artists. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week we’re delighted to have the great comics writer Mark Russell on the pod to discuss another 1980’s classic action movie, Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi satire Robocop, much of which has come to pass in the years since its release. Mark calls it the best of the superhero movies; we are inclined to agree. It adapts and sends up all kinds of cool and weird comics without smoothing out any of their rough edges, and, of course, manages to be very much its own thing. Verhoeven is the creator of the controversial “Jesus Seminar,” a really unusual enterprise that is worth examining. Mark writes movingly about Christianity in a number of his terrific comics and has a new book coming up called Not All Robots with superstar artist Mike Deodato; we’re adding it to our pull list. His comics with artist Richard Pace about Jesus’s return to earth as a superhero sidekick, Second Coming, are wonderful; Vol. 1 is in print and Vol. 2 is currently being serialized and will be out in November. Mark is also writing one of Marvel’s terrific Life Story miniseries, this one for the Fantastic Four.
Our image on the website this week is taken from the sales page for Knightscope, a technology company that sells mall cop robots like the 300-lb K5, pictured here, which recently ran over a toddler in a mall in California and tragically drowned in Washington, D.C. If you see one, kick it.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Robocop is copyright 1987 MGM. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed!
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This week we are privileged to have the great Gregory Thornbury, author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music and some terrific essays as well, notably this one on QAnon, to talk with us about The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary about the late, supernaturally gifted, near-unknown singer-songwriter whose struggles with bipolar disorder kept him out of the public eye even as he amassed a following of similarly talented people. Also, demons.
Demonology is something we talk about a little on the podcast when we watch The Exorcist or Hereditary; here we get a lot more intense about it, and Greg shares some of his own observations and experiences and I just want to say I’m really grateful to him for being so open and honest with us and with all of you. We hope you dig this one. Also if you’re just in it for good music, you’ve come to the right place, and you can listen to new, happy, funky, countrified stuff from Greg’s amazing daughter Kate Thornbury on Spotify, too.
Greg was kind enough to supply the image for this week’s episode, drawn by Johnston himself for a showing of his art that Greg moderated, and is used with our thanks and permission.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is copyright 2005 Sony Pictures Classics. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week’s guest is friend of the pod and all-around good guy Spencer Ackerman, who won the Pulitzer and the IRE Medal for his work on the Guardian’s Snowden coverage team and a National Magazine Award for his reporting on anti-Muslim training materials used to teach FBI recruits. His book Reign of Terror, which builds on that excellent reporting, is due out from Viking on August 10; you can pre-order it here. Sam has read it; it’s very good.
Our film, I’m sorry to say, is Kathryn Bigelow’s despicable 2012 Oscar-bait torture apologia Zero Dark Thirty, one of the most morally repellent things I’ve had the misfortune to watch, down there with The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Spencer is great on it; we apologize for foisting it on him since he is also one of the great writers on the topic of torture, but his expertise on that subject is absolutely invaluable and so we hope you enjoy his perspective. Spencer has also consulted on better movies, notably Armando Iannucci’s UK-US politics farce In the Loop, and he has a lot to say about the difference between verisimilitude and veracity here. Spencer broke the news that the CIA tried to suppress the work of Dan Jones, a staffer for Dianne Feinstein, as he helped the Senate compile its torture report (you may remember this from the excellent movie The Report, which is about Jones’s disclosures). One other writer we want to shout out is Jason Leopold, who did the incredible reporting revealing the extent of the filmmakers’ cooperation with the CIA in the making of the movie.
Our image for this week is from Wikimedia commons, used with our thanks to user EPBechthold; it is of a number of supposed torture devices including the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, a coffin with big spikes in it that the medievals supposedly closed on victims, which would indeed have been a horrible way to die if it was real, but it wasn’t. It was made up to demonstrate the barbarity of a different civilization, which certainly had its flaws and cruelties but wasn’t composed of bizarre, sadistic un-people. Some of the devices are real, and some aren’t. The tendency to invent atrocities to justify atrocities is worth bearing in mind if you watch this movie along with us.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Zero Dark Thirty is copyright 2012 Annapurna Pictures. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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Details, credits, errata: This week’s film is another A24 horror picture, Saint Maud, director Rose Glass’s first movie and a terrific flick Alissa has been trying to get Sam to watch for months. It has pretty much everything we like to talk about on this podcast, so it’s just the two of us this week, and we think you’ll dig the discussion.
Our header image on the website this week is a picture of a polychrome wood carving of Mary Magdalene wearing a cilice or hair shirt undergarment, carved by 17th-century sculptor Pedro de Mena and currently residing at the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid. The image is made freely available through Wikimedia Commons and used with our thanks to the photographer, Nicolás Pérez.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Saint Maud is copyright 2020 A24. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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