The Long Goodbye: The Sundae Presents Episode 27

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. It’s The Long Goodbye, and it happens every day! Dean turns the tables on Ciara and shows her a classic seventies film widely considered among the greatest ever made, Robert Altman’s neo-noir classic, starring Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. They talk about its portrayal of post-Manson L.A., the many iterations of its title song and the security guard’s amazing celebrity impressions.

The Long Goodbye The Sundae Presents

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Come and Have a Go, If You Think You’re Clever Enough

Television criticism, maybe even more so than other forms of arts criticism, has an implicit but rigid hierarchy. “Often, these biases involve class, gender, race, and sexuality, disguised as biases about aesthetics,” Emily Nussbaum writes in her book I Like to Watch: “Green/grey drama, serious; neon-pink musical, guilty pleasure. Single-cam sitcom, upscale; multi-cam, working class.” Nussbaum attributes this, in part, to television’s status anxiety: it wasn’t too long ago that TV was considered the idiot box, the boob tube, a vast wasteland. “So much of TV,” John Mason Brown told Steven H. Scheur in 1955, “seems to be chewing gum for the eyes.” For the rest of the twentieth century, at least, most people would agree with him. And so critics appeal all too readily to other, more respectable mediums – it’s a visual novel, a ten-hour movie. It’s not TV, it’s HBO.

I agree totally with Nussbaum’s argument, and have made versions of it myself over the years. But the privileging of drama over sitcoms, of gritty realism over silly genre fare, of masculinity over femininity, is a relatively small part of the equation. The types of television most neglected by critics are, if we’re honest, the same ones that make up most of the TV made and most of the TV watched: all the vast, vast area that exists outside of scripted comedy and drama programmes.

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As Good As It Gets: The Sundae Presents Episode 26

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. The lads kick off season three with a classic rom-com as Ciara makes Dean watch James L. Brooks’ As Good As It Gets. They talk about What It Gets Right About Mental Illness, the finer details of Jack Nicholson’s performance and whether Melvin should have got the girl.

As Good As It Gets The Sundae Presents

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In Defense of South Park

In 2017, the two-headed monster of Donald Trump’s inauguration and South Park’s 20th anniversary prompted much hand-wringing over the show’s legacy. In the post-2016 rush to point fingers, a cartoon about the adventures of some potty-mouthed 8-year-old boys was made to bear at least some of the blame. Dana Schwartz tweeted that it was impossible to overstate the cultural damage of South Park’s portrayal of “earnestness as the only sin” and mockery as “the ultimate inoculation against all criticism”—and then, her point seemingly proven, she was descended on by trollsSouth Park didn’t invent the alt-right, Sean O’Neal wrote for The AV Club, “but at their roots are the same bored, irritated distaste for politically correct wokeness, the same impish thrill at saying the things you’re not supposed to say, the same button-pushing racism and sexism, now scrubbed of all irony.” For Lara Zarum in The Village Voice, the show’s misogyny—the creators “never seem content just to make fun of women; they relish sexually humiliating them, too, all while shunting the show’s female characters, young and old, to the maddeningly familiar role of disapproving nag”—is deeply tied to Hillary Clinton’s election loss. 

The consensus that seemed to calcify was that South Park’s corrosive influence on popular culture raised a generation of nihilistic trolls that revived American fascism for the lulz. At best, it inculcated a wilful apathy, political and otherwise. According to Lindsay Ellis, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent the whole 2000s “explaining that things were fine actually, both sides bad”: both symptomatic of, and feeding into, a wider apathetic cultural attitude towards social injustice in the 2000s. As Schwartz outlines, South Park has always skewered “both the left and the right—and anyone who believed in anything—as equally ridiculous. The smart people were those detached enough to know that everyone was full of it.”

There is some ring of truth to all this. The best of these critiques—like Zarum’s or O’Neal’s—are rooted in an acknowledgement that South Park is and has always been extremely funny, and that its cultural effect is not necessarily reflective of Stone and Parker’s intentions. But even still, a fundamental rift inevitably opens up between these arguments and my experience of the show itself.

I wrote about South Park, shock humour, and morality in art for Current Affairs. You can read it here!

A Night to Dismember: Love at Worst Sight Episode 4

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. For the final episode, Ciara showed Dean the (theatrical release of the) sole horror film by one-of-a-kind sexsploitation director Doris Wishman: A Night to Dismember. They talk about how she cobbled it together after the original cut was lost (and found), the purity (and perversity) of its auteurist vision and Wishman’s place within (and outside) the history of cinema.

A Night to Dismember The Sundae Presents

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The Joys of Soviet Sherlock Holmes (and Dr. Watson)

Contemporary television feels like an endless tide of hot new thing after hotter, newer thing. I find the faux-urgency of it genuinely stressful. I love television, but I hate obligations, so I find myself retreating into the medium’s past, to shows which, pending an ill-advised reboot or two, don’t feel like they come with a deadline. And very little comes with less of a deadline than a Soviet adaptation of Sherlock Holmes from the 1970s and ‘80s.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson is usually called a series of TV movies, but I’m not sure why: each of the five “TV movies” aired separated into either two or three episodes, making them pretty normal TV seasons by European standards. Despite Vasily Livanov being given an MBE for his portrayal of Holmes, the show isn’t talked about or remembered much in the English-speaking world, at least outside of Holmes fanatics. It will appear and disappear onto YouTube every so often, and you can stream it if you pay to join Soviet Movies Online, a specialist streaming service for Soviet cinema. But it’s not going to show up on Netflix or generate a hundred articles announcing it on entertainment news websites if it did. But as it turns out, it’s one of the best TV shows there is.

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The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?: Love at Worst Sight Episode 3

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. It’s episode three, so Dean showed Ciara a legendary bit of trash: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? They talk about some fun stories from its production, the naive artistry of its best parts and whether the main character is the worst boyfriend of all time.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? The Sundae Presents

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The Sundae Film Awards 2023

In a lot of ways, 2022 wasn’t a “great year” for film, but that certainly wasn’t because it lacked great films. In fact, this was definitely the most competitive year we’ve ever had at the Sundae Film Awards and we genuinely considered tying most of the awards to reflect that. (We only tied one in the end.) We had a truly agonising experience picking our winners, and more than most years, you should check out our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post, because there is nothing in there but great films.

The real reason 2022 won’t go down in film history is there was no one big story to tell about it. Instead, we had lots of little trends: semi-autobiographical films about the director’s youth (Aftersun, Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans), satires of the modern rich (Glass Onion, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness), movies that are mostly just people talking in one room (Three Thousands Years of Longing, The Whale, Women Talking) actors who appeared on Scrubs at the height of their movie stardom getting late career plaudits (Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser). It was also a big year for poop, puke, piss, donkeys, stop-motion, and ominous concrete steps into dark. The last superstar actor and director on the planet each released a long-awaited blockbuster that helped to save theatrical distribution (Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water) and dormant auteurs returned with the best films of their careers (Elvis, Tár). Sony released the biggest superhero flop of the year twice because of memes and a canny campaign launched an indie actress to the front of the Best Actress race.

Most shockingly of all, the Academy… actually did a pretty good job of nominating worthwhile films for Oscars? Excitingly for us, that included correctly noticing that an Irish-language film was one of the best of the year for the first time ever. Irish cinema has been building towards a breakout on the global stage for a while now, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to see this moment finally arrive and celebrate it in our own annual film awards too.

As with every year, we gave one award for each of the eight major Oscars: we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too. We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something that doesn’t fit our other categories: this year, by sheer coincidence, both to animated films.

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Ishtar: Love at Worst Sight Episode 2

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. In episode two, Ciara finally makes Dean watch Elaine May’s iconic comic flop Ishtar. They talk about its legendarily troubled production, how it became a punchline and why it deserves to be reclaimed.

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The Happening: Love at Worst Sight Episode 1

Ciara and Dean co-host The Sundae Presents, a podcast in which they each make the other watch films they haven’t seen. Specifically, films considered among the worst of all time, for a new miniseries called Love at Worst Sight. In the first episode, Dean puts Ciara through the ordeal of M. Night Shyamalan’s infamous flop The Happening. They talk about whether it’s funny, whether it’s meant to be funny, and how it could possibly have ended up like that.

The Happening The Sundae Presents

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