Will be exploring this on the commute home! My familiarity with the 80s punk scene is almost entirely concentrated on the coasts, so this will be illuminating. Got excited about the zine link you posted too, wish I spoke the language though haha
Thanks for sharing!
I ate the onion.
And a hundred thousand tons of crude oil.
Don't get me wrong, it absolutely is that, but that's the surface level shit that got the movie financed. Underneath those obligatory trappings (which the film itself seems relatively uninterested in exploring) is a film so ridiculous, I have to question if they are pulling a sneaky and engaging in knowing parody. I refuse to spoil where the second act of that movie leads, because it was a wonderful surprise while I was watching what I figured was going to be, as you said, "dollar store John Wick".
I gotta be clear though, it still isn't better than a 3/5 even with an aggressively charitable attitude, but it should be criticized for its actual faults, not for what people assume it is.
Of the many accusations that you can hurl at it, I don't know if "generic" applies to The Beekeeper. Like, the plot in that movie really goes places. Most of them ridiculously stupid,
I feel like my regular rotation is slight in comparison to what other folks are posting, but podcasts are an unwinding kind of activity for me, so I don't really want to be inundated with current events or heavy topics. Accordingly, here's a bunch of "Arts and Culture" type recommendations.
Bandsplain: Yasi Salek explores bands' discographies, usually with a guest who is a self-described super fan of the band being discussed. I think it's a Spotify exclusive, which is a bummer, but they leverage that to actually play relevant songs at certain points in the cast. A good way to remove blindspots in your catalog, or to achieve a greater understanding of artists' holistic output, rather than just the hits.
Blank Check: A podcast about filmographies. Each "season" covers a different director, and the hosts examine their career chronologically. Fun, and it encourages me to finally tackle movie blindspots. They are doing the first half of Spielberg's career at the moment, most recently discussing 1987's Empire of the Sun.
Eye of the Duck: A podcast about movie genres / vibes. Each "season" is a different kind of film, and the hosts select emblematic examples to examine in chronological order, with a mind towards how the genre evolved over time. Examples of past topics include Alien Invasion, 80s Dark Fantasy, Space Movies, and so on. They are typically a little more "film school brain" than most amateur podcasts, which I appreciate, but may not be everyone's cup of tea.
Three Moves Ahead: Weekly video game podcast, with a heavy emphasis on strategy games. I'm not a regular listener, but I will often check to see if they've done an episode on a particular game that I'm playing.
Every F'n FF: Three folks (who I think are involved in the speed running scene) on a quest to complete every Final Fantasy game. This coincided with a replay of FFX that I embarked upon. Sadly I think X-2 may have broke them, as they've not uploaded since last October, but it does look like they completed 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, and Dirge of Cerberus.
Given your parenthetical, I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I'm gonna dispute that the series of novels about the fractured and imperfect nations of "the West" uniting against an alliance of barbaric monsters and uncivilized men in "the East" is apolitical at all.
Not to mention it's a text which presupposes the divine mandate of kings, which is an explicitly political stance.
Which is not to say any of this is bad, necessarily, though I do think it would be a fun exercise in fan fiction to rewrite Aragorn's arc. Instead of it culminating with him accepting his "birthright" and becoming king, he winds up fucking off back to the woods with his hot elf-wife and telling Gondor to sort their own shit out.