Episode 8 — The Desire For Chicken Edition

If restaurant menus worked like cinema seasons, any chef serving chicken in the fall or fish in the spring would be given dubious looks, and face nonstop accusations that his food must not be very good, or he’d be serving fish in fall and chicken in spring just like everybody else. But the division of the film year into “studio dumping ground,” “blockbuster season,” and “prestige season” is a fairly recent, entirely artificial, and not particularly nuanced, and can hurt films like Thor: The Dark World, which appear to be on the menu out of season. So in this edition of the podcast, we discuss the film “seasons,” where they came from, and whether they’re making everything taste like fish all summer long. Then we look at a number of recent documentaries that are pushing a little too hard for an artificial narrative framework, and the recent docs that are doing the exact opposite. Then we return to our “How did that character die?” game, Knife/Gun/Other. And finally, a nervous Scott Tobias and a mocking Keith Phipps square off in our competitive recommendation segment, 30 Seconds To Sell.