The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World, and Brand Upon the Brain is a filmmaker who seemingly operates by no rules and often merges the surreal, the traditional, and the experimental. The idea of discomfort at the merger of traditional ideas with the inexplicable, of the familiar with the bizarre, is both true of his style and also the substance of his latest film, Rumours—which he directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. Available now on video on demand, the film follows a G-7 meeting between leaders from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K in the midst of an apocalyptic event that leaves them alone in the woods, having to fend for themselves without any of their systems of support. This week's show is a conversation with Maddin about both the construction of the movie but also its context as an artifact of a world in transition, whether its leaders want to admit it or not.Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

It’s the time of year where awards bodies, critics, and audiences alike are all finally able to catch up on the notable releases of the past year, to look in retrospect at trends, and start to let works settle in ways that they don’t always in the heat of the moment. Most critics will do a best of list, awards bodies have released or already given out their awards. But the idea of our episode today is not to look to the critics who have access to all of the prestige movies, or who have seen exclusive premieres at festivals, but to instead give you a perspective on the last year on our screens from Midwest authorities on film, television, and streaming. So we put together a roundtable discussion where we invited three guests to give their take on 2024: Ryan Syrek, longtime critic for The Reader, Genevieve Radosti, critic and author of I was a Twenty-Something CineMama, and Paul Sanchez, education manager at our local arthouse theater Film Streams.Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

Something that has changed drastically about our relationship with screens over the course of the past few decades has been the shift from reliance on physical media to streaming. With the click of a button and an internet connection, you now no longer need the middle man of DVDs, Blu Rays, or rental stores. You have it all. Or do you? If you listened to our four part series on the life and legacy of Elaine May, you know that a legal nightmare has stopped her 1972 classic The Heartbreak Kid from getting any kind of digital release. And the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery in 2022 led to a new practice among streamers of deleting their original programming that didn’t meet standards of requisite clicks such as Moonshot, Mrs. Fletcher, Vinyl, and Run. It turns out that the ease of digital programming is subject to more politics than simply offering a library of content.But not everyone is content to accept the precarity of the streaming age, and that’s the focus of our show today: the case for physical media. First, we’ll hear from executive director Kate Barr and inventory assistant Joel Fischer from Scarecrow Video, a nonprofit video rental store in Seattle which offers nearly 150,000 titles including rare and out of print offerings that represent over a century of cultural history that they’re here to archive, not delete. Then, later in the show, The Blair Witch Project producer Mike Monello discusses the path toward the latest physical release of the 1999 classic, which finally captures the filmmakers’ intended vision and documents its story in a way that can only be found on physical media.Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

Fairly or not, there’s a huge amount of pressure placed on the way an artist chooses to debut. The first film, album, book–it has potential to launch, and sometimes even define, a career. There’s something thrilling about a first film that manages to break out and signal a unique voice, someone announcing their talent and potential that we as viewers get to anticipate and experience across an emerging body of work. If we perhaps put too much emphasis on debuts, there are only a few debuts about debuting. This is, in fact, the plot, the function, and the thematic exploration of Zia Anger’s aptly titled My First Film, which tells the story of a failed attempt at debuting, mixing autobiographical elements with the fictionalized telling of how authorship manifests, clashes, and announces its presence. My First Film is streaming now on Mubi.Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

One of the things we’re not doing when we’re buried in our screens is soaking in the world around us. Sometimes that’s intentional—a way of hiding from an often ugly and overwhelming reality. Sometimes it’s to fight off the horror of boredom. But the more we live inside our screens, the less we’re outside in our communities or exploring new kinds of cultures that exist all around us. And this brings us to Rick Steves—today’s Herodotus in chinos, insisting that “out there” remains not just more interesting than the echo chamber of our screens but that engaging with it is vital for us as people, and that, in fact, the very act of travel is an act of transformative politics. In an era of walls and fears of “the other,” he continues a crusade for curiosity. His call is simple: put down the phone, go out there, and meet the world. For decades, Steves has been bringing his mission to the homes of Americans through his public access show Rick Steves’ Europe, his radio show Travel with Rick Steves, his travel guides, and his lectures. He has a new edition of his book Travel as a Political Act out now, and he’s currently touring the country with his live orchestral series A Symphonic Journey with Rick Steves, which you can see at the Holland Center on February 15th and 16th. Tickets are available now.Then, later in the show, we’re diving into the history of the travelogue by going all the way back to The Innocents Abroad author Mark Twain in a conversation with Matt Seybold, Professor of American Literature and Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. You can learn more about the Center for Mark Twain Studies here. Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth. Thank you for listening.

For decades now, outlets and scholars have been predicting who the next Spielberg might be, including names like J. J. Abrams or M. Night Shyamalan. But what does it mean to be the next Spielberg? To answer that, we'd have to know what it means to be Spielberg in general. So, to get to the bottom of this, Ian Nathan, author of Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work, chimes in. What accounts for the wild popularity of the filmmaker behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a career that spans many genres and decades? Why is it that his inward turn in 2022’s autobiographic The Fabelmans failed to resonate with audiences like his bigger works? We’re digging into it all, along with which Spielberg films may deserve a second look. Keep the conversation going in the comments. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork was created by Topher Booth.