The Screen Rant editorial team is back with episode one-hundred thirty of the Screen Rant Underground podcast. Join host Ben Kendrick, fellow SR editors Rob Keyes, Anthony Ocasio, and Kofi Outlaw as we offer our thoughts on FOX’s choice for Jim Gordon in the Gotham TV show, discuss how to adapt video games for the big screen, reflect on the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and review The LEGO Movie. Screen Rant Underground is available on the iTunes Music Store or Stitcher Radio but if you’re not near your home computer, check out our latest episode in the player below. Also, Screen Rant Underground is an EXPLICIT podcast. We don’t go out of our way to say controversial things or use explicit language but it does happen – so use discretion when playing the podcast at work and around young, or sensitive, ears. Screen Rant Underground: Episode 130 – The LEGO Movie We offer our thoughts on FOX’s choice for Jim Gordon in the Gotham TV show, discuss how to adapt video games for the big screen, reflect on the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and review The LEGO Movie.
Hosts: Ben Kendrick, Rob Keyes, Anthony Ocasio, and Kofi Outlaw. As mentioned on the podcast, check out our Screen Rant Underground video feature Super Bowl Movie Trailers Analysis & Discussion below: Last Week’s Official Box Office Battle Reader Winner (That Awkward Moment opening): Sal reports that Chris Etrata won with a score of 11. He didn’t even submit a tiebreaker, proving how confident he was! Opening in theaters this week (Wide): Opening this Week in Theaters (Limited): Use the comment section below to continue our various discussions by weighing in with your own thoughts – or just to let us know what you think of the show. Also, don’t forget to vote in our weekly Screen Rant Underground poll: We release one episode a week every Monday and while host Ben Kendrick as well as Rob Keyes, Anthony Ocasio, and Kofi Outlaw are standard fare on the podcast, we’ve lined-up plenty of guests for future episodes. Subscribe to the Screen Rant Underground at your online digital store of choice:
If you don’t use iTunes or Stitcher Radio you can still say up to date with new releases by bookmarking the Underground RSS feed – or keep an eye on the site for future Underground episode posts. Follow 3/4 of the Screen Rant Underground team @benkendrick, @rob_keyes, and @anthonyocasio. , by adding #SRUnderground to your tweets, or leave a message on the SR Underground voicemail line at (323) 522-5455. Music by Omarie B. Williams (@OmarieWilliams) for entertainment news, reviews, and editorials.Serial podcast is being made into TV show by The Lego Movie directors Sarah Koenig’s crazily successful true crime series is heading for the small screen Thursday 1 October 2015 11:27 BST A podcast so popular it achieved unprecedented success is to be made into a television series by the directors of The Lego Movie. Sarah Koenig’s award-winning 12-part podcast Serial became a global phenomenon after it aired in October 2014 and was downloaded more than 77.6m times.
The series investigated the case of Adnan Syed who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend Hae Min Lee, 18, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2000. It cast into question his conviction as Koenig looked into police reports, interviewed witnesses and posited theories about the murder of the Baltimore high-school student who was strangled in 1999. The podcast, which is a spinoff from This American Life, topped the iTunes charts almost overnight becoming the fastest-downloaded podcast in the platform’s history, and earning a Peabody Award for journalism. Now the Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord are working on a TV series charting the making of the podcast. However, the small screen adaptation of Serial will not follow the case of Syed and Lee, but will instead focus on another crime worthy of fresh investigation which is yet to be agreed upon. Koenig and Julie Snyder, who co-produced and narrated the podcast, will executive produce the TV series alongside Lord and Miller.
“Chris and Phil take an unexpected approach to telling stories and that is so appealing to us at Serial,” Snyder told Deadline. “Developing a show with them is exciting because we feel like we speak the same language, only they’re smarter than us.” Koenig and Snyder revealed earlier this year that they are working on a second and third series of Serial. Syed was convicted aged 18, and now 34, has always maintained that he is innocent of the murder of his girlfriend. Three months after Serial aired he was granted permission for an appeal despite having had multiple appeal requests rejected in the previous 12 years. Jay Wilds, a classmate of the convict and Lee, was the main witness in the case having told police that he helped Syed to bury her body and led the authorities to her missing car. In August, Justin Brown, Syed’s defence lawyer, filed a court motion regarding an important document that he says casts doubt on mobile phone data that was central to his client’s conviction because it placed him at the location where Lee's body was found a month after her murder.
The second series of Serial will investigate the mysterious disappearance in Afghanistan of an American soldier who was then held captive by the Taliban for five years.This week Alex and Wesley disagree over The Lego Movie and wonder whether True Detective is just a lot of hot swamp air. Listen to the podcast here: Subscribe to the Grantland Network on iTunes, and check out our podcasts page. Filed Under: Grantland Network, Alex Pappademas, Wesley Morris, true detective, the lego movie, Podcasts Sunrise, sunset: light into darkness, darkness into light. This perpetual cycling through archetypal phases of yin and yang, light slapstick and dour melodrama, is what lends Batman his unique mutability. His fellow heroes are a more stolid lot. They tend to pick a lane and stick with it. A veritable will o' the wisp, that guy. For 78 years we nerds, devout students of his endless adventures, have witnessed him phasing through this dark/light cycle on the comics page. But when it comes to shaping the idea of Batman — how he exists in the public consciousness — it's TV and movies that matter.
And it's possible to see that same cycle at work there, too, if you know where and how to look for it. Every turn of the cycle occurs for a reason, as a reaction to the phase that came before. The '60s Batman television series starring Adam West brought the Caped Crusader before the eyes of the wider world in a huge way. A huge, goofy way. The network and studio executives behind the series didn't create the show out of any particular love for the character. In fact, they considered Batman — and superheroes, and comics themselves — to be disposable junk culture. They approached the creation of the series from the outside: producer Bill Dozier read a few Batman comics, and decided to reproduce them exactly — but with a tone that treated them like serious drama, like Ibsen's A Doll's House in tights. They made him a square, a cop in a cape, a bat-eared representation of the Establishment. He drank milk, lectured Robin about pedestrian safety, and would never think of double-parking the Batmobile.
That tone, and the campy silliness it engendered, made the show a sensation, albeit a short-lived one. Everything about the show's approach angered Batman's hardcore fans, however, and their resentment would live on long after the series went off the air. It was so strong, in fact, that it threw a long shadow from which Batman is only now beginning to emerge. Throughout the '70s and '80s the Batman of the comics existed as a spirited refutation of everything the '60 TV series had stood for. This new Batman was a brooding loner (Robin had shipped off to college) who haunted the urban night. It was this Batman that director Tim Burton picked up on, in creating the 1989 Batman film starring Michael Keaton. His Dark Knight was truly dark, and somber, and goth — and also, with respect to to Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman — kinda kinky. When director Joel Schumacher took over the series, he attempted to pull Batman back into the light, although the light in question was neon pink. In homage to the 1960s series, he upped the campy archness, restored Robin to the mix and — in a move that has enshrined him in nerd infamy — slapped some nipples on the sculpted musculature of the Bat-suit.
The reaction of the hardcore Bat-nerds was swift and savage. They took to the nascent internet to demand that future films treat the character as seriously (read: as grimly and grittily) as the comics had been doing for years. After a brief fallow period, they got their wish. Director Christopher Nolan's Bat-trilogy, beginning with Batman Begins, seemed like a mission statement for the complete refutation of Schumacher's Batman — and by extension, of the '60s series as well. By leaning into a rugged, gunmetal-gray vision that prized somber practicality over anything that smacked of stylization or — God forbid — flair, Nolan gave the hardcore fans the Batman they loved in the grim-and-gritty comics. This was a Batman who would be taken seriously (read: who was very, very serious). The fans proved fiercely protective: Several critics who dared to suggest that the somberness of Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, in particular, smacked of bloated pretension were greeted with death threats.
And so we come to The LEGO Batman Movie, which is just the latest attempt to bring the broody Batman out of his cave, into the light and sun of the upper world. But this attempt is fundamentally different. The creators of the 1966 TV series brought condescension to Batman. Tim Burton brought a determination to remake the character in his own, emo- outsider image. Schumacher brought camp and areolae. Nolan brought a grayscale dourness. Every one of them came at the character from the outside, and imposed their vision on top of him. The screenwriters and director of The LEGO Batman Movie, on the other hand, come at him with 1. a very specific comedic sensibility and 2. a deep, deep, deep knowledge of the character's history that, it turns out, is indistinguishable from love. Their Batman is something else, as well — something important: a complete tool. He's a jerk who takes himself far too seriously, a brooding loner who insists, at every opportunity, upon his own consummate awesomeness.
This is not merely a characterization — a "way in" to the character they'd teach in screenwriting classes. It is a pointed critique of the dour, sulky, militantly humorless Batman that has existed in the public consciousness for nearly 40 years. It is also, more to the point, a slap in the face of the hardcore fanboy culture around him, a culture that insists only one "true" version of the character exists, and stubbornly clings to the conviction that they "own" Batman. Which is to say: It's a reminder — a not particularly gentle one — that this stuff was always supposed to be fun. Consider this, as well: The plot of this movie involves Batman learning that being a dark, disaffected, brooding loner isn't enough. He needs to make human connections, needs to let other people in. In a very real sense, it's about Batman transitioning from an arrested adolescence as a sulky goth, brooding alone in his room, into an adulthood that requires him to join society. Which is probably why, despite the movie's deep, abiding and aggressive silliness, The LEGO Batman Movie stands as the most emotionally mature Batman film yet made.