The End of the World with Michael and Stu

This week we are discussing 90s failed blockbuster sci-fi Alien meets Hellraiser movie Event Horizon, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. This is, I believe, our shortest episode to date, and we spend most of our discussion pointing out the absurdity of many aspects of the film, while also attempting to get to the bottom of just what it was about this picture that so terrified a teenage Stu, because...let's just say we were not ad...

This week we are considering Yorgos Lanthimos's 2025 film, Bugonia. This picture ties into several of our interests: environmental collapse, societal collapse, aliens, Atlantis, it really is a smorgasbord of topics near and dear to our hearts. We both like the way the movie ties together these disparate themes and pins itself on three great performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Aidan Delbis.

We open the episode by talk...

This week we are doing a roundup of the world's news; we touch on the ICE incursion in Minneapolis and the various ways that has been interpreted, before moving on to discuss Iran and the protest movement there. We then consider Donald Trump's play for Greenland, which now seems to have been undertaken in response to his being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, if his letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister is to be believed. B...

This week we are returning to Stanley Kubrick, tackling his late masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut. We discuss its resonances with the ongoing (neverending?) Jeffrey Epstein scandal, while also getting into some of its Freudian themes. We discuss the film's relationship with its source material, Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant Traumnovelle, pointing out the specific sort of dream logic that animates the movie's action.

We ope...

This week we are discussing the United State's "action" in Venezuela which led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. We go over the implications of this for US foreign policy moving forward, what this means for the future of Venezuela, while also touching briefly on the long history of that nation. Does this action imply a shift in the future of US global strategy? Is the US stepping back from its engagements i...

This week we are talking about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece, The Shining. We get into Kubrick's famous "beef" with Stephen King, the author of the novel upon which the film is based, while also discussing the several angles of interpretation that have emerged over the forty five years since the film first premiered. Is the movie about the end of the world? You might not think so at first, but with the help...

We did it. Somehow, we've made it to one hundred episodes. And this week we're going to celebrate by going over some of our favorite and least favorite movies from the first hundred, offering predictions on the future of American politics, and, most importantly, going through three of Michael's famed/hated hypotheticals. We even touch a bit on the afterlife. It's all here.

Thanks to everyone who has listened to a...

This week we are tackling 2007's I Am Legend, a film so bad not even Stu can pretend it is a "masterpiece." Much time is spent in pointing out the many problems with the main character's behaviors in the film (it stars Will Smith at the height of his powers), applying all we have learned from 99 episodes of examining end of the world scenarios. We also tear apart both equally terrible endings of the film.

We open...

This week we are revisiting a 2016 New Yorker profile of Sam Altman by Tad Friend for insight into how we got where we now are with regards to AI and its seeming inescapable ubiquity. The article is quite revelatory, as it shows us Altman in a more nascent moment in his rise to "tech superstardom." And what do we find? A monomaniacal sociopath with dreams of infinite growth and little regard for the consequences of his ac...

This week we are discussing the Heaven's Gate cult, which famously brought about its own end through mass suicide in March of 1997 as the Hale-Bopp Comet sailed past the Earth. We discuss the group's origins in the "cultic milieu" of the early 1970s and compare it to other new religious movements of the time including Peoples Temple, The Manson Family, and EST. The group's beliefs, an interesting fusion of ...

This week we are considering Sidney Lumet's 1976 classic Network. Written by acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and featuring an all-star cast, the film examines the breakdown of the supposed objectivity of the news media in an age of hyper-capitalism. A prophecy of things that would come to fruition decades after it was first released, Network remains relevant today for its extremely cynical depiction of the corporate med...

This week we are tackling Kathryn Bigelow's 2025 film A House of Dynamite which deals with one of our "favorite" nightmare scenarios, namely, a nuclear missile of unknown origin being fired at a major American city. We analyze the film's three part/three perspective structure and also discuss its controversial ending. 

We open the episode by discussing some of the revelations in the latest tranche of Epstein emai...

This week we are charting some of the reactions (and overreactions) to last week's mayoral election in New York City wherein Zohran Mamdani emerged triumphant. Can Mamdani's campaign point the way for future Democratic Party successes, or is it an outlier that must be seen firmly in the context of deep blue New York City? We chart reactions from Third Way, Steve Bannon, Chuck Schumer, David Wallace-Wells, and more.

We open...

This week we're getting into Abel Ferrara's 2011 film 4:44 Last Day on Earth which follows an actor, Cisco (Willem DaFoe), and his painter partner, Skye (Shanyn Leigh), on....the last day on earth. With nods to some of our old favorites including Al Gore, the Norse conception of Ragnarok, as well as Joseph Campbell, the movie explores what two people go through when faced with the certain knowledge that the world will end...

This week for Halloween we are covering "The Shadow over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. We get into Lovecraft's troubling history of racism, showing how it works as a manifestation of the anxieties of white supremacist ideology. We also discuss the work of Mark Fisher, who has looked into Lovecraft's deployment of "the Weird." Lastly we consider Lovecraft's role in popularizing (inventing?) the ide...

Is our genetic makeup our destiny, or is there someway we can overcome the code on which our bodies and minds are based? This is the question asked by this week's film, 1997's Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. We get into the reality of the eugenics-obsessed world presented by this picture while pointing out some of the...other aspects of reality this single-minded focus on genetic destiny allows the inhabit...

We're finally covering the Norse vision of the apocalypse, Ragnarök. We go over the Norse pantheon of gods, Odin, Thor, Loki, all your favorites, and then we get into some of the events that presage the coming of doom before plunging fully into that doom itself, particularly the tragic death of Baldr done by the coward Loki. We also get into some of the classic Norse apocalyptic monsters, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, Hel, Garmr, and, ...

We're finally tackling 1981's Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior. One of the most influential post-apocalyptic films of the last fifty years, it is also considered to be one of the greatest action movies of all time. So of course, Michael is ambivalent about it, and Stu is OUTRAGED by that ambivalence. By the end will our hosts reach some kind of accord, or will this be a friendship-ending episode? To find out, you must listen...

This week we have bowed to pressure and are at last covering a 2013 National Geographic documentary called "How to Survive the End of the World: Zombie Earth." This is the first entry in a six part series to which we shall be returning periodically. The zombie apocalypse scenario set out in this infotainment feature is really about rabies, and not just regular, terrifying rabies, no. The documentary dares to ask, "Wh...