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Mike Schulz begins his session with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about Mel Brooks’s ninety-seventh birthday. Levora shares a fantastic anecdote Brooks shared with Judd Apatow his experience in World War II — you should hear Levora tell it, here. (Or you could read it, elsewhere, in The Atlantic Monthly: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/mel-brooks-judd-apatow-interview/674167/.) After this, talk of Jennifer Lawrence’s new film, the R-rated sex comedy No Hard Feelings, seems somewhat anticlimactic. Continue reading June 29, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Asteroid City” and “No Hard Feelings” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how, despite the warning signs, he didn’t hate Elemental, the latest Disney/Pixar animated joint. Given the film concerns anthropomorphic elements — earth, air, fire, and water — he was a bit flummoxed that earth and air didn’t figure hardly at all in the finished work. Apparently, the thematic thrust is whether fire and water can get along with each other without, you know, canceling one another out. Aside from the lack of songs from Earth, Wind, and Fire in the soundtrack, Continue reading June 23, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Elemental” and “The Flash” →

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Mike Schulz, back from holiday, having seen no movies over the break, talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how “man-oh-man” good Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was; about how the richness of the concept (infinite Spider-Men across an infinite multi-verse, each sharing special life circumstances that made their super-heroism possible) is matched by the eye-popping digital visual effects and the compelling voice-acting. “Favorite movie of the year?” asks one of the Deez. Continue reading June 15, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about having missed Kandahar, but he may have dodged a bullet there; otherwise, he saw the majority of the movies discussed last week. About The Little Mermaid, one of The Deez laments the exclusion of the song “Les Poissons” from the remake, which he felt was the best song in the original. Though the film was not designed to be a “laugh riot,” as Schulz indicates, Rob Marshall’s 2023 remake did do better than either man in the studio could have foretold ($209.2 million on a $250 million budget, and expected to grow, grow, grow). Continue reading June 1, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “The Little Mermaid,” “You Hurt My Feelings,” “The Starling Girl,” “About My Father,” and “The Machine” →

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Mike Schulz reflects with Dave Levora (the presence of Darren Pitra not in evidence) over his nearly-thirty-year-long writing stint as a film critic for the River Cities’ Reader (“the mid-Nineties were the worst. . . Forrest Gump has not aged well at all. . . I hate Bravehart; I really hate Bravehart”) before discussing Fast X, either the tenth or the eleventh installment in the Fast and the Furious franchise — eleven if you count the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. Continue reading May 25, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Fast X” and “Master Gardener” →

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Mike Schulz wants Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about Book Club: The Next Chapter, which he deems “a strange movie” because “it’s not really a movie”: There really isn’t a plot that makes sense or is in any way important. It sounds like it’s just an excuse to get Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen back together to hang out in Italy and drink like Germans. There are a few wisps of narrative here and there, but nothing to indicate that there are any stakes; Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s Trip series of foodies-abroad films feel like the Fast and the Furious franchise. Continue reading May 18, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” “Hypnotic,” and “BlackBerry” →

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Mike Schulz wants Dave Levora and Darren Pitra — and, by extension, everyone in the known universe — to know that he understands the appeal of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3: “It’s pushin’ buttons like crazy.” Understanding, however, is not the same thing as enjoying, and Schulz is one of the outliers who wasn’t responsible for Guardians overtaking Super Mario Bros as the N° 1 film. “[Guardians] was so aggressively pushy,” decrees Schulz, “[with] too much button-pushing.” He enjoyed the comedic touches, many of them furnished by Chris Pratt, Continue reading May 11, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3” and “Love Again” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his latest series of fives: Firstly, Big George Foreman, which was “pretty decent,” rather like Sweetwater, where the story itself is strong enough to carry the film forward, regardless of whatever lunacies — or, with your typical biopics, redundancies— a viewer encounters along the way. Khris Davis does a convincing job portraying Foreman, the oldest boxer to ever win the heavyweight championship, across two decades. As for the all-important Grill, director George Tillman Jr skipped a golden opportunity to anthropomorphize Foreman’s invention and make his biography into a buddy pic. Continue reading May 4, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Big George Foreman,” “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” “Polite Society,” “Sisu,” and “Judy Blume Forever” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his second week of fives — first, the dream logic of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, “creepy, laugh-out-loud funny, and people are going to hate it.” Schulz loved the film, but thought it a narrative mess; and he suspects Aster doesn’t know how everything ties together, either. Second, there’s Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, which doesn’t feel like much thirty minutes in, but after that Continue reading April 27, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Beau is Afraid,” “Evil Dead Rise,” “Chevalier,” “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” and “Somewhere in Queens” →

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Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how the recent run of excellent films has come to an end — or, perhaps, sputtered to a temporary stop, awaiting fresh refills of petrol distillate. Schulz can’t give his heart to Renfield, ultimately, in spite of a top-notch performance by Nicolas Cage as Dracula, because of a stupid subplot, involving the New Orleans Mafia and a horribly-miscast Awkwafina as a straight-shooting cop, which manages to suck dry a rich and vital premise with such sitcom schlockola. Continue reading April 20, 2023 Movie Mike on Planet 93.9 with Dave and Darren — “Renfield,” “Nefarious,” “Sweetwater,” “The Pope’s Exorcist,” and “Mafia Mamma” →