Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast - Podcast Rankings and reviews

While listening to an episode the other day I realized I’ve been enjoying this podcast and its hosts for more than 7 years now and even at that, I’d be considered late to the party. It’s been a part of so many different moments in my life along the way. I’ll remember episodes I listened to and where I was living, working, things I was going through, etc. That’s when you know a podcast is truly special. Arnie, Stewart and Jacob are my favorite trio, but any combination of the hosts is always a delight. I’ve been a paid subscriber on and off through the years and their backlog and release frequency is truly amazing. I can’t recommend this pod enough and I look forward to looking back after another 7+ years at all the top notch content Arnie and crew continue to deliver! Thanks and cheers to you, Now Playing!

I’m a huge music fan and never really got into movies, probably because I barely had TV growing up. This podcast has tipped me off to movies I ended up really liking but may not have otherwise watched, like Thief, Rumblefish, The Batman and Drive. It has also helped me become an adequate conversationalist with movie buffs (seems like every other other person is one!) I’ve tried other movie podcasts to listen to at work but it seems like other movie pods always start with a heavy dose of of blabbing, non-movie related personal stories, and aren’t edited very tightly. Now Playing has a clean structure they always follow that puts the movie as the top priority. The editing is always really tight and professional, no hiss and dead air. The hosts are all good at talking about anything at all (it’s a talent!) and have good chemistry because they’ve known each other a long time. Even if someone pays them a bunch of money to review a movie, they aren’t afraid to give honest opinions, and I feel like they’re always aware that opinions aren’t objective facts, and opinions will differ based on age and what you want out of art or entertainment. I think the first episodes I listened to were them tearing apart the Silent Hill franchise; the skewering they gave it was off putting, but after getting a larger sample size of their reviews I’ve heard them champion underdog movies (not the Underdog franchise though!) and find interesting, modern points of criticism in classics. I have a signed copy of the Now Playing book, am a monthly supporter, and I always look forward to the next review. Unless it’s of a Stephen King property, how are those still being spawned?

I obviously haven’t listened to the entirety of the catalog here (there’s over 1000 episodes) but of the episodes I have listened I’ve always walked away stimulated. There hasn’t been a time that I haven’t completely disagreed with everything they have to say. I may disagree with the hosts individually (Stewart hates Shang Chi…are you nuts?!) or (Arnie recommended Batman Forever but gave a strong not recommend to Batman Begins…huh?) but they express their points in such a way that if I do end up disagreeing I don’t think they’re unintelligent. This is a very smart podcast for those who are interested in film.

I love movies, and enjoy listening to the host’s perspectives and thoughts on movies I have seen. I generally won’t listen to an episode until I’ve seen the movie, so it provides a good opportunity to watch something that I wouldn’t ordinarily watch. I especially love the rapport of the hosts, and the interplay between them and their different tastes. Arnie and Stuart and Jakob, and the rest of the team: keep up the great work!

Hard stop while listening to the Sinners episode at the point when one of the hosts made very insulting remarks regarding the director’s accent. While I do not feel that this was racially charged in any way, I did take this to be a microaggression. Coogler has a distinctive Bay Area accent, which can admittedly be difficult to understand. However, it is very refreshing that he does not code switch in order to make himself more palpable to the masses. Being that his movie has elements noting the issues with cultural assimilation, it is in poor taste to highlight how he is so unintelligible to you. Minorities have spent generations making themselves easier for the majority to digest, often leading to the whitewashing and erasure of traditions and practices that shaped their cultures in the first place. I will not listen any further, but I challenge the hosts of this show to consider how slights such as this will affect their listeners.

I’ve been listening to podcasts for far longer than I’ve owned an iPhone. When I became aware of people releasing shows guaranteed to appeal to a limited and scattered audience—fun and serious discussions of monster movies, for instance—I made it a point to be there. At one point, I even called discovery of fanzine-audio podcasts sort of my “KDKA Moment,” named after the first commercial radio station in the US. For a few years, I enjoyed entertainment, education and fun, textured with an appealing rough edge.

Things change.

That first generation of podcasts began to go away. The host and prime mover of one ‘cast passed, one hopes, to become a star of the Great Broadcasting Studio, blasting his podcast from the hereafter. I’m still trying to find that channel.

Another ‘cast simply faded away, without leaving a trace, other than the episodes I managed to archive. Others…well, met manifold fates.

The _Now Playing_ podcast became a kind of “Bounceback Listen.” I can’t say I’ve ever been that enthusiastic about listening to three often too-loud, often too-obnoxious, often argumentative hosts going at it about mainstream movies, but sometimes there was found a nugget of interest. And this podcast is still better than most of NPR or FOX. Okay, not high bars. Yeah, I must’ve been really jonesin’ for a fix.

And I still can’t tell Arnie from Stuart. One’s the grumpy one; the other seems to do the serious research. Worse, I never found reason to care which was which. Even worse, maybe they’re _both_ the grumpy one.

And some things happened. Covid limited the available new movies for them to argue about. Episodes that had always been behind a paywall, became more evident with changes in Apple design. The hosts seemed to suddenly become aware of their age, and strange melancholic distracting observations began to appear in their podcasts.

Slowly, I would notice I would only listen to the first few of minutes of a given podcast, wherein background about a movie was provided by the host who did the research about the making of the movie. After that segment, I’d drop out and do something productive.

If I listened to an entire episode, I listened to an episode about a movie or show I wasn’t going to watch anyway. The hosts never _sold_ me on watching a movie. They’d often mock it plenty though. RiffTrax does mockery better.

Then one day, I stopped listening.

I revisited the Apple Podcast page recently; Apple Podcasts pushed _Now Playing_ as a suggestion, and the latest movie was about something I had mild interest in. But I didn’t bother, finally having found more fertile ground.

The bounce is gone.