With two kids, a job, a house, and other boring adult responsibilities, I don’t have much time to read these days. Instead, I usually occupy my time doing chores with podcasts. I’m always looking for good movie ideas for my next marathon, so I thought I’d survey iTunes for some good movie podcasts.
I’m a bit picky with my podcasts. I start to get testy if they go long, especially if the hosts start rambling and go off topic. I’m also looking for a good blend of information and entertainment – so the hosts have to give me some facts, but they also have to have a bit of charisma and chemistry together.
Given my personal criteria, my favorite podcast so far is 101 Films You Should Have Seen. Ian and Lewis are two guys from the UK that don’t take themselves too seriously, but are on a similar mission as me to see great movies they otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Their About Page says as much:
In a nutshell, ’101 Films…’ is a podcast dedicated to the films you probably should have seen, but for some reason never quite got round to watching… plus a few obscure ones that you’ve probably never heard of but should watch anyway.
They have a good list of movies – some I’ve seen and some I’ve not – so I’m looking forward to listening to their older episodes. Bonus: their episodes typically run a half hour each, which is right at my sweet spot.
I listened to some other podcasts as well, but none of them really clicked for me. For completeness sake, here’s what I found:
- Best Movies by Farr – 2 minute long episodes that go over one specific movie. Great idea, but publishing seems to have stopped in 2012.
- Doug Loves Movies – A hour traveling comedy routine. Its a long podcast and I didn’t get it.
- Movies You Should See – A diverse group of people talking about movie topics. This sounds like it should be right up my alley. However, I just couldn’t get into an entire hour of witty banter about A Christmas Story. This is probably because there isn’t that much more to say about “A Christmas Story” that hasn’t been said. A lot of this episode sounded like filler.
- The Film Vault – A couple of guys talking about movies – typically about lists of interesting things from movies (e.g. “top 5 taglines”). This podcast was ok, but was long (an hour and a half) and this episode and many episodes were about film buff sort of stuff (e.g. actor debuts) instead of discussions of specific movies.
To be fair to the also-rans, they are very popular and well-reviewed on iTunes, so perhaps I just caught them at the wrong episode for me.
