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Pop Screen
by The Geek Show
Pop Screen is The Geek Show's new podcast tackling movies starring, about or by pop stars - and that's all genres, from rock to hip-hop, jazz to disco. Each week Graham and one of his stable of trusty co-hosts picks a pop movie and examines its history, its film-making and its music in-depth. It's an irreverent ride through an oft-misunderstood strain of cinema, from era-defining masterpieces to kitsch atrocities.
Episodes
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Bill and Ted's Freakish Flop - Pop Screen 176, Freaked
You'd think any movie with the stars of Bill and Ted that came out in 1993 would be a sure-fire hit. You'd think so - but that would reckon without how hard Alex Winter tries to alienate the audience in Freaked, the cult horror-comedy he co-directed, co-wrote and starred in. As arrogant teen…
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Street Fighter (Pop Screen 175) Kylie Minogue - Is it time to reassess the '90s Street Fighter movie?
Is it time to reassess the '90s Street Fighter movie? That's right, Pop Screen is entering the arena of public opinion and fighting for the death this week as we attempt to persuade you that Steven S. DeSouza's 1994 Street Fighter adaptation is both an intentional comedy and a good one at that....
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Forgettable title, unforgettable film: Steve (Pop Screen 174) Little Simz
You wouldn't think a film with a name like Steve would prompt such a wild variety of tangents, but it's all here, from Graham's hatred of eggs to Mark's attempt to restart the War of the Roses. Yes, we're talking about Steve, the Netflix film starring Cillian Murphy and co-starring everyone from...
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Why is Australian Cinema so Grim? Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (Pop Screen 173) Nick Cave
In the same year, Nick Cave sang The Mercy Seat and appeared in this brutal prison drama, the first film from his regular music video collaborator John Hillcoat. You'd ask if he was OK, but it's late-'80s Nick Cave: he absolutely wasn't. A brutal, shocking look at a near-future prison…
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ASAP meets Akira: Highest 2 Lowest - Pop Screen Episode 172
Can you believe this is the first Spike Lee movie we've covered on the podcast? Lee is a director who's always had something to say about music, not always complimentary, and his Akira Kurosawa remake Highest 2 Lowest copped some flack for its take on modern hip-hop. It's the story of a legendary...
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British TV's Maddest Murder Mystery - The Good Ship (Pop Screen 171)
After the inevitable Christmas number one, the life of an X Factor winner isn't always easy. But Shayne Ward, of 'That's My Goal' fame - stop pretending you don't know it - had something unique to fall back on. A stint on Coronation Street gave him enough acting cred, and willing co-stars, to…
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How Good is the New Boards of Canada album, also AGGRO DR1FT - Pop Screen Episode 170
Have you ever seen a hitman movie and thought "It's good, but it needs to be shot entirely in infra-red?" No, because no-one has - except Harmony Korine. After looking at his most famous film Spring Breakers a couple of years back, Robyn and Graham now reunite to talk about the first film from…
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Roger Daltrey & Ringo Starr in Ken Russell's Lisztomania - Pop Screen 169
Has Pop Screen gone highbrow? A biopic of a classical composer isn't normally the kind of film we'd cover, but then biopics of classical composers aren't usually anything like Lisztomania. The final instalment in Ken Russell's legendary series of films about his classical music heroes, it stars...
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The Madness Movie isn't as Nutty as you think - Take it Leave it (POP SCREEN EPISODE
Madness! Madness, they call them Madness, which is fair enough, because that's their name. At a very early stage in their quest to become one of Britain's most beloved bands, the Nutty Boys starred in a semi-improvised film about their formation and rise to fame. It was called Take It Or Leave…
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The First Lego Brick Rock Doc - Piece by Piece (Pop Screen Episode 167)
It's playtime! Pop Screen is starting a themed month on "autobiopics" - films where pop stars play themselves, but in a different context to the standard rock doc. The nearest we'll get to documentary is this film by Morgan Neville, which sees Pharrell Williams talk about his incredible career…
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Explaining the spooky action of Mother Mary - Pop Screen Episode 166
"So we're doing this, right?" The new film from David Lowery, the director of The Green Knight, is not a love story, it's not a ghost story, and a lot of people aren't sure what it is at all. We know it's definitely about a very Gaga-esque pop star played by Anne Hathaway trying to heal the…
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We Love This Iggy Pop Western and So Should You - Pop Screen 165: Dead Man (1995)
It's one of the great films of the '90s, from one of the most Pop Screen-friendly directors of all time: Jim Jarmusch, a man who can't even make a little family drama without sticking Tom Waits in there. Here, he's making a Western starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, a lot of people who would…
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Contains Cinema's Greatest Scenes of Gluttony - Roadside Prophets, Pop Screen 164
Back to the '90s, and a time when a movie could just be, y'know, anything you wanted. The co-writer of Sid & Nancy, Abbe Wool, went to test this theory with this wilfully inconsequential road movie in which a member of X (John Doe) and a member of The Beastie Boys (Adam "Ad-Rock" Horowitz) set…
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Did we find the worst rock biopic? Pop Screen 163
The Jimi Hendrix estate have been notably controlling of the film rights to his life story since his death at the totemic age of 27. Hollywood, though, cannot stand for a classic rock star to go un-biopicised (it's a word now), which is why in 2013 John Ridley got Andre Benjamin - yes, Andre 3000...
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What is a Mod in the 2020s - The Pebble and the Boy - Pop Screen 162
The history of pop is as much about subcultures as it is music, and this week Pop Screen is diving into one of the most enduring (at least round co-host Mick's gaff): mod. From its origins, which were so controversial the phrase "moral panic" was coined to describe the press reaction (fact!) to…
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The Blues History Behind Sinners - Pop Screen Episode 161
SAMMEH! Yes, finally we're getting round to Ryan Coogler's box-office-busting, Oscars-history-making period vampire gangster epic. Joe from Dreaming Machine rejoins Graham to talk about how Coogler's hit film explores the history, tradition and continued relevance of the blues, all the time…
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FRANKENSTING: The Bride with Sting (1985) - Episode 160
Have you seen The Bride yet? No, not Maggie Gyllenhaal's new film - we mean the 1985 film by Frank Roddam, director of Quadrophenia. Like Gyllenhaal's film, it's an attempt at a female-centred sequel to Mary Shelley's novel. Unlike Gyllenhaal's film, it has an actively deranged cast list…
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"Tapping the cringe motherlode", Corey Feldman Vs the World - Pop Screen Episode 159
It's the documentary you never knew you needed, and you do need it. Marcie Hume's chronicle of life on the road with '80s child actor Corey Feldman and his backing band of skimpily-dressed 'Angels' tracks the fallout from his infamous 2016 Today Show performance, which went viral and had the…
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Aretha Franklin & Amazing Grace - Pop Screen 158
This week, Pop Screen takes you to church. On its release, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace became the biggest-selling gospel album of all time, but it was only supposed to be half the story. Originally, it was going to accompany a concert film with the Queen of Soul going back to her roots at an…
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David Bowie in the Hunger - Pop Screen 157
Can it really be ten years since David Bowie died? This week, Pop Screen dives back into the prolific screen career of the Thin White Duke with one of his sexiest, most stylish and silliest films - Tony Scott's 1983 debut The Hunger. A story of vampirism, lesbianism and extremely '80s stylistic...
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2025 in Movies - Part One (Best and Worst)
Another year's over, so it's time to convene an Avengers movie's worth of Geek Show contributors to answer the only question that matters: what was good this year? Did Sinners live up to the hype? What was our pick of the Oscar race? Did 28 Years Later live up to Simon's extremely exacting...
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The Beatles in the Magical Mystery Tour - Episode 155
Roll up, roll up, and let Mark and Graham take you back to 1967, a time when the Beatles had already conquered cinema with Richard Lester. As a result, they decided to make their own film, with no script and the entire band as co-directors, then broadcast it on BBC One on Boxing Day. What could...
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The Coen Brothers and Inside Llewyn Davis - Pop Screen 154
It's the dead of winter, so what better time to watch the frostiest of music movies - in every sense? Set in a bitterly cold early '60s New York, the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis sees Oscar Isaac's titular folk singer getting the cold shoulder wherever he goes, whether it's from his...
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Haim, Teyana Taylor & More in One Battle After Another - Pop Screen 153
Get yourself a couple of small beers, pop The Battle of Algiers on and enjoy a (French) 75 minutes with Graham and Simon talking about arguably THEE film of 2025 - Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. The story of a gone-to-seed revolutionary fighting to protect his daughter from a...
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Bruce Springsteen in Blinded by the Light - Episode 152
Greetings from Castbury Pod! For our latest episode, Graham is joined by new co-host Ian to discuss a Bruce Springsteen movie - but not the one you're thinking of. Yes, while Deliver Me From Nowhere is still in theatres, we're rewinding a few years to look at Gurinder Chadha's Blinded by the…
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John Carpenter & Alice Cooper in Prince of Darkness - Episode 151
When Max Planck began his ground-breaking work on quantum theory, do you think he realised it would be used to prove Satan is a flask of slime in the basement of a San Francisco church? This is - we think - the plot of Prince of Darkness, in every way John Carpenter's weirdest film. Its bizarre...
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Ozzy Osbourne in Trick or Treat - Pop Screen 150
Well, it's not Halloween without a bit of trick or treating, isn't it? Pop Screen's spooky month kicks off with an '80s teen horror that also allows us to remember one of the greats we lost this year - Ozzy Osbourne, whose short but hilarious cameo as an anti-rock preacher in Charles Martin…
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Nick Cave and the Wings of Desire - Pop Screen 149
The loneliness of eternity. The horrors of the 20th century. Nick Cave's hair. Yes, this week Pop Screen is tackling the biggest things possible with Wings of Desire, in which Wim Wenders's observations of Berlin, fondness for the poetry of Rilke and Bad Seeds fandom combined to form one of the...
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Boots Riley (The Coup) with I'm a Virgo - Episode 148
As impossible as it seems, there are people who can still do original things with superheroes - and it's no surprise that one of those people is Boots Riley. One part of the deliciously funky activist hip-hop act The Coup, he turned to directing with 2018's outrageous comedy Sorry to Bother You…
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Pavement in Pavements (2024) - Episode 147
Pavement are a scrappy, bewildering band, so it's only fair that they get a scrappy, bewildering biopic - or is it? A hybrid of documentary, spoof, situationist prank and an off-Broadway jukebox musical that somehow actually happened in reality, Alex Ross Perry's Pavements throws the ultimate...
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Lemmy, Paul McCartney and More in Eat the Rich - Pop Screen 146
We've covered the odd world of The Comic Strip Presents... on Pop Screen before, when Mark and Graham looked at their Kate Bush-starring TV epic Les Dogs. But they also made big-screen films, the first of which featured even more pop stars - Lemmy, Paul McCartney, Shane MacGowan, Bill Wyman…
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Sly Stone in Sly Lives! - Episode 145
In the middle of a not-great summer for musical icons, one death hit us particularly hard. It's Sly Stone, the mercurial, genre-hopping singer, producer and songwriter at the heart of Sly and the Family Stone, a funk Prometheus who suffered too much for bringing humanity its finest grooves. And…
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Motown Records Does the Last Dragon - Episode 144
Berry Gordy founded perhaps the most famous independent record label in history - Motown - co-wrote some of the most enduring hits of the soul genre and dated Diana Ross. Yet he still had an unfulfilled ambition to... produce a martial arts movie? Apparently yes, and The Last Dragon was the…
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The Monkees' Micky Dolenz with Premiere: Story without a Hero - Episode 143
Hey hey! Micky Dolenz was a Monkee, and once he stopped Monkeeing around his career took him to some unusual places. Few stranger than this one-off BBC television drama, part of the Premiere strand of single plays. It's a bleak, eccentric snapshot of a now almost unrecognisable time when Hell's...
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Eels in Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives - Pop Screen Episode 142
We all understand the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, so long as nobody has any follow-up questions. But did you know that the son of the guy who came up with it has several songs on the Shrek franchise soundtracks? This is Mark Oliver Everett, frontman of the band Eels, and this...
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The Village People in Can't Stop the Music - Pop Screen 141
You can't stop the music, although a lot of people wanted to when The Village People's 1980 movie musical came out. Released in the wake of the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" in which rock fans burned disco albums, its appeal to its natural constituency was blunted by its strange tone. A film...
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FKA Twigs in The Crow (2024) - Pop Screen Episode 140
What better time for a crossover than a comic book adaptation? This week, Graham is joined by Andrew and Mick, the two hosts of Behold!, to examine the 2024 remake of James O'Barr's cult comic The Crow. Famously the source for a 1994 film starring Brandon Lee, that star's on-set death sparked...
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Selena Gomez in Spring Breakers - Pop Screen 139
Look at our [stuff]! Yes, it's time for Pop Screen to don its neon balaclava and tackle one of the most iconic and divisive pop movies of the 2010s - Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. With Selena Gomez and Gucci Mane in the cast, Skrillex on the soundtrack and James Franco playing a character who...
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Paul Weller in Blitz - Episode 138
You know you're dealing with a slightly classier type of pop star movie when the director has a knighthood, and Sir Steve McQueen's Blitz is no exception. Despite getting no love at this year's Oscars - it's no Emilia Perez, eh, the Academy? - it's still an ambitious, multi-stranded tale of one...
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Savages in Anatomy of a Fall - Pop Screen 137
One year ago, a very good boi and a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent became the most unexpected Oscar-season obsessions this side of Karla Sofia Gascon's tweets. It's Anatomy of a Fall, of course, and if you're thinking "Where's the Pop Screen connection?", look closer - you've got former Savages...
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The David Lynch Tribute Episode & Lost Highway - Pop Screen 136
As soon as we heard the tragic news about David Lynch's death, we knew we had to do one of his films on Pop Screen. But which one? Most of Lynch's films feature some sort of musician cameo - and, to answer your next question, we've already done his version of Dune. But there's only one that…
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The Four Tops & Little Shop of Horrors - Pop Screen Episode 135
It's suppertime! Yes, after our review of 2024 Pop Screen is back to its old tricks with a look back at 1986's Little Shop of Horrors, the horror-comedy-musical powered by an unforgettable voice performance from none other than The Four Tops's Levi Stubbs. As the "mean green. mother from outer...
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Pop Screen's Best of 2024 (Part Two) July to December
You've heard the first half of our retrospective of 2024's cinema on The Uncut Network, now Pop Screen takes over for an even more epic second half - and that's just the bit where we all argue about The Substance. Join Graham, Robyn, Rob, Kat, Simon, Mike, Faye, Aidan, Andy and - in spirit if not...
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Marvin Gaye in Chrome & Hot Leather - Pop Screen 134
Marvin Gaye! Originator of conscious soul, Motown legend and surely the coolest man ever to be called "Marvin", he had the kind of raw charisma that you'd think the movies couldn't get enough of. In fact, his acting roles were few and far between, with this curious Vietnam-vets-versus-bikers...
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George Michael & Last Christmas - Pop Screen 133
Last Christmas, we gave you a Christmas special, and this year we're doing the same because we're not very imaginative. This year, to save you from tears, we're doing Paul Feig's Wham-inspired romantic comedy Last Christmas. It was poorly received on its 2019 release, but as was generally the…
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Ice-T & Iggy Pop in Tank Girl - Pop Screen 132
The 1990s! A time when Hollywood's brightest minds were trying to solve the impossible problem of how to make a whole movie from those comic book thingies. Nowadays, they're trying to work out how to stop doing that, but that hasn't decreased the charm of things like Rachel Talalay's Tank Girl, a...
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Kris Kristofferson in Heaven's Gate - Episode 131
In all the annals of Hollywood flops, Heaven's Gate stands tall. Michael Cimino's follow-up to The Deep Hunter, a film beloved by seemingly everyone other than Jane Fonda at the time, it bankrupted its studio and became a byword for commercial failure. But what if we told you... it was good?...
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Thor in Rock N Roll Nighmare - Pop Screen 130
Bow before the mighty Thor! That's Jon Mikl Thor, obviously, the musclebound Canadian hard rocker whose mix of riffs and strongman stunts never quite led him to rock Valhalla. Not that it stopped him trying, and Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare was his biggest swing at the big leagues. On paper, it's a...
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Phoebe Bridgers (and More) in I Saw the TV Glow - Pop Screen 129
Phoebe Bridgers! Snail Mail! Fred Durst?! The list of Pop Screen-qualifying cast members is only the beginning of the weirdness in Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore film I Saw the TV Glow. Released in the UK after a wait almost as punishing as the film's devastating time-jumps, it's the story of two…
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Halsey & Moses Sumney in MaXXXine - Episode 128
It's time for Pop Screen's Halloween month, and as luck would have it one of the biggest new horror films of the year has plenty of pop connections. The final instalment in a trilogy which started with X, MaXXXine takes the story of Maxine Minx through to the '80s, and finds Halsey and Moses…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Pop Screen is The Geek Show's new podcast tackling movies starring, about or by pop stars - and that's all genres, from rock to hip-hop, jazz to disco. Each week Graham and one of his stable of trusty co-hosts picks a pop movie and examines its history, its film-making and its music in-depth. It's an irreverent ride through an oft-misunderstood strain of cinema, from era-defining masterpieces to kitsch atrocities.
HOSTED BY
The Geek Show
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Pop Screen have?
Pop Screen currently has 180 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Pop Screen about?
Pop Screen is The Geek Show's new podcast tackling movies starring, about or by pop stars - and that's all genres, from rock to hip-hop, jazz to disco. Each week Graham and one of his stable of trusty co-hosts picks a pop movie and examines its history, its film-making and its music in-depth. It's...
How often does Pop Screen release new episodes?
Pop Screen publishes regularly with 180 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Pop Screen?
You can listen to Pop Screen on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Pop Screen?
Pop Screen is created and hosted by The Geek Show.
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