List: 10 Favorite Podcasts

List: 10 Favorite Podcasts

Posted on February 25, 2010 at 3:59 pm

I love podcasts! I listen to them in the car and on the metro and even while cooking or cleaning the kitchen and they keep me entertained and engaged. And they all meet one of the other top requirements for a podcast — they are all divisible and interruptable witout too much bother so easily adapted to any time period available for listening. Here are some of my favorites, all free and available online and via iTunes.itunes.jpg

  • The Slate Culture Gabfest is a lively conversation about the top stories in media and popular culture each week. The current episode includes John Mayer’s controversial interview in Playboy and the updating of the all-star “We are the World” for the Haiti relief effort. I like the way they invite listeners into the conversation via their Facebook page.
  • The Slate Spoiler Special is the kind of discussion all movie critics wish we could have because instead of explaining whether you should see a movie while trying not to give away too much it is a conversation for those who have already seen it with Slate’s sweet-voiced and always-astute critic Dana Stevens.
  • NPR Culturetopia is a round-up of the best of NPR’s arts, culture, and media coverage with interviews, commentary, and reviews.
  • The Moth has live performances of true stories told with no notes, each under 10 minutes or so. You never know what you will get — a best-selling author, a cop, a movie star, or a teenager participating in a workshop, a story to make you laugh or cry or give you goosebumps — or all three. But every single story has been utterly gripping and I have listened to many of them more than once.
  • This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Over 70,000 have been recorded by famous leaders, great thinkers, and ordinary individuals. There are Nobel Prize winners, statesmen, teachers, writers, clergy, and artists. There are two different podcasts available — one of new essays and one from the archives of the original series back in the 1950’s.
  • Ted Talks are brief presentations by some of the most provocative and inspiring thinkers of our time. Challenging, informative, touching, mesmerizing.
    microphone09.jpg

  • Smithsonian Folkways is an enthralling exploration of music of all kinds. Folkways Records & Service Co. was incorporated in 1948 to bring the entire world of sound to listeners. The Smithsonian took over in 1987 and now operates it as a non-profit. The podcasts, some hosted by Michael Asch, the son of Folkways co-founder Moses Asch, explore the richness of the archive and the many cultures it represents.
  • Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! is NPR’s weekly news quiz, funny, sharp, and of course very topical. One of the highlights each week is a visit by a celebrity, always someone very cool, who gets to chat with the host before being asked to answer three questions on a topic as far removed from his or her area of expertise as possible.
  • StoryCorps like The Moth, is a podcast of true stories but these are less polished and more intimate and authentic. The mission is to honor each others stories by listening and these stories of struggle, learning, devotion, love, laughter, prayers, and joy are breathtaking.
  • Legacy of Laughs is an archive of radio in the days before television when stars like Jack Benny, Martin and Lewis, and Edgar Bergen were as important to American culture as “Seinfeld” and “Friends” were in the heyday of the sitcom. It’s a lot of fun to listen to these vintage shows, commercials and all.
Related Tags:

 

Movie Mom’s Top Picks for Families

The Informant!

Posted on February 25, 2010 at 8:08 am

Like some of the food made with the substances produced by the corporation at the heart of this story, this movie is pleasant but leaves a sour aftertaste. It is inspired by the real-life story of one of the most massive cases of corporate corruption and crime in US history. Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) paid the then-record antitrust fine of $100 million and its top executives went to jail because of a global conspiracy to fix prices and production in violation of antitrust laws. None of this would have been uncovered without the cooperation of a top executive named Mark Whitacre. This film’s decision to present the story as farce and to focus on Whitacre and his flakier qualities is entertaining but unsatisfying.

Matt Damon plays Whitacre with an extra 30 pounds and a toupee that looks like a bird’s nest. He is a PhD but he is less an absent-minded professor type than a free-association, mind-like-a-pinball machine type, and we are privy to his thoughts as they go off in an almost random assortment of directions, often missing the point of what is going on around him as he muses about various questions and reassures himself. When the FBI is brought in to investigate an extortion attempt he reported, Whitacre tells the agent (“Star Trek’s: Enterprise’s” Scott Bakula) that he knows about something much bigger. This leads to an undercover operation spanning years and continents as Whitacre wears a wire to tape more than 200 conversations. He was one of the highest-ranking corporate officials ever to work as an informant. He was also embezzling millions of dollars and having a breakdown, possibly as a result of the stress of leading a double life.

Director Steven Soderburgh also gave us a moving drama about the feisty heroine Erin Brockovich, whose failings were quirky and endearing. Now he brings us a story about another real-life whistleblower presented as farce, with a bright, sit-com-y score by Marvin Hamlisch and the pacing and fonts of a 70’s comedy, familiar faces from television (including Tom and Dick Smothers), and seems to do everything possible to keep us from caring about the squirrelly main character. Whitacre, an accomplished man with a PhD (and now has several post-graduated degrees) who was a rising star at the company, comes across as clumsy, clueless, and narcissistic. We hear his random thoughts about an incongruous variety of topics. They come across as the musings of a doofus but they also show us his scientific curiosity and analytic distance. And we see how both contribute to his success and his downfall.

The film touches on the incongruity of his being sentenced to a jail term more than twice that of the executives responsible for crimes many times the order of magnitude in size and impact, but the reaction it seems to expect from us is a “what do you expect” rather than any sense of outrage. Once again, those who steal a small amount from hundreds of millions of people receive nominal consequences while those who steal a substantial sum from one place take the fall. Economists estimated that the cost to American citizens of one price-fixing case involving electrical equipment in 1961 was greater than all of the robberies of that year. The cost of the ADM price-fixing, based on the explicit view that “the customers are the enemy,” is incalculable. This film perpetuates the lack of understanding about these crimes in favor of cheap shots at the life-shattering impact of the investigation and the enabling, even exploitive behavior of the law enforcement officials who used him and then left him to deal with the consequences. Worst of all, it leaves us with a feeling of smug superiority when it should be illuminating the kind of thinking from both corporate and government officials that led us to the current financial collapse.

Related Tags:

 

Based on a book Based on a true story Crime Drama Satire

Glenn Close interviews Pixar’s Bob Peterson

Posted on February 24, 2010 at 3:57 pm

Actress Glenn Close interviewed writer/director/voice actor Bob Peterson of Pixar about “Up” and especially about dogs, the dogs in his life and the dogs on screen. Peterson provided the voice for the adorable Dug, one of the most popular characters in the movie.

I wrote Dug as a combination of all the dogs I’ve owned. Marcella, Precious, Rosy, and Ava are all in there. The distractibility of Dug (SQUIRREL!!) is based on a game I’d play with my dogs. On a hot day the dogs would be panting to cool themselves down. So, I’d jump in and pant along with them. Then I’d stop abruptly and pretend I’d seen something important. The dogs would do the same and go to attention along with me. Long pause. Then, everyone back to panting. It was hilarious. Also I’ve noticed that dogs have an amazing capacity to give love immediately to people that they meet for the first time. Hence the line “I have just met you and I love you.” Dug says this to our old man character, Carl, when they first meet. It’s a challenge to Carl accept his new “family” who loves him and needs his attention.

And check out Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 50 dogs in movies and television, in honor of the Westminster dog show.

Related Tags:

 

Animation Behind the Scenes Writers

Can You Help Me Do Better?

Posted on February 24, 2010 at 10:00 am

I love all of the comments I get, even the ones that tell me why I’m wrong. I’d love to hear more from you about how I can do better and what we at Beliefnet can do to make you feel more welcome and engaged and to give you the information you are looking for. Please take a moment to give us some feedback through our new survey. And of course, keep those comments coming!
Click here to take the survey

Related Tags:

 

Not specified

Everybody’s Fine

Posted on February 24, 2010 at 8:00 am

Parents try very hard to protect their children and at the same time teach them to be independent. And then we struggle to accept the consequences. That is what has happened to Frank Goode (Robert DeNiro), a recent widower preparing for a visit from his four grown children. When all four of them cancel, he decides to get his suitcase out of the attic and go see each of them. Well, he goes to visit each of them — without calling to let them know. But seeing them will take a little longer.

Based on the 1990 Italian film “Stanno tutti bene,” this is a quietly moving story of a family struggling to re-connect. Like many families, this one had one member, the mother, who operated as a communications hub and mediator. Without her, the grown children feel that their primary obligation is to protect their father, in part because that is what their mother did and in part because no one seems to know how to tell him that one of his children is in terrible trouble.

Frank takes the train, telling the other passengers that he helped to create the miles of telephone wire they are passing by. A million miles of wire to raise his family. And now, his children are constantly on cell phones that communicate without the tangible connection of wires. And no one is communicating with him.

What Frank thought of as encouragement they now see as impossibly high expectations, and each of them is afraid of letting him down. When Frank first arrives, he sees the children as they were. The married woman with a teen-age son (Kate Beckinsale) appears to him as a little girl (Beckinsale’s real-life daughter, Lily Mo Sheen). Director Kirk Jones adds a dreamlike, poetic tone to the story with these encounters, especially one near the end of the film when Frank sees the family gathering he was hoping for, with his sons and daughters appearing to him as the children they were, but letting him see and tell them the truth. Jones, who also wrote the screenplay, makes good use of the vast and varied American landscape as a metaphor for the distances and the connections between the characters. The simple, direct mode of the telephone lines Frank covered so carefully has splintered into a dozen ways of staying in touch — ways that can just as easily be frustrating just-misses that make us feel even more isolated. The movie gently shows us the challenges of maintaining those connections and the inevitability of getting it wrong sometimes — but also that even with that certainty, the importance of trying is what keeps everybody fine.

Related Tags:

 

Drama Family Issues Remake
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik