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.
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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 record label boss, played by Lee's recurrent collaborator Denzel Washington, who springs into action…
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 star in his own murder mystery series where he plays an ex-cop turned cruise ship singer with a murder to…
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 his excellently-named production company EDGELRD, a film whose strangeness is not limited to the fact…
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 Roger Daltrey from The Who as Franz Liszt, Ringo Starr as the Pope, and this is not even close to the…
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 It, it was surprisingly serious in tone, and it was, as Suggs put it, "the beginning and the end of our…
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 and range of star collaborators - Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z and more - through the medium of,…
"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 wounds of the past with her estranged dress designer (Michaela Coel), and we know it's got a storming FKA…
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 go on to be very famous, and the former lead singer of the Stooges. In a dress and bonnet. It's so good…
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 off to scatter the ashes of a friend of the former musician. It's really the excuse for an eclectic set…
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 from OutKast - to play the legendary guitarist in Jimi: All is By My Side, a film tackling Hendrix's…
