August 31, 2012

“Movie & An Argument” Podcast: Clint Eastwood, the GOP, and Shia LaBeouf Nakedness

On this week’s episode of A Movie & An Argument, With Alyssa and Swin, we discuss (scroll down for the audio):

  • Totally Biased, FX’s racially charged news/comedy series hosted by comedian W. Kamau Bell (click here to check out an interview with Bell). Alyssa had visited the set in New York over the weekend, and shared her thoughts on the show’s potential.
  • Clint Eastwood, his politics, his movies, and his (then) upcoming address to the 2012 Republican National Convention (click here for the transcript and video of Eastwood’s bizarre “Invisible Obama” speech, which apparently upset Paul Ryan).
  • Lawless, a new Western set in Virginia gangland during Prohibition, starring Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, and Guy Pearce (my review here). It’s during this part of the conversation that we spend far too much time discussing LaBeouf’s dorky nakedness.
  • The first season finale of Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom (and why the series still frustrates us so).

Each week, I’ll be sitting down to chat with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg (who also does killer work at The Atlantic and Slate‘s “Double X“). We’ll talk, argue, and laugh about the latest movies, television shows, and pop-cultural nonsense—with some politics thrown in just for the hell of it.

Alyssa describes herself as being “equally devoted to the Star Wars expanded universe and Barbara Stanwyck, to Better Off Ted and Deadwood.” I (everyone calls me Swin) am a devoted lover of low-brow dark humor, Yuengling, and movies with high body counts. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and tune in during the weeks to come.

We’ll be featuring guests on the program, and also taking listeners’ questions, so feel free to Tweet them at me here, and we’ll see if we can get to them during a show.

Thanks for listening!

Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones. To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To find more episodes of this podcast in the iTunes store, click here.

To check out Alyssa’s Bloggingheads show, click here.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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