Hit Factory

It's the summer of 1998, and a celestial rock is on a collision course for planet Earth. Our first ever double-feature episode explores the right-wing, explosive preposterousness of Michael Bay's 'Armageddon' alongside the competent, neoliberal eulogy that is Mimi Leder's 'Deep Impact'. Aaron & Carlee sing some Aerosmith and become Ben Affleck apologists along the way.

Thanksgiving. 1973. Or 1997. Or 2020. We revisit one of the unsung masterpieces of the decade: Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm". Aaron & Carlee discuss the film's once-in-a-generation cast, Mychael Danna's hauntingly evocative score, and the cyclical nature of our political and social malaise.

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Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin and the coauthor of 'Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism'. Meagan joins Aaron & Carlee in the Hit Factory to discuss the anti-politics of Nora Ephron's 1998 romantic-comedy 'You've Got Mail' and recast Clintonite Third Way centrism as political defeatism. Read Meagan's piece, "The Romance of American Clintonism" here: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/youve-got-mail-nineties-films-rom-coms-capitalism. Learn more about Labor Notes at: www.labornotes.org

Election Day is nigh. To commiserate, we revisit Warren Beatty's overlooked, all-too-salient political comedy 'Bulworth'. Aaron & Carlee discuss the necrotic 2020 Presidential race, Jay Billington Bulworth's IRL political counterpart, and survey the 90's subsumption into Third Way Clintonian centrism. Warren Beatty's Op-Ed "Why Not Now?": https://archive.commondreams.org/warrenbeatty.htm "Hail to the Chief Remix" by Yoe Mase www.soundcloud.com/yoemase

We kept all the lights on and watched the scariest film of the 1990's, "The Blair Witch Project". Aaron & Carlee discuss the film's legacy as a vanguard of viral marketing and found-footage cinema, its appeal to a greater sense of pre-millennium malaise, and the role of supernatural evil in the age of misinformation. Special thanks to the brilliant and hilarious Nick Lutsko for providing this week's outro song. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickLustko https://twitter.com/NickLutsko and check out his latest album 'Swords' on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/album/2oTWDmzqeri1WOvpSH5J4g?si=omPnVDlCTqa2ZDvtrR1OhQ

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It's officially Spooky Season! We kick it off (and go a little long) with the rebellious-older-sister of 90's Witch Cinema™: 'The Craft'. Aaron & Carlee gush over the peerless Fairuza Balk, extol the combination of plaid skirts with chunky boots, and dissect the film's thesis with a hammer and sickle.

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It's been a while...Sandrapalooza continues into September with Marco Brambilla's dystopian action banger 'Demolition Man'. We talk the film's fetishization of consumption, the liberal tendency towards maintaining hierarchies while sanitizing culture, and speculate on the cleanliness of Sylvester Stallone's nethers. We're still donating all Patreon funds to the The Conscious Kid's COVID Rent Relief Fund through the end of September. Subscribe today at www.patreon.com/hitfactorypod