Why Does It Exist?

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Podcast #60: Terminal Countdown AKA Y2K

In Uncategorized on January 23, 2014 at 2:50 pm
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This is a very low quality image of the most suspenseful part of the movie.

We’re back: a dinosaur story! After a much-needed (ed. note: nope) four-month break, Why Does It Exist? makes its triumphant return with Terminal Countdown AKA Y2K, a very timely Y2K panic thriller starring the guy from Unforgiven (the very 90s-named Jaimz Woolvett) as a bowlcut-sporting hacker who teams up with geriatric marine Lou Gossett Jr. and Russian-accented Sarah Chalke to prevent the USA from exploding Russia. I’m joined by returning guest Walter J. Lyng for a trip down memory lane to a more innocent time when laptops that could access porn were mind-blowing and the lush green forests of British Columbia looked just like the Amazon.

Catch Walter’s monthly talk show Night Fight this Friday, January 24th at Mainline Theatre (3997 Saint-Laurent) in Montreal!

 

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Music this week provided by She’s. Their self-titled split (with Fountain) cassette is streaming right now at Bandcamp and available for PWYC download. You can catch them on February 4th at Barfly (4062 Saint-Laurent) with Mountain Dust and find physical copies of the tape in record stores mid-February.

WHERE ARE YOU, WHY DOES IT EXIST?!

In Uncategorized on January 28, 2013 at 4:14 pm

Hello everyone.

You may be wondering where I’ve been all this time. No more reviews, no more podcasts? Have I died? I have not. The podcast is on a bit of a hiatus due to technical difficulties, but should be up and running again within the next week, right in time for the second week of FEBURTUARY! In the meantime, I have been writing movie reviews at Cult MTL. Why Does It Exist fans will find much to enjoy in my monthly column Made in MTL, where I explore mildly obscure films shot in Montreal:

The Pyx (1973)

Street Smart (1987)

King’s Ransom (2005)

Noel (2004)

Swindle (2002)

You may also have missed my appearance in 9to5.cc’s Go Plug Yourself so listen to that if you have been hankerin’ for my voice. Dan remains MIA at the time these words are being typed.

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Podcast #34: Bad Girls from Valley High (2005)

In Uncategorized on August 1, 2012 at 8:37 am

This wistful picture of Christopher Lloyd brought to you by mortgage payments and unwise financial decisions.

Because we hadn’t seen Dan in some time, we decided to pick up where we left off: teen movies from the turn of the century, preferably of the obscure and unreleasable kind. Bad Girls from Valley High is a Heathers-ish black comedy that sat on the shelf for more than five years despite the presence of an Outsiders-like cast of up-and-coming talent (Julie Benz! Monica Keena! Chris D’Elia! Aaron Paul!) and established A-listers like Christopher Lloyd and Janet Leigh in its midst. We guessed it was most likely because it would be terrible; we discovered it was mostly because it was bungled genius.

As we don’t mention on the episode because we didn’t know at the time, Bad Girls from Valley High is adapted from a Goosebumps-ish parody of young adult literature. Due to a lack of budget and schizophrenic tone, this doesn’t really come across in the movie, leaving instead Aaron Paul’s award-worthy portrayal of snivelling nerdery and Lloyd’s background pratfalls to deliver 1/10th of the promised genius. Also discussed in this episode: boners, Breaking Bad, teen heartthrob Rider Strong, Dan’s imminent (but not fatal) move to Toronto, why Alex doesn’t like Jay Mohr, the douchiness of Danier-style leather jackets, etc.

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Music this week by The Hawks. The song Eclipsed can be found on their Bandcamp. They will be opening for Young Men at Il Motore on August 16th.

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Podcast #10: 100 Rifles (1969) FEBURTUARY CELEBRATIONS BEGIN!

In Uncategorized on February 5, 2012 at 3:42 pm

As promised, here's the poster that makes this movie look more awesome than it is.

FeBURTuary opens with a bang (or rather one hundred bangs) with 100 Rifles, a 1969 semi-Eurowestern that stars Jim Brown, Raquel Welch and mustache menace Burton Milo Reynolds himself as loveable scamp Yahqui Joe. They dick around trying to get a revolution started, or possibly stop a revolution. Lots of things explode, Raquel gets sort of naked but not really and at one point they trip a horse with a chain.

It sounds super awesome, looks super awesome and, well… It nonetheless offers a good starting point for our month-long study of all things Burt, including chest hair, lip hair, head hair, overly-tanned and leathery skin as well as other less important details like body of work, biographical information and studies of Reynolds’ acting style. In this movie, it seems to mostly revolve around falling off things.

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Music this week is ‘All this Culture is Killing Me’ by Wind-Up People. You can find them here.

Dish Flicks – Fall 2011 + Major Announcement

In Uncategorized on November 13, 2011 at 8:20 pm

Will you able to handle it?

Howdy folks.

If any of you have been awaiting Dish Flicks with bated breath, well, here they are. I haven’t been keeping up with them too well (mostly because I wrote them in several parts on several different computers and couldn’t be bothered to track them down) but I have been writing them, so here they are under the handy catch-all of Fall 2011.

If that isn’t exciting enough, though, I have some major news for you all. Why Does It Exist? is going web 2.0 on your ass.

I’m talking podcast.

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Why does Why Does It Exist? exist?

In Uncategorized on April 7, 2011 at 7:12 pm

I worked in a video store for close to two years in 2008 – 2009. It was not the dream movie buff job that I had assumed it would be, mostly because it was a video store that catered to people who rented movies as background noise and people who needed an endless supply of porn. Every Friday, we would prep the new releases that would come out on Monday. We’d get boxes of new releases that typically had twenty-ish copies of the bigger releases and a series of single copies of movies that no one had ever heard of. The majority of these were straight-to-DVD releases and I became fascinated with the concept of these forgotten, filler movies that someone dedicated so much time to yet are almost instantly forgotten.

Granted, the majority of these movies are forgettable. Yet some of them hold a fascinating power. They usually star some down on his luck former A-lister (these days, usually Val Kilmer, Cuba Gooding Jr., 50 Cent or some combination of the three) who stands on the cover pointing a gun at a Photoshopped unnatural angle and typically shot in Bulgaria. There’s very little information about these films online, since few people bother watching them and even fewer people bother relaying their thoughts about the experience.

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