Reserved Recommendations

12/12/2025

Admittedly, I love me a novelty instrumental cover (ask me about my surf rock habit) but I've never really understood the cringe that greets the mention of ska music. Part of this is probably being a Kiwi - we have a slightly different relationship with the pop-punk side of ska music than Americans do - but I've always felt like people who didn't appreciate the genre just hadn't found the good stuff yet.

Elana and John (last heard on the Hair Metal episode) return to the show to give me an American perspective, and we chat about the high points of ska and how to find your way in as a newcomer.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-85 on Manawatu People's Radio or wherever you get your podcasts!

26/11/2025

Here's "The Wasp Factory" with Ross Palethorpe...

Reserved Recommendations is a podcast series about problematic faves, great trash, and difficult relationships with art and culture. This is the seventy sixt...

25/11/2025

Here's the video of the Hair Metal ep!

Reserved Recommendations is a podcast series about problematic faves, great trash, and difficult relationships with art and culture. This is the seventy four...

23/11/2025

It's come to my attention that I've been a bit slow video-fying my older episodes from this year.

Here's the first one:

Reserved Recommendations is a podcast series about problematic faves, great trash, and difficult relationships with art and culture. This is the seventy-thir...

31/10/2025

Solo minisode tonight, distilling some thoughts I had off the back of a couple of conversations (one of which is last episode's chat with Ross about "Enemy") and the 2017 movie "Cargo".

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-84 and get older eps via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

03/10/2025

On tonight's episode I talk to returning champion Ross Palethorpe about Denis Villenueve's strange, evil, very yellow movie "Enemy" (2013).

This is technically a "reversed recommendation" as I first encountered "Enemy" as an online movie reviewer back when it was relatively new, and Ross hadn't heard of it. We really get into it on this one (once Ross gets past cursing me for making him watch "a work movie") because there's a LOT here. Two equally haunted and awful Jake Gyllenhaals encounter one another in a dreadful, poisonous, spider-haunted Toronto, and nothing is exactly what it seems. Ross says the phrase "David Lynch directing 'Sliding Doors'" and talks about the Johari Window.

It's a good time, is what I'm saying.

Listen direct here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-83-enemy_2013, find the show via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved, or search "Reserved Recommendations" wherever fine pods are cast.

05/09/2025

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is a very weird show indeed - a fact that is literally baked into its DNA as an adaptation of a Japanese costumed hero series which (as we'll hear) does not have a consistent plot or cast from series to series. It also has an odd relationship with New Zealand, as it was banned here very early on, and remained banned well into the period where it was actually being made here. To discuss all this and more, I'm joined by artist and author Bijhan Agha - our first ever guest based somewhere other than the broader Anglosphere (she's in Uruguay)!

Listen here: https://bit.ly/re_rec-82-power_rangers and get older episodes via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved!

Find Bijhan at .bsky.social, and her art, books, and comics at jamsheedstudios.com.

01/08/2025

This episode I chat to Dr Lewis Tennant (lately the host of Verbal Highs, and also the brains behind the annual NZ Podcasting Summit) about an era of reggae music from the 1990s, exemplified by artists like Sizzla and Capleton. We go deep on the history of the music, its underlying philosophy, and the factors that give this specific era its unique sound.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/resrec-81-sizzla_and_capleton and get older episodes at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved!

18/07/2025

"Phenomena" (1985) is a movie that is hard to describe without sounding insane. Jennifer Connelly (aged 14, one year out from breaking through in "Labyrinth") stars as a high school girl with the mysterious ability to commune with insects. When she is sent to an exclusive Swiss boarding school for girls, she becomes embroiled in a series of gruesome murders of students which she must investigate with the aid of an eccentric entomologist played by Donald Pleasance and his assistance chimpanzee. The chimpanzee is significantly more important than you'd expect.

The movie was directed by incredibly prolific Italian director Dario Argento (best known for hallucinatory fever dream giallo like "Suspiria" and "Deep Red") and is significantly more chaotic than his usual style.

Morgan Davie, last heard discussing "Under The Skin" way back in Episode #7, joins the show to talk through this very strange, kind of fascinating movie.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-80-phenomena and get more at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

20/06/2025

Nightbreed (1990) is an absolutely fascinating movie. It's Clive Barker flexing his muscles after the massive success of Hellraiser (1988) and really letting loose with an elaborate dark fantasy full of implications about complex mythology and cosmology, a gorgeously-stylised world, and many MANY weird little guys. It's also an incredibly ambitious movie that never quite manages to realise its ambitions, and a tortured project that was compromised and undercut by executive meddling.

There's a lot in here that shares DNA with other dark/Gothic fantasy/horror projects of the 90s like The Crow, or the more adult works of Tim Burton - so why are those things cult hits, and this is a cult failure? Shaun Duke of The Skiffy and Fanty Show (https://skiffyandfanty.com) joins the pod to discuss this strange and powerful film!

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-79-nightbreed, and find past episodes via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved

15/05/2025

Hey! No new episode of the show tomorrow, but I had the excellent good fortune to guest on the newly resurrected Postingcast with John Palethorpe, who you might remember from talking about Dune (1984) and whose husband Ross you ought to remember from talking about The Wasp Factory only a couple of episodes ago. This was a hell of a lot of fun to record, so I hope it's also fun to listen to!
https://postingcast.podbean.com/e/makeartbecauseyouexist/

02/05/2025

What happens when Dan Aykroyd at the absolute peak of his popularity as both a comic powerhouse and a dramatic actor gets a vast budget, and more or less total creative control to make a movie? He makes "Nothing But Trouble" - an ambitious, star-studded, and (to be charitable) tonally-confused horror comedy which flopped at the box office and is more or less universally panned to this day.

A pair of yuppies played by Chevy Chase (having possibly the worst time of his life) and Demi Moore fall foul of a deranged 106 year old judge (played by Aykroyd himself under some impressively vile prosthetics and makeup) and hi-jinks ensue.

Returning guest Bitter Karella is one of this movie's few defenders, and joins the show to talk us through what the hell is going on here.

Listen here: https://bit.ly/res_rec-78-nothing_but_trouble, and find more via Manawatu People's Radio at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved!

Find most things Bitter Karella at www.midnightpals.com, and her new book "Moonflow" at www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bitter-karella/moonflow/9780316581936 (or wherever you get books on the internet!)