Episode twenty-one! The podcast comes of age everywhere, just in time for the world to basically collapse. Alastair matches the mood with Hypernormalisation, a new documentary from Adam Curtis (available here if you have iPlayer access), while Nick is escaping into a surreal superhero dream with Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s Doom Patrol run.
Forcing ourselves into the present day, we take on Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (6:45), a new film set in the past of the Harry Potter universe. To help us get to grips with this, we bring in blogger, booktuber and Potter-lover Claire Rousseau, last seen discussing Harry Potter And The Cursed Child with us in MFV #13. This leads to some continuity deep dives and, yes, EXTREME SPOILERS for the film, right from the get-go.
If you enjoy Claire’s appearance here, you can get more from her at ClaireRousseau.com, @ClaireRousseau on Twitter, or talking about books on YouTube.
Lastly, some links we mentioned during that segments – the politics of Fantastic Beasts by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at The Daily Dot and the episode of The Mispronounced Item podcast in which Nathan Ditum discusses the Star Wars prequels.
We’ve also got a chat about Train To Busan (50:47), a Korean zombie film aiming to change the way we all see rail travel, and, on Nick’s recommendation, we look at Chew (62:59), the recently-concluded hit comic about food and flesh-eating, by John Layman and Rob Guillory.
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For the first time in a while, a deleted chunk from the last episode – Nick and Alastair talk about The Walking Dead and how it endures despite just being the same cycle of suffering again and again. (Well, okay, it’s mostly Nick as Alastair doesn’t watch it.)
Episode twenty! Another numerical milestone, and one recorded before the recent American electoral news, so no mention of that here. However, we do have intro talk of Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow and The Walking Dead from Nick, until Alastair raises the tone with indie film London Overground.
Meanwhile, in cinemas, we’ve got a review of Arrival (40:05), the new scifi/semantics movie starring Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams trying to speak to aliens, and then Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (53:26), a new documentary from Werner Herzog offering a slightly more uplifting view of technology than Black Mirror.
Episode nineteen, and it’s almost feature length this time! But in our defense, there’s a lot to get through. Before any of that, though, we’ve been attending live recordings of other podcasts, specifically 
Moving out of mainstream geek culture, we’ve also seen I, Daniel Blake (52:59), the new movie from Ken Loach about Britain’s none-too-fair welfare system. If you want to read Alastair’s take on the politics of this film, 
And then straight back into the nerdosphere, Nick’s recommended Alastair the first few episodes of anarchic sci-fi cartoon Rick & Morty! (68:14)
This is Alastair’s final update from the 60th BFI London Film Festival. For the end of the festival I saw The Man From Mo-Wax, Snowden and The Gual. Above you can listen to what I thought of each of them. The Man From Mo-Wax is a music documentary about James Lavelle, Snowden is Oliver Stone’s biopic of Edward Snowden and The Gual is a low budget British psychological thriller.
This is my final update from this year’s London Film Festival. It was a great festival. At the end of the recording I choose my favourite films from the entire festival.
This is Alastair’s second update from the 60th BFI London Film Festival. I have scene four more films: A Monster Calls, Planetarium, Arrival and The Stopover. The recording in this post contains my initial thoughts on all of them. A Monster Calls is a YA drama based on the novel by Patrick Ness, Planetarium is a drama about French filmmakers in the 1930s, Arrival is a high concept sci-fi film and The Stopover is a French film about three female soldiers returning from Afghanistan.
There will be more discussion of these films in future MFV episodes and in future posts on this website. Keep alter for those and let us know what you thought of these films or any others films you saw at the festival on social media.
Episode eighteen, so the podcast has finally come of age! Nick also completes a major rite of passage as he finally finishes Twin Peaks, while Alastair is out partying at the London Film Festival.
And if you want the syllabus of post-Luke-Cage reading material Alastair mentions during the episode, 
Alastair has spent the last few days at the 60th BFI London Film Festival. He has seen four films so far: The 13th, Tower, Spaceship and The Worthy. The attached recoding has some off the cuff thoughts about each of them. The 13th is a documentary about the rising rates of incrassation of African Americans; it is hard-hitting, very detailed and really interesting. Tower is a rotoscoped documentary about a mass shooting in Texas in the 1960s. Spaceship is a British indie film and the Worthy is a tense thriller set in a post- apocalyptic Saudi Arabia.
There will be more discussion of the films on at the festival in future MFVs and in another Excessive Fantasy Violence festival summary. Watch out for those on the website and do let us know in the comment or on social media if you have seen any films at the festival that you would recommend.
The seventeenth division has landed! It’s a Brit-heavy episode, with opening talk about the current London production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, plus the revival of 90s middle class soap Cold Feet.
Finally, Britain goes to enhanced war in Nick’s latest recommendation: grim WW2 superpeople comic Uber (50:07) by Kieron Gillen and Caanan White.
Our sweet sixteen! Other important milestones in this episode – Nick finishes watching Chuck after about a year and Alastair books his London Film Festival movies!
Lastly, Nick somehow hasn’t seen The Fifth Element (44:18), but Alastair’s latest recommendation will sort that out.
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