A Degree Absolute!

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" Yippe kai yay, Christmas lovers. It’s your buddy Chris — sans Glen this time — with yet another installment in the metronomically reliable and stereoscopicaly hi-fi-able yuletunes eclectic and inexplicable compilation series. This is installment 18 — they grow up so fast! Which makes it the Ulysses S. Grant edition in the schema of U.S. Presidents. In the discography of Prince, may he rest in power, this would be the Emancipation edition. It’s the Tomorrow Never Dies entry, in EON productions James Bond parlance. I guess I could look up which Marvel movie was the 18, but when I started this project, there were no Marvel Studios marvel movies. That’s how long I’ve been doing this. "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE" SHALL RETURN!

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. Each side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. Break off those recording tabs and commence hall-decking, revelers! "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" SHALL RETURN!

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EPISODE OF THE BELOVED AND INFLUENTIAL PODCAST "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. Each side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. Break off those recording tabs and commence hall-decking, revelers! "A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!" SHALL RETURN!

It's a Y2K-pop extravaganza as Chris and Glen emerge from their unplanned and unannounced hiatus to dissect 72-year-old Patty McG's brief-but-memorable guest appearance reprising the role of Number Six for (the final eight minutes of) the Season 12 Simpsons episode "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes." Cowabunga! The Simpsons, season 12, episode six — "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" Written by John Swartzwelder Directed by Mark Kirkland Originally aired December 3, 2000 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Our guest Keith Phipps is not just a sterling critic and a dad — an essential component when we cover a movie as openly paternal as 1978’s post-WWII espionage thriller Brass Target. He is also the author of new book examining the career of a singularly idiosyncratic actor. A Degree Absolute! endorses Keith’s book Age of Cage absolutely. And Brass Target? Well, minute-for-minute, it has the most undiluted Patty McG purity rating of any film we’ve covered save perhaps for Braveheart. It’s much harder to find than that one but worth the hunt for those such as we. Invest in physical media, people. Brass Target Screenplay by Alvin Boretz, adapted from Frederick Nolan’s novel The Algonquin Project Directed by John Hough Released December 22, 1978 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

It's More Talk About A-Frames and Holes as we slog dutifully through the back half of The Prisoner's 2009 Jim Caviezel-and-Ian McKellen-starring update. It turns out Chris did review Serenity, the Steven Knight film he referes to 54 minutes into this episode. Read that review if you wish! Darling, Schiozid, and Checkmate Written by Bill Gallagher Directed by Nick Hurran Initial airdate: November 15 & 16, 2009 Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Write or send a voicemail to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

We’ve got good news and bad news for you, Villagers: After a long sojourn examining Patty McG’s eclectic-not-checkered filmography, we’ve returned to Prisoner content… in the form of the 2009 Jim Caviezel-and-Ian McKellen-starring update. At Glen’s suggestion, we are devoting a mere two episodes to this six-episode series, because inflation. Who’s hungry for a wrap? Arrival, Harmony, and Anvil Written by Bill Gallagher Directed by Nick Hurran Initial airdate: November 15 & 16, 2009 Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Write or send a voicemail to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

Matty McC meets Patty McG in the battle you didn’t know you wanted to McSee! Look, A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and probably too much studio pressure for him to get away with anything weird. (Braveheart, released 14 months earlier, was a long time ago.) Company-man director Joel Schumacher seems to have saved all his creative chits for putting nipples on Batsuits in this era, turning in a serviceable but unshowy piece of work the summer in between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He sure does like to spray his actors with baby oil, though. The good news is that our friend Linda Holmes is back this episode, lending her quadruple-threat expertise as (in increasing order of significance) a Sandra Bullock expert, and Grisham expert, an actual-albeit-no-longer-practicing lawyer, and of course as a world-class critic to our examination of the picture. Join us, won’t you, on this jurisprudent journey back to nineteen-niner-six. A Time to Kill Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from John Grisham’s novel Directed by Joel Schumacher Released July 24, 1996 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

Terrible fonts! Racist tropes! Puppetty brontos! A doomed marriage! A movie that was made for no one! Plus Paddy McG phoning it in - hardly a single trilled R! Listen, and catch the opposite of a fever! Prolific podmedian & Eisner Award nominee Jordan Morris joins us to carbon-date a seminal document of his dino-loving youth, BABY, SECRET OF THE LOST LEGEND! Starring Rachel the Replicant, The Greatest American Hero, For He's a Julian Fellowes, & Patty McG as the heel. Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend Screenplay by Clifford and Ellen Green Directed by B. W. L. Norton Released March 22, 1985 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

MOOR COWBELL! Slip into your cardigan, roll yourself a jazz cigarette, and prepare to savor one of Patty McG's most sinister heel turns as our lovely theme-song singer Casey Erin Clark joins us to deconstruct All Night Long, director Basil Dearden's 1962 adaptation of Othello set in the London jazz scene. PLUS! Casey draws upon her expertise as a voice coach and musician to examine several of McGoohan's most distinctive vocal performances, and presents her findings to the court. All Night Long Screenplay by Neil King and Paul Jarraco Directed by Basil Dearden Released February 6, 1962 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

A movie for McGoohan die-hards that creator Alexis Kanner the Once-Boxed sued the makers of Die Hard over! Paddy McG and Kanner! Squaring off, with a Montreal radio show as their Thunderdome. A film with all the makings of a taut thriller involving hostages, a building wired with explosives, and McG in fine form: Rolling them Rs! Slamming them consonants! Playing drunk! Almost evincing sexual-adjacent desire! Features more overlapping dialogue than if you played Nashville, A Wedding, and McCabe & Mrs. Miller all at once! Kings and Desperate Men Shot 1977; released (sort of) 1981 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead "All-Time High" Music by John Barry; lyrics by Tim Rice Performed by Townland, from their fine new album Honey on the Hi-Fi Special thanks to Linda Holmes, Gene Demby, and Jessica Reedy

Patty McG's first major project after The Prisoner wrapped up in early 1968 was The Moonshine War, for Sex and the Single Girl director (and title-song lyricist!) Richard Quine. Quine did not write this film's remarkably concise and descriptive title song, "The Ballad of Moonshine," leaving that to Hank Williams, Jr. The great crime writer Elmore Leonard adapted the screenplay of The Moonshine War from his own 1969 novel. No one will argue it's on the level of later, adapted-by-other-screenwriters Leonard translations like Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, or the TV series Justified, but the seeds are here. Also here: Richard Widmark! A pre-M.A.S.H. Alan Alda! A pre-fame Teri Garr and a pre-billing Tom Skerritt! A pre-The Waltons Will Geer! Lee Hazlewood of Lee Hazlewood Industries as gun thug Dual Metters! Plus the Patty McG bedroom scene you've been dreading. Here's the condescending and phony behind-the-scenes featurette we discuss on the episode. The Moonshine War Screenplay by Elmore Leonard, from his novel Directed by Richard Quine Released July 1970 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

Does Mister-not-Doctor Andrew MacDuhui (Paddy McG) hate pets? (He does not, no matter what his low-information neighbors in the fictional Scottish town of Inveronoch think.) Did Walt Disney hate cats? (Our very special guest Disney expert, Josh Spiegel, makes a compelling case.) Were animals harmed during the making of this motion picture? (Most certainly, regrettably.) Our principled stand against pandering to the Internet's insatiable appetite for cat content crumbles as we pad, paw, 'n' claw our merryish way through... The Three Lives of Thomasina Written by Robert Westerby, from Paul Gallico's novel Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Wa God Directed by Don Chaffey Released December 11, 1963 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

On February 9, 1964, Ed Sullivan introduced a band from Liverpool, England formerly known as The Quarrymen to an estimated 73 million viewers of his primetime CBS variety show. And down the dial on NBC, the anthology series Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color drew an audience of something less than 73 million for the first installment of its three-part The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, an adaptation of Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan's novel Christopher Syn starring our man Patty McG as an 18th century man of the cloth* by day/masked-smuggler-by-night who helps the common people by... paying their taxes, we think? Using the funds he earns from smuggling brandy and tobacco. He also helps them elude the pressgangs who roam the marsh looking for reasonably able-bodied youngish men to abduct into King George III's Royal Navy. *Specifically, a "fuckable vicar" in the estimation of our generously oversharing special guest Margaret H. "Hula Hoop" Willison, whose effervescent personality really ties the room together. (Dang. That's the wrong Coen Bros. reference.) The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh Teleplay by Robert Westerby, from the novel Christopher Syn by Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan Directed by James Neilson Original airdates February 9, 16, and 23, 1964 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

Pop some vitamin E before listening, because it's gonna be hug 'n' munch all the way to Chicago! Solvable host Ronald Young, Jr. joins Glen and Chris to examine Silver Streak, ostensibly a hybrid romantic thriller / buddy comedy that gave the world the long-running Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor screen partnership and was a huge hit upon its release in 1976. America's bicentennial anum was a great a year for movies, more despite Silver Streak than because of it, but hey, the movie features a loveably smarmy Columbo-era Patrick McGoohan as the despicable villain. Along with a lot of trite and, by contemporary standards, deeply offensive comedy. Choo choo! Silver Streak Written by Colin Higgins Directed by Arthur Hiller Released December 8, 1976 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

CAUTION: This is not an episode of A Degree Absolute! This is a halldecking aid. Happy Boxing Day, Degree Absolutionists! With Glen still waging his one-man war on Christmas from the sunny heathen hinterlands of Miami, I, Chris, have made an executive decision to use up our vacant server space this month to re-present my 2019 holiday mixtape, "Let's Talk About Christmas!" And if you don't want to talk about, hear about, or think about Christmas, fear not! You can skip this non-episode entirely and catch us when regular programming returns in January. I wrote about my long-running Christmas mixtape project in this 2012 Washington Post essay. 2012! That was like two or three years ago at least.

#Yulemix21 ABIDES! In this second half of my XVIth senses-shattering installment in the apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, Chris attempts penance for preempting your regularly-scheduled podcast with my mixtape by roping Glen & Casey in for some festive preamble before we get to the damn tape. Those halls aren't going to deck themselves, merrymakers!

This is not an episode of A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! This is a halldecking aid. A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! shall return. What this is is the sixteenth installment in what has become a venerable holiday tradition that invariably makes me feel unhinged in the final couple of months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast. The Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable compilation series, most installments of which remain available to stream—I wish this had not become a joke—my Soundcloud is now as licensed to drive as any Cory. In the chronology of the EON Productions James Bond film series, it is Licence-d (sic) to Kill.

It's primae noctis for your ears because we can put it off no longer: The quintuple-Academy Award-winning a-historical epic Braveheart is the most widely seen and, your hosts agree, best latter-day expression of undiluted Patrick McGooted. The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri returns to discuss her journalist doppelganger, the New York Times' Alexandra Petri, and to share with Glen the virgin Braveheart experience. Freeeeeeeeeeeedommmmmmm! Given the volume of Star Wars talk that seems to follow (the Post's) Petri around, it's a wonder we forgot to mention that Braveheart was produced by Alan "Laddie" Ladd, Jr., who 20 years earlier had been the guy preventing the board of 20th Century Fox from firing George Lucas off of the weird, expensive kiddie movie he was making and/or shutting the production down. Braveheart Written by Randall Wallace Directed by Mel Gibson Released May 24, 1995 Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead

THERE CAN BE ONLY TWO(s) as Chris & Glen rank their top six on this week’s exciting episode! Thanks to @UrbanSpaceMan64 for suggesting the topic. Write to the Citizens Advice Bureau at adegreeabsolute dot gmail! Leave us a five-star review with your hottest Prisoner take on Apple Podcasts! Follow @NotaNumberPod! Our song: "A Degree Absolute!" Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark Bass by Marcus Newstead "Break Me Gently" written and performed by doves