A look at the eclectic mix of offerings from Welcome To The Party Pal: The Mind-Bending Film & Television Podcast You Didn’t Know You Needed (Osiris Media), twenty episodes in…
WTTPP on Spotify • WTTPP on iTunes
Welcome to the Party Pal (WTTPP) is the ATM-affiliated mind-bending film and television podcast you didn’t know you needed! Hosted by Brian Sachson (producer/writer) and Michael Shields (writer/editor), WTTPP is a celebration of the art of cinema and filmmaking, where movies and television shows are meticulously dissected and analyzed to evaluate their grandeur (or, conversely when necessary, lament their shortcomings). Guests include the filmmakers and industry insiders that craft the works of art that inhabit the current zeitgeist. In the wake of the release of its twentieth episode, ATM takes a look at what this exciting podcast has brought forth in its latest batch of episodes…
Episode 16: A Prayer Before Dawn
Episode 16 of Welcome To The Party Pal finds hosts Brian Sachson and Michael Shields journeying to Thailand in an episode that puts under the spotlight the ultra-intense 2017 drama A Prayer Before Dawn. The film recounts the amazing true story of Billy Moore (played by Peaky Blinder’s Joe Cole), an English boxer incarcerated in Thailand’s most notorious prison. Thrown into a world of drugs and violence, he finds his best chance to escape is to fight his way out in Muay Thai tournaments. In this episode Brian recaps his recent trip to Thailand where he trained in the art of Muay Thai as both hosts marvel over Billy Moore’s arduous life and Michael laments about the recent cancellation of Netflix’s Daredevil —and much, much more!
Episode 17: The Die Hard 30th Anniversary / Xmas Spectacular!
To commemorate the 30th Anniversary of one of the greatest action (and holiday?) films of all time, Welcome To The Party Pal dedicates it’s final episode of 2018 to the 1988 thriller directed by John McTiernan, written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, and starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman: Die Hard. In this episode hosts Brian Sachson and Michael Shields delve into the many aspects of Die Hard that make it so special, examine how the film has influenced American culture over the last three decades, and settle — once and for all — the controversial Die Hard-Christmas debate!
The Welcome To The Party Pal team once again gets political in an episode dedicated to the Oscar-nominate film Vice, directed by Adam McKay and starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carrell, and Sam Rockwell. Vice is the story of Dick Cheney, an unassuming bureaucratic Washington insider, who quietly wielded immense power as Vice President to George W. Bush, reshaping the country and the globe in ways that we still feel today. In this episode hosts Brian Sachson and Michael Shields marvel over the directing and acting found in Vice, discuss Cheney’s political actions with the benefit of decades of hindsight, discuss the dreaded “Wookflu” and much, much more.
Episode 19: Fyre Fraud/ Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
Episode 19 of Welcome To The Party Pal ushers listeners into one of the most notorious festival failures of all time, Billy McFarland and Ja Rule’s Fyre Festival. Expounding on two documentaries that explored the arrogance and incompetence behind Frye’s failure — Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened — hosts Brian Sachson and Michael Shields discuss all the players involved, the culture of celebrity and exclusivity at the heart of the fiasco, the prospective blow-job heard ’round the world, and more!
Episode 20: True Detective Season 3
The 20th episode of Welcome To The Party Pal draws you deep into the world of HBO’s True Detective, the gritty anthology crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolatto. On the heels of the finale of Season 3, this episode explores the three timelines present in the season, Pizzolatto’s meticulously and deeply-engaging crafted storyline, the exploration of the darkened corners of the mind that defines the season, and the riveting acting found in the season, particularly by Mahershala Ali, Stephen Dorff, and Carmen, Emoji. In a discussion that delves into the open-ended nature of the story’s culmination, ultimately this episodes serves as proof of how fiction can be interpreted differently by multiple people, as the two WTTPP hosts came to vastly diverging conclusions as to how the events surrounding the season finale unfolded.
Explore Episodes 1 — 5 • Explore Episodes 6 — 10 • Explore Episodes 11— 15
To Be Continued…
