5 Star Tossers

Mar 31 2025 56 ep. 96 mins

5 Star Tossers Podcast artwork

Playful academic podcast that looks at movies and other cultural objects through the lens of 5 groovy themes: Pervs 'R Us, Beast & Sovereign, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, Marx Grudge, and What Would Jesus Do?

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Sherlock Holmes: Limited Bandwidth (Inc.)

Mar 31 2025 86 mins

Audient! This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why? We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins. We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were

Nosferatu: Bringing the Finish Line Right To You

Mar 10 2025 98 mins

You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out

The Hustler with an Unconscious of Gold: Homage to David Lynch

Feb 22 2025 96 mins

Greetings, audient! David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod. Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, infor

Revenge of the Nerds: Elon Musk, Silicon Valley, Crypto Fascists and Other Sad Shit

Feb 02 2025 86 mins

Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one wh

Late Stage NBA...

Jan 25 2025 102 mins

Hello, audient, We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame... Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoeroticism, which becomes particularly resonant with t

24: Jack Bauer's Beastly Christian Sovereignty in the State of Emergency

Jan 11 2025 77 mins

Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic

Middle Age, and Middle Ages: The Tossers' 50th Episode, and Trump's Re-election

Dec 01 2024 94 mins

Dear, stubborn, listener, Are you still there? For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with. We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it

Cultural Appropriation: The Terror and Promise of ALWAYS having to do it

Nov 16 2024 93 mins

In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited. To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural app

The Substance: The Capital and Narcissistic Horror of The Young Beautiful Woman (Or: Where is my Mother?)

Oct 20 2024 107 mins

We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it. This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infanti

The Multiverse: Jesus, What a Racket!

Oct 06 2024 83 mins

With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once. Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something of a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge? And