We got a little bit behind editing this one, we admit: Our annual round-up of a dozen-plus indie movies from the summer blockbuster season is dropping closer to the end of the year. But you know what? That works, because this marathon episode includes tons of recommendations that might get lost in the end-of-year awards-movie shuffle. Enjoy our enthusiasm over indie horror, indie whimsy, indie young-adults-figuring-stuff-out, and all the rest! Featuring Aubrey Plaza, Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Maika Monroe, Marcel the Shell, Jessie Buckley, and more!

Once again, the longest-running and most popular SportsAlcohol.com episode format returns to look at the biggest summer movies of 20 years ago. What the hell was going on in 2001? Sequels, dinosaurs, Diesels, and ogres, among others! Join Marisa, Jesse, Ben, Nathaniel, and Jeremy as we talk about the nine highest-grossing movies of that summer, because most of us refused to watch Dr. Dolittle 2. But we also include another half-dozen non-blockbusters that we genuinely love! It's another nostalgic yet skeptical trip down memory lane to summers past!

Look, it's been a long sort-of quarantine for everyone, including your friends at SportsAlcohol.com, and we haven't all completed the projects we thought would be our silver linings for this extended period of inactivity. For example: Thinking we could all use some laughs during a pretty dark time, a bunch of us recorded a comedy-centric podcast about what makes us laugh, back in the spring, when it seemed like maybe we'd be dealing with a pandemic through the summer. Jesse's neglect in editing this long but fun-filled episode turned out to be prescient, as it's now almost six months later, and here we still are, dealing with the pandemic, and maybe still in need of laughs? So here's Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, Sara, Jeremy, and Jon talking about, and analyzing, the kind of comedy (well, mostly comedy) that makes us laugh now, has made us laugh in the past, and we hope will make us laugh again in the future.

It's the end of the year, and you know what that means: music publications published their year-end coverage approximately one to three months ago. We here at SportsAlcohol.com do not have a list of our 200 Favorite Albums That Came Out Between January and Mid-October. For our best music of 2017 wrap-up, we decided instead to take a different tactic and take a roughly chronological trip through the various live shows we all attended, together and apart, throughout the year, and let the discussion spring from there. You'll find out who we went to see because we're afraid of death, whose live show exceeded their disappointing album(s), and which show got Rob feeling real emotional in a rough year.

We'll have a proper podcast about Star Wars: The Last Jedi soon enough, but in the meantime, here: we made you a mixtape.

Here are the instructions:

1. Figure out when you will be arriving at your theater of choice to see The Last Jedi.
2. Approximately 35 minutes before that time, hit "play" on the mp3 of our mixtape on your music-playing device of choice.
3. Get psyched.

There is also a trivia component:

The songs and samples on this mix (EXCEPT those that are from a Star Wars movie or constitute some kind of reference to Star Wars or a Star Wars cast members) have one thing in common. What is it?

While the Steven Soderbergh oeuvre isn't universally beloved by The SportsAlcohol crew, it is well studied. We talk about his return to filmmaking in Logan Lucky as well as his whole career. If you're worried we only cover his films, don't worry: we talk more about K Street than anyone has since K Street aired. Other topics include:

• Legacies
• George Clooney (like, a lot about Clooney)
• Blonde women
• Movies that aren't as good as Do The Right Thing
  
• Why exactly one of us thinks the universally reviled Ocean's Twelve is the best one of the series
• non-actor actors
• professionalism
• contempt
• K Street
• The very nature of reality

As we did for 1994, 1995, and 1996, we look 20 years back at the top films of the summer of 1997. Things were much different 20 years ago and we tackle some of the bug changes including: 

Watching trailers without a broadband connection
Bookstores, existence of
Nicolas Cage was respected, dammit
John Travolta too, for that matter.
Girls wanted to hang out with us

If you're anything like us, this year has been a hard one for living in the moment. That's why we've spent a number of podcast episodes reliving moments of the past, both in our own lives and in the culture. Today, Marisa leads Jesse, Rob, and Sabrina down a guided trip of a representative cross-section of Billboard Magazine's top songs of 1996. It was a simpler time, one when we were all in high school and Bob Dole was the worst thing that could happen to us. Some topics covered: 

Every band is someone's favorite
Getting into a band you don't like before they make it big
Sheryl Crow dishing dirt on the seedy underbelly of the music industry
Rob and Jesse's AP English class
Mickey Rooney's worst role is good argument for a 1984-style regime 
Friends (both the tv show and the concept of a close bond with others)

Be sure to check out SportsAlcohol.com for some videos related to this episode.  

By the time you listen to this, The Suicide Squad movie will have set a box office record for August while receiving such bad reviews its fans are petitioning to shut down review aggregate rottentomatoes.com. So is it any good? There's actually a lot to break down here:

• Studio medling
• Racism
• Ike Barinholtz
• Sexism
• Soundtrack cues
• The triumph of Margot Robbie
• Uneeded DC vs Marvel comparisons
• The many lives of Jai Courtney's career
• How much worse Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was
• Hollywood It Boy Joel Kinnaman 
• Method Acting
• Ike Barinholtz again for good measure

Mother's Day Weekend means that all the SportsAlcohol got together to watch and talk about Captain America: Civil War

Spoiler Warning: Lots of spoilers about this movie and the MCU in general