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Welcome to Kicking the Seat!

Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).

The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar NoéRachel BrosnahanAmy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.

Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.

Serial Mom (1994)

For just a moment, I invite you to consider the possibility that our collective reality is a Matrix-type simulation, programmed and prosecuted by John Waters' brain. Two months before O.J. Simpson's double-homicide arrest launched the defining media event of our age, Serial Mom gave audiences a charismatic killer whose manipulation of public opinion made justice a joke. Simpson's defense team was so convinced of its narrative's invincibility that the Juice's character became magically unimpeachable. Similarly, Waters' protagonist (homicidal homemaker Beverly Sutphin, played by Kathleen Turner) lives by a moral code built on retribution, masked by refinement, and sustained by public gullibility. The writer/director even fabricated a true-crime meta-narrative for his (then) glossiest production. To this day, people wonder whatever happened to the "real" Beverly Sutphin. A better question is: What happened to us, to the ones and zeroes humming cluelessly along the psychic by-ways of Waters' vatic and fabulous supercomputer?

Listen to Kicking the Seat Podcast #222 for Ian's interview with "Dottie Hinkle" herself, actress Mink Stole!

Badlands (1973)

The Devil's Candy (2017)