'Power Ballad' Director Reveals His 'Questionable' Taste In Movies | Sorry Not Sorry
When you tell someone you love The Godfather (1972), nobody bats an eye at your choice. Then there are the movies and television shows that make people wonder why exactly you're watching the thing you love. That seems to be the case with Power Ballad director John Carney, who admitted that his wife isn't always impressed by his viewing choices.
While promoting the 2026 comedy musical, Carney revealed the type of entertainment he gravitates toward. "Eastbound & Down and stuff like that which gets a bad rap sometimes from my wife who's like, 'Why are you watching that?'" he told JustWatch. "And I'm like, 'Because it's hilariously brilliant,'" the director added.
The 2009 comedy series stars Danny McBride as Kenny Powers, a former professional baseball player whose career has completely fallen apart. After returning to his hometown, Kenny takes a job as a substitute physical education teacher while trying to convince everyone (including himself) that he's still destined for greatness.
But Eastbound & Down isn't the only thing Carney watches. According to the filmmaker, he also enjoys some classics that tend to make other people cringe just because they're old. "I guess some old-fashioned, like '30s movies that people are like, 'Why are you watching that incredibly dated thing?" he added. "And I'm like, 'No, it's really cozy.'"
Old Movies Can Tell You More About The Past Than You Expect
Carney makes a good point. Just because something is old doesn't mean it's bad. Some things absolutely haven't aged well, particularly when it comes to attitudes about race, gender, and sexual orientation. A movie doesn't have to agree with modern audiences to be worth watching. At the same time, that doesn't mean every offensive joke suddenly becomes funny if you put it in historical context.
But there's a difference between acknowledging that and deciding an entire generation of movies has nothing left to offer. The 1930s are actually a pretty good example of this. Hollywood was dealing with the Great Depression, and movies became an important form of escapism for people who were struggling in their everyday lives.
Musicals, comedies, melodramas, and gangster movies all gave audiences somewhere else to go for a couple of hours. Some filmmakers were even using movies to dissect what was happening around them. Our Daily Bread (1934) focused on unemployment and an experiment in cooperative farming, while Employees' Entrance (1933) was about economic insecurity during the Depression.
Then, there's the fascinating little window known as pre-Code Hollywood. The Production Code had technically been agreed upon in 1930, but it wasn't properly enforced until 1934. That meant movies from the early part of the decade were able to tackle topics like prostitution, abortion, interracial relationships, and drug use, which became almost impossible to show once the Code was enforced.
Why To Watch 'Eastbound & Down' (And What To Watch After)
Eastbound & Down is a pretty light television series compared to some of the stuff from the 1930s. Kenny Powers is such a ridiculous person that it becomes almost impossible to predict what he'll do next. McBride plays him as someone who genuinely believes he's destined for renewed greatness, even when everything around him is making it painfully obvious that his best days are behind him.
The comedy can be crude, and Kenny can be quite awful, but the show isn't simply asking audiences to laugh at an obnoxious man being obnoxious. There's something sad underneath all of it. Kenny has spent so much of his life believing that being a famous baseball player made him special that he doesn't really know who he is without it. That gives the series more to work with than just its jokes.
If that combination of ridiculous comedy with a deeply flawed character sounds like your thing, Vice Principals (2016) is the obvious next stop. The series stars McBride as Neal Gamby, an aggressive and bitter high school vice principal who finds himself competing with fellow vice principal Lee Russell (Walton Goggins) for the school's top job.
Like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals takes a character who is very easy to dislike and finds plenty of comedy in his inability to see his own flaws. Gamby and Russell spend much of the series trying to destroy each other's careers, but their rivalry eventually becomes more complicated than either man initially expects.
