Drat Pack

As with all good mysteries, our murder mystery-themed summer is drawing to its natural conclusion with a not-good mystery. In this episode, we're going back in time to both the 1980s and the 1870s with Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes, a prequel featuring the famous detective but younger and with a less involved mystery. Enroll in a Victorian boarding school with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as...

As summer draws to its unbearably hot closure, we dust off an old mini episode topic chestnut, Pitcher's Mound! That's right, that thing where we pitch a movie, or in this case, a MUUUUUUSICAL! A jukebox musical, point of fact. The first of three (!) mini episodes kicks off with Leigh pitching her very specifically-focused punk rock jukebox musical featuring a lot of music you might remember from...

Much like Kenneth Branagh's recently-discovered passion project of making Sad Boi adaptations of Hercule Poirot mysteries, our Summer of Murder Mystery continues unabated with 2022's Death on the Nile, a limp effort starring a cast that couldn't be more cursed if they desecrated a pharaoh's tomb. Hope aboard the S.S. Karnak with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we try to solve the dual mystery of who...

Hey, did you hear about how the UK publisher of the Roald Dahl books did some weird overcorrections that no one seems to have asked for and removed words like “fat” or the mystery of why women might wear wigs from their most recent editions? Or how Disney apparently is censoring language from the streaming version of The French Connection, lest you be shocked that New York cops in the 70s tossed a...

The sweaty misery of summer is finally upon us, and what better way to forget our reality than the comforting escapism that only murder can provide? (We see you, Albert Camus’s The Stranger!) Our Summer of Murder Mystery kicks off with the forgotten 1994 mystery / slapstick comedy / farce / comedy of remarriage / so much other crap, Radioland Murders, straight from the minds that brought you Ameri...

In this Why Watch mini episode, we're living in the Land of the Lost! And by that, we mean we live in a world where we were initially promised that streaming content online would allow unimaginable access to movies and television, only to find shockingly that we actually live in a world where exclusive content can be taken down and hidden on a hard drive somewhere to suit the whims of large horrif...

When an amnesiac woman and a hardboiled detective with a very heightened American accent discover through the magic of hypnosis that they were married in a past life (until a grisly murder by scissors cut things short), how long will they be able to maintain a relationship until one of them is dead... AGAIN? The answer, mercifully, is about 90 or so minutes. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they...

As the weather starts to heat up, the temperature of our takes go right with it! Get all warm and toasty with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we present a deeply-held opinion in the form of an absurdly hot take, and then attempt to defend it calmly and rationally. Slip on your oven mitts before you pick up your phone after listening to this, because these takes are… rather hot!* Also as per usual the...

Fourteen years ago in a city not very far away.… BRIDE WARS Episode I THE FEMININE MENACE Turmoil has engulfed the nuptials of Emma Allan and Olivia Lerner. After a minor clerical error results in their separate weddings being booked on the same day at the same venue, their friendship is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a series of trite and vapid pranks, the two would-be brides have...

It sure seems like video games, the hot new trend among today's youths, are here to stay! In fact, it seems that these have become so popular, they've started to transform motion pictures into video games! It's true! Granted, some of these adaptations have been... questionable in quality, to say the least. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they think back upon some of the video games we've played...

How do you keep your franchise going when the lead actor has no interest in reprising the main character and you don't want to recast them? Well, you simply shift focus to another character who has never been shown or mentioned before and has similar abilities to your former main character but got them through science and magic rather than practice and training. Feeling sweaty yet? Join Leigh, Bre...

For our latest mini episode, we present part two of a part two mini episode. No, just go with it, it's okay. Rather than cover all of our second Looking to Score discussion from four weeks ago as one long episode, we decided to do it in two for your listening convenience. This time, we’re ostensibly covering a piece of orchestral dance music by Stephen Sondheim and a ballet piece reconceived in a...

In our latest episode, we return to that fertile well of 1980s fantasy movies and pull out a big sloshy bucket of Willow, George Lucas's long-gestating story about a little person who wants to be a wizard and some other magic shit as filtered through the generically-competent lens of Ron Howard. Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about a movie that we were all dimly aware of but had never...

Our oft-featured discussion on film music (and music from other forms of media) returns with a mighty vengeance in our latest mini. LISTEN, won't you, as we discuss some scores used in both movies and video games and try to avoid having this episode taken down for copyright infringement by talking over the music. It's hard! Also, next episode will tackle a movie that seems to be a beloved cult cla...

It's time for our annual Valentine's Day rom com episode, and nothing says romance like two duplicitous people enacting horrific deceptions upon each other in an attempt to advance their positions at work. This horrific web of deceit is the plot that forms the backbone of 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, and a bunch of supporting actors in thankless r...

Look, Valentine's Day is fast approaching and we couldn't think of any rom com con(versation)s to have, so Leigh very kindly whipped up yet another round of our patented (patent pending) game where we have to decide what titles are real and what ones are fake. But THIS time, there's an eastern Asian twist to it, as all the titles are for K-Dramas (or J, or other countries, there's fertile ground h...

What if we kissed 😘 at the Magnolia 🎹 at midnight 🕛 on New Year's Eve 🎉 as part of an elaborate lie 😳 that was in actuality not a lie because we have been in love for our entire lives 🙈??? What do you do when you're a pair of radio hosts who are both secretly in love with each other but unable to admit it, despite the fact that everyone else in your life already believes you're destined to b...

That's right, we're back again with our end-of-the-year lazy finale episode, the Closing of the Year! Listen in as we talk about the previous year, including favorite and least favorite movies and drinks, and discuss a little bit about what the next year will bring. More themed summers! Crazier cocktails! Long lost lovers reappearing during multiple weddings! And a moratorium on made-for-TV holida...

At long last, our Holiday Spectacular episode focuses on a real piece of made-for-TV Christmas trash with the nebulously named A Date by Christmas Eve! Is it about a young lady attempting to find a date before Christmas only to realize love was in front of her all along? Uh, well, no, that would make a lot more sense, though. Look, so there's this lady who works for a Christmas dating app and then...

In which we play round two of last year's winter party game, the Hallmark Christmas Movie Generator Game! We've got all the same hats and slips of paper, but this time with a NEW category to make our titles even more cumbersome and difficult to find when scanning through a list of vague nonsensical titles on Hulu. Naturally, we also introduce the subject of our 2022 Christmas Spectacular, where we...

Journey with us, won't you, back in time to both medieval times and 1963, a veritable dark ages for the citizens of England and the Walt Disney studios. For this episode, we cover the movie that sits at the center of this Venn diagram, The Sword in the Stone. Is this a charming bit of nostalgic fun, or weak effort built upon an episodic screenplay and boring protagonist? Spoilers, it can be two th...

Yes, we're sorry, we know it's Halloween but we have no more ideas for Halloween mini episode topics. We're open to suggestions! Until then, we're going to do another Pitcher's Mound mini where we each pitch an updated modern adaptation of a classic piece of literature / drama. That's right, until Hollywood gets its act together and makes the teen comedy version of Cymbeline that we've all been cl...

For our annual Halloween Spooktacular, we chose a movie so terrifying, so unnatural, so deeply unsettling- oh, wait, no, it's just Vamps, a 2012 horror (?) comedy (??) movie (???) about vampires, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. Ah, you might think, at least the idea of vampires filtered through Clueless sounds fun! Well, you'd be wrong, because Amy has left her "good movie" period and beco...

Part of the Golden Age of Television™ we now find ourselves inundated with is that so many large conglomerates are now spending absurd amounts of money on streaming-friendly television extensions of their media brands. What does this mean for you, the viewer? Well, it means that right now you've got four separate franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings) currently scre...

When you split up with your husband and are faced with the challenge of starting a new life, do you up and move away? Do you try to find yourself? Do you invite three sweet well-mannered boys into your guest house and use them for child care / tech support / sex? Well, if you're Reese Witherspoon in the 2017 Hallie Meyers-Shyer romantic (?) comedy Home Again, you sort of half-heartedly do all of t...