Drat Pack

For our Halloween spooktacular this year, we're not going to be a ghost movie podcast, but a podcast with ghost movies in it. And if that means anything to you, you may be familiar with Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro's 2015 half-written love letter to gothic fiction that Universal Studios would really rather prefer you to think was a horror movie. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris whip up a tea cocktail...

It's finally happened. We've run out of things to say about scary movies for Halloween. It's a real kick to the shins, it is! Anyhow, in lieu of that and springing from a tangent about horror films, we all talk about the things in film that make us not want to see a movie with no further information needed. No matter how open minded we try to be about these things, there's always a genre, director...

For our extra special forty-seventh episode (sure, why not?), we're trying something no podcast has surely ever tried before- having two special returning guests to total FIVE white people talking over each other about a movie. It's okay, though, since three are women and that's still more than any other podcast has ever had on together at the same time. And what a movie for us all to discuss! We...

Friends, nostalgia is the most dangerous drug and none of us can get enough of it! But, for about forty minutes anyway, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris will doff their nostalgia goggles and discuss times they revisited a movie they loved growing up and later revisited. Will it hold up like so many movies broadcasted incessantly on Comedy Central in the early 90s? Or will it be more like rewatching the 1...

Nothing says instant chemistry like the classic pairing of a heterosexual woman and a gay man, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of our modern complicated times. And nothing makes a more compelling case for why this premise alone is not enough to hang a story on than 2015's Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, a movie that's as wildly unlikable and messy as the millennial burdens at its peanut butter center....

Finally, an entire episode dedicated to the songs and performances of Tone Loc! Whether it's "Funky Cold Medina" or showing up for one scene in FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Tone Loc has- oh, wait, never mind. It's about tone. Tone in cinema. Like movies feeling "big" or "intimate" and the cultural and critical baggage that entails, that kind of thing. Also our upcoming back-to-school movie and...

In Hollywood, nothing is a more surefire hit than an adaptation of a book from the 1890s that the majority of your audience probably haven't read but are maybe familiar with just from cultural osmosis. Once you've locked in this successful blockbuster, be sure to alienate fans of the source material by also removing any sort of subtext or metaphor that the original novel had so that no one ends up...

Whether telling an impossible ad intellectually-stimulating tale using the realities available to us through science fiction or wringing jokes from a mom wanting to fuck her son who was sent back in time by his elderly scientist friend using wildly unsafe experiments funded by aiding international terrorists, time travel movies have been an important part of film history for decades. As a prelude...

With all the political turmoil that surrounds us every waking moment of our lives, what better way to forget your troubles than an action movie with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts where, uh, it turns out it's not really an action movie but a windy conspiracy thriller about how a large untouchable bank is making the entire world miserable just for the sake of profits? Yes, it turns out The Internationa...

For this mini episode, we decided to do something a little different and play a game that would lead to discussion. Well, it's kind of a game and kind of a discussion, but not like in the strict sense of either. Well, there are actually aspects of both to it, but- look, we work from a list of capital-I Important Films and ask those amongst us who have NOT seen the movie in question to try their be...

"I'm here to reap souls and eat peanut butter, and I'm all out of peanut butter!" says Brad Pitt as Death as he shows up at Anthony Hopkins's door, shortly before macking on his vacant-eyed daughter and mocking old Jamaican ladies. Or something like that. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris pour some classy cocktails and sit through all three hours of this ponderous meditative slog, then discuss the source...

With the impending summer movie season upon us all, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris decide to kick it off with a mini episode about when movies make you cry and scared and feel stuff. Mostly the first one, I think because we were all in a certain mood seeing how the movie we're doing next is a delightful romp about death and life and all that frivolity. Also we prepare a recipe for a classy cocktail tha...

As the weather becomes more pleasant and your social media timelines are full of endless memes about how it's gonna be May, only one thing is on the mind of America- unquestionably, the prom! Whether you're a high school senior, some sophomore who really shouldn't be involved in all this anyway, or a lumpy and uncompassionate adult, the prom is probably the thing around which your entire life has...

Disney took an old film of great acclaim / Can you imagine that? / And made a sequel that's more of the same / Can you imagine that? / New actors but a similar plot / In some ways charming but sort of not / There's decent choreography but also BMX / What was with those guys biking on the ramps? / When Leigh saw that sequence on a plane she said we had to chat / So we all watched this Poppins pic /...

For this episode, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss a stirring biopic that tells the story of Ethan Hawke's mother Leslie and the struggles of raising a young child alone while- wait, sorry, it's not that, it's a very 80s medieval movie with all the perils of a fairy tale adaptation despite not actually being based on any existing one. We talk about the rules of the world, the many paper-thin char...

Whether you're a movie maker, a dungeon master, or just some kid who is haphazardly slapping together some Legos without any sort of regard for the instructions and DAMMIT TEDDY THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE TAJ MAHAL DOES THAT LOOK AT ALL LIKE THE TAJ MAHAL TO YOU???, world building is a big thing to consider. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about world building as it relates to movies, from good one...

Ladies and gentlemen! We have gathered you all here in the accusing car because there has been a murder! Thankfully, we only lost Johnny Depp, so... don't strain yourselves trying to work out who may have done it. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris don their mustache guards to discuss 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, directed by / starring / production designed within an inch of its life by Kenneth Bra...

As a prelude to our Mystery March episode (which is a thing we just made up now), Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about detectives in pop culture, be they Sherlock Holmes or, uh, other. Also there's some stuff about whether or not you should be able to solve a mystery while watching / reading it and a lot of stuff with TV procedurals. Anyway, you've got two weeks to start growing a ridiculous musta...

What could possibly be more charming than having a late 19th century duke show up in your Manhattan apartment, offering you all of that 1870s class with none of that 1870s misogyny / racism / chauvinism? Very little aside from perhaps the scent of warm brioche smothered in marmalade and fresh creamery butter, posits James Mangold's 2001 romcom Kate & Leopold. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris watch th...

Because we spent our last mini episode doing our customary new year nothingness, we bumped a discussion about Shakespeare adaptations to this mini episode instead. It still works! Anyway, Leigh leads a group discussion about the various movie versions of Shakespeare plays, be they mostly faithful to the text and setting or something set in a high school with the great sounds of the 90s permeating...

Finally, a film adaptation that combines the quiet contemplations of William Shakespeare's final play with the visual goofiness of Julie Taymor! Taymor brings her trademark sense of "how many effects can you add in post before the screen melts" to this 2010 take on The Tempest, most notable for casting Helen Mirren in the gender-bent role of Prospera and maybe also for covering a naked Ben Whishaw...

As is our wont, we were feeling very lazy at the end of the calendar year and just recorded us talking about our favorite and least favorite movies and drinks of 2018. Two weeks from now we’ll be ready to work again, we promise. Happy New Years! Continue reading →

Now that December is well upon us, there's little better to do than make some sort of hot alcoholic drink and watch pleasant Christmas nonsense while your brain goes into a stupor until 2019. Keeping that in mind, we decided to pick some new vague Christmas nonsense to cover for our annual holiday episode, the Netflix original movie The Christmas Chronicles, which has Kurt Russell as Santa and tha...

Now that it's well past Thanksgiving, we're at the glorious time of year where Christmas movies are being thrown at the you like some festive, pleasantly bland spaghetti against a wall. Be they movies about journalists who meet a prince on Christmas or bakers who meet a prince on Christmas or kids who meet a fuckable Santa on Christmas, the options abound and yet for the most part aren't all that...

In a world where supernatural young adult series were flying off the shelves of a Borders near you, your dad's second-favorite airport novelist thought "Hey, why not more money for Dean Koontz?" Then the director of The Mummy and Van Helsing had a similar thought with the name "Stephen Sommers" in place of Koontz's, and that's how we got the underwhelming 2013 supernatural mystery movie Odd Thomas...