Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

Mandy Kaplan turned off Sinners a few minutes in, the same week everyone she knew was calling it the best movie of the year. She has been apologizing for that ever since, and this episode is the formal version. Her guide is Rhonda Smith, an Atlanta actress and IT professional who runs the ATL Movie Club and has now seen the film four times, the fourth one the night before recording so she could be...

Andy Nelson has been sitting on this one. He's been talking about movies on The Next Reel since 2011, and when Mandy asked him to come back and pick anything, he chose the film he has loved most for his entire adult life, because he suspected (correctly, it turns out) that it would require a Xanax. Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a comedy about paperwork. It is also a horror movie about paperwork. A man...

Until this week, Mandy Kaplan did not know the word "Stargate" existed. Not the 1994 movie, not the ten seasons of television that followed, not the conventions full of people who can spell Goa'uld on the first try. (She has also never seen an Avengers movie, and she would like that noted as a point of pride.) Fortunately, Jonny Lee Jr. was nine when the film came out, bought it on VHS and then ag...

The whole premise of Make Me a Nerd is that Mandy has never seen the thing. Matthew Fox arrives to honor the late Tim Curry with a movie he has attended dozens of times and, by their own count, watched all the way to the ending exactly twice (the back row of a midnight screening has other priorities), only to learn that Mandy was once in it, onstage in New Hampshire, as an emergency replacement Co...

In 1998, Hanna-Barbera handed a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie to a crew of veterans and then, by all accounts, forgot to supervise them. The crew used that freedom to do the one thing thirty years of Scooby-Doo had solemnly promised would never happen: they made the monsters real. Mandy came for the nostalgia — Saturday morning, cereal, the little kitchen TV dragged into the living room — and l...

Mandy spent her son's Mighty Morphin years with one nagging question: why are the Power Rangers wearing their helmets in every single fight? She never asked anyone. This week Omari Miller, actor, singer, and possibly the most caffeinated man in Los Angeles, answers it before she finishes asking. The Power Rangers are a Japanese show with American teenagers taped over the top. Super Sentai has been...

Marty Schneider and Dan Ludwig, hosts of the podcast Breaking Mayberry, explain that they once built two rating scales for The Andy Griffith Show: an Andy-meter for how good the episode is, and a Barney-meter for how much psychic damage it did to America. They needed both. Mandy watched three episodes on assignment (a boy kills a bird and learns a lesson, a city slicker learns to slow down whether...

The British period drama is a genre built on restraint. Longing glances across drawing rooms. Inheritance law. A great many people declining, for six or seven seasons, to say the one thing they most want to say. Fackham Hall surveys this rich and noble tradition, agrees that it is both rich and sufficiently noble, and then installs a bell in the servants’ hall labeled masturbatorium. The bell ring...

Three times in the theater. Twenty-odd more at home. Six years of having thoughts about Parasite, and roughly four minutes total in which anyone has let her share them. This week Sherry Mandujano gets an hour. Mandy had never seen it. She takes notes throughout, and most of them are some version of "what genre is this," because the film keeps answering differently. The conversation follows it wher...

Mandy Kaplan came to this with three episodes of Drive to Survive and one other piece of racing knowledge, which is that she can recite Talladega Nights from memory. Ninety seconds into the first episode a teenager gets dropped off at school by his mother, says bye Mom, grabs his backpack, and turns out to be a professional Formula 1 driver. Something maternal took hold around then and never reall...

Mandy has a real, non-joking anxiety about death. You'd think that's the sort of thing a person would mention to a friend before that friend assigns her a series about a man who reanimates corpses for sixty seconds at a stretch to ask them who did it. Jessica Jimenez knew. Jessica Jimenez picked it anyway. Third appearance, still working off the Showgirls debt. So Mandy watched all nine episodes w...

Jason Yeung spent more than a decade working in video stores — not Blockbuster, mind you, but Hollywood Video, a distinction he holds with the unwavering intensity of a man asked to sing a rival team's fight song. (Mandy asks. It does not go well for the show.) He knows the smell. He knows what the drop box looked like on a Tuesday morning. He knows exactly which customers will get physical over a...

Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan Dias picked Sphere. It's a 1998 Barry Levinson picture starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, and it currently sits at twelve percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (Twe...

Rick London came for Alien: Earth — Noah Hawley's reportedly quarter-billion-dollar fever dream about corporations, immortality, and dying children installed in adult bodies — and he came prepared to defend every last drop of the show's frankly staggering liquid output. (There is a lot of liquid. Mandy counted. It was her first note, and the most consistent theme of her entire viewing experience.)...

The instant a movie is pitched to Mandy as "aliens come to Earth," she has already changed the channel, mentally relocated to a spa, and started a calmer life. So naturally, this week she sat down with Arrival, a film she spent years confusing with The Martian (fair), which she also assumed was basically the plot of Project Hail Mary (it is not), a book that gave her an actual, physiological anxie...

The Grateful Dead's own biographer opens their official four-hour documentary by admitting it's really hard to love this band if you're not already a fan — which is a bold marketing strategy, like a restaurant with a sign reading "you probably won't like the food." Naturally, Mandy took the dare. Her spirit guide through the patchouli: Jeffrey Nicholas Brown — actor, Blue Man, drummer in numerous...

Mandy has never seen Psycho. She has, however, seen Hot in Cleveland, which — it turns out — quotes Psycho constantly, meaning Mandy has been unknowingly absorbing the cultural shrapnel of a movie she'd never actually watched. It's the kind of realization that says more about the half-life of a seventy-two-minute-in shower scene than anything else could. Enter Jesse Pfister: voice actor, day trade...

There exists a specific cohort of women who, if you say the words "do you remember My So-Called Life," will respond — instantly, involuntarily, with the faraway look of someone recalling a first love — "Jordan Catalano." They cannot help it. This is a documented phenomenon. And so Mandy, a mainstream mom who spent the 90s sensibly watching shows that got renewed, sits down to discover what exactly...

This week we have a three-act superhero musical, shot on a borrowed studio lot during a labor strike, financed by one guy's personal credit card, in which approximately none of the songs are allowed to finish. Weird as it may be, it all clicks into place, and you understand why a generation of nerds has had this thing memorized for going on two decades. This week, returning guides Kyle Olson and K...

Batman: he does not use guns. This is practically the whole point of him — a man so committed to a single rule that he built an entire personality, a cave, and a frankly concerning number of themed vehicles around it. So when Batman Beyond opens its very first episode with an aging Bruce Wayne pulling a gun, under a content warning slapped over the face of Bugs Bunny, you understand exactly why ma...

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have seen The Godfather, and those who have built an entire personality around not having seen it (a group that, until this week, proudly included our own Mandy Kaplan — a grown woman fully comfortable assigning Rotten Tomatoes scores to a film she had never once watched). Enter Seth Vargas of the Movie Friends podcast, back in the nerd chair...

Here’s a fun fact about Prince Rogers Nelson: that wasn’t a stage name. Prince was his actual, legal, on-the-birth-certificate first name. Once you accept that a man named Prince grew up to become the artist known as Prince, you’re already most of the way to accepting everything else. The 8,000 unreleased tracks in a literal underground vault. The candles balanced precariously on the mixing boards...

Vampires, as a concept, should not work. They are dead. They are allergic to weather. Their entire dating strategy is "what if I bit you." And yet — somehow, Anne Rice took this nonsense, draped it in frilly eighteenth-century shirts (a look Jonny Lee Jr. has, to his eternal credit, brought to this very podcast), and produced one of the most genuinely seductive pieces of pulp fiction of the twenti...

Pinball looks like two buttons and a ball. It is not two buttons and a ball. It is a 300-pound machine with layered rules, competitive leagues, wrist injuries, a flow state, and — this will surprise you — an expectation that you will physically grab the machine and move it while playing. That last part is legal. Encouraged, even. This week, Mandy's new neighbor Clark Hill, who carries quarters at...

The X-Files is, technically, a show about two FBI agents investigating extraterrestrial activity, government conspiracy, and the unexplained — which is why it's mildly hilarious that filmmaker Chelsea Stardust's curated onramp for Mandy contains, by Mandy's own count, exactly zero alien episodes. What it does contain: a man who hibernates in a nest every thirty years and squeezes through air ducts...