Zen Pop

We celebrate Halloween month on Zen Pop with the original Poltergeist from 1982. Cathy and Todd revisit the movie that made us afraid of television static, bedroom closets, and that terrifying clown doll, along with the behind-the-scenes stories that fueled its “curse” reputation. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson play Diane and Steve Freeling, whose suburban family life turns upside down when t...

Cops and Robbers month continues with The Dark Knight. We rewatched Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and know for sure that Heath Ledger earned that posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and that we got to see a lot of Chicago. Christian Bale plays Bruce Wayne/Batman, who teams up with Gary Oldman's Lt. Jim Gordon and Aaron Eckhart’s DA Harvey Dent to take down the mob, only to find that ever...

Cops & Robbers Month- Heat

Cops & Robbers Month- The Town We rewatched Ben Affleck's The Town and know for sure that Jeremy Renner earned that Best Supporting Actor nomination and that we got to see a lot of Boston. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, who runs a crew of bank and armored car robbers in a one-square-mile neighborhood where the family business isn't optional, it's inherited (generational trauma!). After a job goes side...

Cops & Robbers Month We rewatched and overanalyzed Point Break, and realized Bodhi was doing self-help before self-help was a thing, just with more bank robberies and extreme sports thrown in. An FBI agent goes undercover with a crew of surfers who rob banks in president masks to fund a life of chasing the perfect wave. But it's also a movie about a generation looking for meaning outside the usual...

Cathy and Todd close out their "Movies We Love (But Love to Make Fun Of)" series with 1987's Summer School, the comedy where Mark Harmon's laid-back gym teacher gets stuck teaching English after the assigned teacher wins the lottery and bails. It's full of '80s pop culture, and underneath all of it there's a genuinely sweet message about meeting struggling kids where they are.

Cathy and Todd discuss Teen Wolf for Movies We Love and Love to Make Fun Of month, the 1985 werewolf-basketball classic that turned a barely-known Michael J. Fox into a star just months after Back to the Future changed his life. They discuss the movie's best and strangest moments from Stiles's party-hosting mastery to Boof simply refusing to take no for an answer, and get into what the wolf actual...

Cathy and Todd discuss St. Elmo's Fire for Movies We LOVE and LOVE to Make Fun Of month, the 1985 classic that made $37.8 million on a $10 million budget despite critics disliking it. They get into the David Blum "Hollywood's Brat Pack" article that changed everyone's careers overnight, Andrew McCarthy's book and documentary about being labeled a Brat, and then go over the movie's genuinely alarmi...

Cathy and Todd discuss Cocktail  for Movies We Love and Love to Make Fun of Month. They revisit the 1988 Tom Cruise classic with its flair bartending, strange plot turns, and very serious ideas about money, masculinity, friendship, and success. They share their memories of seeing it when they were younger, explore the darker story hidden beneath the story, unpack Doug’s Coughlin’s Laws a...

Cathy and Todd discuss Top Gun: Maverick to complete their summer blockbuster series, the 2022 legacy sequel that brought Tom Cruise back to the role that made him famous, three decades (and a pandemic delay) later. They talk about Val Kilmer’s real battle with throat cancer and how it shaped his return as Iceman, discuss the film’s themes of grief, legacy, and mentorship, debate why J...

Cathy and Todd continue their summer blockbuster series and discuss Wedding Crashers, the 2005 comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that grossed $288.5 million on a $40 million budget. They cover the cast including Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher, Christopher Walken, Bradley Cooper, and Jane Seymour, plus behind-the-scenes trivia like the almost-cast Justin Long, the scrapped Daniel Craig sequ...

Cathy and Todd discuss the most recent summer blockbuster, The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic and why a 2,700-year-old story about identity, home, and longing still hits just as hard today. From the Cyclops to the Sirens to Circe, they trace the myths and monsters and what those stories still reveal about who we are, and why the humanities matter to a thriving cultur...

Cathy and Todd continue their summer blockbusters series with National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), John Landis's frat-house classic that launched the college-comedy genre. They discuss the cast, behind-the-scenes trivia, the film's most WTF scenes, and their own experiences in the Greek system. They also list the top 15 fraternity party songs of the early '90s, plus the top ten things Animal Ho...

Cathy and Todd discuss Back to the Future for their summer blockbuster series, Robert Zemeckis's 1985 time-travel classic that took nearly 40 rejections to get made before Steven Spielberg got involved. They discuss how Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly and shot for five weeks before being replaced by Michael J. Fox, who then secretly filmed the movie at night while shooting Family Ti...

Cathy and Todd discuss Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, the 10-episode horror-comedy that has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and an early season two renewal. They discuss its “Parks and Rec meets Stephen King” premise and its numerous horror movie homages including Carrie, The Wicker Man, The Shining, Jaws, Halloween, and more. It’s small-town bureaucracy, ancient sea-gods, a resurr...

Cathy, Todd, Jacey, Camryn, and Skylar draft their way through 10 movie categories: horror/thriller, rom-com, animated, 80s, since 2020, based on a book, sports, most rewatched, holiday, and honorable mention. Snake draft order, 10 rounds, everyone answers every category exactly once. Whose picks are closest to yours? Part 2 of 2. Subscribe to Cathy’s weekly Zen Moment and upgrade to hear a weekly...

Cathy, Todd, Jacey, Camryn, and Skylar draft their way through 10 movie categories: horror/thriller, rom-com, animated, 80s, since 2020, based on a book, sports, most rewatched, holiday, and honorable mention. Snake draft order, 10 rounds, everyone answers every category exactly once. Whose picks are closest to yours? Part 1 of 2. Subscribe to Cathy’s weekly Zen Moment and upgrade to hear a weekly...

Cathy and Todd continue their summer blockbusters series with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi action landmark that grossed $519 million on a then-record $102 million budget and won four Academy Awards. They cover the best behind-the-scenes stories, including how Billy Idol was originally cast as the T-1000 before a motorcycle accident took him out, how Edward Furlong...

Cathy and Todd discuss Gladiator, released in 2000 and directed by Ridley Scott, it stars Russell Crowe as Maximus, a Roman general betrayed by the Emperor’s son Commodus, who murders his own father Marcus Aurelius to seize power, then orders the execution of Maximus and his entire family. Sold into slavery and forced into the arena, Maximus fights his way back to Rome for one purpose: venge...

Cathy and Todd continue their summer blockbusters series with Raiders of the Lost Ark, the George Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaboration born from a beach conversation in Hawaii, diving into the film’s origins, iconic casting (Tom Selleck almost got the role), and the chaotic Tunisia shoot where nearly the entire cast and crew got food poisoning. They rank history’s oddest movie titl...

Cathy and Todd kick off their summer blockbuster series with Top Gun (1986), directed by Tony Scott and produced by Simpson and Bruckheimer, which turned a $15 million budget into $357 million worldwide and made Tom Cruise a superstar. The episode covers the Scott brothers’ contrasting Hollywood legacies, the Navy’s behind-the-scenes script approval that reshaped the story, plus fun tr...

Cathy and Todd discuss Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs for Zen Pop’s space month, a 1987 Star Wars parody following Lone Starr and his half-man half-dog sidekick Barf as they rescue Princess Vespa from Dark Helmet and the incompetent President Skroob (whose name is literally an anagram of Brooks). The cast includes Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, Joan Rivers, and Dom DeLuise as...

Cathy and Todd discuss Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar for Space Month – the dying Earth, the wormhole near Saturn, the black hole that swallows decades of a man’s life while his daughter grows old without him. They get into Matt Damon showing up two-thirds through as a villain nobody knew was in the movie, why Anne Hathaway’s love speech is the whole point of the film, the fact...

Cathy and Todd discuss Apollo 13 (1995) for Space Month, Ron Howard’s docudrama starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris, based on the true story of NASA’s near-disastrous 1970 lunar mission. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and grossed over $355 million worldwide, cementing its place as one of the great survival stories ever put on screen. They...

It’s Space Month on Zen Pop, and Cathy and Todd are talking about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Steven Spielberg film he called the first movie he ever made for himself. They discuss why it dominated 1982 and held the all-time worldwide box office record for eleven years, the Reese’s Pieces deal that made Mars look very foolish, the Atari game so bad they buried it in the desert, and...