Drat Pack

Lace up your hoverboots and strap on your black villain cape complete with voluminous sleeves, it's time for Why Watch Ascending! That's right, we're kicking off 2021 with the Wachowski's 2015 sci-fi-space-opera-which-feels-like-a-fan-fic-but-somehow-isn't, Jupiter Ascending! Join the three Dratpaxus siblings Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we discuss how a movie can have too much plot and yet too li...

UP ON THE KNEES OF A SERGEANT MAJOR RIDE THROUGH THE WOODS WITH THE WIND IN YOUR HAIR SILVER BELLS ON A STOLEN REINDEER WHILE WE RACE TO THE CASTLE OVER THERE It's our usual lazy day look back on the year in review, an awful awful year full of awful awful movies and some pretty good drinks. What were our favorites and what should be consigned to the dustbin of oblivion? Look, listen and find out,...

Finally, the prophecy has been fulfilled. No, not the prophecy that a human would become the elf king and lead them all to salvation (hey, not at all played out or uncomfortable!), but the prophecy that we made ages ago when we said we'd do The Christmas Chronicles 2 as a follow-up to the OG Christmas Chronicles episode we did two years ago. So, here it is. And there it lies like a glossy piece of...

December is almost upon us, and with it a plethora of original holiday-related programming. Instead of focusing on of of the ones with a Christmas ghost or some other supernatural hook (next time!), we discuss a Netflix original miniseries we all found ourselves binging very very quickly, Dash & Lily. As another adaptation based off of a jointly-written Rachel Cohn and David Levithan young adu...

Back in the Before Times when movies were actually a thing you could go to, it was customary for studios to start dropping Oscar bait movies in late fall and continue throughout the holiday season. It's always fun to look back on which ones never ended up getting the little golden men they were angling for, and for our November episode we look at a recent example, 2013's The Secret Life of Walter...

OOOOOO PRETTY SNARKY, EH? It's been over a year (or maybe like three months time isn't real anymore who knows) since the finale of Game of Thrones aired and disappointed nearly everyone with its rushed plotting, shoddy characterizations, and shots of Dany making it look like she has dragon wings. Since then, we've all entered into a collective pact to not think about it anymore. Well, we're smashi...

Welcome, boys and GHOULS, to our annual Halloween Spooktacular featuring The Haunting! Yes, this is Jan de Bont's 1999 CGI-encrusted remake of Shirley Jackson's classic story of horror and pulsating doors, not the 1961 classic, or the Netflix series based off the same source material, or The House on Haunted Hill, or the remake of The House on Haunted Hill, or The Legend of Hell House. Leigh, Bren...

Remember that thing that was going around twitter a while ago where people were listing the top five television shows that explained who they were as a person? Remember? Before all this other stuff that happened? Well, we do and so we're doing it but instead of just saying what the five television shows that define ourselves are, we're making everyone else guess what they would be. It's a game! We...

What do you get when you take Patrick Dempsey, the writers of The Hangover, the director of The Lion King, and a group of esteemed and notable actors and lock them all up together in a bank overnight? Did you guess Flypaper? No? You've never even heard of it? Oh. Well, you get Flypaper, a 2011 crime comedy that opened at Sundance and then everyone forgot about entirely. Everyone but Leigh. So natu...

No, we didn't forget how to count, but we ARE going a bit off schedule this week to feature our final episode of Why Don't We Watch This. This week we talk about Shane Black's The Nice Guys, a rollicking mystery comedy adventure set in the 1970s if your average film reviewer or podcaster named Chris is to be believed! Turns out when you watch a great movie that gives you great laugh per minute mil...

No, not that Beauty and the Beast, god forbid! The bad one. The one where all the charm and heart of the original animated classic was replaced with CGI glop and soulless autotune and Stanley Tucci as a harpsichord that shoots keys at people (we didn't say EVERY change was bad). Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss the uncanny valley recreation of your childhood that has no reason to be other than to...

In this continuation of our mini mini-series Why Don't We Watch This, we discuss Strange Days. No, not the prolonged Kafka-esque fever dream that is 2020, the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow directed cyberpunk neo-noir film starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Heads up, this movie is Intense with a capital I, as in the optical organs you may want to avert, as we did, during some of the more violent and...

It’s been over four months since we all started working from home, and it’s leaving us nostalgic for the things we used to be able to do, like physically touch our loved ones and ride public transportation to our places of work. Accordingly, we decided to put ourselves back in that state of mind by watching Jaume Collet-Serra‘s 2018 thriller The Commuter, starring an especially haggard-looking Lia...

In which we continue our summer of watching things that are good but we haven't all seen by watching Preston Sturges's 1941 screwball comedy The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda and a cartoon snake. Also we use this movie as a jumping off point to talk about our thoughts on screwball comedies (good!) and the weird way Nancy Meyers structures her movies so that you can't tell whe...

What could be more timely than a comedy where a millennial sacrifices her entire identity to fulfil the mad whims of a wildly wealthy older white couple? Don't worry! She's white and kind of well off and doing this voluntarily, so it's fun!!! Yes, it's The Nanny Diaries, a film à clef based on the chick lit beach read where recent college graduate Scarlett Johansson for some flimsy reason chooses...

We continue our miniseries of indeterminable length with another movie that we enjoy watching JUST BECAUSE, Carl Reiner's 1993 sex thriller parody, Fatal Instinct. Also we talk about parody movies in general and why some of them work better than others. And this one doesn't always even work all the time! But hey, where else can you get Armand Assante and Sean Young screwing recklessly while spinni...

As the disgraced knight Bowen says, "Dreams die hard and you hold them in your hands long after they've turned to dust." Similarly, when some of us revisited the 1996 fantasy / CGI test feature Dragonheart, we also found that our memories of a beloved childhood film had also turned to dust. Take away the once-impressive (?) computer-generated costar and you're left with a pretty trite story bogged...

Look, we really enjoy watching a bad movie but sometimes even we have limits. So while everything in the world is going to hell, we thought maybe we should watch a GOOD movie that not all of us have seen. Ergo this exceedingly wordy minisode miniseries, Why Don't We Watch This. And for our inaugural ep, we got some food and drinks and decided to watch the 1966 Cold War comedy, The Russians Are Com...

Nothing better reflects the state of the world right now than a bunch of ominous and spooky events that have no real relation to each other and keep getting worse and worse, and boy, does The Mothman Prophecies have that in spades! Leigh, Brendan, and Chris try to make sense of the vague supernatural nonsense, piece together what the hell is trying to be accomplished by the weird-for-weird's-sake...

One way to get through your social distancing quarantine to watch a lot of movies, and another way is to wildly speculate about how these movies could have been changed in some way. That's our whole thing! This time, we tweak that whole thing a little bit by speculating about what movies would have been like if they had a different director behind them. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they specu...

What better way to spend your COVID-19 quarantine than by listening to a podcast about a 1991 Kathleen Turner movie that no one remembers? Join hard-drinking gumshoes Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they dredge up the celluloid carcass of V.I Warshawski from the Chicago River and conduct a post-mortem to determine what killed the whole endeavor. Could it have been the lack of a compelling mystery, th...

Truly, there is no easier way to shake up a movie industry mired in the safe and predictable AND enrage a certain sector of the Internet than by swapping the gender of one or more of your film's characters. It is, literally, the easiest way to increase the representation of women or make male characters mildly less dull- all you have to do is some simple find+replace in Final Draft. So what movies...

No, no, not that one! The 2008 remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic where an alien shows up and warns us all to knock it off with all the nuclear warfare global warming. Except in this one the alien Klaatu doesn't really warn us so much as he just... scowls and runs arounds. Klaatu is certainly portrayed by Keanu Reeves, who adds another notch next to "emotionless cypher who looks really great in a s...

What better way to celebrate the final days of February the Month of Love than by discussing a rom-com that finally pairs up Fran Drescher and Timothy Dalton, the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks of February 1997? That's right, at long last someone is giving The Beautician and the Beast the attention it shrilly demands. After all, what could be more romantic than traveling to a small formerly-USSR country,...

Hold on to your monocles, dear listeners, because this 2008 rom-com is about to flip your preconceived notions of what a bridal party can be like so many mini kilts during the Highland games! Just imagine this- what if maid of honor... but a MAN? If that concept just split your sides, then suture them back up again because you're most assuredly the target audience for this bland and conventional p...