Frame Work

Send us Fan Mail Brendan Leonard joins us to discuss Fincher's satirical thriller.  We're talking media satire, marriage as a fraud upon the public, where Fincher and author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn's real allegiances lie, and the ultimate battle of the sexes as Kim Dickens faces off against Tyler Perry.

Send us Fan Mail Chris Prentice returns to discuss the meteoric rise of possibly the biggest, most unlikely and unique star in the history of Hollywood:  Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger.  No one did it like him.  Is that because he is a one-of-a-kind talent, or because he is just an inhuman brick that can only play cyborgs believably?   And is KINDERGARTEN COP actually better than PREDATOR?  No. It&ap...

Send us Fan Mail Elisabeth Rappe joins the guys to talk about Fincher's opening to an aborted trilogy, which somehow operates as a triptych of films unto itself.   Rated "S" for Stellan Skarsgaard, Serial Killers, Sexual Assault, and Superfluous Swedish-ness.  

Send us Fan Mail It's all accents, ACAB and antiheroes as the guys sit down to talk about HBO's latest prestige murder mystery, and slip quickly from fooling around with "wudder" and "hewgies" to Jean Smart's septuagenarian play for total dominance of TV to how MARE seems to have  completely sidestepped the debates around "copaganda" despite Mare hersel...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the guys contemplate an alternate reality where the Oscars are biased toward broad, capital-C Comedies rather than stately costume dramas and respectful biopics.    Which is very important cultural commentary, and definitely not just an excuse to talk about how incredible Bill Murray is in KINGPIN.

Send us Fan Mail If you are trying to be an asshole, is it even possible to fail?

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome old internet friend Brad Millette to begin the long journey through the catalogue of epic single player RPGs the Bioware company has produced over the last quarter century.  First up is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons port, Baldur's Gate, which we find to be something of an beta test for what the Bioware model we will come to recognize in the future.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim makes a triumphant return to help try to crack the case of BENJAMIN BUTTON.  Who thought this movie needed to be 3 hours long?  What drew Fincher to material so spectacularly ill-suited to his talents?  Where did the sudden godlike omniscience in Benjamin's narration come from, or disappear to?  Why did Eric Roth turn in a script without having cracked the nature mai...

Send us Fan Mail As a sort of counterpoint to all the fawning they did over Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy, John and Al look at another adaptation of an epic fantasy series that fell flat on its face.  Both have some intense love for Stephen King's magnum opus, despite wildly different views of the ending stretch.  Where they agree is that the 2017 film version is enough to make even the m...

Send us Fan Mail Fincher hit an artistic high and commercial low with the epic serial killer docudrama ZODIAC.   We look at the exacting period detail, the protean versions of the Avengers and True Crime genre it represents, murderer's row of character actors, the off putting squirreliness of Jake Gyllenhall, and whether there is actual closure to be gleaned from this movie about the lack of...

Send us Fan Mail It's dancing barons versus singing fishwives as Joon Kim drops in once more to compare the world building of the MCU and DCEU.

Send us Fan Mail The giant-sized LOTR conversation concludes with a lot of gushing over the performances, spurred by Al's contention that the trilogy has a dozen Alec Guinness-es littering its sprawling cast.  Other topics include (of course) the multiple ending meme and enduring influence over blockbuster filmmaking.

Send us Fan Mail The guys continue to rain praises on the production design, unique humanism, special features, location work, and wizard fights of the LOTR trilogy.

Send us Fan Mail The long-prophesied SnyderCut of JUSTICE LEAGUE is upon us, and the guys are not impressed.  After an hour of pondering the merits of "mature" superhero stories, unfiltered artistic visions, Steppenwolf's makeover,  and the ambiguous mourning of musical Finnish fishwives, we switch to a quick recap of the WANDAVISION finale (1:04:00) and the premiere of FALCON AND T...

Send us Fan Mail The guys decamp to Middle Earth/New Zealand to talk over the crowning achievement of blockbuster filmmaking in the 2000s, Peter Jackson's epic, maximalist adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS.  In part one, we look at the miraculous realization of Gollum, the cascading successes the production pulled off in each area of the story's world, and a few dozen other things.   This...

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim returns to talk about Fincher's most overlooked film, the Hitchcockian (if you're feeling generous) potboiler PANIC ROOM.   

Send us Fan Mail The boys welcome Gwen Sisco to the program to break somewhere between 2 and 5 rules of Fight Club, depending on how strict you get about the "two men at a time" and "no shirts" policies.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim drops by to discuss the impressively Lynchian highs and bafflingly  doofy lows of the first 7 episodes of WANDAVISION.

Send us Fan Mail "You know what is not an appropriate theme for a birthday party?  Your Father's Suicide."

Send us Fan Mail Fincher's breakout film still packs a transgressive wallop after 25 years, and the guys are here to dig into its unique blend of theatrical abstraction and sincere humanity, the interplay of banal and baroque evil, how it incepts you it thinking it is much more gory than it is the Spacey factor, and how completely the best Batman movie was ripping it off.

Send us Fan Mail Frame Work branches out into gaming, with a look at the most sneakily influential piece of culture of the last half century, the OG table-top role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.  The original idea was to examine its role in shaping  the video game industry, but before that the party finds a great deal to unpack about the creation of the game, its strange method of encouragi...

Send us Fan Mail The guys begin a look at the filmography of David Fincher by welcoming Bill Heidrich to discuss and defend his divisive debut, a franchise sequel/ender that somehow manages to be completely compromised  and utterly uncompromising at the same time.

Send us Fan Mail Before kicking off their next David Fincher series with the deeply imperfect ALIEN3,  John and Al geek out over Ridley Scott's perfect creature feature ALIEN and James Cameron's perfect sequel ALIENS.   They gush over the incredible creature design, intricate world-building, forgotten plot twists, and Cameron's facility at making R-rated movies for kids.  

Send us Fan Mail John embarks on a semantic quest to define the genre of Adventure films, leading Al through a series of puzzles and pursuits that hits all the notes one would expect:.  The correct pronunciation of "Cary Elwes".  Historical revisionism.  The quality of Charlie Hunnam's agent.  The relationships between The Goonies and Da Vinci Code.  And more talk of the 1990s, Arma...

Send us Fan Mail "Donnie, got us an internet that loves ranking movies!  OBLIGE him."