2 Dads 1 Movie

The Birdcage is Steve's pick, and it's not close: this is a movie he and his wife Heather have been quoting to each since they first met, Steve having fallen in love with it as a theater kid in high school. Nic, on the other hand, had never seen it, despite a stated lifelong allegiance to who he now insists on calling "Bobby Williams" (a nickname that is, delightfully, sticking aro...

Shelley Long struts through 1989's Troop Beverly Hills in a fur coat, a cigarette holder, and a Rolls-Royce convertible, playing a soon-to-be-divorced socialite who takes over her daughter's floundering Girl Scouts knockoff mostly out of spite and boredom. It's Nic's pick, a movie his wife introduced him and his daughter to during the pandemic, while Steve grew up on it, owned it o...

Tombstone (1993) is thirty-three years old, R-rated, and apparently the rare nineties western that's stayed alive the old-fashioned way, through pure word-of-mouth quotability, no memes or GIFs required (okay, except Curly Bill's "Well... bye."). That's Steve's pick, and it's personal. He fell for it as a teenager, rewatched it a couple times a year for most of his adul...

Twenty years of movies, twenty episodes, one final destination: a soul-crushing office park somewhere in generic suburban America. Office Space is Nic's pick to close out 2 Dads 2 Decades, and honestly, there's no better way to go out: a movie that gave an entire generation its workplace vocabulary before most of them had set foot in a workplace. Both dads know this one cold. For Nic, it w...

BASEketball hit theaters in July 1998, about a month after Steve and Nic graduated high school, and promptly became the kind of pre-party background movie where, as Nic confesses, you're ultra familiar with the first twelve minutes and mildly surprised to learn there's a plot. It's Steve's pick to close out the penultimate year of 2 Dads 2 Decades (penultimate means second to last,...

In 1997, a 26-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson somehow talked New Line into $15 million and final cut, then spent it on a two-and-a-half-hour epic about a well-hung busboy who becomes a porn legend, falls apart on cocaine, and winds up pushing a dead Corvette to the only father figure who ever actually loved him. That's Boogie Nights , and it's Nic's pick. It's his favorite movie of 1...

The dads land at 1996 in the 2 Dads 2 Decades run, and Steve has picked the movie that turned him into the guy who browbeat an entire cast party into watching it in late '97. Swingers is Jon Favreau's debut screenplay, Doug Liman's debut feature, a $200,000 picture that spent half its budget on music, and the closest thing Steve has to a sacred text. Nic caught it weeks later through t...

Nic picks the movie, and he picks one that wormed into his teenage brain during the blockbuster-video era of the mid-'90s: 1995's Desperado , Robert Rodriguez's stylish, blood-spurting follow-up to El Mariachi and the second chapter of his unofficial Mariachi trilogy. Back then it played like a revelation. Two guns at once. A ponytail with strategic strands falling out. Salma Hayek cro...

In 1994, a 23-year-old Kevin Smith maxed out every credit card he could open to make a movie about two guys talking shit behind a convenience store counter for 92 minutes. Steve has been a stan ever since. Clerks (1994) is Steve's pick, and he doesn't hide it. This was the movie that made teenage Steve start asking how movies actually get made. Nic, meanwhile, saw it once around '97, h...

Menace II Society opens with a cold truth and never looks away. For episode 60, Nic brings this Hughes Brothers gut-punch to the table -- a film he's been watching since high school, quoting with his college crew, absorbing into his bones -- and Steve arrives as a first-timer who's done his homework on the adjacent movies ( Boyz n the Hood , Higher Learning , Colors ) but not this one. He...

Some movies leave a line or two rattling around in your head for years. Wayne's World (1992) apparently colonized Steve's entire personality. The man is 46 years old and recently said "exsqueeze me, baking powder" on a Zoom call with his direct reports. In a professional context. With no apparent regret. Steve picked this one as a deliberate palate cleanser after two heavy weeks, a...

Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) lands on the podcast courtesy of Nic, who has a habit of bringing thrillers Steve has never seen. Pacific Heights, Cape Fear, The River Wild -- all Nic joints, all new to Steve. The streak continues. The setup: Julia Roberts is Laura, a woman living a gorgeous, terrible life on Cape Cod with a controlling husband named Martin who irons his soul right out of every roo...

Steve picked Goodfellas (1990) to kick off the '90s leg of 2 Dads 2 Decades, and the dads immediately acknowledged the absurdity of trying to review a movie that is, by any reasonable measure, perfect. Both discovered Scorsese around the same time — sophomore year of high school, mid-'90s, right in the post- Pulp Fiction window where you suddenly cared about what a good movie was and start...

Nic brought the pleated-linen-pants-and-mullet energy this week with Road House (1989), a movie both dads discovered in their late teens and have been unironically-slash-ironically in love with ever since. Steve first caught it during a freshman year hangout in a dorm room with a big TV and a bigger DVD collection. Nic remembers it as the ultimate bro night movie — rewatchable, quotable, and conve...

Beetlejuice (1988) is one of those movies where everybody thinks they've seen it more times than they actually have, and both dads discovered exactly that when they sat down with Tim Burton's PG-rated fever dream about dead suburbanites, haunted real estate, and a bio-exorcist with boundary issues. Steve picked this one, and it's personal. He was 8 when his parents took him and his bro...

Nic brings Wall Street to the table this week, and the reasoning is hard to argue with: how have the Dads spent 50-plus episodes in the '80s and '90s without Michael Douglas? Oliver Stone's 1987 ode to pinstripes and insider trading follows Bud Fox, a hungry young broker played by Charlie Sheen, as he claws his way into the orbit of corporate raider Gordon Gekko by way of Cuban cigars,...

Steve brought a childhood favorite to the table this week, and Nic brought a grudge he didn't know he had. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) is John Hughes's love letter to the perfect skip day — a senior with no car but a god-tier hacking setup, a best friend's dad's priceless Ferrari, and a city full of places most suburbanites never bother to visit. Steve first watched it on L...

This week the Dads get detention along with The Breakfast Club, and what was supposed to be a conversation about a teen movie turns into something closer to a therapy session for two middle-aged fathers who suddenly can't stop seeing their own kids in every frame. Both dads have history with this one, but neither watched it young enough for it to hit the way John Hughes intended. Steve saw it...

This week, the Dads continue their 2 Dads 2 Decades march with 1984's Ghostbusters. Steve has seen Ghostbusters well over a hundred times. He watched it on LaserDisc as a four-year-old, weekly through high school and college, and still has an autographed photo of Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis hanging on his wall. Nic's history is a little more modest: he saw it young, lost track of it in the...

For their 50th episode, the dads crack open a 24-pack of nostalgia with Strange Brew (1983), the Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas comedy that somehow became every kid's unofficial guide to Canadian culture. Nic picked this one as a palate cleanser after the heavier terrain of Thief and Fast Times at Ridgemont High , and both dads went in carrying the same memory: this was the movie that taught an...

This week, the Dads dive into Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Cameron Crowe's undercover-journalism-turned-screenplay debut brought to life by first-time director Amy Heckerling. Both Steve and Nic trace their history with the film back to high school sleepovers and VHS rewatches, and the rewatch hits different through 2026 eyes. The killer soundtrack gets immediate love, with Jackson Bro...

This week, the Dads fire up the cutting torch on Thief (1981), Michael Mann's gritty directorial debut that launched a career and divided a podcast booth. Steve came in completely blind, having never even heard of this Chicago-set crime noir, while Nic had been curious about it for years without ever actually watching. Fresh eyes all around, which makes the resulting conversation all the more...

This week, the Dads kick off their new 2 Dads 2 Decades series with 1980's Airplane! , and Steve arrives with the ultimate childhood credential: he first watched this movie at two years old on laserdisc. His parents reconsidered their parenting choices when three-year-old Steve looked up at them and said, "What a pisser." Nic's introduction came via TV broadcast around age eight, a...

This week, the Dads wrap up JanuArnie with Nic's personal favorite Schwarzenegger film, 1985's Commando , and Steve is seeing it for the very first time. Nic describes it as "black tar Arnie," the most purely distilled version of what makes Schwarzenegger movies tick, and he's been quoting it with college buddies for decades. The film wastes zero time establishing its chaos: fo...

This week, the Dads take another step through JanuArnie with James Cameron's 1994 spy action-comedy True Lies , and Steve is practically vibrating with joy from minute one. He calls it possibly the most fun he's had watching any of the 45 movies they've covered together. The film doesn't let up for its full two hours and twenty minutes, and neither do the Dads, who find themselves...