Biopic: A Podcast Story

Description: Black History Month continues, and numerical kismet isn’t the only thing we love this week: We LOVE 42, the 2013 biopic about Jackie Robinson’s first year as the first Black Major League Baseball player. The late, great Chadwick Boseman is, of course, brilliant, but so is Harrison Ford as sportsball manager Branch Rickey, a man committed to desegregating MLB. Which, spoiler alert, is...

It’s our first episode in Black History Month, and we’re starting with a bang – the story of one Harriet Tubman. Ms. Tubman is among the historical figures whose life most closely resembles that of a Marvel hero, so her moment was long overdue. But if you have to wait, at least you get the superlative talents, brilliance, and star power of one Cynthia Erivo playing Harriet.  While witnessing the u...

How DOES it feel to be a total genius? It’s a burden for our dear friend Bob Dylan. A Complete Unknown is a big hit and is nominated for a billionty-five Academy Awards, so we went to the theaters to experience what might be the most sincere, prestige-y portrait of a ridiculously talented douchebag in the history of filmmaking. Sara and Rena mostly love this, because of America’s high school Engli...

In honor of Sara’s natal day, we attempt to deconstruct her weird obsession with character actors as we enjoy this delightful film about the blacklist and one of its central heroes, Dalton Trumbo. Absent from the film are twin douchenozzles Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, but present are douchenozzles like real-life blacklisting masturbator Louis CK and a bowdlerized version of nightmare gossip hack Lo...

How gorgeous is Sofia Coppola’s delicious, vibes-filled Marie Antoinette? So gorgeous that we brought on a special guest, Belle, the host of Silhouettes: The Fashion History Podcast, to discuss. In addition to Belle’s deep expertise around the era, we discuss Kirsten Dunst’s perfection, the meta-level brilliance of Sofia’s cast (who better to play Louis XV than Rip Torn, a madcap actor with a secr...

How do two astonishing gifted women—director Marjane Sartrapi and actor Rosamund Pike—make a movie together about 2x Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and have it come out this boring? Start by combining masterful visual style with dull, on-the-nose words, and then add weird, apocryphal character quirks (Marie Curie is afraid of hospitals for … reasons) and stick the most interesting elements of the...

We all are Spartacus this week. Sara and Rena watch this astonishing epic that masterfully Trojan-horses a bunch of crazy messages about communism, righteousness, and self-sacrifice in a movie that pretends to be about toxic masculinity and oiled-up, 1950s-fit men gladiating.   Of course we love this movie: So much Peter Ustinov, so much Stanley Kubrick being forced to work within the rubric of th...

People wanted this, so we did it, and one of us is WAY happier about it than the other. Is Bohemian Rhapsody an efficient, joyful look at the life and genius of Freddie Mercury and his fellow geniuses in Queen, or is it a Wikipedia-skimming, nightmarishly-edited, lie-filled romp through fan-service hell? Things we can agree on: Adam Lambert is unconvincing as a truck driver, Bob Geldof’s fame is m...

Maria is nominally about a profoundly gifted opera singer, but seems a bit more about how ponderous and remote character studies never fail to trap the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Two hours of visiting Paris (aka Budapest) as it would look if Jesus raptured the city and left behind only Satan and a few journalists, with some diversions to the shared cinematic universe of fellow sa...

Why are we watching yet another movie about trashy royals, this one from 1933? Because this one’s pretty seminal: it introduced the world to auteur filmmaking pioneers Charles Laughton and director/producer Alexander Korda, and actresses Merle Oberon and Elsa Lanchester. If you’ve seen the musical Six you know the story: Henry VIII has an easy time getting married, but finds it challenging to stay...

Rena and Sara venture into the much-documented world of Elvis Presley and the people who he trapped in his hunka-hunka-burning-emotional-tractor beam from a heretofore unconsidered POV: his wife, Priscilla Presley. Never has grooming a minor looked so glamorous. While Sofia Coppola has undisputedly crafted another remote, beautiful piece of art and we loved many things, there are, of course, quest...

Presidential month continues apace as Sara and Rena watch Tennessee Johnson, a garbage movie that would be better titled Battle Cry of FreeDumb. Outrage, the likes of which our microphones and households have never experienced, is on the menu this week as we bear witness to this trashfire hagiography about one of America’s worst presidents, the drunken, corrupt, racist monster Andrew Johnson, who...

Apparently we watched this movie. Amistad is an unusually mediocre (for him, and only for him) and sort of forgettable Steven Spielberg movie about a captive mutiny against slave runners, John Quincy Adams, and the awkward game of hot-potato that was the pre-Civil War era U.S. government. Come for the uprising, stay for the utterly depressing and real depiction of the American legal system. Some o...

Presidential biopic month continues with the 2016 television movie All the Way, about the blockbuster year of 1964 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s first (and only) year of presidential campaigning and his efforts to try to do nice things for all Americans by spearheading the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act. We know how Americans love it when leaders try to do things to make America a better place...

This week we enter the world of Lincoln, an almost-perfect 2012 movie that features just about every “hey it’s that guy” brilliant character actor and one unforgettable, magical performance as honest Abe by Daniel Day-Lewis. We don’t have a lot to complain about outside of top hats, weird facial hair, and “states’ rights,” so we spend a lot of time praising the casual brilliance of Tony Kushner’s...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our 13th edition of Irrelevant Host Banter, with a flashback to mid-2024 with Episode 25: Ray and Episode 26: Liz & Dick.  These are some outtakes that were cut for running time, and/or because we were digressive or repetitive. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. We jump around in a senseless, context-deprived manner, and you sh...

Biopic’s all grown up and welcoming its very first guest, the brilliant comedian Liam McEneaney. Liam is also an Ed Wood expert (making all of Sara and Rena’s outstanding Wikipedia-based research less critical) his work has been praised by Gilbert Gottfried, and he’s released 2 comedy albums and has written for a variety of funny shows and comedians. Outside of an opening jump scare featuring conv...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our 12th edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time, and/or because we were digressive or repetitive. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. We jump around in a senseless, context-deprived manner, and you should definitely skip this episode and download any normal episode from “Episode 10:...

Is it a movie if half of the scenes only have one line of dialogue? This and other philosophical issues about the art of filmmaking are considered as Rena and Sara reluctantly reenter the chaotic, tax-dodging world of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 2012’s barely-a-movie Lifetime teleplay Liz and Dick. Is there a world where Lindsay Lohan was on Ambien the entire time she was making this mo...

It’s time to dissect one of the reasons for this podcast’s existence: The Oscarbatory biopic of the life of one Ray Charles, as told by director and co-writer Taylor Hackford (aka Mr. Helen Mirren) and featuring a dynamite performance by Jamie Foxx. Picture it: 2004, peak “I am going to imitate this famous person and I am going to get awards for it” filmmaking. Sara and Rena have a few problems wi...

Rena and Sara find themselves in complete agreement on Saint Joan, the 1957 Otto Preminger adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.  Find out about Rena’s secret passion for time traveling historical characters and learn more about Sara’s weird catholicism, along with the timeless visuals of a young woman being emotionally destroyed in a courtroom filled with men fighting over who gets to h...

Our 1+ hour journey into our oldest film yet, 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees, leads us to ask, who is history’s greatest monster? Probably Sara, for the giant tank of haterade she dumps all over this painfully “and-then” film featuring far-too-old actors that covers the life and times of the nevertheless honorable man and incredible athlete Lou Gehrig.  We discuss Lou Gehrig’s miraculous birth to...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our 11th edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time, and/or because we were digressive or repetitive. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. We jump around in a senseless, context-deprived manner, and you should definitely skip this episode and download any normal episode from “Episode 10:...

Finally, a proper costume drama! We are surprised that it took this long. In the 2008 film The Duchess, we travel to the days where it really sucked to be a woman (as opposed to every other time in history) and meet the captivating, delightful, ahead-of-her-time Duchess of Devonshire, her dull-as-dishwater, dog-obsessed husband, and her “he looks like a member of Oasis” partner in cuckolding. Desp...

Remember that time we pretended that Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The King of Comedy, ET, and Rocky III were inferior to the movie Gandhi? The 1980s were fun. Rena and Sara take a journey back to their teen years to re-watch this beloved teaching aid for high school history instructors and it was … not fun. Gandhi remains a bloodless but well-executed hagiography that also happens t...