Biopic: A Podcast Story

We recorded around three hours of material for “Episode 20: Reagan” back in August of 2024. That movie was torture to endure and we wound up cutting about half of what we recorded. We assert that the right to free assembly allows us, the much-loathed coastal media types, the right to seek hope, comfort, and the mutual salving of wounds among the like-minded. So, this bonus episode is not for every...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our ninth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. 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: Cobb” onwards if this is your first time listen...

The fascinating topic of Pancho Villa’s savvy engagement of the film industry to prop up the Mexican Revolution is made somewhat less fascinating with this sometimes jaunty and crackling, sometimes bummer-ific 2003 HBO film And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself. Why must we have two Blandy McBlanderson tubs of vanilla ice cream as our way into this story? Why does one of them have to be the condesc...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our eighth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. 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: Cobb” onwards if this is your first time liste...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our seventh edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. If this is your first time listening to us, we recommend that you listen to one of our regular episodes instead. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from: Episode 16: Cleopatra Episode 17: Get on Up! Highlight...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our sixth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from: Episode 15: Prefontaine Episode 4: Respect Episode 5: The Conqueror  Highlights include: Rena and Sara debate what number constitutes “several.” The "Second Opinion" for...

WE CALLED AN AUDIBLE FOR THE GIPPER.   The things you do for love: Because Rena and Sara care and do not want anyone to spend money to see this movie, they went to see it.  While Reagan is a soul-crushing journey through a propagandistic vision of the life and times of one simple mofo who was either blindly optimistic or the root of all modern evil, it’s also (mostly) objectively bad filmmaking: E...

Have you ever thought, “Maybe John Gotti has a lot in common with Nelson Mandela?” If so, this is the film for you.  John Gotti gets the “throw every good movie about the cosa nostra in a blender and strain out the wrong lessons and the cliches” treatment with this barely-a-movie biopic that boasts 38 producers, 5 production companies, too many connections to the TV show Entourage, and little else...

The mercurial, incredibly talented, and wildly chaotic James Brown gets the biopic treatment with Tate Taylor’s Get On Up!, which depicts a troublingly sanitized version of the musical superstar. Featuring perhaps the greatest framing device in the history of the genre (an office park, a rifle, a life coaching seminar, and a woman who used the wrong toilet), Get On Up! keeps us on our toes with it...

Holy sh%t you guys. Rena and Sara dive into this colossal fiasco of a motion picture and come dangerously close to anhedonia as they stare into the void for four boring hours. Get on board for a lengthy history lesson about one of the film industry’s greatest cautionary tales. How did everyone involved do so little with so much? Was Richard Burton’s Roomba charging station filled with whiskey? How...

We had a lot to say about Race, so much that our fifth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter is entirely composed of material that we cut from Episode 14: Race.   Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs, mostly about Race.   Highlights include: The sentimental way that Rena commemorates D-Day every year. Spoilers for Jordan Peele's Nope. Sara marvels at the wonders of the p...

Did you even medal, bro? White male mediocrity (compared to last week’s movie, at least) gets its due as we watch one of two debatably necessary Steve Prefontaine biopics that arrived in the late 1990s. What exactly did this guy do except run really fast on the collegiate level, witness the Munich Olympics’ atrocious massacre unfold on television, and serve as a Nike footwear beta user? Sara and R...

Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our fourth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time.   Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs.   Includes material cut from: • Episode 12: Becket • Episode 13: Frida   Highlights include: Rena's rant about her unintended visit to Casa Trotsky. An extended cut of portions of our "Would You...

All it took for a feature film about American hero, sports pioneer, and Third Reich-bitch-slapper Jesse Owens were French, Canadian, and German film producers to team up to get it off the ground. The results are mostly magical, with a compelling and winsome lead performance from Stephan James and a budget stretched to the max to bring the cringe-inducing Hitler Olympics to life.  Sara and Rena go...

We have a bonus episode: our third edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from: • Episode 10: Cobb • Episode 11: Evita   Highlights include: • The extended take of our reactions to Eva Peron’s corpse. • Extra criticisms of Robert Wuhl’s performance in Cobb....

Salma Hayek’s passion project Frida—a gem of a film directed by the confounding, singular talent that is Julie Taymor—is under the microscope this week. At play: what’s the deal with communist men and the civilized way they hang out with their exes? Why are there so many children’s books about Frida Kahlo, a completely badass artist who played by her own rules, hooked up with everybody she felt li...

How’d we get a biopic about the one-time Archbishop of Canterbury and his bromance with King Henry II before Roberto Clemente? Should we have watched this movie during Pride Month? Rena and Sara debate these and other issues like when forks actually arrived in Great Britain and whipping-as-penance. Sara has many dumb questions because she majored in Valley of the Dolls Studies at college, but Rena...

Rena and Sara confront the ghosts of their theater-kid selves while exploring the Madonna-starring Evita, the film version of hopelessly middlebrow composer Andrew Lloyd Webbers’s musical. Come for Sara’s appreciation of director Alan Parker’s oeuvre and Rena’s impassioned take-down of the least convincing pair of brown contact lenses ever used, stay to ponder “How much Madonna is too much Madonna...

Just in time for 4th of July weekend 2024, we have a bonus episode: our second edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes from the episodes that we released in June of 2024 that were cut for running time. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from: Episode 6: Milk Episode 7: Bessie Episode 8: Rocketman Episode 9: Gia Highlights i...

What better way to celebrate America’s birthday than with a baseball movie with exactly one scene of baseball, elder abuse, racism, and Robert Wuhl? This week we will be talking about Cobb, starring returning champion Tommy Lee Jones as rather evil baseball legend Ty Cobb, who might be less evil than Al Stump, this film’s proposed protagonist. This episode features a passionate if unintentional de...

Is it a movie about the 1970s and 1980s fashion scene if there’s no fashion in it? Rena and Sara are varying degrees of annoyed at this biopic about legendary supermodel Gia Carangi, whose meteoric rise and devastating fall in the modelling industry is kind of documented in this film. Who’s the worse pastiche character – the grubby modelling agency owner or the makeup artist, who came straight to...

Rena and Sara discuss Rocketman, the 2019 musical biopic about the life and work of the one and only Elton John.  Are musicals realistic biopics, or not? We discuss the parameters of why they totally are, and why everything about this movie is pretty darn delightful, from the brilliant costumes, the fabulous singing and dancing, and the stylish exploration of the sad, desperate world of being a su...

Rena and Sara watched Bessie, the 2015 HBO movie starring Queen Latifah as Blues Empress Bessie Smith. We dissect the glory that is Mo’Nique, the spiritual battle between Dee Rees and Horton Foote, and the world’s fakest-looking pair of emerald earrings as we journey through Bessie Smith’s rise, fall, and recovery (and thankfully, not her tragic death). The all-over-the-place screenplay inspires u...

This is a re-recording of an episode that originally dropped on June 4, 2024, as the first film in our 2024 Pride Month series. We are re-releasing it because the original version sounded like we recorded it inside a wind tunnel on board a submarine. It sounded that way because we didn’t know that we needed to turn off the air conditioner before recording an episode. Kicking off Gay Pride Month wi...

Rena and Sara prefer that our podcast be at least half an hour shorter than the movies that we talk about. Rena generally dislikes listening to other podcast hosts banter about their personal lives, so she's happy to cut all of that out. But we needed to learn some new audio skills, so she spliced together a bunch of random irrelevant host banter and a few things that were cut for running time. Th...