Box Office GROSS: The Top 50 Hit Films of 2006

Our brilliant pal and FOUR TIME B.O.G. Legend TJ Dobbin ( Sin City, Batman Begins, Chicken Little ) returns to help us inspect the Steve Martin entry in the PINK PANTHER series. We delve into the lengthy tail of the legendary original series (and one of our host's noted dislike for them!), and TJ schools us on the sprawling history of Depatie-Freleng studios and their prolific animated Panther...

We invited our brilliant and funny pal Trevor Strunk (@Hegelbon, No Cartridge ) to talk about an equally brilliant and erudite work, Martin Lawrence in BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2 ! We delve into the war crime that is the first film, with its implicit endorsement of sexual assault, and the extremely proto- Blart ian second film's official position that starting a family with Nia Long is one of the...

SEASON 2 BEGINS! This week, after 50 weeks of 2005, we dive headfirst into the wild reeds of *2006*, and we pick up another returning BOG Legend, the great Daniel Gorman (from our Amityville Horror and Sky High episodes) to help us pick apart our first entry, the lugubrious vampires v. werewolves saga of UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION (#47 of 2006)! We delve into the series' ludicrously overcomplicated...

Our unofficial third host Kevin Gray (from our Pacifier and Forty-Year-Old Virgin episodes!) makes his triumphant return for our SEASON ONE FINALE!!!! We delve into Peter Jackson's grand epic KING KONG ! We discuss Jackson's obsession with the material and its complicated rights issues, the film's gargantuan runtime, its beautifully rendered 1930s NYC setting, its incredible lead perfo...

Our beloved pal Katie Stebbins (from our Herbie and Flightplan episodes) returns for the real main course here: the prickly, maniacal, fascinating Christmas family dramedy THE FAMILY STONE . We go way, WAY deep (tying our third-longest episode so far) on a movie that just needs it because there's just so much to untangle: this is a film packed with huge stars and WILD tonal swings, a film that...

Our expert Oscars handicapper and group-chat BFF Shaun Swayne follows up covering Best Picture winner CRASH by joining us for the film that should have won Best Picture, Ang Lee's moving, elegiac western BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN . We delve into the fairly hostile culture that a movie about "gay cowboys falling in love" was released into, and the power of the film to override those qualms a...

Our wonderful pal Kev Koeser ( Tasting Menu ) swoops in at the eleventh hour to save us again as we cover moribund Oscar bait Memoirs of a Geisha ! We discuss its lackluster source material, its controversial casting, and somehow absolve Rob Marshall's direction as one of the least-guilty culprits here. Other topics include Spielberg's near-miss racial-insensitivity trifecta, the insanely...

The homie Soham Gadre ( Chicago Reader, Fangoria, Paste Magazine, Polygon, Screen Slate, The Film Stage ) joins us to take aim at the infamous biopic genre as we pick apart WALK THE LINE , a handsomely-made but inert piece of work that dives headlong into every winsome cliche in the book as it goes to cover the Man in Black. We discuss our distaste for the lurching, numbing structure of the genre,...

One of my podcasting heroes, the great Alex Goldman ( Hyperfixed ) braved illness and weather to join us for "the most mediocre film ever made", a film seemingly everyone has seen and no one cares about, the second-highest-grossing film of 2005, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe . We discuss the film's nebulous religious bent, its inexplicably horrendou...

In one of our absolute most fun episode so far, the great Daniel (y'know, from Sport!) joins us as our '05 holiday marathon continues with a completely non-existent, inexplicably summer-vacation-y Christmas release, CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2. We allow ourselves to wander to and fro as we delve into the bizarrely detailed history of this franchise, which deviates greatly from its true-story or...

Our holiday marathon continues as our pal Andrew McNally (Allston Pudding) stops by to delve into FUN WITH DICK & JANE , one of the least-existent films in our list, a belated remake of a completely forgotten late-70s fluffy social satire buoyed to the top 20, a little bit by culturally relevant corporate scandals and a LOT by the enduring star power of Jim Carrey. This one floated through a l...

Our wonderful and erudite pal Scott Nye returns (first appearing on our Mr. & Mrs. Smith episode) for a movie that deserves much more thoughtful analysis, JARHEAD ! We delve into the difficulty of selling a movie whose chief appeal is that it's unpleasant and nothing happens in it other than a lot of furious masturbation, the tangled web of Sam Mendes' cultural reputation, the iconogra...

We invite the charming, chaotic chatterboxes of The Weekly Podcast Massacre to be our guests for an episode covering the sprawling mortal chaos of YOURS, MINE & OURS . We delve into somehow the less successful of the two films released in late 2005 remaking a golden-age Hollywood film based on a true story about a couple trying to deal with the wacky hijinks of their large family of children....

We have been teasing this portent of doom for months and have finally arrived at the infamous CHICKEN LITTLE ! We grab two true animation experts, the great TJ Dobbin ( Sin City, Batman Begins ) returns and the great Joe Kowalski debuts to pick apart this nightmare epic; its hideous animation, its compromised, borderline-nonsensical narrative, its painfully unfunny attempts at irreverence, the onl...

Our old pal Alex Watkins (BOG War of the Worlds ) returns for one of the most anticipated episodes of the show: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit ! We dive DEEP on stop-motion animation generally, Aardman Animation specifically, and a multitude of other topics as we journey through everyone's favorite old-man-and-dog pairing and their trip to the big screen, from their early h...

We go SOLO on this one, just two gents trapped in a bathroom trying to cut out feet off! We discuss the bizarre and influential and tremendously successful SAW series in what still qualifies as its nascent period, our adolescent fandom, and the specific innovations of SAW II : its ungainly melding of multiple scripts to distinct sections of "lore" and "game", its weird cast flo...

The great Esther Rosenfield (@capybaroness, The Lost Broadcasts ) joins us to pick apart one of the worst and most befuddling films we've covered so far: the pseudo-horror COURTROOM DRAMA(?!) The Exorcism of Emily Rose ! We discuss its baffling narrative structure, go deep on director Scott Derrickson's backstory leading up to this, and ask important questions like "is having an ambit...

Surprise! We had a major multi-level cascading scheduling snafu the past few weeks so we decided, in lieu of having nothing at all, we would do something fun and silly: our pal Shaun Swayne ( Crash ) returns to join us a live commentary track to a movie that came up a LOT in recent weeks had been Kate Hudson and Gena Rowlands in THE SKELETON KEY , which none of us had ever seen. It's messy, it's r...

The wonderful Katie Stebbins ( Herbie: Fully Loaded ) becomes our newest #BOGBFF as she makes her triumphant return for a real mess of a movie: Jodie Foster in FLIGHTPLAN , a theoretically twisty, tricky thriller where the only twist is that nothing makes sense and the only trick is that you thought it otherwise might. We discuss the film's impossibly nonexistent legacy for being one of the 20...

One of my oldest, dearest, smartest and coolest friends, yet somehow the second person in her household to be a guest, the very talented writer and PUBLISHED AUTHOR Willow Catelyn Maclay ( Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema ) joins the show this week to discuss Wes Craven's sweaty airplane thriller RED EYE . We discuss Craven's relief in making a qui...

We had to bring back two of our absolute favorite guests, Kevin Gray ( The Pacifier ) and Doug Tilley ( Batman Begins ) to cover the absolutely titanic pop cultural event that was The Forty-Year-Old Virgin . We discuss the seismic effect that this film had on comedy, pop culture and the careers of basically everyone who participated in it in the ensuing years, from Judd Apatow to Steve Carell to S...

Excited to have the big homey Aaron from the HIT FACTORY podcast join us for John Singleton's Detroit-set crime drama FOUR BROTHERS . We talk about the legendary Singleton's bumpy directorial career, FOUR BROTHERS 's dizzying violence, outrageous action and unjustly nonexistent cultural legacy, its historical tendrils back to westerns and blaxploitation, its Marxist fist-fight climax,...

My cine-masochist brethren Steve Carlson returns from our AMITYVILLE HORROR episode to discuss an even more disreputable entry on the project, Jay Chadrasekhar's adaptation of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD ! We get down and dirty discussing the mind-numbing plotting and popularity of the original show, the film's contemporary lineage of SUPER TROOPERS and JACKASS , its awkward handling of the show&...

Our delightful and erudite pal Daniel Gorman (BOG #13 - The Amityville Horror ) returns to unexpectedly discuss an equally unexpectedly quite fun little Disney family superhero comedy, Kurt Russell and co. in SKY HIGH! We discuss the unusual route that Daniel came to appear on this specific episode, this forgotten movie overachieving thanks to its quality cast, good energy and genial humor at play...

We welcome the lovely Michael Chau ( @srirachachau ) onto the show to talk about yet another real doozy, Tim Burton's massive hit remake CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY . We discuss the film's strangely adversarial relationship to its beloved predecessor, Burton's tone-deaf restorations and destructive additions to the narrative, Johnny Depp's bizarre, catastrophic lead performance, Freddie Hi...